Climate-related impacts calls for a "pro-poor stance" agricultural policy

In this article, Mwai Daka highlights the impact of climate change on agriculture farming in Zambia, particularly on small-scale farmers. He explains why it is important for Zambia's Ministry of Agriculture to take a pro-poor stance in order to help small-scale farmers deal with the effects of climate change on the country's agriculture sector such as the introduction of a non-native insect the fall armyworm

Benchmarking of RDBMS and NoSQL performance on unstructured data

New requirements are arising in the database field. Big data has been soaring. The amount of data is ever increasing and becoming more and more varied. Traditional relational database management systems have been a dominant force in the database field but due to the massive growth of unstructured and multiform data, firms are now turning to architectures that have scaleout capabilities using open source software, commodity servers, cloud computing and services like Database as a Service. Due to this, relational databases ought to adopt and meet these new data requirements with easier and faster data processing capabilities and also provide multiple analytical tools that have the possibility of displaying analytics instantly. This study aims to benchmark the performance of relational systems and NoSQL systems on unstructured data.Novos requisitos estão surgindo na área das bases de dados. “Big data” permitiu avanços consideráveis em vários setores. O volume de dados tem aumentado e tornase cada vez mais variado. Os sistemas tradicionais de gestão de base de dados relacionais têm sido uma força dominante na área, mas devido ao crescimento massivo de dados não estruturados e multiformes, as empresas agora recorrem a arquiteturas que possuem recursos escaláveis usando software livre, servidores, computação em nuvem e serviços, tais como “base de dados como um serviço”. Nesse sentido, as bases de dados relacionais devem considerar e adotar novos requisitos de dados com maior agilidade no seu processamento e também fornecer múltiplas ferramentas analíticas com a possibilidade de mostrar análises em tempo real. Este estudo tem como objetivo avaliar o desempenho de sistemas relacionais e sistemas NoSQL em dados não estruturados

Prevalence of Non-Communicable Diseases and Social Interactions in Kenya: An Empirical Analysis

Despite a remarkable progress in the control and management of communicable diseases over the past century, the world is not better-off as the prevalence of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) is on the increase, both in developed and developing countries. The upsurge in NCD prevalence is attributable to risk factors both outside and within the control of individuals. . One risk factor that has received less attention than it deserves is the social interactions variable. Social interactions are the established relationships among individuals, e.g., among peers or persons in the same circumstances. Interactions of persons in the same circumstances affect behavior because of the necessity for the individual to conform to established group norms or values. It is believed that NCD prevalence in Kenya is high in sections of the populations where social interactions among certain groups is intense, but little evidence exists in support of this supposition. This paper examines this assumption taking into account the endogeneity of behavior in a group setting .In particular, we estimate a binary probit model of an individual contracting a non-communicable disease, conditional on engaging in certain consumption behaviors that are malleable by peer or group pressure. The key finding from the estimation exercise is that variables that capture social interactions such as the village level means of drinking alcohol, consuming vegetables and fruits, and smoking cigarettes are significantly associated with the likelihood of getting an NCD. The policy implication of this finding is that NCD prevalence in Kenya can be reduced by implementing programs to change health behaviors within social groups

Improved sequential decision-making with structural priors: Enhanced treatment personalization with historical data

Personalizing treatments for patients involves a period where different treatments out of a set of available treatments are tried until an optimal treatment is found, for particular patient characteristics. To minimize suffering and other costs, it is critical to minimize this search. When treatments have primarily short-term effects, the search can be performed with multi-armed bandit algorithms (MABs). However, these typically require long exploration periods to guarantee optimality. With historical data, it is possible to recover a structure incorporating the prior knowledge of the types of patients that can be encountered, and the conditional reward models for those patient types. Such structural priors can be used to reduce the treatment exploration period for enhanced applicability in the real world. This thesis presents work on designing MAB algorithms that find optimal treatments quickly, by incorporating a structural prior for patient types in the form of a latent variable model. Theoretical guarantees for the algorithms, including a lower and a matching upper bound, and an empirical study is provided, showing that incorporating latent structural priors is beneficial. Another line of work in this thesis is the design of simulators for evaluating treatment policies and comparing algorithms. A new simulator for benchmarking estimators of causal effects, the Alzheimer’s Disease Causal estimation Benchmark (ADCB) is presented. ADCB combines data-driven simulation with subject-matter knowledge for high realism and causal verifiability. The design of the simulator is discussed, and to demonstrate its utility, the results of a usage scenario for evaluating estimators of causal effects are outlined

