INTRODUCTION HIV disclosure to a steady sexual partner (SSP) is important both in preventing HIV transmission and improving the quality of life of people living with HIV (PLHIV). Its determinants have been poorly investigated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The study objective was to determine factors independently associated with voluntary disclosure to one's SSP in PLHIV receiving se...

Data provenance is essential for debugging query results, auditing data in cloud environments, and explaining outputs of Big Data analytics. A well-established technique is to represent provenance as annotations on data and to instrument queries to propagate these annotations to produce results annotated with provenance. However, even sophisticated optimizers are often incapable of producing ef...

We describe the set-up for an electrical muscle stimulation device based on near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), designed for use as a brain-computer interface (BCI). Employing multi-channel NIRS, we measured evoked cerebral blood oxygenation (CBO) responses during real motor tasks and motor-imagery tasks. When a supra-threshold increase in oxyhemoglobin concentration was detected, electrical sti...

The federal government’s debt has increased dramatically in the past few years, and large annual budget deficits will probably continue indefinitely under current laws or policies. If current laws remain unchanged, deficits will total roughly $7 trillion over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects; if certain policies that are scheduled to expire under current law wer...

In vitro studies have been carried out to establish the nutritional differences between crude and refined vegetable oils; however, the impact of the consumption of these foods on metabolism, in particular the effect of buriti oil, needs to be further evaluated. The aim of this study was to evaluate the biochemical and murine parameters and the vitamin A and E status in young rats fed with diets...

Opposition-based learning was first introduced as a solution for machine learning; however, it is being extended to other artificial intelligence and soft computing fields including meta-heuristic optimization. It not only utilizes an estimate of a solution but also enters its counter-part information into the search process. The present work applies such an approach to Colliding Bodies Optimiz...

Preface Pe rceptions that the pace of new-drug development has slowed and that the pharmaceutical industry is highly profitable have sparked concerns that significant problems loom for future drug development. This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study—prepared at the request of the Senate Majority Leader—reviews basic facts about the drug industry's recent spending on research and developmen...