1,355,452 research outputs found
GETnet: A General Framework for Evolutionary Temporal Neural Networks
No full textAbstract — Among the more challenging problems in the design of temporal neural networks are the incorporation of short and long-term memories and the choice of network topology. Delayed copies of network signals can form short-term memory (STM), whereas feedback loops can constitute longterm memories (LTM). This paper introduces a new general evolutionary temporal neural network framework (GETnet) for the automated design of neural networks with distributed STM and LTM. GETnet is a step towards the realization of general intelligent systems that can be applied to a broad range of problems. GETnet utilizes nonlinear moving average and autoregressive nodes and sub-circuits that are trained by enhanced gradient descent and evolutionary search in architecture, synaptic delay, and synaptic weight spaces. The ability to evolve arbitrary time-delay connections enables GETnet to find novel answers to classification and system identification tasks. A new temporal minimum description length policy ensures creation of fast and compact networks with improved generalization capabilities. Simulations using Mackey-Glass time series are presented to demonstrate the above stated capabilities of GETnet. I
Essays in Experimental and Health Economics
No full textAntibiotics and vaccines are undoubtedly among the greatest milestone discoveries in human history. The introduction of antibiotics and vaccines has revolutionized modern medicine by arming health care workers with prevention and curative tools across a wide spectrum of infectious diseases. However, the appropriate use of both antibiotics and vaccines has been a subject of scrutiny and debate within the health and development literature. As a matter of fact, while antibiotics are misused and overused, vaccines – which have the potential to reduce the need for antibiotics – are underutilized. Recent decades have witnessed a rise in antibiotic resistance attributed to burgeoning antibiotic consumption along with failures in implementing antibiotic stewardship in health care settings. Studies have shown that regulatory and socioeconomic environments in developing countries encourage unregulated and indiscriminate use of antibiotics. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to tackle the unjustified sales of antibiotics in community pharmacies. The first chapter reports the results of a field experiment aimed at reducing the non-prescription sale of antibiotics in the developing world. Using a randomized controlled trial in Ethiopia we examine, in collaboration with the Addis Ababa Food Medicine Health Care Administration and Control Authority (AAFMHACA), the effectiveness of three types of nudges – namely, a coercive letter, a moral appeal letter, and an informational sticker with evocative messages placed in pharmacies – in reducing over-the-counter sales of antibiotics. The results of an audit study, conducted two to three weeks after the intervention, indicate that all three inexpensive nudges lead to a significant decrease in the sale of antibiotics without prescription, compared to the control (untreated) group of pharmacies. The coercive letter has the highest impact (reducing over-the-counter sales of antibiotics by 23.3 percent in comparison to the control group), followed by the appeal letter and the sticker treatment (with a reduction of 17.5 and 15.7 percent compared to the control, respectively). The second chapter is a sequel to the first one and reports on the persistent and heterogeneous effects of the treatments five months after the intervention. The results show that our treatments persisted well into the fifth month, despite some waning down of the effects of the letter treatments. The heterogeneity analysis indicates that the findings are robust across different subgroups of characteristics. The third chapter assesses the determinants of inequities in child immunization status. One approach to reducing excessive antibiotic use is through investing resources in protection strategies that reduce the need for antibiotic prescription in the first place. One strategy is the wider use of vaccines in the population particularly through childhood immunization programs. Tragically, not all children of tantamount age partake in the fruit of vaccines as the odds of getting immunized largely depend on several socioeconomic factors. In the last chapter of the thesis, we quantify and study the determinants and decomposition of immunization inequality in Ethiopia using two rounds of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data. We find that while the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) increased from 18 per cent to 28.1 per cent, the inequality index only showed a marginal improvement of declining by a meagre 2 per cent. These improvements are largely appropriated by the urban population as inequality remains constant in rural areas over the study period. The Shapley decomposition analysis reveals that regional variations, distance to health facilities, religion affiliations, household economic status and maternal education consistently contribute to the inequality
Permutation multivariate tests for treatment effect: theory and recent debelopments
