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Long-term virological outcome in children receiving first-line antiretroviral therapy.
No full textBackground: Studies relating to long-term virological outcomes among children on first-line antiretroviral therapy (ART) from low and middle-income countries are limited.Keywords: Antiretroviral therapy, Pediatrics, First-line, Treatment outcome, Viral load.Springer Open
the politics of care: conversations with domestic caregivers.
No full textHow does racialized and gendered exploitation pattern the identities and experiences that emerge and are created in this space of “rupture”? And how do caregivers experience and understand the commodification of the intimate and interpersonal nature of care-work? Submitted in partial fulfillment of the grant requirement of the Tufts Summer Scholars Program
Dry Chain Complements Disaster Preparedness, Food, Feed, Nutrition and Health Security to Alleviate Hunger and Poverty
No full textThis poster brings awareness about the primary preventive "Dry Chain" intervention for disaster preparedness and to improve nutrition and food security and alleviate hunger and poverty
Improving Human Interaction Research through Ecological Grounding.
No full textIn psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of falsificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (how we come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’ (how we test them). However, when studying human interaction, separating these contexts can lead to theories with low ecological validity that do not generalize well to life outside the lab. We propose borrowing research procedures from well-established inductive methodologies in interaction research during the process of discovering new regularities and analyzing natural data without being led by theory. We introduce research procedures including the use of naturalistic study settings, analytic transcription, collections of cases, and data analysis sessions, and illustrate these with examples from a successful cross-disciplinary study. We argue that if these procedures are used systematically and transparently throughout a research cycle, they will lead to more robust and ecologically valid theories about interaction within psychology and, with some adaptation, can enhance the reproducibility of research across many other areas of psychological science.Keywords: experimental psychology; conversation analysis; methodology; interactio
'an obvious caricature': The Consequences of Scientific Discourse on Theatrical Madness, 1807-1895
No full textAbstract: This dissertation explores the consequences of the collision between the Victorian stage and scientific writing on madness. I determine how and why tropes of madness persisted in the public imagination despite the prevalence of new scientific discoveries, reforms, and legislation surrounding insanity that circulated throughout British society. In particular, this project asks how the stage mediates this collision, how it reflects the mentalité of the period, and why the theatre returns again and again to madness as a dramatic tool. To determine the consequences of these collisions, I use archival research rooted in microhistory. Specifically, I read and interpret an archive of disparate sources including play texts, theatrical ephemera including performance reviews, images, diary entries, and autobiographies, medical monographs, scientific writing in the popular press, and legislative documents. These materials recreate not only performances of madness, but also the ways in which audiences understood these representations in the context of scientific and legislative discourse. Existing critical scholarship on madness in the theatre is limited to discussions of canonical works, namely Ophelia and Hamlet in Hamlet, Lear in King Lear and Lucy Audley in adaptations of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. While these provide an invaluable framework for this study, I also examine lesser-known and under-studied plays including Moncrieff's The Lear of Private Life (1820), Somerset's Crazy Jane (1829), Collins's The Woman in White (1871), Donizetti and Cammarano's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and Morton's A Roland for an Oliver (1819). Taken as a new and significant in the study of theatre history, these less popular works demonstrate that the public used the stage as a site to experiment with new ideas throughout the nineteenth century. These texts and the materials associated with their production demonstrate the consequences of circulating scientific knowledge and reveal how the theatre grappled with the social implications of madness.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2018.Submitted to the Dept. of Drama.Advisor: Laurence Senelick.Committee: Heather Nathans, Matthew Smith, and Barbara Grossman.Keywords: Theater history, European history, and Science history
Optimization over digraphs: Linear algorithms with linear convergence
No full textAbstract: In this thesis, we study distributed optimization, where a network of agents, in- teracting over a directed graph, collaborates to minimize the average of locally- known convex functions. Most of the existing algorithms apply push-sum consen- sus, which utilizes column-stochastic weight matrices. Column-stochastic weights require each agent to know (at least) its out degree, which may be impractical in e.g., broadcast-based communication protocols. In contrast, we describe FROST (Fast Row-stochastic Optimization with uncoordinated STep-sizes), an optimization algo- rithm applicable to directed graphs with row-stochastic weights and non-identical step-sizes at the agents. Its implementation is straightforward as each agent locally decides the weights assigned to the incoming information and locally chooses a suit- able step-size. Furthermore, we propose a completely linear algorithm which avoids using push-sum (type) techniques and thus leads to less communication and com- putation over the network of agents. Under the assumptions that each local function is strongly-convex with Lipschitz-continuous gradients, we show that the proposed algorithms linearly converge to the global minimizer with sufficiently small step- sizes. We present numerical simulations to illustrate our theoretical results.Thesis (M.S.)--Tufts University, 2018.Submitted to the Dept. of Electrical Engineering.Advisor: Usman Khan.Committee: Brian Tracey, and Babak Moaveni.Keyword: Mathematics
Linking Universities to Communities.