What Lies in the Gray: Creative Analytic Pieces on the Formation and Evolution of Beliefs in Masxha

The purpose of this project was to look at how members of Durban\u27s Masxha township develop their belief systems and ideas about their world. This topic was developed out of a desire to better understand the factors that promote or inhibit individuals from changing their mind about topics relating to their community, society, and culture. I sought to gain a deeper understanding of the specific context of Masxha and the experiences and lives of those with whom I spoke. To accomplish the goal of learning from lived experiences, this study employed a narrative inquiry approach. Using loosely-structured interviews involving eight Masxha residents, this project was deeply-rooted in participants sharing their lived experiences surrounding the development of their beliefs; the wide array of responses gathered from interviews illustrates the highly individualized nature of these conversations. I found that participants’ beliefs were far less black and white than I had initially anticipated. The nature of my interviews—they were one-on-one and I encouraged the telling of personal stories—allowed participants to share the gray areas of their belief formation in richly descriptive ways. I didn’t know it at the time of my interviews, but these gray areas would become an essential component in my personal reflection on this project. This paper sought to illustrate the complexity of the belief narratives I heard and to demonstrate that the gray areas—the spaces in between understanding and clarity—are where opportunities for learning take place. This paper also explored findings on the roles of both community and family members in the development of beliefs and the highly complex and personal process of navigating belief formation and evolution. These stories have been interwoven into a series of creative analytic pieces that serve as snapshots into the far more intricate experiences of the eight individuals whose narratives, by and large, form this project’s foundation

An Investigation Into Rewriting a Security Policy for Loreto College

Computers as well as the networking environments in which they operate have evolved into highly sophisticated and complex systems. The intricacy of these systems and especially the relationship between them forms the greatest area of vulnerabilities for organizations. (Whitman and Mattord, 2004) Information needs to be transmitted to and from the organization, and thus may be vulnerable within certain stages along the communications line. If at any stage of the process, the information is compromised, it could have a negative impact on the entire organization. Protective measures such as disaster recover plans, encryption/ decryption, and information system security controls, can minimize or prevent the negative consequences. Therefore it is vital that management of information system assets take measures to protect their critical data and information from loss damage and misuse. The process of minimizing risks associated with information security includes the compilation of a detailed and standardized information security policy. Such a policy has to address issues such as threats and possible counter measures as well as defining roles and responsibilities. The aim of this study was to assess the status of the information security policy compiled and implemented by Loreto College Msongari. During the study, the status of security of the information systems assets at the college, existence and format of the security policy as well as the commitment of the college to address security issues was measured

Eliud Mwai Wahome to James H. Meredith (2 October 1962)

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mercorr_pro/1541/thumbnail.jp

A baseline review of the ability of hospitals in Kenya to provide emergency and critical care services for COVID-19 patients

