Switching vaccination among target groups to achieve improved long-lasting benefits

Babesia and its hosts: adaptation to long-lasting interactions as a way to achieve efficient transmission

Babesia, the causal agent of babesiosis, are tick-borne apicomplexan protozoa. True babesiae (Babesia genus sensu stricto) are biologically characterized by direct development in erythrocytes and by transovarial transmission in the tick. A large number of true Babesia species have been described in various vertebrate and tick hosts. This review presents the genus then discusses specific adaptat...

Vaccination: short- to long-term benefits from investment

In the context of current economic difficulties across Europe, accurate budgeting and resource allocation have become increasingly important. Vaccination programmes can respond to the needs of governments to budget with confidence. It may be more reliable and accurate to forecast budget and resource allocation for a vaccination programme than for unpredictable seasonal disease peaks of infectio...

Head Start’s Lasting Benefits

The benefits of Head Start are under increased scrutiny as Congress debates its reauthorization. How effective is Head Start, and how can it be improved? We provide a current overview and critical evaluation of Head Start research and discuss implications of this research with an eye toward informing debate. There has been a good deal of controversy over whether Head Start produces lasting bene...

Long-Lasting Protective Immunity to

Improved Switching among Temporally Abstract Actions

In robotics and other control applications it is commonplace to have a preexisting set of controllers for solving subtasks, perhaps hand-crafted or previously learned or planned, and still face a difficult problem of how to choose and switch among the controllers to solve an overall task as well as possible. In this paper we present a framework based on Markov decision processes and semi-Markov...