No full textStudents in UEP 261 Community Development, Planning and Politics (Spring 2018, Professor Lorlene Hoyt) worked together to create a video project to "secure funding to promote radical change in academia through meaningful partnerships between universities and the communities with whom they engage." The video appeared on the Tufts Crowdfunding platform in April 2018. To read more about how students Cecilia Flores, Trina Jackson, Drew Merril, Miriam Ortiz, Professor Hoyt, and Talloires Network Program Administrator Brianda Hernandez Cavalcanti describe their project, visit the archived version of the Tufts Crowdfunding page at: https://perma.cc/6X8P-FTCK
The U.S. Foreign Policy on Cultural Heritage Preservation as an Instrument of U.S. Public Diplomacy.
No full textSubmitted in partial fulfillment of the degree Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Abstract: This work seeks to bridge the gap in the public diplomacy and cultural heritage preservation literatures by analyzing the effectiveness of the U.S. Department of State's premier cultural heritage program, the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation
Semi Annual report Year 8.
No full textThe Semi -Annual Report submitted to USAID is a summary of the program's activities, research endeavors, capacity building projects, successes, challenges, solutions, and academic outputs.Keywords: USAID, Nutrition, Semi-Annual Report, Uganda, Stunting, Aflatoxin, Agriculture
Impact of chlorination on silver elution from ceramic water filters.
No full textApplying silver nanoparticles (nAg) or silver nitrate (AgNO3) to ceramic water filters improves microbiological efficacy, reduces biofilm formation, and protects stored water from recontamination. A challenge in ceramic filter production is adding sufficient silver to achieve these goals without exceeding the maximum recommended silver concentration in drinking water. Silver release is affected by silver type, application method, and influent water chemistry. Despite a lack of data, there is an assumption that chlorinated water should not be used as influent water because it may increase silver elution. Thus, the objective of this work was to systematically evaluate the impact of chlorinated water (0-4 mg/L free chlorine residual, FCR) on silver release from ceramic filter disks painted with casein-coated nAg, painted with AgNO3, or containing fired-in nAg over a range of ionic strength (IS = 0-10 mM as NaNO3) in the presence or absence of natural organic matter (NOM) Influent deionized water containing chlorine increased silver release 2-5-fold compared to controls. However, this effect of chlorine was mitigated at higher IS (≥1 mM) or in the presence of NOM (3 mg C/L) For filter disks painted with nAg or AgNO3, silver release increased with increasing IS (with or without chlorine), and effluent concentrations remained above the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline of 0.1 mg/L even after 30 h (80 pore volumes, PVs) of flow with a background solution of 10 mM NaNO3. Silver speciation (nAg vs. Ag+) was monitored in effluent samples from painted or fired-in nAg filter disks. Results indicated that in general, greater than 90% of the eluted silver was due to Ag+ dissolution rather than nAg release. Additionally, a filter disk prepared with fired-in nAg exhibited a lower % released in the nanoparticle form (nAg = 5% of total Ag in effluent) compared to painted on nAg (nAg = 14% of total Ag in effluent) The findings of this study suggest that chlorinated influent water has minimal impact on silver elution from ceramic filters under simulated natural water conditions, and thus, the recommendation to avoid the use of chlorinated water with ceramic filters is not necessary under most conditions