Increased demand for rapid access to UK magnetic observatory data : implications for quality control procedures

During the last decade the demand for magnetic observatory data has steadily increased both from the scientific community and in particular from commercial organisations. Not only are the quantity of data products greater now but the speed at which they are delivered is faster and the quality of the data provided better. The modern user requirements for timely data have prompted the need for improved automatic procedures utilising the new technologies available. This has to be balanced against the user requirements for accuracy, which necessitate rigorous quality control procedures. While some of these have been automated, as is shown in the flow diagram, there remains a requirement for human interpretation and action if and when the data contain errors. Software development to reduce this human intervention is on-going

Legal socialization effects on democratization

As is the case with all our joint publications, this article represents a genuine research collaboration between the authors, with equal contributions. Therefore, neither is first or second author. This article uses data from a collaborative project that grew out of the Law and Society Associations Working Group on Orientations toward Law and Normative Ordering‘. Ellen S. Cohn, lames L. Gibson, Susan O. White, Joseph Sanders, Joan McCord, and Felice Levine were responsible for the development and implementation of the research design. Funding for the project was provided by the (US) National Science Foundation (SE 13237 and SIR 11403). Our European collaborators include Chantal Kourilsky-Augeven (France), Grazyna Skapska, Iwona Jakubowska-Branicka, and Maria Barucka-Arctowa (Poland), Andras Sajo (Hungary), Rosemary Barberet (Spain), and Stefka Naoumova (Bulgaria). Pam Moore, Kris Guffey, Marika Litras, Julie Nadeau, John Kraft, and Kimberly Smirles provided valuable research assistance

Ameiva corax

Number of Pages: 2Integrative BiologyGeological Science

HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis: additional insights through secondary analyses of the PROUD trial

This thesis utilises data from PROUD, a randomised controlled trial to evaluate pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention. PROUD randomised 544 HIV-negative men who have sex with men (MSM) to receive PrEP immediately or deferred for a year. The trial demonstrated that PrEP was highly effective at preventing HIV transmission. In this thesis, I consider four further questions: (1) Who should access PrEP? (2) How appropriate are epidemiological measures that are commonly used for PrEP and other prevention strategies? (3) Is PrEP-use associated with an increased risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs)? and (4) What is the risk of hepatitis C (HCV) among PrEP-users? The highest risk of HIV acquisition was associated with a rectal STI or syphilis diagnosis in the previous year, or reporting condomless receptive intercourse with two or more partners in the previous three months. MSM meeting these criteria are therefore in most need of PrEP. STI diagnoses were more common among PrEP-users, found in both the randomised and pre-/post-PrEP comparisons. It was unclear whether this was driven by a difference in screening or sexual behaviour. Regardless, PrEP-using MSM are at high risk of STIs, and frequent screening in a PrEP programme would likely help control onward transmission. HCV incidence was high and increased during the four-year period of follow-up, doubling in the final year. Risk varied according to reported risk factors. Thus, the current recommendation of quarterly HCV screening for all PrEP-using MSM may not be appropriate unless there is a localised epidemic. My findings show that MSM seeking PrEP have a high but heterogeneous risk of sexually transmitted diseases, with variation according to individual- and population-level risk factors. PrEP programmes need to allocate sufficient provisions to screen for and treat other clinical outcomes, including STIs and HCV

Missionaries of Nebraska Christian Women\u27s Missionary Society

https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/crs_books/1408/thumbnail.jp

Research Proposal: Design and Analysis of Practical Switching Networks

At the heart of any communication system is the switching system for supporting connections between sets of endpoints. A switching system consists of one or more switching networks connected by communication links. Effective design of switching networks is critical to the success of a communication system. This paper proposes the study of three problems in the design of switching networks: design of nonblocking multirate distribution, evaluation of blocking probability in distributors and quantitative comparison of architectures. Each of these problems is significant in the design of practical networks and lacks broad analytic treatment

The Clos Network as a Multirate Distributer with a Greedy Routing Algorithm

Yang and Masson [14] have demonstrated that the Clos network is a nearly nonblocking distributer, with the proper choice of network parameters. The resulting network has better asymptotic crosspoint compleixty than other known constructions when the number of stages is fixed. In addition, the routing algorithm is efficient, taking time linear in the number of network inputs to route a new connection. We extend these results to the multirate environment in which each connection has an associated weight indicating the fraction of link bandwidth which it requires. Connections may share a link provided the sum of the weights does not exceed 1. The overall complexity of the network is better than other known multirate results when the number of stages is fixed

ANNOTATING A CORPUS OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH TEXTS: TWO MODELS OF RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Recent advances in the biomedical sciences have led to an enormous increase in the amount of research literature being published, most of it in electronic form; researchers are finding it difficult to keep up-to-date on all of the new developments in their fields. As a result there is a need to develop automated Text Mining tools to filter and organize data in a way which is useful to researchers. Human-annotated data are often used as the ‘gold standard’ to train such systems via machine learning methods. This thesis reports on a project where three annotators applied two Models of rhetoric (argument) to a corpus of on-line biomedical research texts. How authors structure their argumentation and which rhetorical strategies they employ are key to how researchers present their experimental results; thus rhetorical analysis of a text could allow for the extraction of information which is pertinent for a particular researcher’s purpose. The first Model stems from previous work in Computational Linguistics; it focuses on differentiating ‘new’ from ‘old’ information, and results from analysis of results. The second Model is based on Toulmin’s argument structure (1958/2003); its main focus is to identify ‘Claims’ being made by the authors, but it also differentiates between internal and external evidence, as well as categories of explanation and implications of the current experiment. In order to properly train automated systems, and as a gauge of the shared understanding of the argument scheme being applied, inter-annotator agreement should be relatively high. The results of this study show complete (three-way) inter-annotator agreement on m an average of 60.5% of the 400 sentences in the final corpus under Model 1, and 39.3% under Model 2. Analyses of the inter-annotator variation are done in order to examine in detail all of the factors involved; these include particular Model categories, individual annotator preferences, errors, and the corpus data itself. In order to reduce this inter­ annotator variation, revisions to both Models are suggested; also it is recommended that in the future biomedical domain experts, possibly in tandem with experts in rhetoric, be used as annotators