Background: In recent years the number of tools developed to help advance sustainable urban sanitation coverage in low- and middle-income countries has increased significantly, yet no study been undertaken determine their usage or impact. This paper explores impact four tools: Shit flow Diagram (SFD), City Service Delivery Assessment (CSDA), SaniPath, Citywide Planning Tool. Methods: A mixed me...

The synthesis of nanostructured anionic-surfactant-templated mesoporous silica (AMS) recently appeared as a new strategy for the formation of nanostructured silica based materials. This method is based on the use of anionic surfactants together with a co-structure-directing agent (CSDA), mostly a silylated ammonium precursor. The presence of this CSDA is necessary in order to create ionic inter...

The journal of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (CSDA) regularly publishes papers with a strong algorithmic and software component. Some recent CSDA related articles can be found in Bustos and Frery (2006), Hammill and Preisser (2006), Keeling and Pavur (2007), Novikov and Oberman (2007), Rosenthal (2007) and Tomasi and Bro (2006). This is the first CSDA special issue on Statistical A...

Workshop Co-Sponsored by The Special District Leadership Foundation Registration fee includes continental breakfast and lunch. Limited class size register early! A practical career development workshop for senior executives and emerging leaders in special districts. This action-oriented workshop includes group and panel discussions on: the journey, roles, and skill sets of a general manager; id...

(1) Background: In Southern countries, companies that employ a large number of workers are concerned with poverty reduction, which is the priority their CSR policy. The banana sector has made great efforts to calculate “living wage”, but this not sufficient. How do we assess decent living standard in where basic social needs rarely covered by public authorities? (2) Methods: selection and analy...

This special issue of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (CSDA) is dedicated to Dr. Stanley Azen, founding Editor and continuing Editor-in-Chief of CSDA for the past 20 years. The Special Issue consists of peer review papers from the Editorial Board members of CSDA. Dr. Azen has made innumerable contributions to biomedical research during his career as a researcher and educator. As a de...

Abstract Reinforcement learning (RL) problems with continuous states and discrete actions (CSDA) can be found in classic examples such as Cart Pole Puck World, well real world applications Market Making. Solutions to CSDA typically involve a function approximation (FA) of the mapping from linear or nonlinear. Linear FAs tile-coding (Sutton Barto learning, 2nd ed, 2009) suffer state information ...