Designing and implementing a communications strategy: lessons learnt from HIV and Sexual and Reproductive Health Research Programme Consortia.

In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the importance of strategic research communication. Health research organisations need to be able to communicate their research effectively to increase the probability that the findings influence policy and practice, and benefit those in greatest need. Many research funders are making communications a requirement of research funding. This paper reflects on the experience in developing and implementing communications strategies of several Research Programme Consortia funded by the Department for International Development.Different research topics will require different communications approaches in order to be effective. This is reflected in the diversity of strategies employed by different research programmes. Strategic research communications designed to influence policy and practice require different skills and expertise from those required for carrying out research and writing it up for publication in academic journals. Therefore researchers involved in communicating research should be supported in this work. One of the ways in which research programme consortia have sought to do this is through convening workshops to develop the communications skills of researchers from partner organisations. These have proven invaluable. Another way of providing ongoing support to those involved in communicating research is through a Communications Community of Practice. Where this has been used it has proven a good way to support researchers both with ideas and resources, but also a strong sense of belonging to a community that shares a common concern with communication. Developing strong partnerships with research users, other research organisations, knowledge intermediaries and other stakeholders is vital for effective communication.Embracing the challenges and opportunities presented by communicating research to influence policy practice is vital if research is to have maximum possible impact, and demonstrate its worth at a time when funding for health and development activities is at risk. Sharing lessons learnt in this process between research programmes is important to support this work

What is a crystal?

Almost 25 years have passed since Shechtman discovered quasicrystals, and 15 years since the Commission on Aperiodic Crystals of the International Union of Crystallography put forth a provisional definition of the term crystal to mean ``any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction diagram.'' Have we learned enough about crystallinity in the last 25 years, or do we need more time to explore additional physical systems? There is much confusion and contradiction in the literature in using the term crystal. Are we ready now to propose a permanent definition for crystal to be used by all? I argue that time has come to put a sense of order in all the confusion.Comment: Submitted to Zeitschrift fuer Kristallographi

A Better Definition of the Kilogram

This article reviews several recent proposed redefinitions of the kilogram, and compares them with respect to practical realizations, uncertainties (estimated standard deviations), and educational aspects.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

Impact of maternal education on response to lifestyle interventions to reduce gestational weight gain : Individual participant data meta-Analysis

Acknowledgements The authors are also grateful to the i-WIP Network for the individual participant data shared and to Helena Teede, Janette Khoury and Márcia Vitolo for the contribution of data. Contributors ECOB, FMMcA: wrote a proposal to the i-WIP data access committee; set the objectives, study design and data analysis plan. ECOB, FMMcA, RS, AAG and GA: analysis and interpretation of data; drafting of manuscript; critical revision; final approval of version to be published; agreeable to be accountable for all aspects of the work. ER: i-WIP IPD database manager; study conception and design; critical revision; final approval of version to be published; agreeable to be accountable for all aspects of the work. AA, RBC, AB, JGC, AC, CJMdG, RD, JMD, NEB, FF, NG, KG, LH, CH, HH, DMJ, KK, TIK, RL, BWM, SM, NM-T, JAO, MP, EP, SP, LP, KR, GR, KMR, AER, LS, KÅS, TTS, GS, AS, SNS, FGS, ShT, SeT, MNMvP, CV, IV and SY: study conception and design; critical revision; final approval of version to be published; agreeable to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Funding The data come from a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded project (HTA-12/01/50) and the Queen Mary University of London is its legal sponsor. The database was initially funded by the NIHR and is currently funded by WHO. This work was also supported by the Health Research Board, Health Research Centre for Health and Diet Research, Ireland.Peer reviewe

The rule of law in the Islamic legal system

This presentation was given as part of the Islamic Law and International Law Conference 2011 by Irmgard Marboe from the University of Vienna. The conference was hosted by the Brunel Law School on the 9th September 2011

Fourteenth(14th) seminar on tropical medicine

노트 : Seminar on Tropical Medicine, 14th (9-11 Jun 1983 : Seoul, KR

WarpedGANSpace: Finding non-linear RBF paths in GAN latent space

This work addresses the problem of discovering, in an unsupervised manner, interpretable paths in the latent space of pretrained GANs, so as to provide an intuitive and easy way of controlling the underlying generative factors. In doing so, it addresses some of the limitations of the state-of-the-art works, namely, a) that they discover directions that are independent of the latent code, i.e., paths that are linear, and b) that their evaluation relies either on visual inspection or on laborious human labeling. More specifically, we propose to learn non-linear warpings on the latent space, each one parametrized by a set of RBF-based latent space warping functions, and where each warping gives rise to a family of non-linear paths via the gradient of the function. Building on the work of Voynov and Babenko that discovers linear paths, we optimize the trainable parameters of the set of RBFs, so as that images that are generated by codes along different paths, are easily distinguishable by a discriminator network. This leads to easily distinguishable image transformations, such as pose and facial expressions in facial images. We show that linear paths can be derived as a special case of our method, and show experimentally that non-linear paths in the latent space lead to steeper, more disentangled and interpretable changes in the image space than in state-of-the art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We make the code and the pretrained models publicly available at: https://github.com/chi0tzp/WarpedGANSpace

Evolution of community structure in the world trade web

In this note we study the bilateral merchandise trade flows between 186 countries over the 1948-2005 period using data from the International Monetary Fund. We use Pajek to identify network structure and behavior across thresholds and over time. In particular, we focus on the evolution of trade "islands" in the a world trade network in which countries are linked with directed edges weighted according to fraction of total dollars sent from one country to another. We find mixed evidence for globalization.Comment: To be submitted to APFA 6 Proceedings, 8 pages, 3 Figure