Breadth Of Contexts Research Articles

Design and methods for a quasi-experimental pilot study to evaluate the impact of dual active ingredient insecticide-treated nets on malaria burden in five regions in sub-Saharan Africa

BackgroundVector control tools have contributed significantly to a reduction in malaria burden since 2000, primarily through insecticidal-treated bed nets (ITNs) and indoor residual spraying. In the face of increasing insecticide resistance in key malaria vector species, global progress in malaria control has stalled. Innovative tools, such as dual active ingredient (dual-AI) ITNs that are effective at killing insecticide-resistant mosquitoes have recently been introduced. However, large-scale uptake has been slow for several reasons, including higher costs and limited evidence on their incremental effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. The present report describes the design of several observational studies aimed to determine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of dual-AI ITNs, compared to standard pyrethroid-only ITNs, at reducing malaria transmission across a variety of transmission settings.MethodsObservational pilot studies are ongoing in Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Rwanda, leveraging dual-AI ITN rollouts nested within the 2019 and 2020 mass distribution campaigns in each country. Enhanced surveillance occurring in select study districts include annual cross-sectional surveys during peak transmission seasons, monthly entomological surveillance, passive case detection using routine health facility surveillance systems, and studies on human behaviour and ITN use patterns. Data will compare changes in malaria transmission and disease burden in districts receiving dual-AI ITNs to similar districts receiving standard pyrethroid-only ITNs over three years. The costs of net distribution will be calculated using the provider perspective including financial and economic costs, and a cost-effectiveness analysis will assess incremental cost-effectiveness ratios for Interceptor® G2, Royal Guard®, and piperonyl butoxide ITNs in comparison to standard pyrethroid-only ITNs, based on incidence rate ratios calculated from routine data.ConclusionsEvidence of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the dual-AI ITNs from these pilot studies will complement evidence from two contemporary cluster randomized control trials, one in Benin and one in Tanzania, to provide key information to malaria control programmes, policymakers, and donors to help guide decision-making and planning for local malaria control and elimination strategies. Understanding the breadth of contexts where these dual-AI ITNs are most effective and collecting robust information on factors influencing comparative effectiveness could improve uptake and availability and help maximize their impact.

Perspectives on the Academic Discipline of Kinesiology

This special issue of Kinesiology Review celebrates the 40th anniversary of the publication of George Brooks’s Perspectives on the Academic Discipline of Physical Education: A Tribute to G. Lawrence Rarick (1981). Written by many of the luminaries within kinesiology, the papers in this special issue highlight the tremendous growth of knowledge that has occurred in the subdisciplines of kinesiology over the last 40 years and the breadth of contexts in which new knowledge is now being applied. Kinesiology has rapidly become an influential discipline, and its breadth, depth, and influence continue to grow. Though not without challenges, there is much to be optimistic about concerning kinesiology’s future.

Theorizing the role of technologies in the COVID-19 pandemic times

The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced the fragility arising from often overlooked risks across a breadth of contexts, including the lack of coordination among public health institutions, disruption in supply-chains, the spread of misinformation, uncertainty in decision making, and the absence of real-time monitoring systems. For these reasons, many organizations and societies turn to digital tools to reduce the magnitude of disruption. The surge in the use of digital technologies in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic may emerge new opportunities and problems. Some view the current pandemic as an opportunity for organizations to thrive by accelerating digital transformation. Others voiced that the reckless use of technologies may make the situation even worse, generating unexpected challenges. The empirical insights from presenters will advance our understanding of whether and how the digital tools can address the challenges in the face of the COVID-19 crisis at various levels of analysis - individual, organizational and societal levels. Building Trust in Simulation Models: Lessons from the Study of Digital Modeling for COVID and Beyond Presenter: Paul Leonardi; UC Santa Barbara What does contact tracing really mean? The contestation process over the meaning of contact tracing Presenter: Semi Min; New York U. Presenter: Natalia Levina; New York U. Presenter: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf; New York U. Reducing the Uncertainty of Treating COVID-19 patients: Application of an AI-based Predictive Model Presenter: Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld; New York U. Presenter: Elisabeth Yang; Yale School of Management The Transformation Myth: Leading Your Organization Through Uncertain Times Presenter: Jerry Kane; Boston College

Capacity-building and training opportunities for implementation science in mental health

This article traces efforts over the past decade by the National Institute of Mental Health, of the US National Institutes of Health, and other US organizations to build capacity for mental health researchers to advance activities in implementation science. Authors briefly chronicle the antecedents to the field's growth, and describe funding opportunities, workshop and conferences, training programs, and other initiatives that have collectively engaged hundreds of mental health researchers in the development and execution of implementation studies across the breadth of contexts where mental health care and prevention programs are delivered to those in need. The authors summarize a number of key initiatives and present potential next steps to further build the capacity for a new generation of implementation studies in mental health.

