Land Grant Application- King, Moses (Pittston)

Land grant application submitted to the Maine Land Office on behalf of Moses King for service in the Revolutionary War, by their widow Mary Brainardo.https://digitalmaine.com/revolutionary_war_me_land_office/1534/thumbnail.jp

Gendered sexual risk patterns and polygamy among HIV sero-discordant couples in Uganda

This study examined the multiple sexual partnerships and HIV sero-discordant relationships are among the most at-risk for HIV transmission.Multiple sexual partnerships and HIV sero-discordant relationships are among the most at-risk for HIV transmission. Polygamy is a common form of multiple-partnered relationships in Eastern Uganda. We investigated the association between HIV risk patterns and polygamy among HIV sero-discordant couples at The AIDS Support Organization in Jinja, Uganda Methods Participants were enrollees in a prospective cohort of HIV sero-discordant couples, the Highly Active Antiretroviral therapy as Prevention (HAARP) Study at TASO Jinja. Descriptive nand bivariate analyses to compare sexual risk patterns among HIV sero-discordant men; in polygamous as compared to single-spouse relationship

Factors influencing students' behavioral intention to use an online learning portal

The widespread introduction of Information Technology and the Internet is reshaping the landscape of the learning environment, namely online education. It is important to note that, to achieve a successful online education, it is important to understand the determinants of online learning among students. Therefore, this research study aims to explore the factors that can influence students' behavioral intention to use an online learning portal. In view of that, a comprehensive search of the literature was carried out. The literature review reveals that gender, students' attitude, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, motivation and social interaction influence an individual's intention to use an online learning portal. Indeed, online learning has changed the learning culture forever

Assessing the presence of Wuchereria bancrofti in vector and human populations from urban communities in Conakry, Guinea

The Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis was launched in 2000 with the goal of interrupting transmission of lymphatic filariasis (LF) through multiple rounds of mass drug administration (MDA). In Guinea, there is evidence of ongoing LF transmission, but little is known about the most densely populated parts of the country, including the capital Conakry. In order to guide the LF control and elimination efforts, serological and entomological surveys were carried out to determine whether or not LF transmission occurs in Conakry.; The prevalence of circulating filarial antigen (CFA) of Wuchereria bancrofti was assessed by an immuno-chromatography test (ICT) in people recruited from all five districts of Conakry. Mosquitoes were collected over a 1-year period, in 195 households in 15 communities. A proportion of mosquitoes were analysed for W. bancrofti, using dissection, loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay and conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR).; CFA test revealed no infection in the 611 individuals examined. A total of 14,334 mosquitoes were collected; 14,135 Culex (98.6 %), 161 Anopheles (1.1 %) and a few other species. Out of 1,312 Culex spp. (9.3 %) and 51 An. gambiae (31.7 %) dissected, none was infected with any stage of the W. bancrofti parasite. However, the LAMP assay revealed that 1.8 % of An. gambiae and 0.31 % of Culex spp. were positive, while PCR determined respective prevalences of 0 % and 0.19 %.; This study revealed the presence of W. bancrofti DNA in mosquitoes, despite the apparent absence of infection in the human population. Although MDA interventions are not recommended where the prevalence of ICT is below 1 %, the entomological results are suggestive of the circulation of the parasite in the population of Conakry. Therefore, rigorous surveillance is still warranted so that LF transmission in Conakry would be identified rapidly and adequate responses being implemented

Substrate envelope and drug resistance: crystal structure of RO1 in complex with wild-type human immunodeficiency virus type 1 protease

In our previous crystallographic studies of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) protease-substrate complexes, we described a conserved envelope that appears to be important for substrate recognition and the selection of drug-resistant mutations. In this study, the complex of HIV-1 protease with the inhibitor RO1 was determined and comparison with the substrate envelope provides a rationale for mutational patterns

Dosing pole recommendations for lymphatic filariasis elimination: A height-weight quantile regression modeling approach

