Humla Province is a remote mountainous region of northwest Nepal. The climate is harsh and the local people are extremely poor. Most people endure a subsistence culture, living in traditional housing. Energy for cooking and heating comes from fuelwood, supplies of which are diminishing. In order to improve the indoor environment and reduce fuelwood use, smokeless stoves are being introduced to ...

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a serious public health issue. Kangaroo mother care (KMC) is widely considered to be the most feasible, readily available and preferred intervention for decreasing neonatal morbidity and mortality in developing countries. We conducted a prospective study to assess the effect of KMC on PPD. The study population included 177 low-income mothers with their preterm inf...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder originating from early childhood; nevertheless, its diagnosis is in older ages. In addition to heredity, environmental factors are also of great significance in the etiology of the disease. Dermatoglyphic patterns, albeit varied, remain stable for a lifetime and yield a large number of patterns upon examination. Studies have shown a significant associatio...

Evolutionary approaches to parental care suggest that parents will not automatically invest in all offspring, and they should reduce or eliminate investment in their children if the costs outweigh the benefits. Lack of paternal or social support will increase the costs born by mothers, whereas infant health problems will reduce the evolutionary benefits to be gained. Numerous studies support th...

OBJECTIVE Postpartum depression (PPD) is a common health problem which affects women in the postpartum period. This is a brief note on its associated factors in women from different cultures. METHODS A literature review was performed in MEDLINE and Pubmed from 1991 to 2008 and Magiran from 1991 to 2009. Additional articles and book chapters were referenced from these sources. RESULTS The pr...

In the past decade various attempts have been made to extend standard random effects models to the analysis of spatial observations. This extension is a source of theoretical difŽculty due to the multidirectional dependence among nearest observations; much of the previous work was based on parametric assumptions about the random effects distribution. To avoid any restriction, we propose a condi...

While most popular collaborative filtering methods use low-rank matrix factorization and parametric density assumptions, this article proposes an approach based on distribution-free concentration inequalities. Using agnostic hierarchical sampling assumptions, functions of observed ratings are provably close to their expectations over query ratings, on average. A joint probability distribution o...

Thomas and Brown (2007) suggest that games and virtual worlds allow play and learning to merge, enabling “learning to be” rather than “learning about”. In this context, I address the challenge of designing game-based learning to enact a pedagogy of ‘learning as becoming’ in classroom contexts. I argue that the theory of human information processing fails to provide a tenable account of human le...

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a major mental health disorder that affects at least 13 percent of new mothers and has detrimental consequences for populations that are of concern to social workers, such as low-income women, women of color, young women, and single mothers. Despite the relevance of PPD to multiple social work problems and populations, the social work literature contains sparse in...

INTRODUCTION Cost-effectiveness analysis are crucial in the management of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly in resource-limited settings. Such analyses have not been performed in the use of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) for prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT). OBJECTIVE Cost-effectiveness analysis of HAART approach in Malawi for PMTCT. METHODS In 2 health cen...