No full textWhen the effect of a treatment is evaluated according to several outcomes, a suitable multivariate test must be applied. When the number of response variables is very large, especially in the presence of a small number of patients, typical multivariate parametric solutions (such as Hotelling T-square test) are not possible. As a motivating example, we consider a randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of a specific myotensive technique
Advances on Permutation Multivariate Analysis of Variance for big data
No full textIn many applications of the multivariate analyses of variance, the classic parametric solutions for testing hypotheses of equality in population means or multisample and multivariate location problems might not be suitable for various reasons. Multivariate multisample location problems lack a comparative study of the power behaviour of the most important combined permutation tests as the number of variables diverges. In particular, it is useful to know under which conditions each of the different tests is preferable in terms of power, how the power of each test increases when the number of variables under the alternative hypothesis diverges, and the power behaviour of each test as the function of the proportion of true alternative hypotheses. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature about combined permutation tests, in particular for big data with a large number of variables. A Monte Carlo simulation study was carried out to investigate the power behaviour of the tests, and the application to a real case study was performed to show the utility of the method
Characterisation of the proteomic composition of Schistosoma haematobium extracellular vesicles: towards the development of vaccine and diagnostic candidate antigens
No full textGebeyaw Getnet Mekonnen characterised the proteomic composition of different populations of extracellular vesicles (EVs) from Schistosoma haematobium adult worms and assessed the vaccine and diagnostic efficacy of selected EV-membrane proteins. He found that S. haematobium EV tetraspanins are potential diagnostic candidates, which has resulted in a patent
Nonparametric Method for MUltivariate Tests with Big Data
No full textIn several testing problems we have big datasets. For instance, we could have a large number of response variables. Parametric methods, such as Hotelling T-square test, cannot be applied when the number of outcomes is greater than the sample sizes. Furthermore, strong assumptions such as homoskedasticity and normality are not plausible. We focus on two-sample multivariate problems and propose a nonparametric solution based on a permutation test
Feminist Activist Archives: Towards a Living History of the Gender Education Training Network (GETNET)
No full textThis article engages the dilemmas and challenges of writing histories of the recent past, and of the political agendas of intervening in those histories in the present. This is done through producing an archive of documentation and oral histories of the Gender Education Training Network, GETNET. GETNET was a feminist political education organisation formed in South Africa in the 1990s that is best known for creating spaces of thinking and learning to strengthen action and intervention at numerous levels from 1992 to 2014. This article portrays the history and pedagogy as well as groundbreaking work of GETNET—the first gender training organisation in South Africa that attempted to make real the gains made on paper by challenging gender dynamics and institutionalised sexism in post-apartheid South Africa. It draws on the literature of activist archiving and feminist methodologies of intergenerational dialogue, aiming to (a) share some of the most radical and relevant work done in the decade after 1994 by anti-apartheid feminist activists developing what they called indigenous and regional perspectives, materials, and methodologies to expose and shift gender dynamics, and (b) to spark ideas and conversations about ways of producing activist archives that are accountable to both movements and to the future
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Sistema control de ejecutivos en terreno empresa Getnet
No full textTesis (Ingeniero en Computación e Informática)En este ensayo se encuentra la documentación que detalla el ciclo de vida del proyecto, este surge de la necesidad de la empresa GETNET, quienes en la gerencia comercial tienen a cargo a los ejecutivos en terreno siendo estos la cara hacia el cliente para realizar las visitas de mantención del servicio.
Todo el proceso de gestión y desarrollo de software se ha basado en la metodología SCRUM, además de estándares y buenas prácticas.
Para finalizar se muestran los resultados y conclusiones obtenidos del desarrollo de un producto de software como respuesta y solución al problema, además de evidenciar las mejoras en el proceso de control de visitas de ejecutivos en terreno.
Como lecciones aprendidas, destacamos que utilizar metodologías y herramientas para la dirección de un desarrollo de software nos ayudó a conseguir los objetivos académicos y
del proyecto
Variations on the Author
No full text“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
