663 research outputs found
Scaling up antiretroviral therapy in Malawi-implications for managing other chronic diseases in resource-limited countries.
The national scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Malawi is based on the public health approach, with principles and practices borrowed from the successful DOTS (directly observed treatment, short course) tuberculosis control framework. The key principles include political commitment, free care, and standardized systems for case finding, treatment, recording and reporting, and drug procurement. Scale-up of ART started in June 2004, and by December 2008, 223,437 patients were registered for treatment within a health system that is severely underresourced. The Malawi model for delivering lifelong ART can be adapted and used for managing patients with chronic noncommunicable diseases, the burden of which is already high and continues to grow in low-income and middle-income countries. This article discusses how the principles behind the successful Malawi model of ART delivery can be applied to the management of other chronic diseases in resource-limited settings and how this paradigm can be used for health systems strengthening
Introduction: Ludic Seriality, Digital Seriality
Special issue on Digital Seriality.Please click on the links below for HTML or PDF versions of the introduction
Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games
In this paper we are concerned to outline a set of perspectives, methods, and theories with which to approach the seriality of digital games and game cultures â i.e. the aesthetic forms and cultural practices of game-related serialization, which we see unfolding against (and, in fact, as a privileged mediator of) the broader background of medial and socio-cultural transformations taking place in the wake of popular media cultureâs digitalization. Seriality, we contend, is a central and multifaceted but largely neglected dimension of popular computer and video games. Seriality is a factor not only in explicitly marked game series (with their sequels, prequels, remakes, and other types of continuation), but also within games themselves (e.g. in their formal-structural constitution as an iterative series of âlevelsâ or âworldsâ) as well as on the level of transmedial relations between games and other media (e.g. expansive serializations of narrative worlds across the media of comics, film, television, and games, etc.). Particularly with respect to processes of temporal âcollapseâ or âsynchronizationâ that, in the current age of digitization and media convergence, are challenging the temporal dimensions and developmental logics of pre-digital seriality (e.g. because once successively appearing series installments are increasingly available now for immediate, repeated, and non-linear consumption), computer games are eminently suited for an exemplary investigation of a specifically digital type of seriality. In the following, we look at serialization processes in digital games and game series and seek to understand how they relate to digital-era transformations of temporally-serially structured experiences and identifications on the part of historically situated actors. These transformations range from the microtemporal scale of individual playersâ encounters with algorithmic computation processes (the speed of which escapes direct human perception and is measurable only by technological means) all the way up to the macrotemporal (more properly âhistoricalâ) level of collective brokerings of political, cultural, and social identities in the digital age. To account for this multi-layered complexity, we argue for a decidedly interdisciplinary approach, combining media-aesthetic and media-philosophical perspectives with the resources of discourse analysis and cultural history. We approach the seriality of digital games both in terms of textual and aesthetic forms as well as in the broader context of serialized game cultures and popular culture at large
Estimation of the applicability domain of kernel-based machine learning models for virtual screening
Quality control of laser welds based on the weld surface and the weld profile
2D or 3D sensor technology can be used for data acquisition to monitor the weld quality during laser welding. Compared to a 2D camera image, the 3D height data contains additional relevant information for quality inspection. However, the disadvantages are system complexity, higher costs, and longer acquisition times. Therefore, we compare two image-based methods with the quality assessment based on height data. The
first method uses feature vectors of coaxial acquired grayscale images. The significant advantage is that a camera is often integrated into the laser system, so no additional hardware is required. In the second approach, we use an AI-based single-view 3D reconstruction method. The height profile is calculated from
a camera image and used for further quality assessment. Thus, we combine the advantages of 2D data acquisition with higher accuracy in evaluating 3D data. In this paper, we analyze a dataset of welded hairpins with different defect types and compare the quality assessment using the height data acquired with OCT, the feature vectors from the camera images, and the reconstructed height data
Structural record of an oblique impact: the central uplift of the Upheaval Dome impact structure, Utah, USA
Most asteroids strike their target at
an oblique angle (Pierazzo & Melosh
2000). The common criterion for identifying
craters formed by an oblique impact
is the pattern of the ejecta blanket.
On Earth, however, ejecta blankets
are rarely preserved and morphological,
structural, geophysical as well
as depositional criteria were used to infer
an oblique impact (e.g. for Chicxulub,
Schultz & DâHondt 1996, Ries-
Steinheim, Stöffler et al. 2003, Mjölnir
& Tsikalas 2005). However, the significance
of such criteria in predicting
impact angle or direction is a matter
of debate (c.f. Schultz & Anderson,
1996, Ekholm & Melosh 2001). Particularly,
it is not yet known whether
there is an influence of the impact angle
on the displacement field during the
collapse of large transient cavities, and
thus, the final crater. For most impact
angles, the shape of the final crater is
controlled by its size. At a critical diameter
(ca. 2â5 km on Earth), simple
bowl shaped craters are getting gravitationally unstable and collapse to form
complex craters, with a flat floor and
a terraced rim (Melosh 1989). During
collapse, the crater floor rises to form a central uplift, that may or may not be
visible as a central peak, or, when the
peak in turn collapses, as a peak ring at
yet larger diameters.conferenc
jCompoundMapper: An open source Java library and command-line tool for chemical fingerprints
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The decomposition of a chemical graph is a convenient approach to encode information of the corresponding organic compound. While several commercial toolkits exist to encode molecules as so-called fingerprints, only a few open source implementations are available. The aim of this work is to introduce a library for exactly defined molecular decompositions, with a strong focus on the application of these features in machine learning and data mining. It provides several options such as search depth, distance cut-offs, atom- and pharmacophore typing. Furthermore, it provides the functionality to combine, to compare, or to export the fingerprints into several formats.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We provide a Java 1.6 library for the decomposition of chemical graphs based on the open source Chemistry Development Kit toolkit. We reimplemented popular fingerprinting algorithms such as depth-first search fingerprints, extended connectivity fingerprints, autocorrelation fingerprints (e.g. CATS2D), radial fingerprints (e.g. Molprint2D), geometrical Molprint, atom pairs, and pharmacophore fingerprints. We also implemented custom fingerprints such as the all-shortest path fingerprint that only includes the subset of shortest paths from the full set of paths of the depth-first search fingerprint. As an application of jCompoundMapper, we provide a command-line executable binary. We measured the conversion speed and number of features for each encoding and described the composition of the features in detail. The quality of the encodings was tested using the default parametrizations in combination with a support vector machine on the Sutherland QSAR data sets. Additionally, we benchmarked the fingerprint encodings on the large-scale Ames toxicity benchmark using a large-scale linear support vector machine. The results were promising and could often compete with literature results. On the large Ames benchmark, for example, we obtained an AUC ROC performance of 0.87 with a reimplementation of the extended connectivity fingerprint. This result is comparable to the performance achieved by a non-linear support vector machine using state-of-the-art descriptors. On the Sutherland QSAR data set, the best fingerprint encodings showed a comparable or better performance on 5 of the 8 benchmarks when compared against the results of the best descriptors published in the paper of Sutherland et al.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>jCompoundMapper is a library for chemical graph fingerprints with several tweaking possibilities and exporting options for open source data mining toolkits. The quality of the data mining results, the conversion speed, the LPGL software license, the command-line interface, and the exporters should be useful for many applications in cheminformatics like benchmarks against literature methods, comparison of data mining algorithms, similarity searching, and similarity-based data mining.</p
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