Attitudes Toward Risk and Effort Tradeoffs in Human-Robot Heterogeneous Team Operations

Current operational human-agent teaming paradigms place the full burden of danger on non-human agents. Shifting this burden entirely to the robot is currently possible due to the nature of the limited situations in which teleoperated robots are currently employed in military contexts. However, as the roles of non-human agents grow, robots are expected to function as teammates rather than tools. Here, we present a theoretical framework and metric for quantifying commanders’ attitudes toward risk and effort for humans and robots under their command. Twenty-one participants tasked a Soldier, a robot, and a heterogeneous team to rescue civilians in dangerous environments. Participants were risk averse when tasking each agent individually, but exhibited a risk averse attitude for the Soldier and an effort averse attitude for the robot when tasking the team. These findings show that risk attitudes can change as a function of team composition. The framework developed herein has utility for studying tradeoff attitudes across a wide breadth of contexts.

Human Teaching and Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Although evidence of teaching behaviour has been identified in some nonhuman species, human teaching appears to be unique in terms of both the breadth of contexts within which it is observed, and in its responsiveness to needs of the learner. Similarly, cultural evolution is observable in other species, but human cultural evolution appears strikingly distinct. This has led to speculation that the evolutionary origins of these capacities may be causally linked. Here we provide an overview of contrasting perspectives on the relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans, and briefly review previous research which suggests that cumulative culture (here meaning cultural evolution featuring a trend towards improving functionality) can occur without teaching. We then report the results of a novel experimental study in which we investigated how the benefits of teaching may depend on the complexity of the skill to be acquired. Participants were asked to tie knots of varying complexity. In our Teaching condition, opportunities to interact with an experienced partner aided transmission of the most complex knots, but not simpler equivalents, relative to exposure to completed products alone (End State Only condition), and also relative to information about the process of completion (Intermediate States condition). We conclude by considering the plausibility of various accounts of the evolutionary relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans.

The Place You Come from Stamps You: Saul Bellow’s Midwest

The Place You Come from Stamps You:Saul Bellow’s Midwest Andrew Seal A review of Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) and Saul Bellow’s There is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor ( New York: Viking Press, 2015). “I am an American, Chicago-born,” wrote Saul Bellow, in the opening line of The Adventures of Augie March. But while that simple statement was true of Augie, it was not true of Bellow, who was born in Québec, in Montréal. Bellow did not even become a naturalized American citizen until 1943, only ten years before Augie March was published. Bellow is therefore, among other things, the most decorated first-generation author in U.S. literary history—a distinction not often mentioned in his list of accolades. He is also perhaps the best-known undocumented immigrant writer in U.S. history (his family crossed the Canadian border on the Fourth of July, 1924, smuggled over by bootleggers). Yet in the most important senses, Augie bore no false witness on Bellow’s behalf: if Saul was not a Chicagoan by nativity, he had what some Jews would call a Chicagoan neshama, a Chicagoan soul or spirit. Bellow brought a renewed wave of literary respect to the city of Chicago; he spoke often of it in public talks and affirmed how much it had shaped him. Although his fiction was set in many places over the years, Chicago was obviously an anchor, his axis mundi, a place to renew his literary gifts. The Chicago that people all over the world knew was the Chicago of the Bellovian imagination. But if Bellow was unimpeachably a Chicagoan, was he also a midwesterner? In Zachary Leader’s first volume of a two-volume biography of Bellow, we are given Bellow affirming his affinity for the Midwest on a number of occasions, for instance in an interview with a University of Minnesota student newspaper: “I think the place you come from stamps you,” he remarked, [End Page 207] and added, “I consider myself a mid-westerner.” But generally Bellow discussed his midwesternness in connection with his love for the City of Broad Shoulders, as when he wrote to Ralph Ellison enthusiastically about his time spent in Minneapolis: “I find the Midwest agrees with me. Here I recognize things. And I’m near Chicago.” A Chicagoan first, then, and a midwesterner second—perhaps not an uncommon form of nested identities, local and then regional. But even though a good chunk of the biography is set in Minneapolis and in Madison, Wisconsin, Leader’s biography of Bellow barely probes the question of region or regionalism in Bellow’s work or life, though that is not exactly a knock on his work, as most Chicago-centric lives and books seem to let the question of regionalism subside rather quickly, that jump from city to region left undefined. Those books which have been written about this question generally take a roundabout way of answering it. When that relationship is faced squarely—in a novel or a monograph or a biography—it is generally from the viewpoint of a migrant to the Windy City—which Bellow was, although not from the midwestern hinterland. Midwesterners become Chicagoans; Chicagoans, perhaps, are midwesterners by a kind of courtesy appointment. To read the two books under review—Leader’s biography and Benjamin Taylor’s edited collection of Bellow’s nonfiction—simply to settle the case of Saul Bellow’s midwesternness, however, would be a poor use of their vast scope. Leader’s biography in particular is an extraordinary work of accumulation and organization—it is really one of the most complete pictures of intellectual life in the United States of midcentury that we have. It more than earns the title “authoritative,” although biographies which are considered authoritative are also often said to have “the last word” on their subject, and while the work is certainly the former, it does not really attempt to have the latter. It is comprehensive—enormously impressive in its breadth of context and in its diligence of detail—but it...

