178,692 research outputs found

    Pulmonary Tuberculosis among Women with Cough Attending Clinics for Family Planning and Maternal and Child Health in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

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    Tuberculosis (TB) case detection in women has remained low in developing world. This study was conducted to determine the proportion of smear positive TB among women with cough regardless of the duration attending family Planning (FP) and Maternal and child health (MCH) clinics in Dar es Salaam. We conducted a cross sectional study in all three municipal hospitals of Dar es Salaam, between October 2007 and June 2008. All women with cough attending FP and MCH clinics were screened for TB by smear microscopy. Pearson chi-square was used to compare group difference for categorical variables. Risk factors for smear positive were estimated by logistics regression with 95% confidence intervals (CI) given for odds ratios indicating statistically significant relationship if the CI did not include one. We enrolled a total of 749 TB suspects. Five hundred and twenty nine patients (70.6%) were from MCH clinics. Mean (SD) age was 27.6 (5.2) years. A total of 616 (82.2%) patients were coughing for less than two weeks as compared to 133 (17.8%), who coughed for two or more weeks. Among 616 TB suspects, 14 (2.3%) were smear positive TB patients, and of the 133 who had coughed for two or more weeks, 13 (9.8%) were smear positive TB patients. Risk factors associated with smear positive results were having attended more than one visit to any facility prior to diagnosis (OR = 6.8; 95%CI 2.57-18.0) and having HIV/AIDS (OR = 4.4; 95%CI 1.65-11.96). Long duration of cough was not a risk factor for being smear positive (OR = 1.6; 95%CI 0.59-4.49). The proportion of smear positive TB patients among women with cough attending MCH and FP was 3.8%. Visits to any health facility prior to Diagnosis and HIV infection were risk for having a smear positive TB

    Traumatic identity and aura in David Lodge's "Author, author"

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    Este artículo analiza la novela Author, Author (2004) de David Lodge como ejemplo de bioficción neo-victoriana centrada en una celebridad, en este caso concreto, Henry James. El género forma parte del renacimiento Victoriano actual que afecta a los estudios culturales en su conjunto. Mi argumento central es que la novela de Lodge constituye una respuesta a las ansiedades culturales actuales, en particular a las que se refieren a la crisis identitaria y autoría literaria, así como a la pérdida del aura artística de Walter Benjamin, sublimándolas a través de los traumas de finales del siglo XIX. La elección de James, como demuestra el artículo, no es casual. Es el último representante de un mundo perdido en el que el aura aún tenía un espacio; el ser humano en crisis y traumatizado porque no encaja en un status quo nuevo.This paper delves into David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004) as an example of neo-Victorian celebrity biofiction, more concretely on Henry James. The genre belongs to the wave of Victorian revival in current literature which also affects cultural studies in general. My main contention is that Lodge’s novel responds to current cultural anxieties, particularly the crisis of identity and authorship and the end of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, by sublimating them into late-nineteenth-century traumata. The choice of James is, the article argues, not casual. He represents the redeeming figure of a lost auratic world; the human in crisis, traumatized because he does not fit in the new status quo

    Identifying author-inventors from Spain: methods and a first insight into results

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    The aim of this paper is to describe a matching and disambiguation methodology for the identification of author-inventors located in the same country. It aims to maximize precision and recall rates by taking into account national name writing customs in the name matching stage and by including a recursive validation step in the person disambiguation stage. An application to the identification of Spanish author-inventors is described in detail, where all SCOPUS 2003-2008 publications of Spanish authors are matched to all 1978-2009 EPO applications with Spanish inventors. Using this data, we identify 4,194 Spanish author-inventors. A first look at their patenting and publication patterns reveal that Spanish author-inventors make quite a significant contribution to the overall country’s scientific and technological production in the time periods considered: 27% of all EPO patent applications invented in Spain and 15% of all SCOPUS scientific articles authored in Spain, with important differences across fields and excluding journals in non-technologically relevant fields.Peer reviewe

    ¿Es China capitalista?

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    International audienceEste libro quiere romper el consenso y perturbar algunas certezas. Por ejemplo, sosteniendo que es un error atribuir los logros de la economía china a la supuesta “adhesión” de este país al capitalismo. La conclusión a la que llegan los autores Rémy Herrera y Zhiming Long es que, hoy, el sistema chino no es capitalista –aunque no sin riesgos de desembocar en el capitalismo– sino una forma de socialismo con mercado, en el que la planificación es, todavía, determinante

    Long-lived collateralized assets and bubbles

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    When infinite-lived agents trade long-lived assets secured by durable goods, equilibrium exists without any additional debt constraints or uniform impatience conditions on agents' characteristics. Also, price bubbles are absent when physical endowments are uniformly bounded away from zero.Collateralized assets, Existence of equilibrium, Asset pricing bubbles.

    ¿Qué es el plagio?

