Resource value, productivity and ecosystem integrity: an intertemporal water resource management tool in a river basin

River basinsWater allocationWater resource managementModelsFarmersPastoralism

Student Experiences in Accessing Learning Higher Education During Covid-19: Case of a University in Malawi

In 2020, the world experienced the unexpected as the Covid-19 pandemic ravished countries across the globe. This led to major disruptions in people’s day to day lives. Within the education sector, schools and other institutions of learning were forced to shut down. One way of regaining some semblance of normality involved teaching and learning taking on a different format as institutions migrated to online teaching. Alongside this transition came major adjustments that both institutional staff and students had to make. While the transition from face-to-face learning to online was argued to have been an uphill struggle, the situation varied from country to country and region to region, with most countries especially in the Global North, to a large extent, transitioning with reasonable ease. The transition to online learning in response to Covid-19 offered an opportunity to clarify aspects that influence the use of digital technology in teaching and learning as well as to explore the overall student learning experience. The main objective of the article is to explore how students in Malawi, a country in the Global South and one of the poorest countries in the world, coped with this major disruption in trying to access higher education. Using a qualitative approach, data was collected through interviews with both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Data was analysed thematically, and findings presented based on themes emerging from the analysis that were categorised as pre-lockdown, lockdown and post-lockdown experiences. Findings revealed the interconnectedness between the various aspects of student life that affect their learning experiences. It also highlighted how disruption only bring to the fore underlying issues from where learning experiences would either be looked at as positive or negatives

Time domain simulations of dynamic river networks

The problem of simulating a river network is considered. A river network is considered to comprise of rivers, dams/lakes as well as weirs. We suggest a numerical approach with specific features that enable the correct representation of these assets. For each river the flow of water is described by the shallow water equations which is a system of hyperbolic partial differential equations and at the junctions of the rivers, suitable coupling conditions, viewed as interior boundary conditions are used to couple the dynamics. A different model for the dams is also presented. Numerical test cases are presented which show that the model is able to reproduce the expected dynamics of the system. Other aspects of the modelling such as rainfall, run-off, overflow/flooding, evaporation, absorption/seepage, bed-slopes, bed friction have not been incorporated in the model due to their specific nature

Paediatric oncology in the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Blantyre

In a developing country, where infection, malnutrition and HIV infection cause an enormous burden of childhood illnesses, cancer is, for many, not a priority. It is reported that globally 80% of the children who develop cancer have no or poor access to cancer treatment1 but childhood cancer is often curable and every child needs care, be it curative or palliative.Malawi Medical Journal Vol. 20 (4) 2008: pp. 115-11

Higgs boson hadronic branching ratios at the ILC

We present a study of the Higgs boson decay branching ratios to $b\bar{b}$, $c\bar{c}$ and gluons, one of the cornerstones of the physics program at the International Linear Collider (ILC). A standard model Higgs boson of 120\,GeV mass, produced in the Higgs-strahlung process at $\sqrt{s} = 250$\,GeV was investigated using the full detector simulation and reconstruction procedures. The analysis was performed in the framework of the Silicon Detector (SiD) concept with full account of inclusive standard model backgrounds. The selected decay modes contained two heavy flavour jets in the final state and required excellent flavour tagging through precise reconstruction of interaction and decay vertices in the detector. A new signal discrimination technique using correlations of neural network outputs was used to determine the branching ratios and estimate their uncertainties, 4.8\%, 8.4\% and 12.2\% for $b\bar{b}$, $c\bar{c}$ and gluons respectively.Comment: 9 Pages, 5 figures and 5 table

HIV infection and domestic smoke exposure, but not human papillomavirus, are risk factors for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in Zambia: a case-control study

(c) 2015 The Authors. Cancer Medicine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Shift-Symmetric Configurations in Two-Dimensional Cellular Automata: Irreversibility, Insolvability, and Enumeration

The search for symmetry as an unusual yet profoundly appealing phenomenon, and the origin of regular, repeating configuration patterns have long been a central focus of complexity science and physics. To better grasp and understand symmetry of configurations in decentralized toroidal architectures, we employ group-theoretic methods, which allow us to identify and enumerate these inputs, and argue about irreversible system behaviors with undesired effects on many computational problems. The concept of so-called configuration shift-symmetry is applied to two-dimensional cellular automata as an ideal model of computation. Regardless of the transition function, the results show the universal insolvability of crucial distributed tasks, such as leader election, pattern recognition, hashing, and encryption. By using compact enumeration formulas and bounding the number of shift-symmetric configurations for a given lattice size, we efficiently calculate the probability of a configuration being shift-symmetric for a uniform or density-uniform distribution. Further, we devise an algorithm detecting the presence of shift-symmetry in a configuration. Given the resource constraints, the enumeration and probability formulas can directly help to lower the minimal expected error and provide recommendations for system's size and initialization. Besides cellular automata, the shift-symmetry analysis can be used to study the non-linear behavior in various synchronous rule-based systems that include inference engines, Boolean networks, neural networks, and systolic arrays.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 2 appendice