5,523 research outputs found

    Why do patients engage in medical tourism?

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    Medical tourism is commonly perceived and popularly depicted as an economic issue, both at the system and individual levels. The decision to engage in medical tourism, however, is more complex, driven by patients¿ unmet need, the nature of services sought and the manner by which treatment is accessed. In order to beneficially employ the opportunities medical tourism offers, and address and contain possible threats and harms, an informed decision is crucial. This paper aims to enhance the current knowledge on medical tourism by isolating the focal content of the decisions that patients make. Based on the existing literature, it proposes a sequential decision-making process in opting for or against medical care abroad, and engaging in medical tourism, including considerations of the required treatments, location of treatment, and quality and safety issues attendant to seeking care. Accordingly, it comments on the imperative of access to health information and the current regulatory environment which impact on this increasingly popular and complex form of accessing and providing medical care

    Estimating Photometric Redshifts for X-ray sources in the X-ATLAS field, using machine-learning techniques

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    We present photometric redshifts for 1,031 X-ray sources in the X-ATLAS field, using the machine learning technique TPZ (Carrasco Kind & Brunner 2013). X-ATLAS covers 7.1 deg2 observed with the XMM-Newton within the Science Demonstration Phase (SDP) of the H-ATLAS field, making it one of the largest contiguous areas of the sky with both XMMNewton and Herschel coverage. All of the sources have available SDSS photometry while 810 have additionally mid-IR and/or near-IR photometry. A spectroscopic sample of 5,157 sources primarily in the XMM/XXL field, but also from several X-ray surveys and the SDSS DR13 redshift catalogue, is used for the training of the algorithm. Our analysis reveals that the algorithm performs best when the sources are split, based on their optical morphology, into point-like and extended sources. Optical photometry alone is not enough for the estimation of accurate photometric redshifts, but the results greatly improve when, at least, mid-IR photometry is added in the training process. In particular, our measurements show that the estimated photometric redshifts for the X-ray sources of the training sample, have a normalized absolute median deviation, n_mad=0.06, and the percentage of outliers, eta=10-14 percent, depending on whether the sources are extended or point-like. Our final catalogue contains photometric redshifts for 933 out of the 1,031 X-ray sources with a median redshift of 0.9.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, A&A accepte

    Preliminary Water Assessment Reports of The Test Basins of The Watch Project

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    This report presents the initial plans of the case studies how they link to rest of the Watch project and on which water resources they will focus. This report will function as the basis for further discussions on how to improve the integration of the case studies within the project and to develop a more general protocol for each of the case studies. Currently 5 catchments are used within the Watch project, they differ in climatic and hydro-geological features and expected climate changes: the Glomma River basin (Eastern Norway), the upper Guadiana basin (Central Spanish Plateau), the Nitra River basin (central Slovakia), the Upper-Elbe basin (part of the Elbe River) and the island of Crete. Also the water resources issues vary over these cases. Agricultural (and domestic) water use is under pressure in the Mediterranean catchments probably aggravating with the expected increase in drought frequency under future climate. The Norwegian catchment provides hydropower services under threat of precipitation increase rather than decrease. The central European catchments are threatened mainly by increased variability, i.e. increased frequencies of extremes in a densely populated environment, and river flow may need additional buffers (reservoirs) to reduce floodrisk and store water for dry period

    El Costo de la Seguridad en Dispositivos Móviles

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    The mobile devices have rapidly evolved, they have become into the platform of communication and computation preferred by people. Nevertheless, the growing popularity of these devices is not always positive because they threaten the safety of their users. If we consider that the technological limitations are still present in these mobile devices and that most of them have safety mechanism which based their operation on cryptographic techniques, so we can expect some restrictions at the moment of attempting to protect the applications and data handled by these devices.  For this reason, this article investigates the commitment between: safety, performance factors and the energy that these devices consume at the moment of being  pplied on mobiles and digital assistances. The obtained results show that safety in the mobile applications is not free and that a good implementation requires a careful selection of each parameters used by cryptographic mechanisms. Based on this study, we have also proposed a “framework” of safety easy to use for the development of mobile applications in J2ME. Los dispositivos móviles han evolucionado vertiginosamente convirtiéndose en la plataforma de comunicación y computación preferida por las personas. Sin embargo, la creciente popularidad de estos dispositivos va acompañada de amenazas cada vez más preocupantes a la seguridad de sus usuarios. Si consideramos las limitaciones tecnológicas aún existentes en los dispositivos móviles y el hecho de que la mayoría de los mecanismos de seguridad basan su accionar en técnicas criptográficas, podemos esperar ciertas restricciones al intentar proteger las aplicaciones y datos manejados por estos dispositivos. Es así que este artículo estudia los compromisos existentes entre una adecuada seguridad y factores como el desempeño y consumo de energía de aplicaciones ejecutándose sobre teléfonos celulares y asistentes digitales. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que la seguridad en las aplicaciones móviles no es gratuita y que su correcta implementación requiere una selección cuidadosa de cada uno de los parámetros utilizados por los mecanismos criptográficos. Basados en este estudio, hemos también propuesto un ‘framework’ de seguridad fácil de usar para el desarrollo de aplicaciones móviles en J2ME

    Vanadium in animal drinking water of dairy farms from Southeast Córdoba, Argentina

