Morphological features and differential counts of Plasmodium knowlesi parasites in naturally acquired human infections

Background: Human infections with Plasmodium knowlesi, a simian malaria parasite, are more common than previously thought. They have been detected by molecular detection methods in various countries in Southeast Asia, where they were initially diagnosed by microscopy mainly as Plasmodium malariae and at times, as Plasmodium falciparum. There is a paucity of information on the morphology of P. knowlesi parasites and proportion of each erythrocytic stage in naturally acquired human infections. Therefore, detailed descriptions of the morphological characteristics and differential counts of the erythrocytic stages of P. knowlesi parasites in human infections were made, photographs were taken, and morphological features were compared with those of P. malariae and P. falciparum. Methods: Thick and thin blood films were made prior to administration of anti-malarial treatment in patients who were subsequently confirmed as having single species knowlesi infections by PCR assays. Giemsa-stained blood films, prepared from 10 randomly selected patients with a parasitaemia ranging from 610 to 236,000 parasites per mu l blood, were examined. Results: The P. knowlesi infection was highly synchronous in only one patient, where 97% of the parasites were at the late trophozoite stage. Early, late and mature trophozoites and schizonts were observed in films from all patients except three; where schizonts and early trophozoites were absent in two and one patient, respectively. Gametocytes were observed in four patients, comprising only between 1.2 to 2.8% of infected erythrocytes. The early trophozoites of P. knowlesi morphologically resemble those of P. falciparum. The late and mature trophozoites, schizonts and gametocytes appear very similar to those of P. malariae. Careful examinations revealed that some minor morphological differences existed between P. knowlesi and P. malariae. These include trophozoites of knowlesi with double chromatin dots and at times with two or three parasites per erythrocyte and mature schizonts of P. knowlesi having 16 merozoites, compared with 12 for P. malariae. Conclusion: Plasmodium knowlesi infections in humans are not highly synchronous. The morphological resemblance of early trophozoites of P. knowlesi to P. falciparum and later erythrocytic stages to P. malariae makes it extremely difficult to identify P. knowlesi infections by microscopy alone.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Language Transfer of Audio Word2Vec: Learning Audio Segment Representations without Target Language Data

Audio Word2Vec offers vector representations of fixed dimensionality for variable-length audio segments using Sequence-to-sequence Autoencoder (SA). These vector representations are shown to describe the sequential phonetic structures of the audio segments to a good degree, with real world applications such as query-by-example Spoken Term Detection (STD). This paper examines the capability of language transfer of Audio Word2Vec. We train SA from one language (source language) and use it to extract the vector representation of the audio segments of another language (target language). We found that SA can still catch phonetic structure from the audio segments of the target language if the source and target languages are similar. In query-by-example STD, we obtain the vector representations from the SA learned from a large amount of source language data, and found them surpass the representations from naive encoder and SA directly learned from a small amount of target language data. The result shows that it is possible to learn Audio Word2Vec model from high-resource languages and use it on low-resource languages. This further expands the usability of Audio Word2Vec.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1603.0098

Alliances, Partnerships and an Ethiopian Journey: The Story of Mekelle’s Children’s Library

Janet Lee, Technical Services Librarian and Associate Professor, Regis University, devoted her sabbatical leave for joining Yohannes Gebregeorgis, 2008 CNN Hero, and establishing the Segenat Children and Youth Library in Mekelle, Ethiopia. Lee discusses successes and challenges in setting up a library in a developing country

A Window on Library Collaboration in Southeast Asia: Insights and Perspectives of Lourdes T. David

Collaborative Librarianship Advisory Board Member, Lourdes T. David, provides an overview of library collaboration in the Philippines and in other countries in Southeast Asia

Probit and logit analysis

Call number: LD2668 .R4 1967 D

Values and Academic Achievement among Rural Indian High School Students in North Dakota

Literature relating to American Indian formal education reveals that throughout much of history, the majority culture has stressed assimilation in the educational process. Indian students have been encouraged to give up their values and embrace the values of majority culture members. However, for the majority of Indian people, the goals of assimilation have not been realized. Indians have retained unique cultural values. This study was designed to systematically investigate the role of differential values in the educational process of rural North Dakota Indian high school students. High school students and their teachers from seven schools were surveyed in group testing sessions. All subjects completed questionnaires eliciting personal information, character trait preferences, and perceptions of themselves, ideal self, and others. Students completed two additional self-esteem measures. Relevant information from school records was also utilized. The results of the study support notions of Indian educational underachievement. Findings further indicate that the values of Indian students, as a group, were quantifiably and qualitatively different from those of their teachers. Self-esteem measurement results suggested that self-identity was different for Indian and non-Indian students. Comparisons between high and low achieving Indians were made. It was discovered that character trait preferences of high achieving Indians were more closely aligned with those of their teachers than were character trait preferences of low achieving Indians. High achieving Indians valued the educational process to a greater degree than low achievers, and ranked school-related character traits more favorably. They expressed more positive attitudes towards their teachers, and were less critical of non-Indians. Their responses appeared to indicate that they were less alienated from the non-Indian world. However, high achievers did not appear to be rejecting the Indianness. Neither high nor low achievers were more likely to participate in traditional Indian activities. It was concluded that the findings support the benefits of acculturation as opposed to assimilation in the educational process. Through acculturation, individuals uniquely combine their heritage with new ideas and methods from an outside culture. A separate chapter presents innovative ideas from the literature, regarding how schools for Indian students might achieve the goals of acculturation

Studies on the genus streptococcus

The streptococci, as a group, are gram positive cocci which occur in pairs or chains; they are nonmotile, nonsporing, and catalase negative. Most species are facultative anaerobes, and a few are obligate anaerobes. They are chemorganotrophs producing lactic acid as an end product of glucose metabolism. The G + C (guanine + cytosine) content reported for 15 species is 33-42% (Diebel and Seeley, 1974). The genus Streptococcus includes a large number of saprophytic, pathogenic and non pathogenic species. Many of these bacteria are members of the normal body flora. However, man is very susceptible to the pathogenic members, and no organ in the body is completely immune to streptococcal infections. As a result, streptococci cause a greater variety of clinical manifestations than any other genus of bacteria. As far as it known, no biochemical, physiological, or antibiogram pattern studies have been done on streptococci from Stockton or other parts of California. Therefore it is the purpose of this investigation to biochemically and physiologically characterize primarily extra-respiratory streptococcal isolates, study their antibiogram patterns, and relate these characteristics to each other and to other patterns reported in the United States