BACKGROUND Registration of the fact of death is almost complete in the city of Chennai and not so in the rural Villupuram district in Tamilnadu, India. The cause of death is often inadequately recorded on the death certificate in developing countries like India. A special verbal autopsy (VA) study of 48,000 adult (aged >or= 25 yrs) deaths in the city of Chennai (urban) during 1995-97 and 32,000...

A small set of extensions to the PureData architecture and to its external API is proposed, which will facilitate the creation of audio feature detectors (pitch followers, beat trackers, onset detectors, etc.) as Pd patches. An experimental implementation is discussed, and two application examples are demonstrated.

Pure alexia is a reading disorder that occurs in literate individuals secondary to a lesion in the left occipito-temporal region. The hallmark of this deficit is the word-length effect: the naming latencies of patients increase dramatically with increasing numbers of letters in the word. For example, every additional letter can take a further 3 s for a patient who is reading a word aloud [compa...

In October 1994, a retrospective study of mortality of children was conducted in Maringué, a district of central Mozambique. Estimates based on maternity histories of 1503 women aged 15-60 years revealed complex changes in the under-5 death rate. During the colonial period (1955-1974), mortality declined from 373 to 270 per 1000. During the civil war period (1975-1991), mortality increased rapi...

BACKGROUND The Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG4) to reduce mortality in children aged <5 years by two-thirds from 1990 to 2015 has made substantial progress. We describe the contribution of measles mortality reduction efforts, including those spearheaded by the Measles Initiative (launched in 2001, the Measles Initiative is an international partnership committed to reducing measles deaths wo...

1. The beginning of blood management The blood management system in Korea was initiated in 1952 with the establishment of the first blood storage facilities in the navy during the Korean War (1950-1953). The National Blood Center was opened in 1954, and the services of the Korean Red Cross (KRC) Blood Center were commenced in 1958 after blood services were transferred from the National Blood Ce...

Manufacturers are now looking closely at ways of optimizing 'quality' and increasing process efficiency while reducing manufacturing costs. Near infra-red (NIR) technology is a popular solution to this challenge: it provides manufacturers with rapid and reliable in-process analysis and thousands of systems have already been installed in the food, chemical, pharmaceutical and agricultural market...