Rationing Antiretroviral Therapy for HIV/AIDS in Africa: Efficiency, Equity, and Reality

Background: Rationing of access to antiretroviral therapy already exists in sub-Saharan Africa and will intensify as national treatment programs develop. The number of people who are medically eligible for therapy will far exceed the human, infrastructural, and financial resources available, making rationing of public treatment services inevitable. Methods: We identified 15 criteria by which antiretroviral therapy could be rationed in African countries and analyzed the resulting rationing systems across 5 domains: clinical effectiveness, implementation feasibility, cost, economic efficiency, and social equity. Findings: Rationing can be explicit or implicit. Access to treatment can be explicitly targeted to priority subpopulations such as mothers of newborns, skilled workers, students, or poor people. Explicit conditions can also be set that cause differential access, such as residence in a designated geographic area, co-payment, access to testing, or a demonstrated commitment to adhere to therapy. Implicit rationing on the basis of first-come, first-served or queuing will arise when no explicit system is enforced; implicit systems almost always allow a high degree of queue-jumping by the elite. There is a direct tradeoff between economic efficiency and social equity. Interpretation: Rationing is inevitable in most countries for some period of time. Without deliberate social policy decisions, implicit rationing systems that are neither efficient nor equitable will prevail. Governments that make deliberate choices, and then explain and defend those choices to their constituencies, are more likely to achieve a socially desirable outcome from the large investments now being made than are those that allow queuing and queue-jumping to dominate

Countering Communist and Nasserite Propaganda: the Foreign Office Information Research Department in the Middle East and Africa, 1954-1963

This thesis considers the role of the Information Research Department (IRD) in countering Arab nationalist and Communist propaganda directed at British interests in the Middle East and Africa between 1954 and 1963. It argues that the 1956 Suez Crisis and its fallout was the catalyst that drove a significant expansion of IRD's remit and responsibility. From 1956 the department – which up to this point had had a purely anti-Communist function – was given the responsibility of countering the increasing flow of Arab nationalist propaganda emerging from Egypt. The same year, the Communist powers mounted a renewed and concerted effort to culturally and ideologically penetrate Africa. IRD, who to this point had been excluded from directly operating in Africa, began counter-Communist work in the face of stiff Colonial Office resistance. Analysis of IRD in the Middle East has rarely considered events beyond the immediate aftermath of Suez. IRD's work in Africa is almost wholly unexplored. It is a central contention of this thesis that the two regions cannot be viewed in isolation post-Suez. Egypt's standing was buoyed by the propaganda capital of victory over Suez, and Nasser's position as the figurehead of Arab nationalism was assured. In seeking the removal of colonial influence from the Middle East and Africa, Arab propaganda – particularly the Voice of the Arabs programme of Cairo Radio – ties the regions together. Communist and African nationalist propagandists were drawn to Cairo in the wake of the Suez Crisis. The former, building relationships through aid, sought to leverage Cairo's expanding influence to their own advantage. The latter sought facilities and support for their own propaganda efforts. After Suez, IRD sought to manage Egyptian propaganda whilst avoiding direct confrontation, seeking to normalise relations. In Africa, the department sought to build an infrastructure for information work aimed at influencing future leaders, their efforts constrained by the timetable of British decolonisation. In both regions, through developing relationships with local agencies and the BBC, and from initiatives such as the Transmission 'X' news commentary service, IRD continued to address Arab nationalist and Communist propaganda with a flexibility and responsiveness not recognised in the current literature on IRD