BACKGROUND: The World Health Organization (WHO) currently recommends height or age-based dosing as alternatives to weight-based dosing for mass drug administration lymphatic filariasis (LF) elimination programs. The goals of our study were to compare these alternative dosing strategies to weight-based dosing and to develop and evaluate new height-based dosing pole scenarios. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Age, height and weight data were collected from \u3e26,000 individuals in five countries during a cluster randomized LF clinical trial. Weight-based dosing for diethylcarbamazine (DEC; 6 mg/kg) and ivermectin (IVM; 200 ug/kg) with tablet numbers derived from a table of weight intervals was treated as the gold standard for this study. Following WHO recommended age-based dosing of DEC and height-based dosing of IVM would have resulted in 32% and 27% of individuals receiving treatment doses below those recommended by weight-based dosing for DEC and IVM, respectively. Underdosing would have been especially common in adult males, who tend to have the highest LF prevalence in many endemic areas. We used a 3-step modeling approach to develop and evaluate new dosing pole cutoffs. First, we analyzed the clinical trial data using quantile regression to predict weight from height. We then used weight predictions to develop new dosing pole cutoff values. Finally, we compared different dosing pole cutoffs and age and height-based WHO dosing recommendations to weight-based dosing. We considered hundreds of scenarios including country- and sex-specific dosing poles. A simple dosing pole with a 6-tablet maximum for both DEC and IVM reduced the underdosing rate by 30% and 21%, respectively, and was nearly as effective as more complex pole combinations for reducing underdosing. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Using a novel modeling approach, we developed a simple dosing pole that would markedly reduce underdosing for DEC and IVM in MDA programs compared to current WHO recommended height or age-based dosing

Statistical parametric speech synthesis for Ibibio

Ibibio is a Nigerian tone language, spoken in the south-east coastal region of Nigeria. Like most African languages, it is resource-limited. This presents a major challenge to conventional approaches to speech synthesis, which typically require the training of numerous predictive models of linguistic features such as the phoneme sequence (i.e., a pronunciation dictionary plus a letter-to-sound model) and prosodic structure (e.g., a phrase break predictor). This training is invariably supervised, requiring a corpus of training data labelled with the linguistic feature to be predicted. In this paper, we investigate what can be achieved in the absence of many of these expensive resources, and also with a limited amount of speech recordings. We employ a statistical parametric method, because this has been found to offer good performance even on small corpora, and because it is able to directly learn the relationship between acoustics and whatever linguistic features are available, potentially mitigating the absence of explicit representations of intermediate linguistic layers such as prosody. We present an evaluation that compares systems that have access to varying degrees of linguistic structure. The simplest system only uses phonetic context (quinphones), and this is compared to systems with access to a richer set of context features, with or without tone marking. It is found that the use of tone marking contributes significantly to the quality of synthetic speech. Future work should therefore address the problem of tone assignment using a dictionary and the building of a prediction module for out-of-vocabulary words. Key words: speech synthesis, Ibibio, low-resource languages, HT

"The Actor Is Policy": Application of Elite Theory to Explore Actors' Interests and Power Underlying Maternal Health Policies in Uganda, 2000-2015.

BACKGROUND: The persistence of high maternal mortality and consistent failure in low- and middle-income countries to achieve global targets such as Millennium Development Goal five (MDG 5) is usually explained from epidemiological, interventional and health systems perspectives. The role of policy elites and their interests remains inadequately explored in this debate. This study examined elites and how their interests drove maternal health policies and actions in ways that could explain policy failure for MDG 5 in Uganda. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective qualitative study of Uganda's maternal health policies from 2000 to 2015 (MDG period). Thirty key informant interviews and 2 focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted with national policy-makers, who directly participated in the formulation of Uganda's maternal health policies during the MDG period. We reviewed 9 National Maternal Health Policy documents. Data were analysed inductively using elite theory. RESULTS: Maternal health policies were mainly driven by a small elite group comprised of Senior Ministry of Health (MoH) officials, some members of cabinet and health development partners (HDPs) who wielded more power than other actors. The resulting policies often appeared to be skewed towards elites' personal political and economic interests, rather than maternal mortality reduction. For a few, however, interests aligned with reducing maternal mortality. Since complying with the government policy-making processes would have exposed elites' personal interests, they mainly drafted policies as service standards and programme documents to bypass the formal policy process. CONCLUSION: Uganda's maternal health policies were mainly influenced by the elites' personal interests rather than by the goal of reducing maternal mortality. This was enabled by the formal guidance for policy-making which gives elites control over the policy process. Accelerating maternal mortality reduction will require re-engineering the policy process to prevent public officials from infusing policies with their interests, and enable percolation of ideas from the public and frontline