324,226 research outputs found

    Sensitivity & specificity of combination testing algorithms for HIV in a tuberculosis clinic

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    Introduction: Co-management of tuberculosis (TB) and HIV is complicated by pharmacologic drug interactions between rifampicin (RMP) and certain classes of antiretroviral agents. The NNRTIs Nevirapine (NVP) or Efavirenz (EFV), used to HIV infection, are known to induce the CYP 450 enzyme system. Thus when RMP is co-administered along with NVP or EFV, the bioavailability of RMP could be lowered leading to drug resistance and treatment failure. Objectives: To study the steady state pharmacokinetics of RMP in HIV and HIV-TB patients receiving antiretroviral regimens containing NVP or EFV respectively. Methods: The study population comprised of HIV and HIV-TB patients undergoing antiretroviral treatment with NVP and EFV containing regimens respectively. These patients were also receiving concomitant RMP. Rifampicin was estimated by HPLC in blood collected at different time points after drug administration. The pharmacokinetic variables of RMP were calculated using WinNonlin software. Results & Conclusions: Co-administration of NVP or EFV did not alter the pharmacokinetics of RMP in HIV and HIV-TB patients, suggesting that the dose of RMP need not be altered during antiretroviral treatment with NVP or EFV

    Distributed enterprise search using software agents

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    In this paper we introduce a distributed information retrieval system using agent-based technology. In this multiagent system, each agent has its own specific task and can be used to handle a specific document repository. The system is designed to automatically comply with access restriction rules that are normally enforced in companies. It is used in the administration offices of the German capital city Berlin where it serves as a testbed for further research on aggregated search in an enterprise environment with roughly 50,000 employees

    Land administration and regulation model for improved formal delivery and accessibility of urban lands in Nigeria.

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    Acquiring developable land for property development in suitable locations especially in urban areas is considered as a global problem, and is no exception in Nigeria. Some of the reasons responsible for this phenomenon are uncontrolled urbanisation, increasing demographic growth, complex bureaucracies, unskilled technocracy, corruption and weak institutional machineries, among others. All these had hampered smooth and efficient delivery processes and finally had decreased delivery and accessibility of urban lands in Nigeria. Therefore, this study was conducted, essentially to simplify the processes for land administrators while discharging their responsibilities, by examining and resolving those underlying factors that are affecting the optimal performance of formal land administration and regulation systems. This study adopted quantitative approach, with the use of both probabilistic and non-probabilistic sampling techniques. The respondents participated in this study were relevant government agencies and committees that are directly involved in the supply of urban land; low, medium and high density land users in eighteen (18) formal land development schemes, from two cities in each of six states of the Southwestern Nigeria. These schemes were found in Isheri and Ikorodu in Lagos State; Abeokuta and Ijebu-Ode in Ogun State; Ibadan and Ogbomoso in Oyo State; Osogbo and Ile-Ife in Osun State; Akure and Ondo in Ondo State; and Ado-Ekiti and Ijero-Ekiti in Ekiti State. Furthermore, the independent land consultants and shelter or land mandated non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were considered as the intermediate component of the land delivery and accessibility equation; so as to have balanced results that are sufficient to address these challenges. By using the Analysis of Moments of Structures Software Package (AMOS), via Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), the results show that merely nine percent (9%) of causal relationship exists between the duo of formal land administration and regulation system (FLARS) and policy development and compliance engineering (PDCE), as determining agents of formal land delivery and accessibility in Nigeria. Furthermore, these are due to the stand-alone structure of the lands regulo-administrative machineries, leading to their insignificant contribution of nine percent (9%) towards formal land delivery and accessibility. As a conclusion, close to 70% of these challenges were caused by ill-structuration, corruption, lack of collaboration and policy summersault, and thus will remain unsolved if this trend continues. Among the suggestions is that, there should be improvement to land administration operations which can be achieved through SLADECOM Model applications, where restructuring of departments and land administration regulation systems, as well as policy frameworks will be made to improve the efficiency and performances of land administration and regulation systems in Nigeria

    Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

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    Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

    A Work in Progress: Philadelphia's 311 System After One Year

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    Evaluates the first year of the city's municipal information and service-request system's implementation, including costs, call volume, types of requests, and user satisfaction. Points out areas for improvement and constraints due to the budget crisis

    A Factory-based Approach to Support E-commerce Agent Fabrication

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    With the development of Internet computing and software agent technologies, agent-based e-commerce is emerging. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become an important issue along the way to success. We propose a factory-based approach to support agent fabrication in e-commerce and elaborate a design based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) framework. The details of agent fabrication, modular agent structure, agent life cycle, as well as advantages of agent fabrication are presented. Product-brokering agent is employed as a practical agent type to demonstrate our design and Java-based implementation

    Agent fabrication and its implementation for agent-based electronic commerce

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    In the last decade, agent-based e-commerce has emerged as a potential role for the next generation of e-commerce. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become a serious consideration in this field. This paper proposes a new scheme named agent fabrication and elaborates its implementation in multi-agent systems based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) architecture. First, a conceptual structure is proposed for software agents carrying out e-commerce activities. Furthermore, agent module suitcase is defined to facilitate agent fabrication. With these definitions and facilities in the SAFER architecture, the formalities of agent fabrication are elaborated. In order to enhance the security of agent-based e-commerce, an infrastructure of agent authorization and authentication is integrated in agent fabrication. Our implementation and prototype applications show that the proposed agent fabrication scheme brings forth a potential solution for creating agents in agent-based e-commerce applications

    Economic Policy Review \u2013 issue 57

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