Border parasites: schistosomiasis control among Uganda's fisherfolk

Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis. This article has been made publically available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.It is recognized that the control of schistosomisais in Uganda requires a focus on fisherfolk. Large numbers suffer from this water-borne parasitic disease; notably along the shores of lakes Albert and Victoria and along the River Nile. Since 2004, a policy has been adopted of providing drugs, free of charge, to all those at risk. The strategy has been reported to be successful, but closer investigation reveals serious problems. This paper draws upon long-term research undertaken at three locations in northwestern and southeastern Uganda. It highlights consequences of not engaging with the day to day realities of fisherfolk livelihoods; attributable, in part, to the fact that so many fisherfolk live and work in places located at the country’s international borders, and to a related tendency to treat them as "feckless" and "ungovernable". Endeavours to roll out treatment end up being haphazard, erratic and location-specific. In some places, concerted efforts have been made to treat fisherfolk; but there is no effective monitoring, and it is difficult to gauge what proportion have actually swallowed the tablets. In other places, fisherfolk are, in practice, largely ignored, or are actively harassed in ways that make treatment almost impossible. At all sites, the current reliance upon resident "community" drug distributors or staff based at static clinics and schools was found to be flawed.The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, Imperial College, under the auspices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

The Digital Flynn Effect: Complexity of Posts on Social Media Increases over Time

Parents and teachers often express concern about the extensive use of social media by youngsters. Some of them see emoticons, undecipherable initialisms and loose grammar typical for social media as evidence of language degradation. In this paper, we use a simple measure of text complexity to investigate how the complexity of public posts on a popular social networking site changes over time. We analyze a unique dataset that contains texts posted by 942, 336 users from a large European city across nine years. We show that the chosen complexity measure is correlated with the academic performance of users: users from high-performing schools produce more complex texts than users from low-performing schools. We also find that complexity of posts increases with age. Finally, we demonstrate that overall language complexity of posts on the social networking site is constantly increasing. We call this phenomenon the digital Flynn effect. Our results may suggest that the worries about language degradation are not warranted

K→(ππ)I=2K\to(\pi\pi)_{I=2} decays and twisted boundary conditions

We propose a new method to evaluate the Lellouch-L\"uscher factor which relates the $\Delta I=3/2$ $K\to\pi\pi$ matrix elements computed on a finite lattice to the physical (infinite-volume) decay amplitudes. The method relies on the use of partially twisted boundary conditions, which allow the s-wave $\pi\pi$ phase shift to be computed as an almost continuous function of the centre-of-mass relative momentum and hence for its derivative to be evaluated. We successfully demonstrate the feasibility of the technique in an exploratory computation.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure

Heavy quark mass dependence of semileptonic form factors for B decays

We present our study of the dependence of the heavy-to-light semileptonic B decay form factors on the heavy-light meson mass $M_{PS}$. Simulations are made over a range of the heavy quark mass covering both the charm and bottom quarks using the $O(a)$-improved clover action at $\beta=5.9$ on a $16^3\times 40$ and $24^3\times 64$ lattice. We find that a weak dependence of form factors on $M_{PS}$ observed in previous studies in the region of charm quark persists up to the region of$b$ quark. The soft pion relation $f^0(q^2_{max})=f_B/f_\pi$ is examined and found to be largely violated.Comment: 3 pages, latex source-file, 4 figures as epsf-file, uses espcrc2.sty. Talk presented by S. Tominaga at Lattice 97, Edinburgh, Scotland, 22-26 Jul 199

The kaon semileptonic form factor in Nf=2+1 domain wall lattice QCD with physical light quark masses

We present the first calculation of the kaon semileptonic form factor with sea and valence quark masses tuned to their physical values in the continuum limit of 2+1 flavour domain wall lattice QCD. We analyse a comprehensive set of simulations at the phenomenologically convenient point of zero momentum transfer in large physical volumes and for two different values of the lattice spacing. Our prediction for the form factor is f+(0)=0.9685(34)(14) where the first error is statistical and the second error systematic. This result can be combined with experimental measurements of K->pi decays for a determination of the CKM-matrix element for which we predict |Vus|=0.2233(5)(9) where the first error is from experiment and the second error from the lattice computation.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 6 table

A lattice NRQCD computation of the bag parameters for ΔB\Delta B = 2 operators

We present an update of our NRQCD calculation of $B_B$ at $\beta$=5.9 with increased statistics. We also discuss a calculation of $B_S$, which is relevant to the width difference in the $B_s-\bar{B}_s$ mixing.Comment: LATTICE99 (Heavy Quarks), 3 pages, 2 figures, espcrc2.st

Heavy Hadron Spectroscopy

I review recent theoretical advances in heavy hadron spectroscopy.Comment: Plenary talk at the XXXIII International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP 06), Moscow, Russia, July 26 - August 2, 2006; 11 page

Anatomy of Cirrus Clouds: Results from the Emerald Airborne Campaigns

2000 FLORIDA AVE NW, WASHINGTON, USA, DC, 2000