Background Although skilled birth care contributes significantly to the prevention of maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality, utilization of such care is poor in mid- and far-western Nepal. This study explored the perceptions of service users and providers regarding barriers to skilled birth care. Design We conducted 24 focus group discussions, 12 each with service users and service provi...

In recent years, several SAR satellites such as TerraSAR-X, COSMO-SkyMed and Radarsat-2 have been launched. These satellites provide high resolution data suitable for sophisticated interferometric applications. With shorter repeat cycles, smaller orbital tubes and higher bandwidth of the satellites; deformation time series analysis of distributed scatterers (DSs) is now supported by a practical...

The value of commercial Service-Based Applications (SBAs) will depend not only on their functionality, but also on the value of their non-functional properties, known as QoS attributes, that are not tied to a specific functionality, but rather to its delivery features. QoS values may vary according to the provision strategies of providers as well as users’ requirements expressed as global const...

Service-based applications (SBAs) will increasingly be composed of third-party services available over the Internet. Reacting to failures of those third-party services by dynamically adapting the SBAs will become a key enabler for ensuring reliability. Determining when to adapt an SBA is especially challenging in the presence of conversational (aka. stateful) services. A conversational service ...

The superficial brachial artery (SBA), a branch of the axillary artery, is one of the most common arterial variations in this area. While it is more vulnerable to accidental arterial injection or injury, it could be useful for the nourishment of a medial arm skin free flap. To analyze the relationship between the SBA of axillary origin and segmental variation of the axillary artery, we dissecte...

The atmospheric artifacts in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) measurements are a large error source in accurately estimating terrain deformation signals [1]. For example, the large magnitude, high spatial frequency atmospheric bubbles can easily be misinterpreted as deformation phenomena [2, 3]. Various InSAR time series techniques, such as the Permanent Scatterer (PS) and Small...

This report describes the key elements and results of Stanford University’s contribution to the development of the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) and its underlying technologies. The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) became the first operational space based augmentation system (SBAS) in July 2003. WAAS augments the Global Positioning System (GPS) with the following three services: inte...

The Hatch filter is a code-smoothing technique that uses the variation of the carrier phase. It can effectively reduce the noise of a pseudo-range with a very simple filter construction, but it occasionally causes an ionosphere-induced error for low-lying satellites. Herein, we propose an optimal single-frequency (SF) divergence-free Hatch filter that uses a satellite-based augmentation system ...