Special Issue BASAS Annual Conference, April 3rd–5th 2013, University of Leeds

This special issue of Contemporary South Asia comprises a selection of six papers presented at the 27th Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) held at the University of Leeds, 3–5 April 2013. The papers in this special issue represent a fraction of what was presented at the 27th BASAS conference. However, they reflect well the diversity within BASAS in terms of the career stage of members, the breadth of contexts studied and the range of disciplinary approaches to the study of South Asia. While there was no explicit theme driving the selection of papers for this edition, an emphasis did emerge upon thinking about the reproduction, embodiment and resistance of authority and marginalization through examining the specific role that location and space play.

Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic. By Karen Oslund, with foreword by William Cronon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. 280 pp. $35.00)

Karen Oslund's recent book provides a fascinating account of the development of the concept of “the European North,” that is, the image of the most northerly regions of the Atlantic littoral that formed in the minds of Europeans, mostly educated members of the upper classes with a keen interest in science and culture, and how this image changed from the 17th century up to the 20th. What makes this book particularly valuable is the breadth of context it creates by viewing “the North” as a whole, taking in all the lands of the northwestern margins of Europe—Iceland, Greenland, northern Norway and the Faeroe Islands. Common to these lands was a portrayal by a succession of European travelers as being remote and even exotic, their appeal deriving from their harsh physical conditions, inhospitable social environment, long history and unusual cultural context, set within a technological and material culture that was seen as simple and in many ways primitive.

Quality-based payment: six case examples

The logic of paying more for high-quality care and less for low-quality resonates. Increasingly health system leaders worldwide acknowledge that payment reforms are needed to do just that, prompted no doubt by the growing body of evidence indicating that quality is not what it should be. This review was undertaken to explore contexts in which quality-based payment appears feasible. The ultimate intent is to provoke thoughtful debate about whether and how quality-based payment might fit within a particular developing country's framework of policies to ensure and promote quality of care. With guidance from key informants with first-hand knowledge of international quality-based payment schemes, a purposive sample of six quality-based payment schemes was assembled. Schemes were examined to identify environmental contexts and design features. Examples illustrate a variety of approaches and a breadth of contexts in which quality-based payment has been implemented. Contrary to what might be expected, implementation does not appear to be constrained to private-sector purchasers, private-sector providers, hospital settings, nor to any particular type of underlying payment system. Further, quality-based payment pioneers are using a variety of incentive structures, and are tapping a rich mix of structural, process, and outcome standards to benchmark quality. Despite significant operational challenges, quality-based payment has been implemented in developing as well as developed countries, albeit not frequently in either instance. What we do not know--what the literature is nearly silent on--relates to the sustainability and ultimate impact of alternative incentive schemes.

Computer-based semantic analyzers

Computer-based semantic analyzers come from five basic areas: machine translation, question and answer systems, content analysis, bibliographic retrieval, and medical information retrieval systems. This paper brings together and reviews these five basic areas and looks at representative semantic analyzers from them. The diversity of these semantic analyzers makes precise comparison impossible, but it was useful to draw some general comparisons in the areas of subject matter and breadth of context.