When we first set about designing the PFI program, we had many hours of lively debate about how it should be structured. What guidelines should we develop for prospective grantees? What parameters should we require of the partnerships? We all knew that PFI would best serve its purpose if it attracted a wide variety of institutions, partnerships, and proposed experiments and innovation. In the e...

Background Human behaviors are affected by attitudes and beliefs, which in turn are shaped by higher-level values to which we have ascribed. In this study, we explore the relationship between two higher-level values, press freedom and LGBT freedom, and HIV infection with national data at the population level. Methods Data were the number of persons living with HIV (PLWH, n = 35,468,911) for 1...

A comparison in the context of sparse matrices is made between the Product Form of the Inverse PFI (a form of Gauss-Jordan elimination) and the Elimination Form of the Inverse EFI (a form of Gaussian elimination). The precise relation of the elements of these two forms of the inverse is given in terms of the nontrivial elements of the three matrices L, U, U~l associated with the triangular fact...

In most animal growth experiments, groups of animals are housed within a pen. Occasionally, an individual animal shows a very different growth rate than its pen mates or dies during the experiment. When this happens, if pen feed intake (PFI) cannot be reestimated for the calculation of ADFI and feed efficiency, an observation will be lost from the data set. Therefore, we propose a model to esti...

a review of the evidence and an extensive consultation process, the WHO recommendations were endorsed by the FFPRHC.1 Different rules for pills containing 20 μg or 30 μg ethinylestradiol are appropriate to minimise intervention for the majority of women without risking contraceptive efficacy. The risk of pregnancy is greatest when pills are missed either side of the pill-free interval (PFI) and...

Japan has a long history of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs); however, it has experienced many failures but learned various lessons from them. The representative example is a management failure of the third sector, which is a joint corporation capitalized by both the public and private sectors. In fact, many of the third sectors were successively bankrupted or serious questions were raised co...