Rapid expansion of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and a shortage of health care workers (HCWs) required the implementation of a peer educator (PE) model as part of a task-shifting strategy in Lusaka District clinics. The purpose of this study was to evaluate patient and staff perceptions regarding whether the PE program: a) relieved the workload on professional HCWs; and b) delivered services of ...

The Health Care Financing Administration is in the process of designing a competitive bidding model for the purchase of outpatient clinical laboratory services. One segment of this process involves the development of a relative value scale (RVS). The RVS could be used as part of the bidding process and as the basis of payment. The RVS could also be used as the basis of a national fee schedule, ...

The incorporation of increasing core counts in modern processors used to build state-of-the-art supercomputers is driving application development towards exploitation of thread parallelism, in addition to distributed memory parallelism, with the goal of delivering efficient high-performance codes. In this work we describe the exploitation of threading and our experiences with it with respect to...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown favourable results with intensive behavioural treatment for children with autism: evidence has emerged that treatment can be successfully implemented in a community setting and in adolescent participants. The aim of this study was to describe the 2-year adaptive functioning outcome of children and adolescents with autism treated intensively within the cont...

AIM To determine if the benefit of early confirmation of permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) on children's receptive language development is associated with fewer behavioural problems. METHOD Follow-up of a total population cohort of 120 children with PCHI of moderate or greater severity (≥ 40 decibels relative to hearing threshold level) (67 males, 53 females; mean age 7 y 11 mo, r...

Communication media have become the primary way of interaction thanks to the discovery and innovation of many new technologies. One of the most widely used communication systems today is video streaming, which is constantly evolving. Such communications are a good alternative to face-to-face meetings, and are therefore very useful for coping with many problems caused by distance. However, they ...

One of the most important issues in web mining is how to find out similarities between web pages. In this paper we propose a method based on distributed learning automata which take advantage of usage data to find out web pages similarities. The idea of the proposed method is that if different users request a couple of pages consistently together, then these pages are likely to correspond to th...

When I became Editor in Chief of Wiley’s WIREs Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology, I felt one of the most important issues was that the publication is dedicated to nanomedicines. This essentially suggested that nanotechnology would be transitioning into the actual development of human therapeutics. Recently, this movement has begun. We have seen the initiation of multiple clinical trials of nan...

In any communication, security is the most important issue in today’s world. Lots of data security and data hiding algorithms have been developed in the last decade, which worked as motivation for the research. In the era of internet, in every communication images play a very important role. Images are used for secret communication also like for military purposes, hiding the serial number or co...

In this paper we present a conferencing architecture compliant with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) specification. To the purpose, we embrace a practical approach, by describing an actual implementation of an open source centralized video-conferencing system, called CONFIANCE, capable to offer advanced communication experience to end-users through the effective exploitation of mechanisms like...