this study tries to make a distinction between factors affecting adopters and non-adopters of domestic rainwater harvesting (drwh) in golestan province, iran. in order to better comprehend the differences, nine dimensions were considered in this study, including (1) social background (including respondents’ demographics, water sources, issues in accessing water sources, primary awareness of the...

Over the last twenty years, the field of epidemiology has seen a rapidly increasing interest in, and need for, addressing low-level risks, interactions as well as main effects, and simultaneous assessment of vast numbers of biomarkers. Multiple examples over this time have shown the necessity for very large, high-quality individual studies (e.g., biobanks) or consortia of studies for these effo...

It is evident that politicians, health managers and academics are realising the potential contribution of Family Medicine to health systems in sub-Saharan Africa. The challenge is in training institutions to recruit and train enough Family Physicians in order to meet expectations. The 3rd Family Medicine Conference in Uganda, held in October 2013, explored innovative ways of scaling up Family M...

BACKGROUND To achieve population-wide health improvement, public health interventions found effective in selected samples need to be 'scaled up' and implemented more widely. The pathways through which interventions are scaled up are not well characterised. The aim of this paper is to identify examples of public health interventions which have been scaled up and to develop a conceptual framework...

The main challenge in an effort to build a realistic system with context-sensitive inference capabilities, beyond accuracy, is scalability. This paper studies this problem in the context of a learning-based approach to context sensitive text correction – the task of fixing spelling errors that result in valid words, such as substituting to for too, casual for causal, and so on. Research papers ...

We used the Lives Saved Tool (LiST) to estimate deaths averted if midwifery was scaled up in 78 countries classified into three tertiles using the Human Development Index (HDI). We selected interventions in LiST to encompass the scope of midwifery practice, including prepregnancy, antenatal, labour, birth, and post-partum care, and family planning. Modest (10%), substantial (25%), or universal ...

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, such as RMAX, make (with high probability) only a small number of poor decisions. In practice, these algorithms do not scale well as the number of states grows because the algorithms spend too much effort exploring. We introduce an RL algorithm State TArgeted R-MAX (STAR-MAX) that explores a subset of the state space, called the exploration envelop...

S pecies whose presence or abundance readily reflect some measure of the character of the habitat within which they are found are often identified as bioindicators 1 , most frequently to monitor changes within a particular habitat. In spite of the intuitive appeal of bioindication, largely as a consequence of its cost-effectiveness in the face of urgent conservation issues, indicator studies fr...

Linked Data semantic sources, in particular DBpedia, can be used to answer many user queries. PowerAqua is an open multi-ontology Question Answering (QA) system for the Semantic Web (SW). However, the emergence of Linked Data, characterized by its openness, heterogeneity and scale, introduces a new dimension to the Semantic Web scenario, in which exploiting the relevant information to extract a...