Pupal surveys for Aedes aegypti surveillance and potential targeted control in residential areas of Mérida, México.

A mosquito larval-pupal survey was conducted in 1,160 households of the Mexican city of Mérida during the rainy season of 2003 to determine their differential productivity for Aedes aegypti. Larvae and pupae were detected in 15 broad categories of container types. All breeding sites were found in the patios (backyards) and were potentially rain filled. Ae. aegypti pupae were produced from all categories of breeding site, and no single container type was predominately responsible for pupal production. The most productive buckets comprised 42% of the pupae-positive containers and provided 34% of the total pupae collected. Pupal production in buckets, together with plastic rubbish, pet dishes and basins, utensils for cooking and washing, tires, and flowerpots, accounted for almost 87% of pupal production. However, the most important pupal producers had low infestation indices for immature forms, illustrating that the use of positive-container indices can underestimate the importance of certain breeding sites. Overall, 40% of containers that were observed harboring Ae. aegypti pupae were classified as disposable. The remaining containers were considered useful, although some were seldom used. The discussion focuses on the potential utility of the pupal survey for targeting control, and its resulting pupae-per-person entomological indicator, both for comparison with a theoretical threshold for dengue transmission and for targeting vector control in this Mexican city

Disjunction, Conjunction and Categories

This paper examines some taken-for-granted themes from an unusual angle. It might be analytical, but (it is hoped) none the worse for that. We cannot deal only in single instances. Our brains would be overwhelmed. So, we take refuge in generalisations of one kind or another that can be containers into which single instances can conveniently be put. This paper explores some of the containers we use: sets; categories; norms; rules; principles. With an eye on the notion of a ‘common law method’, it attempts to illuminate their characteristics and usages. In so doing, it must confront: (i) separation-combination ambiguity and (ii) conceptions of similarity and difference. Although concentrating on the ‘how?’ of categorisation, this paper also suggests that, in the necessary categorisation process, we overestimate the separateness, and underestimate the malleability and temporality, of the categories we contrive. In short, the process and its resulting categories are — despite their appearances and common attitudes to them — mind-dependent and not Platonistic

Dates for Suction Scarred Bottoms: A Chronology for Early Owens Machine-Made Bottles

For much of the 20th century the Owens automatic bottle-blowing machines were used to produce glass containers around the world. This machine and others revolutionized glass production and led to the end of hand production of commercial glass containers. Bottles produced on the Owens machines have distinct suction scars on their bases that make them easy to identify. Because of the way the rights to the Owens machines were licensed, these licenses have a great potential to establish the dates when the production of major categories of glass containers on the Owens bottle-blowing machine began. The first lease for the use of the Owens machine was issued in 1904, followed by a number of leases issued in 1905 and a few subsequent years. Thus 1905 is a good terminus post quem for suction-scarred glass containers. The last Owens bottle-blowing machine went out of production in 1982

Data types with symmetries and polynomial functors over groupoids

Polynomial functors are useful in the theory of data types, where they are often called containers. They are also useful in algebra, combinatorics, topology, and higher category theory, and in this broader perspective the polynomial aspect is often prominent and justifies the terminology. For example, Tambara's theorem states that the category of finite polynomial functors is the Lawvere theory for commutative semirings. In this talk I will explain how an upgrade of the theory from sets to groupoids is useful to deal with data types with symmetries, and provides a common generalisation of and a clean unifying framework for quotient containers (cf. Abbott et al.), species and analytic functors (Joyal 1985), as well as the stuff types of Baez-Dolan. The multi-variate setting also includes relations and spans, multispans, and stuff operators. An attractive feature of this theory is that with the correct homotopical approach - homotopy slices, homotopy pullbacks, homotopy colimits, etc. - the groupoid case looks exactly like the set case. After some standard examples, I will illustrate the notion of data-types-with-symmetries with examples from quantum field theory, where the symmetries of complicated tree structures of graphs play a crucial role, and can be handled elegantly using polynomial functors over groupoids. (These examples, although beyond species, are purely combinatorial and can be appreciated without background in quantum field theory.) Locally cartesian closed 2-categories provide semantics for 2-truncated intensional type theory. For a fullfledged type theory, locally cartesian closed \infty-categories seem to be needed. The theory of these is being developed by D.Gepner and the author as a setting for homotopical species, and several of the results exposed in this talk are just truncations of \infty-results obtained in joint work with Gepner. Details will appear elsewhere.Comment: This is the final version of my conference paper presented at the 28th Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (Bath, June 2012); to appear in the Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. 16p

