“I Wish I Had AIDS”: A qualitative study on access to health care services for HIV/AIDS and diabetic patients in Cambodia

Financially stricken Cambodian patients with diabetes and HIV/AIDS typically encounter multiple, serious barriers to effective care. This process may extend over many years and involve numerous rounds of diagnosis and treatment as the disease progresses from initial symptoms to longer term complications. Living with both the impact of the disease and this ongoing struggle for care can severely disrupt the everyday life of both sufferers and their families. Our retrospective study adopted qualitative research methods to collect data from HIV/AIDS and diabetic patients enrolled and not enrolled in treatment programs at varying institutions in urban and rural settings. Using purposive sampling techniques, a total of 25 HIV/AIDS and 45 diabetic patients were recruited. Semi-structured and open-ended interviews were used to collect information on patient experiences of different phases in the on-going process of seeking care and treatment. The findings indicate that both HIV/AIDS and diabetic patients encounter multiple supply- and demand-side barriers to care at different stages of their illness. More strikingly, our research findings suggest that supply-side barriers, for example rationing systems or targeting strategies that limit access to free treatment or social assistance, are substantially higher for diabetic patients. This perceived inequity had a profound impact on diabetic patients to the extent that some “wished they had HIV/AIDS”. These findings suggest that there is an urgent need to widen the focus of health care to address the substantial and increasing burden of disease resulting from diabetes and other serious chronic disorders in Cambodia and many other low/middle income countries.

Supervision of the ATLAS High Level Trigger System

Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, PDF (from MS Word). PSN TUGT009; Available at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C0303241/proc/papers/TUGT009.PDF pers/THJT006.PDFInternational audienceThe ATLAS High Level Trigger (HLT) system provides software-based event selection after the initial LVL1 hardware trigger. It is composed of two stages, the LVL2 trigger and the Event Filter. The HLT is implemented as software tasks running on large processor farms. An essential part of the HLT is the supervision system, which is responsible for configuring, coordinating, controlling and monitoring the many hundreds of processes running in the HLT. A prototype implementation of the supervision system, using tools from the ATLAS Online Software system is presented. Results from scalability tests are also presented where the supervision system was shown to be capable of controlling over 1000 HLT processes running on 230 nodes

Solutions of Minimal Four Dimensional de Sitter Supergravity

Pseudo-supersymmetric solutions of minimal $N=2$, $D=4$ de Sitter supergravity are classified using spinorial geometry techniques. We find three classes of solutions. The first class of solution consists of geometries which are fibrations over a 3-dimensional manifold equipped with a Gauduchon-Tod structure. The second class of solution is the cosmological Majumdar-Papapetrou solution of Kastor and Traschen, and the third corresponds to gravitational waves propagating in the Nariai cosmology.Comment: 17 Pages. Minor correction to section 4; equation (4.21) corrected and (old) equation (4.26) deleted; the final result is unchange

Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

Peer reviewe

Supergravity Duals to the Noncommutative N=4 SYM theory in the Infinite Momentum Frame

In this work the construction of supergravity duals to the noncommutative ${\cal N}=4$ SYM theory in the infinite momentum frame but with constant momentum density is attempted. In the absence of the content of noncommutativity, it has been known for some time that the previous $AdS_{5}/CFT_{4}$ correspondence should be replaced by the $K_{5}/CFT_{4}$ (with $K_{(p+2)}$ denoting the generalized Kaigorodov spacetime) correspondence with the pp-wave propagating on the BPS brane worldvolume. Interestingly enough, putting together the two contents, i.e., the introduction of noncommutativity and at the same time that of the pp-wave along the brane worldvolume, leads to quite nontrivial consequences such as the emergence of ``time-space'' noncommutativity in addition to the ``space-space'' noncommutativity in the manifold on which the dual gauge theory is defined. Taking the gravity decoupling limit, it has been realized that for small $u$, the solutions all reduce to $K_{5}\times S^5$ geometry confirming our expectation that the IR dynamics of the dual gauge theory should be unaffected by the noncommutativity while as $u\to \infty$, the solutions start to deviate significantly from $K_{5}\times S^5$ limit indicating that the UV dynamics of the dual gauge theory would be heavily distorted by the effect of noncommutativity.Comment: 21 pages, Latex, One expression changed, a reference added, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Analysis and design of a slotless tubular permanent magnet actuator for high acceleration applications

This paper presents the design of a linear actuator for high acceleration applications. In the analysis, a slotless tubular permanent magnet actuator is modeled by means of semianalytical field solutions. Several slotless topologies are modeled and compared to achieve the highest acceleration. A design has been proposed and built, and measurements are conducted to verify the model

Three-Dimensional Magnetic Field Modeling of a Cylindrical Halbach Array

A semi-analytical description of the 3-D magnetic field distribution of a cylindrical quasi-Halbach permanent magnet array is derived. This model avoids the necessity of time-consuming finite element analyses and allows for fast parameterization to investigate the influence of the number of segments on the magnetic flux density distribution. The segmented magnet is used to approximate an ideal radial magnetized ring in a cylindrical quasi-Halbach array. The model is obtained by solving the Maxwell equations using the magnetic scalar potential and describes the magnetic fields by a Fourier series

Non-extremal black holes from the generalised r-map

We review the timelike dimensional reduction of a class of five-dimensional theories that generalises 5D, N = 2 supergravity coupled to vector multiplets. As an application we construct instanton solutions to the four-dimensional Euclidean theory, and investigate the criteria for solutions to lift to static non-extremal black holes in five dimensions. We focus specifically on two classes of models: STU-like models, and models with a block diagonal target space metric. For STU-like models the second order equations of motion of the four-dimensional theory can be solved explicitly, and we obtain the general solution. For block diagonal models we find a restricted class of solutions, where the number of independent scalar fields depends on the number of blocks. When lifting these solutions to five dimensions we show, by explicit calculation, that one obtains static non-extremal black holes with scalar fields that take finite values on the horizon only if the number of integration constants reduces by exactly half.Comment: 22 pages. Based on talk by OV at "Black Objects in Supergravity School" (BOSS2011), INFN, Frascati, Italy, 9-13 May, 201