Call concatenation in wild meerkats

Repertoire size, frequently determined by the number of discrete call types, has been used to assess vocal complexity in animals. However, species can also increase their communicative complexity by using graded signals or by combining individual calls. Animal call sequences can be divided into two main categories, each subdivided into two classes: repetitions, with either an unlimited or finite number of iterations of the same call type, and mixed call combinations, composed of two or more graded or discrete call types. Social contexts involve a wide range of behaviours and, unlike predation contexts, can be associated with both positive and negative emotions. Therefore, interactions linked to social contexts may place additional demands on an animal's communicative system and lead to the use of call combinations. We systematically documented call combinations produced by wild meerkats, Suricata suricatta, a highly social carnivore, in social contexts in their natural habitat. We observed 12 distinct call combinations belonging to all four classes of combination, produced in all the observed behavioural contexts. Four combinations were each produced in a specific context whereas the remaining eight were produced in several contexts, albeit in different proportions. The broad use of combinations suggests that they represent a non-negligible part of meerkat social communication and that they can be used in flexible ways across various behavioural contexts. Comparison with combinations produced in predation contexts indicated that social call combinations are more varied in number of classes and structural complexity than the former, perhaps due to the greater variety of social contexts. However, in meerkats, combinations of functionally referential calls have been documented in predation but not social contexts, suggesting that both social and predation pressures may play a role in the evolution of combinatoriality in animal communication

Carlos Gardel. Su vida, su música, su época

Biography of one of the leading figures of Argentine tango, Carlos Gardel

Access to Justice software development, Participatory Action Research Methods and Researching the Lived Experiences of British Military Veterans

Participatory action research (PAR) methods aim to position the people who are most affected by the issue being studied as equal partners in the research process through a cyclical process of data gathering, data analysis, planning and implementing action and evaluation and reflection. In doing so, it ensures that the research better reflects participants’ ideas, priorities, and needs, thereby enhancing its validity and relevance and the support for the findings and proposed changes. Furthermore, it generates immediately applicable results. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of developing the UK’s first access to justice platform for veterans and their families through an ongoing PAR project that brought together armed forces veterans, representatives from veterans' service providers, and the Veterans Legal Link team members comprising of legal academics, lawyers, sociologists, computer software designers and graphic designers to collect, interpret, and apply community information to address issues related to the delivery of access to justice. We present findings from Stages 1 and 2 of our three-stage iterative research process which includes the following steps: Understanding and cross-checking the lived experience of the veteran community (Stage 1), developing and testing a prototype of the access to justice platform (Stage 2) and creating the final product and giving real users an opportunity to use the platform (Stage 3). Data collection and analysis from Stage 1 of the study informed the themes that underpinned Stage 2. Specifically, data was collected through the following methods: co-facilitated focus group discussions, a web survey that was codesigned with veteran community stakeholders and remote and digitally enabled ethnographic research methods. We include several reflections that may help legal practitioners and researchers interested in applying PAR within the area of access to justice and the field of legal research

Aid Allocation of the Emerging Central and Eastern European Donors

The paper examines the main characteristics of the (re)emerging foreign aid policies of the Visegrád countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), concentrating on the allocation of their aid resources. We adopt an econometric approach, similar to the ones used in the literature for analyzing the aid allocation of the OECD DAC donors. Using this approach, we examine the various factors that influence aid allocation of the Visegrád countries, using data for the years between 2001 and 2008. Our most important conclusion is that the amount of aid a partner county gets from the four emerging donors is not influenced by the level of poverty or the previous performance (measured by the level of economic growth or the quality of institutions) of the recipients. The main determining factor seems to be geographic proximity, as countries in the Western-Balkans and the Post-Soviet region receive much more aid from the Visegrád countries than other recipients. Historical ties (pre-1989 development relations) and international obligations in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq are also found to be significant explanatory factors. This allocation is in line with the foreign political and economic interests of these new donors. While there are clear similarities between the four donors, the paper also identifies some individual country characteristics

Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models

Non-autoregressive generation (NAG) has recently attracted great attention due to its fast inference speed. However, the generation quality of existing NAG models still lags behind their autoregressive counterparts. In this work, we show that BERT can be employed as the backbone of a NAG model for a greatly improved performance. Additionally, we devise two mechanisms to alleviate the two common problems of vanilla NAG models: the inflexibility of prefixed output length and the conditional independence of individual token predictions. To further strengthen the speed advantage of the proposed model, we propose a new decoding strategy, ratio-first, for applications where the output lengths can be approximately estimated beforehand. For a comprehensive evaluation, we test the proposed model on three text generation tasks, including text summarization, sentence compression and machine translation. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing non-autoregressive baselines and achieves competitive performance with many strong autoregressive models. In addition, we also conduct extensive analysis experiments to reveal the effect of each proposed component