OBJECTIVE Test associations between household water and sanitation (W&S) and children's concurrent and subsequent Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) scores. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING Ethiopia, India, Peru, Vietnam. PARTICIPANTS 7269 children. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURES PPVT scores at 5 and 8 years. Key exposure variables were related to W&S, and collected at 1, 5 and 8 ...

South Carolina, despite being a small state, possesses a wide range and diversity of hydrogeologic conditions, generally arranged into geologic belts or physiographic provinces. These distinct areas range from the mountains and piedmont with crystalline metamorphic and igneous rocks with major geologic structural features, to a broad coastal plain with sand and limestone aquifers (Fig. 1). Acco...

A major deficiency in state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is the lack of robustness in additive and convolutional noise. The model of auditory perception (PEMO), developed by Dau et al. (1996a) for psychoacoustical purposes, partly overcomes these difficulties when used as a front end for automatic speech recognition. To further improve the performance of this auditory-b...

In this section, we briefly present the formalism we use. This formalism aims at describing the state of a system and its dynamic behaviour in an algebraic framework [DG 94]. It was first introduced in a case study on a formal specification of the embedded safety part of an automatic subway pilot [DM 91], [Dau 92], [DGM 93], in order to cope with the large number of variables whose values made ...

Collaborative tagging systems have the potential to produce socially constructed information organization schemes. However, their effectiveness depends on how users choose tags. Using data from del.icio.us, a popular collaborative tagging system for organizing web bookmarks, we quantitatively test three hypotheses concerning users’ tag choices: 1) Users imitate other user’s choices of tags, 2) ...