33,717 research outputs found
Insecticide treated bednets: A review
The functioning and efficacy of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) in controlling malaria are discussed in the present review. ITNs Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) have been shown to have a beneficial impact in reducing malaria mortality and morbidity in children. However, a few issues are still unresolved: for instance the short and long term effects of an artificially induced reduction in the intensity of malaria transmission on the immune system and the mortality of children is not entirely understood; further studies are needed on whether the spread of resistance to pyrethroids, which is the only class of insecticide currently recommended on nets, affects the effectiveness of ITNs so that resistance to these insecticides would constitutes a serious threat for the success of the malaria vector control programs. Lastly, the economic aspects are presented. The main problem is to find a way for a sustainable implementation of this methodology, that includes purchasing new bednets, delivery and the regular re-impregnation of the existing nets. Free delivery and retreatment in poor countries is not only more equitable but also more efficient than marketing methods
The Use and Abuse of Special-Purpose Entities in Public Finance
States increasingly are raising financing indirectly through special-purpose entities (SPEs), variously referred to as authorities, special authorities, or public authorities. Notwithstanding their long history and increasingly widespread use, relatively little is known or has been written about these entities. This article examines state SPEs and their functions, comparing them to SPEs used in corporate finance. States, even more than corporations, use these entities to reduce financial transparency and avoid public scrutiny, seriously threatening the integrity of public finance. The article analyzes how regulation could be designed in order to control that threat while maintaining the legitimate financing benefits provided by these state entities
Social (pragmatic) communication disorders and autism spectrum disorder
Changes have been made to the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and similar changes are likely in the WHO International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) due in 2017. In light of these changes, a new clinical disorder, social (pragmatic) communication disorder (SPCD), was added to the neurodevelopmental disorders section of DSM-5. This article describes the key features of ASD, SPCD and the draft ICD-11 approach to pragmatic language impairment, highlighting points of overlap between the disorders and criteria for differential diagnosis
Diversity not quantity in caregiver speech: using computational modeling to isolate the effects of the quantity and the diversity of the input on vocabulary growth
Children who hear large amounts of diverse speech learn language more quickly than children who do not. However, high correlations between the amount and the diversity of the input in speech samples makes it difficult to isolate the influence of each. We overcame this problem by controlling the input to a computational model so that amount of exposure to linguistic input (quantity) and the quality of that input (lexical diversity) were independently manipulated. Sublexical, lexical, and multi-word knowledge were charted across development (Study 1), showing that while input quantity may be important early in learning, lexical diversity is ultimately more crucial, a prediction confirmed against children’s data (Study 2). The model trained on a lexically diverse input also performed better on nonword repetition and sentence recall tests (Study 3) and was quicker to learn new words over time (Study 4). A language input that is rich in lexical diversity outperforms equivalent richness in quantity for learned sublexical and lexical knowledge, for well-established language tests, and for acquiring words that have never been encountered before
Tensorial Reconstruction at the Integrand Level
We present a new approach to the reduction of one-loop amplitudes obtained by
reconstructing the tensorial expression of the scattering amplitudes. The
reconstruction is performed at the integrand level by means of a sampling in
the integration momentum. There are several interesting applications of this
novel method within existing techniques for the reduction of one-loop multi-leg
amplitudes: to deal with numerically unstable points, such as in the vicinity
of a vanishing Gram determinant; to allow for a sampling of the numerator
function based on real values of the integration momentum; to optimize the
numerical reduction in the case of long expressions for the numerator
functions.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure
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Gladstone and Scott: Family, identity, and nation
In the 175 years since his death, Walter Scott has regularly been hailed as an influence by politicians. Amongst the poet-novelist's nineteenth-century political admirers, William Ewart Gladstone was possibly the most ardent, genuine, and significant. Scott's poems and novels were amongst the earliest texts Gladstone read; he read no works (in English), except the Bible, so consistently or completely over such a length of time. They offered him a plethora of inspirations, ideas, and language, which he imbibed and appropriated into his public and private lives. His concept of self, his understanding of family, and his sense of home, were all forged and conducted within a Scottian frame of reference. Scott's life and works also crucially influenced Gladstone's political understanding of the Scottish nation and its people, and his conception of how he could best serve their political interests. This article casts new light on an important and influential relationship in Gladstone's life, establishing that it was neither the superficial and recreational association some have described, nor simply a ploy of an astute politician. The article falls into three parts. The first elucidates how Gladstone's consumption of Scott's writings was seminal in the formation of his private identity, both individual and familial. The second explains how Gladstone's readings of Scott fitted into the specific and serious character of his other reading and knowledge-gathering, and the third shows how the details of Gladstone's response to Scott related to the broader intellectual and cultural context of his public life. By placing Gladstone within his Scottish context, this article shows how frequently and significantly his private and public worlds intersected
A Trial of a 7-Valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine in HIV-Infected Adults.