Exploring the Three Dimensions of Sustainability Related to Clay Cups

Since long before the use of disposable foil, plastic and paper cups, clay cups have been widely used in India as single-use containers for a variety of beverages and foods. This is now changing. The cost, convenience and transportability of non-earthen containers has resulted in their replacing clay containers. This paper discusses the gains and losses from this substitution along the three dimensions of sustainability economic, environmental and social, and shows that the replacement analyses for even such a simple product are complex with tradeoffs in the three dimensions impacting the wellbeing of the producers and users. The paper also presents the life cycle assessment of clay cups in terms of endpoint and midpoint categories using ReCiPe method, and also find the environmental hotspots

Upcycling Shipping Containers as Building Components : an environmental impact assessment

The introduction of shipping containers in the trading system has increased world economic growth exponentially. The drawback of this linear economy consists in the accumulation of empty containers in import-based countries. Sustainable and green architecture should consider not only recycling but also upcycling and reuse of material. Therefore designers troughout the world are working with intermodal containers for environmental purposes. Moving from ethical considerations, it is possibile to determine whether container architecture is actually sustainable? The aim of this study is to quantify the impact of the use of shipping containers as building components from an environmetal point of view. A comparative life cycle analysis has been undertaken. Two benchmark technologies have been selected for this comparative analysis: a steel frame and an X-Lam structure. Three different scenarios have been developed in order to understand how climate can affect results of the study: hot-tropical, temperate and cold. A Life cycle Assessment has been used to evaluate 4 impact categories: Global Warming Potential, Ozone Depletion Potential, Acidification Potential and Eutrophication Potential

The benefits of virtualization across the software development pipeline

Abstract. The emergence of cloud computing and the evolution into service-based solutions across the software industry have influenced many changes in software development paradigms and methods. As a result, various forms of virtualization and container-based solutions have become more and more commonplace throughout the field, with technologies and frameworks such as Docker and Kubernetes becoming industry standard solutions to virtualization. This thesis is a literature review into existing research on virtualization and containers, and their use in various categories of the software industry. The aim of the thesis is to look at the reasons for the proliferation of virtual machines and containers, along with their benefits for the software development process, the continuous integration and delivery pipeline, and the different cloud platforms and providers. The benefits of virtualization are clearest in the cloud infrastructure, as cloud services are inherently built to utilize virtual machines. Containers and container orchestration systems allow container management and dynamic resource allocation, improving efficiency and reducing costs. In software development and testing, the modular and self-contained nature of containers allows for faster iteration and more problem-averse development. And finally, in the continuous integration and delivery pipelines, containers and container management tools allows automation, and lower overhead and complexity, enabling lower-threshold software deployment. Along with enabling cloud infrastructure as it exists today, the evolution of virtualization and containers in the software industry provide benefits across the board

Directed Containers as Categories

Directed containers make explicit the additional structure of those containers whose set functor interpretation carries a comonad structure. The data and laws of a directed container resemble those of a monoid, while the data and laws of a directed container morphism those of a monoid morphism in the reverse direction. With some reorganization, a directed container is the same as a small category, but a directed container morphism is opcleavage-like. We draw some conclusions for comonads from this observation, considering in particular basic constructions and concepts like the opposite category and a groupoid.Comment: In Proceedings MSFP 2016, arXiv:1604.0038

Integration of linked open data in case-based reasoning systems

This paper discusses the opportunities of integrating Linked Open Data (LOD) resources into Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems. Upon the application domain travel medicine, we will exemplify how LOD can be used to fill three out of four knowledge containers a CBR system is based on. The paper also presents the applied techniques for the realization and demonstrates the performance gain of knowledge acquisition by the use of LOD