Rapid expansion of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and a shortage of health care workers (HCWs) required the implementation of a peer educator (PE) model as part of a task-shifting strategy in Lusaka District clinics. The purpose of this study was to evaluate patient and staff perceptions regarding whether the PE program: a) relieved the workload on professional HCWs; and b) delivered services of ...

The Health Care Financing Administration is in the process of designing a competitive bidding model for the purchase of outpatient clinical laboratory services. One segment of this process involves the development of a relative value scale (RVS). The RVS could be used as part of the bidding process and as the basis of payment. The RVS could also be used as the basis of a national fee schedule, ...

The incorporation of increasing core counts in modern processors used to build state-of-the-art supercomputers is driving application development towards exploitation of thread parallelism, in addition to distributed memory parallelism, with the goal of delivering efficient high-performance codes. In this work we describe the exploitation of threading and our experiences with it with respect to...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown favourable results with intensive behavioural treatment for children with autism: evidence has emerged that treatment can be successfully implemented in a community setting and in adolescent participants. The aim of this study was to describe the 2-year adaptive functioning outcome of children and adolescents with autism treated intensively within the cont...

AIM To determine if the benefit of early confirmation of permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) on children's receptive language development is associated with fewer behavioural problems. METHOD Follow-up of a total population cohort of 120 children with PCHI of moderate or greater severity (≥ 40 decibels relative to hearing threshold level) (67 males, 53 females; mean age 7 y 11 mo, r...

Abstract We study jump-diffusion processes with two well-separated time scales. It is proved that the rate of strong convergence to the averaged effective dynamics is of order O(ε1/2), where ε 1 is the parameter measuring the disparity of the time scales in the system. The convergence rate is shown to be optimal through examples. The result sheds light on the designing of efficient numerical me...

Particle simulations and analytic arguments are presented to demonstrate that the electron dissipation region, including the physics which breaks the frozen-in condition, does not affect the rate of reconnection in collisionless plasma. The result is a general consequence of the quadratic nature of the dispersion character of whistler waves, which control the plasma dynamics at small scales. Th...

The wavelet transform is a widely used pre-filtering step for subsequent R spike detection by thresholding of the coefficients. The time-frequency decomposition is indeed a powerful tool to analyze non-stationary signals. Still, current methods use consecutive wavelet scales in an a priori restricted range and may therefore lack adaptativity. This paper introduces a supervised learning algorith...

In this poster presentation, we will show our development of a particle-level simulation system targeted for analyses of biochemical reactions. Rate equations and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are now widely used in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology. These two simulation techniques have also greatly contributed to application fields such as modeling of pathways and designing...

Our goal in this article is to characterize temporal patterns of violent civilian deaths in Iraq. These patterns are expected to evolve on time-scales ranging from years to minutes as a result of changes in the security environment on equally varied time-scales. To assess the importance of multiple time-scales in evolving security threats, we develop a self-exciting point pro cess model similar...