Should we be treating animal schistosomiasis in Africa? The need for a One Health economic evaluation of schistosomiasis control in people and their livestock

A One Health economic perspective allows informed decisions to be made regarding control priorities and/or implementation strategies for infectious diseases. Schistosomiasis is a major and highly resilient disease of both humans and livestock. The zoonotic component of transmission in sub-Saharan Africa appears to be more significant than previously assumed, and may thereby affect the recently revised WHO vision to eliminate schistosomiasis as a public health problem by 2025. Moreover, animal schistosomiasis is likely to be a significant cost to affected communities due to its direct and indirect impact on livelihoods. We argue here for a comprehensive evaluation of the economic burden of livestock and zoonotic schistosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa in order to determine if extending treatment to include animal hosts in a One Health approach is economically, as well as epidemiologically, desirable

"The fridge door is open" : temporal verification of a robotic assistant's behaviours

Robotic assistants are being designed to help, or work with, humans in a variety of situations from assistance within domestic situations, through medical care, to industrial settings. Whilst robots have been used in industry for some time they are often limited in terms of their range of movement or range of tasks. A new generation of robotic assistants have more freedom to move, and are able to autonomously make decisions and decide between alternatives. For people to adopt such robots they will have to be shown to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we focus on formal verification of a set of rules that have been developed to control the Care-O-bot, a robotic assistant located in a typical domestic environment. In particular, we apply model-checking, an automated and exhaustive algorithmic technique, to check whether formal temporal properties are satisfied on all the possible behaviours of the system. We prove a number of properties relating to robot behaviours, their priority and interruptibility, helping to support both safety and trustworthiness of robot behaviours

The effects of poverty and prison on British Muslim men who offend

© 2018 by the author. Focusing on the lives of British Muslim young men, this article examines the links between their social and economic relations and their prison experiences, desistance, and identity. In understanding the meanings they place on their prison experiences and their social and economic marginalization, the article theorises about social integration, and their place in British society. An intergenerational shift from the availability of local high-waged, skilled, and secure textile work to low-waged, precarious, service work presented them with a series of problems and opportunities, leading them to reject licit wage labour and embrace illicit entrepreneurial criminality. The article concludes that their social and economic relations drove criminal solutions, not ethnicity

Circuit QED with a Flux Qubit Strongly Coupled to a Coplanar Transmission Line Resonator

We propose a scheme for circuit quantum electrodynamics with a superconducting flux-qubit coupled to a high-Q coplanar resonator. Assuming realistic circuit parameters we predict that it is possible to reach the strong coupling regime. Routes to metrological applications, such as single photon generation and quantum non-demolition measurements are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

“Prisons Were Made for People Like Us” : British Pakistani Muslim Experiences Upon Release From Prison

British Muslim young men who offend upon reentry from prison reported that “Prisons were made for people like us.” At one level, this meant that the challenges they faced were likely to be intractable and insurmountable, regrettably returning them to prison. At another, their social integration after release from prison was hampered by something more than their individual choices and agency. Cycling between neighborhood, offending, and prison, it was their characteristic social relations and the peculiar social structural constraints placed upon them as a group that best explained their experiences upon release from prison

Formal verification of an autonomous personal robotic assistant

Human–robot teams are likely to be used in a variety of situations wherever humans require the assistance of robotic systems. Obvious examples include healthcare and manufacturing, in which people need the assistance of machines to perform key tasks. It is essential for robots working in close proximity to people to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we examine formal verification of a high-level planner/scheduler for autonomous personal robotic assistants such as Care-O-bot ™ . We describe how a model of Care-O-bot and its environment was developed using Brahms, a multiagent workflow language. Formal verification was then carried out by translating this to the input language of an existing model checker. Finally we present some formal verification results and describe how these could be complemented by simulation-based testing and realworld end-user validation in order to increase the practical and perceived safety and trustworthiness of robotic assistants

Scalable simultaneous multi-qubit readout with 99.99% single-shot fidelity

We describe single-shot readout of a trapped-ion multi-qubit register using space and time-resolved camera detection. For a single qubit we measure 0.9(3)x10^{-4} readout error in 400us exposure time, limited by the qubit's decay lifetime. For a four-qubit register (a "qunybble") we measure an additional error of only 0.1(1)x10^{-4} per qubit, despite the presence of 4% optical cross-talk between neighbouring qubits. A study of the cross-talk indicates that the method would scale with negligible loss of fidelity to ~10000 qubits at a density <~1 qubit/um^2, with a readout time ~1us/qubit.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; simulations added to fig.3, with some further text and figure revisions. Main results unchanged

Development of novel multiplex microsatellite polymerase chain reactions to enable high-throughput population genetic studies of Schistosoma haematobium

© 2015 Webster et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. The attached file is the published version of the article