Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

In the aftermath of civil war or violent internal conflict, one of the key peacebuilding challenges is the reconciliation of former enemies who are members of the same small-scale societies. A failure of social reintegration may contribute to what is known as a conflict trap. To detect lingering hostile attitudes among a community’s various factions is crucial, but the approaches adopted in previous studies tend to focus on the impact of conflict on one or other aggregated indicator of social cohesion rather than on how violence-affected individuals regard and act towards their fellow community members. Here we demonstrate the value of concentrating on this latter dyadic component of social interactions and we use behavioural experiments and a social tie survey to assess, in an appropriately disaggregated manner, social cohesion in a post-conflict setting in northern Uganda. Whereas in self-reported surveys, ex-combatants appear to be well-connected, active members of their communities, the experiments unveil the continued reluctance of other community members to share or cooperate with them; fewer resources are committed to ex-combatants than to others, which is statistically significant. The dyadic nature of our analysis allows us to detect which groups are more prone to discriminate against ex-combatants, which may help facilitate targeted interventions

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Transmitting times

In response to concerns about infection rates at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, a study was undertaken to identify staff knowledge about infection, and to quantify the incidence of infections to develop a strategy to reduce it. Of the 294 staff sent questionnaires, 41 per cent responded. The survey, Infection transmission in the university workplace: incidents and staff knowledge of the modes of transmission, found that 60 per cent of staff suffered an infectious illness over the study period and one-third took an average of three days\u27 sick leave. The average score on questions regarding infection transmission was 48.5 per cent. There was no significant relationship between knowledge and incidence of illness, however a non-significant trend was noted between the frequency of handwashing and illness rates. Given that knowledge of disease transmission was poor and that the incidence of illness was lower in people who washed their hands more frequently, a workplace education strategy on hygiene may reduce the incidence of infectious illness

Health care workers’ knowledge of hepatitis C and attitudes towards patients with hepatitis C: a pilot study

A questionnaire was developed to determine health care workers\u27 (HCWs) knowledge of, and attitudes towards, hepatitis C in order to inform an education strategy to prevent discrimination towards hepatitis C-positive patients. The study\u27s aim was to determine the questionnaire\u27s reliability and validity