Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue

Research on the structure of dialogue has been hampered for years because large dialogue corpora have not been available. This has impacted the dialogue research community's ability to develop better theories, as well as good off the shelf tools for dialogue processing. Happily, an increasing amount of information and opinion exchange occur in natural dialogue in online forums, where people share their opinions about a vast range of topics. In particular we are interested in rejection in dialogue, also called disagreement and denial, where the size of available dialogue corpora, for the first time, offers an opportunity to empirically test theoretical accounts of the expression and inference of rejection in dialogue. In this paper, we test whether topic-independent features motivated by theoretical predictions can be used to recognize rejection in online forums in a topic independent way. Our results show that our theoretically motivated features achieve 66% accuracy, an improvement over a unigram baseline of an absolute 6%.Comment: @inproceedings{Misra2013TopicII, title={Topic Independent Identification of Agreement and Disagreement in Social Media Dialogue}, author={Amita Misra and Marilyn A. Walker}, booktitle={SIGDIAL Conference}, year={2013}

Perceptions and Barriers to Exclusive Breastfeeding in Manicaland, Zimbabwe

The study explored perceptions and barriers to exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) among rural women in Zimbabwe. A descriptive cross sectional design was used with 490 participants (146 men and 344 women). Questionnaires and Focus Group Discussions were held with women 15-49 years who had a child below 2 years and their male partners. The prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding amongst the infants 0 – 6months was 66.8%. Seventy-four and 64.7% of girls and boys respectively were exclusively breastfed. Sixty-three percent of newborns were exclusively breastfed immediately after birth with 32% and 5% of the newborns being initiated within 6 hours and 1 day respectively. Women reported that they were comfortable to exclusively breastfeed for the first 3 months. The top six barriers to EBF were poor support from men(<30%),pressure from in-laws to introduce other foods, scanty knowledge on appropriate infant feeding practices, negative cultural and religious practices and lack of interest in women to exclusively breastfeed. The EBF prevalence was higher amongst young mothers (below 19 years) as compared to older women (20-49 years). EBF practices were lower (58.2%) amongst the more educated women compared to the less educated women (79.2%). The study concluded that community social mobilization should be intensified to increase knowledge and improve perceptions by engaging both men and women and other powerful stakeholders on infant and young child feeding through participatory approaches. Keywords: Exclusive breastfeeding, perceptions, attitudes, knowledg

Malaria Outbreak Investigation in Chipinge, Zimbabwe: A Case-control Study

Background: Malaria outbreaks are common in Zimbabwe. They are common in Manicaland, which has the greatest burden of malaria in the country. Methods: A matched case control study was conducted to investigate the malaria outbreak in ward 13 and 14 of Chipinge district in Manicaland Province in Zimbabwe, week 30 to week 40 of year 2015. A sample size of 92 (46 cases and 46 controls) was used. Guided interviews were conducted with the aid of a structured questionnaire and a checklist. The investigation assessed factors associated with contracting malaria and the community knowledge levels on malaria. Results: Participants who stayed in houses with open eaves had 2.4 odds (95% CI=1.0; 5.6) of contracting malaria compared to those who lived in houses without open eaves. Staying within a radius of 3 km from the river or swamp also predisposed people to contracting malaria (OR =2.7, 95%CI=1.2; 6.3). People who had no insecticide treated mosquito nets hanged in their bed rooms had odds of 2.2 (95%CI=1.2; 6.4) of contracting malaria compared to those that hanged insecticide-treated mosquito nets in their bedrooms. Consequently, among people exposed to outdoor activities in the evening and at night, those that had insecticide-treated mosquito nets hanged in their rooms were more protected from malaria than those that did not. Conclusion: There is high need to intensify all pillars in the malaria prevention and control programs and maintenance of a strong surveillance system to prevent future occurrences of outbreaks

Bird tolerance to humans in open tropical ecosystems

AbstractAnimal tolerance towards humans can be a key factor facilitating wildlife–human coexistence, yet traits predicting its direction and magnitude across tropical animals are poorly known. Using 10,249 observations for 842 bird species inhabiting open tropical ecosystems in Africa, South America, and Australia, we find that avian tolerance towards humans was lower (i.e., escape distance was longer) in rural rather than urban populations and in populations exposed to lower human disturbance (measured as human footprint index). In addition, larger species and species with larger clutches and enhanced flight ability are less tolerant to human approaches and escape distances increase when birds were approached during the wet season compared to the dry season and from longer starting distances. Identification of key factors affecting animal tolerance towards humans across large spatial and taxonomic scales may help us to better understand and predict the patterns of species distributions in the Anthropocene.</jats:p

Modelling of the response of sable antelope (Hippotragus niger niger) to trophy hunting: A GIS and remote sensing approach

RP-PCP grant/Project ECO#3,The main objective of this study was to test the impact of hunting on sable (Hippotragus niger niger) habitat selection using a combination of satellite remotely sensed data and GIS based spatial analysis. Firstly, we used remotely sensed vegetation cover estimated by the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) to test whether hunted sables selected more closed woodland habitats, i.e., an uncharacteristic habitat for sable, while those not exposed to hunting selected more open woodland habitats, i.e., characteristic habitat for sable. Secondly, we tested whether terrain based visibility modelled from remotely sensed data explains sable Flight Initiation Distance (FID), an indicator of fearfulness in hunted animal species, better than vegetation based visibility measured in the field. We tested these hypotheses in a study area consisting of one hunting area and one non-hunting area of northwestern Zimbabwe. Our results show that hunted sables significantly (P < 0.05) selected more closed woodland than those not exposed to hunting. Our results also show that remotely sensed Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer Digital Elevation Model (ASTER DEM) derived visibility could explain FID of sable better than field measured vegetation based visibility. Results of this thesis open new ground in spatial ecological understanding of wildlife species such as the threatened sable antelope,Ministère Français des Affaires Etrangères through the French Embassy in Zimbabwe (RP-PCP grant/Project ECO#3

An Ecological Paradox: The African Wild Dog (Lycaon Pictus) Is Not Attracted to Water Points When Water Is Scarce in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe.

In dry biomes, spatio-temporal variation in surface water resource stocks is pervasive, with unknown effects on the ranging behaviour of large predators. This study assessed the effect of spatial variation in surface water resources on the ranging behaviour of the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus). We analyzed data for 1992 (dry year with 20 water points) and 2000 (wet year with 30 water points) against presence-only data for five packs of L. pictus in a part of Hwange National Park and adjacent smallholder communal farming areas in western Zimbabwe. Modelling the potential habitat for L. pictus using Maxent with distance from water points (Dw) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as predictor variables was successful for 2000 (AUC = 0.793) but not successful for 1992 (AUC = 0.423), with L. pictus probability of occurrence near water points being more for year 2000 than for year 1992. The predicted L. pictus range was wider in 1992 (~13888.1 km2) than in 2000 (~958.4 km2) (Test of Proportions, χ2 = 124.52, df = 1, P = 0.00). Using the 2nd order Multitype Nearest Neighbour Distance Function (Gcross), we also observed significant attraction between L. pictus and water points within only ~1km radius for 1992 but up to ~8km radius for 2000. Our study reinforced the notion that surface water resources attract wild dogs in the savannahs but paradoxically less so when water resources are scarce. In particular, our study furthers current understanding of the effects of changing water availability regimes on the endangered L. pictus, providing evidence that the endangered predator's home range encroaches into potential ecological traps (i.e., smallholder communal farming areas) when water resources are scarce