18,030 research outputs found
Life, Death and Preferential Attachment
Scientific communities are characterized by strong stratification. The highly
skewed frequency distribution of citations of published scientific papers
suggests a relatively small number of active, cited papers embedded in a sea of
inactive and uncited papers. We propose an analytically soluble model which
allows for the death of nodes. This model provides an excellent description of
the citation distributions for live and dead papers in the SPIRES database.
Further, this model suggests a novel and general mechanism for the generation
of power law distributions in networks whenever the fraction of active nodes is
small.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Burden of podoconiosis in poor rural communities in Guliso woreda, western Ethiopia
Background. Podoconiosis is an environmental lymphoedema affecting people living and working barefoot on irritant red clay soil. Podoconiosis is relatively well described in southern Ethiopia, but remains neglected in other parts of the Ethiopian highlands. This study aimed to assess the burden of podoconiosis in rural communities in western Ethiopia.
Methodology/Principal Findings. A cross-sectional study was conducted in Gulliso woreda (district), west Ethiopia. A household survey in the 26 rural kebeles (villages) of this district was conducted to identify podoconiosis patients and to measure disease prevalence. A more detailed study was done in six randomly selected kebeles to describe clinical features of the disease, patients’ experiences of foot hygiene, and shoe wearing practice. 1,935 cases of podoconiosis were registered, giving a prevalence of 2.8%. The prevalence was higher in those aged 15 – 64 years (5.2%) and in females than males (prevalence ratio 2.6:1). 90.3% of patients were in the 15 – 64 year age group. In the detailed study, 335 cases were interviewed and their feet assessed. The majority of patients were farmers, uneducated, and poor. Two-third of patients developed the disease before the age of thirty. Almost all patients (97.0%) had experienced adenolymphangitis (ALA - red, hot legs, swollen and painful groin) at least once during the previous year. Patients experienced an average of 5.5 ALA episodes annually, each of average 4.4 days, thus 24 working days were lost annually. The incidence of ALA in podoconiosis patients was higher than that reported for filariasis in other countries. Shoe wearing was limited mainly due to financial problems.
Conclusions. We have documented high podoconiosis prevalence, frequent adenolymphangitis and high disease-related morbidity in west Ethiopia. Interventions must be developed to prevent, treat and control podoconiosis, one of the core neglected tropical diseases in Ethiopia
Spatial distribution of podoconiosis in relation to environmental factors in Ethiopia: a historical review
BACKGROUND
An up-to-date and reliable map of podoconiosis is needed to design geographically targeted and cost-effective intervention in Ethiopia. Identifying the ecological correlates of the distribution of podoconiosis is the first step for distribution and risk maps. The objective of this study was to investigate the spatial distribution and ecological correlates of podoconiosis using historical and contemporary survey data.
METHODS
Data on the observed prevalence of podoconiosis were abstracted from published and unpublished literature into a standardized database, according to strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. In total, 10 studies conducted between 1969 and 2012 were included, and data were available for 401,674 individuals older than 15 years of age from 229 locations. A range of high resolution environmental factors were investigated to determine their association with podoconiosis prevalence, using logistic regression.
RESULTS
The prevalence of podoconiosis in Ethiopia was estimated at 3.4% (95% CI 3.3%-3.4%) with marked regional variation. We identified significant associations between mean annual Land Surface Temperature (LST), mean annual precipitation, topography of the land and fine soil texture and high prevalence of podoconiosis. The derived maps indicate both widespread occurrence of podoconiosis and a marked variability in prevalence of podoconiosis, with prevalence typically highest at altitudes >1500 m above sea level (masl), with >1500 mm annual rainfall and mean annual LST of 19-21°C. No (or very little) podoconiosis occurred at altitudes 24°C.
CONCLUSION
Podoconiosis remains a public health problem in Ethiopia over considerable areas of the country, but exhibits marked geographical variation associated in part with key environmental factors. This is work in progress and the results presented here will be refined in future work
Are physical objects necessarily burnt up by the blue sheet inside a black hole?
The electromagnetic radiation that falls into a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole
develops a ``blue sheet'' of infinite energy density at the Cauchy horizon. We
consider classical electromagnetic fields (that were produced during the
collapse and then backscattered into the black hole), and investigate the
blue-sheet effects of these fields on infalling objects within a simplified
model. These effects are found to be finite and even negligible for typical
parameters.Comment: 13 pages, ordinary LaTex. Accepted for Physical Review Letters
Ecology, behavior and bionomics: distribution of the Spittlebug Deois flavopicta Stal (Homoptera: Cercopidae) on wild and cultivated host species.
Correlations in Networks associated to Preferential Growth
Combinations of random and preferential growth for both on-growing and
stationary networks are studied and a hierarchical topology is observed. Thus
for real world scale-free networks which do not exhibit hierarchical features
preferential growth is probably not the main ingredient in the growth process.
An example of such real world networks includes the protein-protein interaction
network in yeast, which exhibits pronounced anti-hierarchical features.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Live and Dead Nodes
In this paper, we explore the consequences of a distinction between `live'
and `dead' network nodes; `live' nodes are able to acquire new links whereas
`dead' nodes are static. We develop an analytically soluble growing network
model incorporating this distinction and show that it can provide a
quantitative description of the empirical network composed of citations and
references (in- and out-links) between papers (nodes) in the SPIRES database of
scientific papers in high energy physics. We also demonstrate that the death
mechanism alone can result in power law degree distributions for the resulting
network.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. To be published in Computational and
Mathematical Organization Theor
Radiative Falloff in Neutron Star Spacetimes
We systematically study late-time tails of scalar waves propagating in
neutron star spacetimes. We consider uniform density neutron stars, for which
the background spacetime is analytic and the compaction of the star can be
varied continously between the Newtonian limit 2M/R << 1 and the relativistic
Buchdahl limit 2M/R = 8/9. We study the reflection of a finite wave packet off
neutron stars of different compactions 2M/R and find that a Newtonian, an
intermediate, and a highly relativistic regime can be clearly distinguished. In
the highly relativistic regime, the reflected signal is dominated by
quasi-periodic peaks, which originate from the wave packet bouncing back and
forth between the center of the star and the maximum of the background
curvature potential at R ~ 3 M. Between these peaks, the field decays according
to a power-law. In the Buchdahl limit 2M/R -> 8/9 the light travel time between
the center and the maximum or the curvature potential grows without bound, so
that the first peak arrives only at infinitely late time. The modes of neutron
stars can therefore no longer be excited in the ultra-relativistic limit, and
it is in this sense that the late-time radiative decay from neutron stars
looses all its features and gives rise to power-law tails reminiscent of
Schwarzschild black holes.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to appear in PR
Quasinormal Modes of AdS Black Holes and the Approach to Thermal Equilibrium
We investigate the decay of a scalar field outside a Schwarzschild anti de
Sitter black hole. This is determined by computing the complex frequencies
associated with quasinormal modes. There are qualitative differences from the
asymptotically flat case, even in the limit of small black holes. In
particular, for a given angular dependence, the decay is always exponential -
there are no power law tails at late times. In terms of the AdS/CFT
correspondence, a large black hole corresponds to an approximately thermal
state in the field theory, and the decay of the scalar field corresponds to the
decay of a perturbation of this state. Thus one obtains the timescale for the
approach to thermal equilibrium. We compute these timescales for the strongly
coupled field theories in three, four, and six dimensions which are dual to
string theory in asymptotically AdS spacetimes.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures extended discussion of horizon boundary
conditions, added note on higher l mode
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