BACKGROUND: Streptococcus pneumoniae is a leading and serious coinfection in adults with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, particularly in Africa. Prevention of this disease by vaccination with the current 23-valent polysaccharide vaccine is suboptimal. Protein conjugate vaccines offer a further option for protection, but data on their clinical efficacy in adults are needed. METHODS: In this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical efficacy trial, we studied the efficacy of a 7-valent conjugate pneumococcal vaccine in predominantly HIV-infected Malawian adolescents and adults who had recovered from documented invasive pneumococcal disease. Two doses of vaccine were given 4 weeks apart. The primary end point was a further episode of pneumococcal infection caused by vaccine serotypes or serotype 6A. RESULTS: From February 2003 through October 2007, we followed 496 patients (of whom 44% were male and 88% were HIV-seropositive) for 798 person-years of observation. There were 67 episodes of pneumococcal disease in 52 patients, all in the HIV-infected subgroup. In 24 patients, there were 19 episodes that were caused by vaccine serotypes and 5 episodes that were caused by the 6A serotype. Of these episodes, 5 occurred in the vaccine group and 19 in the placebo group, for a vaccine efficacy of 74% (95% confidence interval [CI], 30 to 90). There were 73 deaths from any cause in the vaccine group and 63 in the placebo group (hazard ratio in the vaccine group, 1.18; 95% CI, 0.84 to 1.66). The number of serious adverse events within 14 days after vaccination was significantly lower in the vaccine group than in the placebo group (3 vs. 17, P=0.002), and the number of minor adverse events was significantly higher in the vaccine group (41 vs. 13, P=0.003). CONCLUSIONS: The 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine protected HIV-infected adults from recurrent pneumococcal infection caused by vaccine serotypes or serotype 6A. (Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN54494731.) Copyright 2010 Massachusetts Medical Society
Next-to-leading order QCD predictions for W+W+jj production at the LHC
Because the LHC is a proton-proton collider, sizable production of two
positively charged W-bosons in association with two jets is possible. This
process leads to a distinct signature of same sign high-pt leptons, missing
energy and jets. We compute the NLO QCD corrections to the QCD-mediated part of
pp -> W+W+jj. These corrections reduce the dependence of the production
cross-section on the renormalization and factorization scale to about +- 10
percent. We find that a large number of W+W+jj events contain a relatively hard
third jet. The presence of this jet should help to either pick up the W+W+jj
signal or to reject it as an unwanted background.Comment: 15 pages, 5 (lovely) figures, v3 accepted for publication in JHEP,
corrects tables in appendi
Deep Learning using K-space Based Data Augmentation for Automated Cardiac MR Motion Artefact Detection
Quality assessment of medical images is essential for complete automation of
image processing pipelines. For large population studies such as the UK
Biobank, artefacts such as those caused by heart motion are problematic and
manual identification is tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, there is an
urgent need for automatic image quality assessment techniques. In this paper,
we propose a method to automatically detect the presence of motion-related
artefacts in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. As this is a highly
imbalanced classification problem (due to the high number of good quality
images compared to the low number of images with motion artefacts), we propose
a novel k-space based training data augmentation approach in order to address
this problem. Our method is based on 3D spatio-temporal Convolutional Neural
Networks, and is able to detect 2D+time short axis images with motion artefacts
in less than 1ms. We test our algorithm on a subset of the UK Biobank dataset
consisting of 3465 CMR images and achieve not only high accuracy in detection
of motion artefacts, but also high precision and recall. We compare our
approach to a range of state-of-the-art quality assessment methods.Comment: Accepted for MICCAI2018 Conferenc
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