BACKGROUND Increasing resistance to first line antimalarial drugs led to a change in the antimalarial policy of Uganda in 2005. Successful implementation of this policy depends on changing prescribing patterns of health workers. OBJECTIVES To describe prescribing patterns for malaria and associated factors in a rural Ugandan hospital following a change in antimalarial treatment policy from ch...

Evaluate the comprehensiveness of primary school sun-protection policies in tropical North Queensland, Australia. Pre-determined criteria were used to assess publicly available sun-protection policies from primary schools in Townsville (latitude 19.3°S; n = 43), Cairns (16.9°S; n = 46) and the Atherton Tablelands (17.3°S; n = 23) during 2009-2012. Total scores determined policy comprehensivenes...

We consider an M/M/N/K/FCFS system (N > 0, K ≥N), where the servers operate at (possibly) heterogeneous service rates. In this situation, the steady state behavior depends on the routing policy that is used to select which idle server serves the next job in queue. We define a class of idle-time-order-based policies (including, for example, Longest Idle Server First (LISF)) and show that all pol...

In Hong Kong, statutory regulation for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners has been implemented in the past decade. Increasing use of TCM on top of biomedicine (BM) services by the population has been followed; but corresponding policy development to integrate their practices has not yet been discussed. Using focus group methodology, we explore policy ideas for integration by colla...

In an N x N shared buffer switch architecture, a common buffer space is shared among output ports, which provides flexibility in resource allocation. However the problem arises when the buffer space is dominated by one or more output ports in case of imbalanced input traffic. Thus this results in an increased packet loss rates due to unfair sharing of buffer space. For this reason buffer manage...

We consider the following linearly combinatorial multiarmed bandits (MABs) problem. In a discrete time system, there are K unknown random variables (RVs), i.e., arms, each evolving as an i.i.d stochastic process over time. At each time slot, we select a set of N (N ≤ K) RVs, i.e., strategy, subject to an arbitrarily constraint. We then gain a reward that is a linear combination of observations ...

1. Szlezak N. Strengthening the Role of Research in Improving Health in Developing Countries Current Concepts and Institutions. Presentation slides from Knowledge for Development Seminar; 19 February 2004; Center for International Development, Harvard University. Available from URL: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/sed/docs/ k4dev/szlezak_k4dev_040219.ppt 2. Trostle J, Brofman M, Langer A. How do res...

The single server queueing model with control policies has a wide range of applications in the quality control of telephone switching systems and production systems. As a result, several variations of the controlled queueing model have been studied extensively in the literature. These studies give rise to several types of control policies. To name a few, Yadin and Naor [1] analyzed the control ...

Introduction: Prison, as the most important place for the transmission of infectious diseases, has particular importance, and prison populations are at high risk for infectious diseases like Hepatitis B & C. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of Hepatitis B & C among male inmates in six prisons of different provinces in Iran in 2012. Methods: In...

We present a theoretical framework for online probabilistic plan recognition in cooperative multiagent systems. Our model extends the Abstract Hidden Markov Model (AHMM) (Bui, Venkatesh, & West 2002), and consists of a hierarchical dynamic Bayes network that allows reasoning about the interaction among multiple cooperating agents. We provide an in-depth analysis of two different policy terminat...