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    En este trabajo se cuantificaron los niveles de vanadio presentes en el agua de bebida animal de25 establecimientos lecheros, ubicados en el departamento de Unión, sudeste de la provinciade Córdoba, Argentina. Además, se cuantificaron sólidos totales disueltos (STD) e ionesmayoritarios, a fin de determinar la calidad del agua con la que se abastecen los tambos relevados.A partir de los datos analizados, se evidenció que el 48% de los mismos se abastece de la capafreática, cuya calidad es inferior al agua proveniente de pozos más profundos. Asimismo seobservó que la totalidad de las muestras de nivel freático superaban los valores máximos devanadio recomendados para agua de bebida animal, alcanzándose niveles superiores a los 6mg/L; y que las muestras con los niveles más bajos de vanadio presentaban, en contraposición,concentraciones elevadas de cloruros y sulfatos. Respecto de las aguas provenientes de pozossemisurgentes, menos del 10% de las muestras presentaban niveles de vanadio superiores a losestablecidos, no alcanzándose en ningún caso valores por encima de los 0,3 mg/L. El presenteestudio sugiere entonces que el agua procedente de la capa freática no sería segura paraaprovisionamiento de los animales.In this paper, vanadium levels, in animal drinking water, were quantified in water samples from 25 dairy farms located in the department of Union, southeast of the province of Cordoba, Argentina. In addition, total dissolved solids (TDS) and major ions were considered in order to determine the quality of water source used for livestock. Analyzed data showed that 48% of farms use a groundwater from the freatic aquifer (3 to 15 m), for animal drinking water, whose quality is worst than water from deeper wells (80 to 120 m). It was also noted that all the samples from the freatic aquifer exceeded the maximum vanadium levels considered for animal drinking water, reaching more than 6 mg/L. Regarding the water from deeper wells, less than 10% of them have vanadium concentrations above the recommended level, presenting a maximum level of 0.3 mg/L. The present study suggests that the water from the freatic aquifer would not be safe for use as water for livestock drinking; because of the levels of vanadium, arsenic, fluoride, chloride and sulphate.Fil: Pérez Carrera, Alejo Leopoldo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Unidad Ejecutora de Investigaciones en Produccion Animal; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Centro de Estudios Transdisciplinarios del Agua; ArgentinaFil: Alvarez Gonçalvez, C. V.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Centro de Estudios Transdisciplinarios del Agua; ArgentinaFil: Fernandez Cirelli, Alicia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Unidad Ejecutora de Investigaciones en Produccion Animal; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Centro de Estudios Transdisciplinarios del Agua; Argentin

    Una nueva infraestructura para el desarrollo de agentes autónomos en RoboCup

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    RoboCup is an international competition for autonomous robots intended to promote re­search and education in Artificial Intelligence. The competition contains several separate leagues, one of which is called Simulator League and deals with purely simulated players. A team of players for this league can be written in any programming language. Howe­ver, a major problem when constructing RoboCup players is to implement the basic fun­ctionality of each player, since there are several problems related to information retrieval, processing, and management, as well as the development of basic skills for the soccer pla­yers. Thus, this paper proposes a new infrastructure oriented to simplify the programming of RoboCup teams allowing us to concentrate on the job of controlling players without worrying about the low-level tasks previously mentioned. Besides describing the proposed infrastructure, this paper evaluates our Java implementation of the infrastructure using isolated players and complete RoboCup teams.RoboCup es una competencia internacional para robots autónomos orientada a promo­ver la investigación y educación en el campo de la Inteligencia Artificial. La competencia incluye varias ligas separadas, una de las cuales se denomina Liga de Simulación y trata únicamente con jugadores de fútbol virtuales. Un equipo para esta liga puede ser escrito en cualquier lenguaje de programación. Sin embargo, uno de los mayores problemas al momento de programar los agentes autónomos es implementar la funcionalidad básica de cada jugador, pues existen varios inconvenientes asociados a la recuperación, procesamiento y administración de la información, así como también al desarrollo de las habilidades típicas de un jugador de fútbol. Siendo así, este artículo propone una nueva infraestructura orientada a facilitar la programación de equipos para RoboCup, permitiendo que los pro­gramadores se concentren en las estrategias de alto nivel aplicadas por los agentes antes que en las tareas de bajo nivel previamente mencionadas. Además de describir la infra­estructura propuesta, este artículo evalúa una implementación en Java de la mencionada infraestructura usando tanto jugadores aislados como equipos completos

    Performance of CUF approach to analyze the structural behavior of slender bodies

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    This paper deals with the accurate evaluation of complete three-dimensional (3D) stress fields in beam structures with compact and bridge-like sections. A refined beam finite-element (FE) formulation is employed, which permits any-order expansions for the three displacement components over the section domain by means of the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF). Classical (Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko) beam theories are considered as particular cases. Comparisons with 3D solid FE analyses are provided. End effects caused by the boundary conditions are investigated. Bending and torsional loadings are considered. The proposed formulation has shown its capability of leading to quasi-3D stress fields over the beam domain. Higher-order beam theories are necessary for the case of bridge-like sections. Various theories are also compared in terms of shear correction factors on the basis of definitions found in the open literature. It has been confirmed that different theories could lead to very different values of shear correction factors, the accuracy of which is subordinate to a great extent to the section geometries and loading conditions. However, an accurate evaluation of shear correction factors is obtained by means of the present higher-order theories

    Agua virtual : el agua que no vemos : seguridad alimentaria

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    Fil: Volpedo, Alejandra V. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias; ArgentinaFil: Pérez Carrera, Alejo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias; ArgentinaFil: Fernández Cirelli, Alicia. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias; ArgentinaLas actividades agropecuarias son el principal usuario de agua dulce ya que utilizan aproximadamente entre el 70 y el 80% del agua accesible, por lo que producir alimentos implica, necesariamente, consumir agua. En los últimos tiempos, el concepto de agua virtual -en referencia al agua utilizada en la producción de alimentos y/o la contenida en ellos- globaliza discusiones sobre su escasez, la sostenibilidad ecológica, la seguridad alimentaria y el consumo, estimulando la reflexión sobre los procesos de cambio socio-económicos en relación con la evolución de la demanda de alimentos
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