Background Prior to 1993, Nepal had a vertical health logistics system. Logistics was not a government priority. No logistics curricula had been developed, no staff had been trained, and no logistics information systems existed at any level. After the establishment of the Logistics Management Division in 1993, the lack of trained manpower in logistics was realized. With support of USAID funded ...

In this paper we summarize recent results on finding tight semidefinite programming relaxations for the Max-Cut problem and hence tight upper bounds on its optimal value. Our results hold for every instance of Max-Cut and in particular we make no assumptions on the edge weights. We present two strengthenings of the well-known semidefinite programming relaxation of Max-Cut studied by Goemans and...

In this paper we derive a sufficiency theorem of an unconstrained fixed-endpoint problem of Lagrange which provides sufficient conditions for processes which do not satisfy the standard assumption of nonsingularity, that is, the new sufficiency theorem does not impose the strengthened condition of Legendre. The proof of the sufficiency result is direct in nature since the former uses explicitly...

Brooks’ Theorem states that a connected graph G of maximum degree ∆ has chromatic number at most ∆, unless G is an odd cycle or a complete graph. A result of Johansson shows that if G is triangle-free, then the chromatic number drops to O(∆/ log∆). In this paper, we derive a weak analog for the chromatic number of digraphs. We show that every (loopless) digraph D without directed cycles of leng...

We investigated the nature of the memory mechanisms underlying cognitive bias modification by applying Jacoby's (1991) process-dissociation procedure to responses during the transfer task. In the two training conditions (negative and benign), students imagined themselves in 100 ambiguous scenarios, most with potentially negative resolutions; the ambiguity was resolved in a consistently negative...

A new cryptographic pseudorandom number generator Cilia is presented. It hashes real random data using an iterative hash function to update its secret state, and it generates pseudorandom numbers using a block cipher. Cilia is a simple algorithm that uses an improved variant of double encryption with additional security to generate pseudorandom numbers, and its performance is similar to double ...