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    El plagio es tomar un fragmento de una obra artística o intelectual ajena y hacerlo pasar como propio, sin la debida acreditación del autor.Plagiarism is taking a fragment of another's artistic or intellectual work and passing it off as one's own, without due accreditation of the author

    Microbial larvicide application by a large-scale, community-based program reduces malaria infection prevalence in urban Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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    BACKGROUND\ud \ud Malaria control in Africa is most tractable in urban settlements yet most research has focused on rural settings. Elimination of malaria transmission from urban areas may require larval control strategies that complement adult mosquito control using insecticide-treated nets or houses, particularly where vectors feed outdoors.\ud \ud METHODS AND FINDINGS\ud \ud Microbial larvicide (Bacillus thuringiensis var. israelensis (Bti)) was applied weekly through programmatic, non-randomized community-based, but vertically managed, delivery systems in urban Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Continuous, randomized cluster sampling of malaria infection prevalence and non-random programmatic surveillance of entomological inoculation rate (EIR) respectively constituted the primary and secondary outcomes surveyed within a population of approximately 612,000 residents in 15 fully urban wards covering 55 km(2). Bti application for one year in 3 of those wards (17 km(2) with 128,000 residents) reduced crude annual transmission estimates (Relative EIR [95% Confidence Interval] = 0.683 [0.491-0.952], P = 0.024) but program effectiveness peaked between July and September (Relative EIR [CI] = 0.354 [0.193 to 0.650], P = 0.001) when 45% (9/20) of directly observed transmission events occurred. Larviciding reduced malaria infection risk among children < or =5 years of age (OR [CI] = 0.284 [0.101 to 0.801], P = 0.017) and provided protection at least as good as personal use of an insecticide treated net (OR [CI] = 0.764 [0.614-0.951], P = 0.016).\ud \ud CONCLUSIONS\ud \ud In this context, larviciding reduced malaria prevalence and complemented existing protection provided by insecticide-treated nets. Larviciding may represent a useful option for integrated vector management in Africa, particularly in its rapidly growing urban centres

    A long-term corrosion investigation of bronze sculptures exposed outdoor

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    Safeguarding our cultural heritage for the future generations is possible only by applying tailored conservation strategies. The safeguard is a complex task and often requires measurements to be performed on the artefacts. This paper describes an interesting case regarding the metallic artefacts belonging to the Gori Art Collection at Fattoria Celle (Pistoia, Italy). This collection of modern art, developed inside a project of environmental art, is facing different corrosion phenomena due to its permanent exposure to outdoor environmental conditions. A non-invasive and in-situ multi-analytical approach was recently started in order to assess the conservation state of the metal artefacts and to assure their long-lasting preservation trough the development of a conservation project. In this paper, the preliminary results of the monitoring campaign carried on the bronze sculpture "Cavaliere" by Marino Marini will be presented and discussed

    Participatory mapping of target areas to enable operational larval source management to suppress malaria vector mosquitoes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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    BACKGROUND\ud \ud Half of the population of Africa will soon live in towns and cities where it can be protected from malaria by controlling aquatic stages of mosquitoes. Rigorous but affordable and scaleable methods for mapping and managing mosquito habitats are required to enable effective larval control in urban Africa.\ud \ud METHODS\ud \ud A simple community-based mapping procedure that requires no electronic devices in the field was developed to facilitate routine larval surveillance in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The mapping procedure included (1) community-based development of sketch maps and (2) verification of sketch maps through technical teams using laminated aerial photographs in the field which were later digitized and analysed using Geographical Information Systems (GIS).\ud \ud RESULTS\ud \ud Three urban wards of Dar es Salaam were comprehensively mapped, covering an area of 16.8 km2. Over thirty percent of this area were not included in preliminary community-based sketch mapping, mostly because they were areas that do not appear on local government residential lists. The use of aerial photographs and basic GIS allowed rapid identification and inclusion of these key areas, as well as more equal distribution of the workload of malaria control field staff.\ud \ud CONCLUSION\ud \ud The procedure developed enables complete coverage of targeted areas with larval control through comprehensive spatial coverage with community-derived sketch maps. The procedure is practical, affordable, and requires minimal technical skills. This approach can be readily integrated into malaria vector control programmes, scaled up to towns and cities all over Tanzania and adapted to urban settings elsewhere in Africa

    Parametric study regarding the influence of preliminary design parameters of a long-span timber footbridge on the human-induced dynamic behaviour

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    Dynamic behaviour often is a topic of concern in the design of pedestrian bridges. It is time-consuming to assess and little is known about the way it is influenced by the characteristics of a bridge. In many cases, a bridge needs testing after is has been finished to determine the specifications of a damper. Striving to reduce the environmental impact of bridges, there lies a great potential in using materials with a low environmental impact, such as timber. This research combines the lack of knowledge about dynamic behaviour of footbridges with the need for using timber instead of other materials. It consists of two parts. The first part, the parameter study, investigates the influence of three preliminary design parameters on the dynamic behaviour of a long-span timber footbridge, namely the pylon height, the pylon shape and the amount of cables. The second part, the optimisation study, examines to what extent it is possible to design a long-span timber footbridge that does not need dampers to control excessive vibrations.To this end, a parametric model of a bridge was made in which parameters can be varied and optimised to create realistic design variants. To be able to optimise taking into account dynamic behaviour, a python script was written to automatically determine the type of modes. The results of the parameter study show that the dynamic behaviour can be influenced by the parameters, although the results depend on the specific model, dimensions, parameter values and damping value. The results of the second part show that a with a 14% increase in mass a design variant that does not need dampers to control excessive vibrations can be obtained.Civil Engineerin
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