Introduction: As the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases in Kenya begin to rise, the number of severe and critical COVID-19 patients has the potential to quickly overload the local healthcare system beyond its capacity to treat people. Objective: The purpose of this study was to gather information about the ability of hospitals in Kenya to provide emergency and critical care services and to identify priority actions for use by policymakers and other stakeholders as a roadmap toward strengthening the COVID-19 response in the country. Methods: This was a comprehensive review of the published and grey literature on emergency and critical care services in Kenya published in the last three years through April 2020. Screening of articles was conducted independently by the authors and the final decision for inclusion was made collaboratively. A total of 15 papers and documents were included in the review. Key recommendations: There is an urgent need to strengthen prehospital emergency care in Kenya by establishing a single toll-free ambulance access number and an integrated public Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system to respond to severe and critical COVID-19 patients in the community and other emergency cases. Functional 24-h emergency centres (ECs) need to be established in all the level 4, 5 and 6 hospitals in the country to ensure these patients receive immediate lifesaving emergency care when they arrive at the hospitals. The ECs should be equipped with pulse oximeters and functioning oxygen systems and have the necessary resources and skills to perform endotracheal intubation to manage COVID-19-induced respiratory distress and hypoxia. Additional intensive care unit (ICU) beds and ventilators are also needed to ensure continuity of care for the critically ill patients seen in the EC. Appropriate practical interventions should be instituted to limit the spread of COVID-19 to healthcare personnel and other patients within the healthcare system. Further research with individual facility levels of assessment around infrastructure and service provision is necessary to more narrowly define areas with significant shortfalls in emergency and critical care services as the number of COVID-19 cases in the country increase

NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES RISK FACTORS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO NCD INCIDENCES IN KENYA

Although mortality from communicable diseases and poor nutrition have been declining, non-communicable diseases have been on the rise in developing countries. Consequently, this poses a serious challenge to health programming. There are predictions that NCDs will continue to rise in the coming years resulting to at least 9 million deaths every year. This death rate would occur among people who are below 60 years of age in sub-Saharan Africa. NCDs are associated with some underlying risk factors of which most of them can be tackled through clear policy intervention. Notably, many risk factors are also known to be country specific which requires country specific studies. The efforts towards the prevention of NCDs in Kenya are inadequate. This could be attributed to inadequate understanding of the contribution of suspected risk factors to NCDs. In addition, addressing the risk factors associated with these diseases may present a cheaper and long-term solution to the problem of rising cases of NCDs in Kenya. This paper uses household national survey data to estimate the influence of risk factors associated with NCD in Kenya. A probit binary model was used while controlling the econometric problem associated with endogeniety and heterogeneity assumptions. The key finding is that income, distance, peer, effects on area of residence, and education are key risk factors associated with the rising NCD in Kenya. Age and gender are non-policy variables that increased the likelihood of one getting a NCD. This study has pointed out that the health care system in Kenya needs to develop mechanisms for promoting preventive care for NCDs. Also, effective prevention methods that address the NCD risk factors are preferable for treatment. However, these prevention methods are not only expensive, but are also protracted

NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES RISK FACTORS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO NCD INCIDENCES IN KENYA

Although mortality from communicable diseases and poor nutrition have been declining, non-communicable diseases have been on the rise in developing countries. Consequently, this poses a serious challenge to health programming. There are predictions that NCDs will continue to rise in the coming years resulting to at least 9 million deaths every year. This death rate would occur among people who are below 60 years of age in sub-Saharan Africa. NCDs are associated with some underlying risk factors of which most of them can be tackled through clear policy intervention. Notably, many risk factors are also known to be country specific which requires country specific studies. The efforts towards the prevention of NCDs in Kenya are inadequate. This could be attributed to inadequate understanding of the contribution of suspected risk factors to NCDs. In addition, addressing the risk factors associated with these diseases may present a cheaper and long-term solution to the problem of rising cases of NCDs in Kenya. This paper uses household national survey data to estimate the influence of risk factors associated with NCD in Kenya. A probit binary model was used while controlling the econometric problem associated with endogeniety and heterogeneity assumptions. The key finding is that income, distance, peer, effects on area of residence, and education are key risk factors associated with the rising NCD in Kenya. Age and gender are non-policy variables that increased the likelihood of one getting a NCD. This study has pointed out that the health care system in Kenya needs to develop mechanisms for promoting preventive care for NCDs. Also, effective prevention methods that address the NCD risk factors are preferable for treatment. However, these prevention methods are not only expensive, but are also protracted