1,082 research outputs found
Medical traditions and chronic disease in Ethiopia: a story of wax and gold?
Effective medical care for non-communicable diseases (NCD) remains lamentably poor in Ethiopia and many low-income countries. Consequently, where modern medicine does not reach or is rejected, traditional treatments prevail. These are fragmented and esoteric by nature, and their understanding of illness is so fundamentally different that confusion proliferates when attempts are made to introduce modern medical care. Ethiopia is host to a variety of longstanding medical belief systems that coexist and function together, where modern medicine is often viewed as just another choice. This multiplicity of approaches to illness is accompanied by the Ethiopian custom of weaving layers of meaning, often contradictory, into speech and conversation - sometimes referred to as 'wax and gold', the 'wax' being the literal and the 'gold' the deeper, even hidden, meaning or significance. We argue that engagement with traditional belief systems and understanding these subtleties of meaning could assist in more effective NCD care
Reflexivity of the translation-dilation algebras on L^2(R)
The hyperbolic algebra A_h, studied recently by Katavolos and Power, is the
weak star closed operator algebra on L^2(R) generated by H^\infty(R), as
multiplication operators, and by the dilation operators V_t, t \geq 0, given by
V_t f(x) = e^{t/2} f(e^t x). We show that A_h is a reflexive operator algebra
and that the four dimensional manifold Lat A_h (with the natural topology) is
the reflexive hull of a natural two dimensional subspace.Comment: 10 pages, no figures To appear in the International Journal of
Mathematic
The visual standards for the selection and retention of astronauts
Literature search with abstracts on visual performance standards for selection and retention of astronaut
A stochastic model for the evolution of the web allowing link deletion
Recently several authors have proposed stochastic evolutionary models for the growth of the web graph and other networks that give rise to power-law distributions. These models are based on the notion of preferential attachment leading to the ``rich get richer'' phenomenon. We present a generalisation of the basic model by allowing deletion of individual links and show that it also gives rise to a power-law distribution. We derive the mean-field equations for this stochastic model and show that by examining a snapshot of the distribution at the steady state of the model, we are able to tell whether any link deletion has taken place and estimate the link deletion probability. Our model enables us to gain some insight into the distribution of inlinks in the web graph, in particular it suggests a power-law exponent of approximately 2.15 rather than the widely published exponent of 2.1
Sampling properties of directed networks
For many real-world networks only a small "sampled" version of the original
network may be investigated; those results are then used to draw conclusions
about the actual system. Variants of breadth-first search (BFS) sampling, which
are based on epidemic processes, are widely used. Although it is well
established that BFS sampling fails, in most cases, to capture the
IN-component(s) of directed networks, a description of the effects of BFS
sampling on other topological properties are all but absent from the
literature. To systematically study the effects of sampling biases on directed
networks, we compare BFS sampling to random sampling on complete large-scale
directed networks. We present new results and a thorough analysis of the
topological properties of seven different complete directed networks (prior to
sampling), including three versions of Wikipedia, three different sources of
sampled World Wide Web data, and an Internet-based social network. We detail
the differences that sampling method and coverage can make to the structural
properties of sampled versions of these seven networks. Most notably, we find
that sampling method and coverage affect both the bow-tie structure, as well as
the number and structure of strongly connected components in sampled networks.
In addition, at low sampling coverage (i.e. less than 40%), the values of
average degree, variance of out-degree, degree auto-correlation, and link
reciprocity are overestimated by 30% or more in BFS-sampled networks, and only
attain values within 10% of the corresponding values in the complete networks
when sampling coverage is in excess of 65%. These results may cause us to
rethink what we know about the structure, function, and evolution of real-world
directed networks.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure
On Abelian Multi-Chern-Simons Field Theories
In this paper a class of multi-Chern-Simons field theories which is relevant
to the statistical mechanics of polymer systems is investigated. Motivated by
the problems which one encounters in the treatment of these theories, a general
procedure is presented to eliminate the Chern-Simons fields from their action.
In this way it has been possible to derive an expression of the partition
function of topologically linked polymers which depends explicitly on the
topological numbers and does not have intractable nonlocal terms as it happened
in previous approaches. The new formulation of multi-Chern-Simons field
theories is then used to remove and clarify some inconsistencies and
ambiguities which apparently affect field theoretical models of topologically
linked polymers. Finally, the limit of disentangled polymers is discussed.Comment: 18 pages, plain LaTe
A Coxsackievirus B1-mediated nonlytic Extracellular Vesicle-to-cell mechanism of virus transmission and its possible control through modulation of EV release
Like most non-enveloped viruses, CVB1 mainly uses cell lysis to spread. Details of a nonlytic virus transmission remain unclear. Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) transfer biomolecules between cells. We show that CVB1 entry into HeLa cells results in apoptosis and release of CVB1-induced āmedium-sizedā EVs (CVB1i-mEVs). These mEVs (100ā300ānm) harbour CVB1 as shown by immunoblotting with anti-CVB1-antibody; viral capsids were detected by transmission electron microscopy and RT-PCR revealed CVB1 RNA. The percentage of mEVs released from CVB1-infected HeLa cells harbouring virus was estimated from TEM at 34ā%. Inhibition of CVB1i-mEV production, with calpeptin or siRNA knockdown of CAPNS1 in HeLa cells limited spread of CVB1 suggesting these vesicles disseminate CVB1 virions to new host cells by a nonlytic EV-to-cell mechanism. This was confirmed by detecting CVB1 virions inside HeLa cells after co-culture with CVB1i-mEVs; EV release may also prevent apoptosis of infected cells whilst spreading apoptosis to secondary sites of infection
A stochastic evolutionary model for capturing human dynamics
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in various contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the dynamics of survival analysis, traditionally employed in clinical trials and reliability analysis in engineering.
We derive a general solution for the model in the form of a product, and then a continuous approximation to the solution
via the renewal equation describing age-structured population dynamics. This enables us to model a wide range of survival distributions,
according to the choice of the mortality distribution.
We provide empirical evidence for the validity of the model from a longitudinal data set of popular search engine queries over 114 months, showing that the survival function of these queries is closely matched by the solution for our model with power-law mortality
A flexible and efficient template format for circular consensus sequencing and SNP detection
A novel template design for single-molecule sequencing is introduced, a structure we refer to as a SMRTbellā¢ template. This structure consists of a double-stranded portion, containing the insert of interest, and a single-stranded hairpin loop on either end, which provides a site for primer binding. Structurally, this format resembles a linear double-stranded molecule, and yet it is topologically circular. When placed into a single-molecule sequencing reaction, the SMRTbell template format enables a consensus sequence to be obtained from multiple passes on a single molecule. Furthermore, this consensus sequence is obtained from both the sense and antisense strands of the insert region. In this article, we present a universal method for constructing these templates, as well as an application of their use. We demonstrate the generation of high-quality consensus accuracy from single molecules, as well as the use of SMRTbell templates in the identification of rare sequence variants
Topological interactions in systems of mutually interlinked polymer rings
The topological interaction arising in interlinked polymeric rings such as
DNA catenanes is considered. More specifically, the free energy for a pair of
linked random walk rings is derived where the distance between two segments
each of which is part of a different ring is kept constant. The topology
conservation is imposed by the Gauss invariant. A previous approach (M.Otto,
T.A. Vilgis, Phys.Rev.Lett. {\bf 80}, 881 (1998)) to the problem is refined in
several ways. It is confirmed, that asymptotically, i.e. for large
where is average size of single random walk ring, the effective
topological interaction (free energy) scales .Comment: 16 pages, 3 figur
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