We measured hair and plasma concentrations of isoniazid among sixteen children with tuberculosis who underwent personal or video-assisted directly observed therapy and thus had 100% adherence. This study therefore defined typical isoniazid exposure parameters after two months of treatment among fully-adherent patients in both hair and plasma (plasma area under the concentration-time curve, AUC,...

A novel and generic approach named as "history-oriented envisioning" is proposed to qualitatively envision all the possible and the sound situations focusing on our intended partial behaviors and actions of an objective system. Some basic notations called a "partial history" and a "partial situation" are introduced as the extensions of the conventional history and its situations representing qu...

In this paper we show that, paradoxically, what looks like a “universal improvement” or a “straight-forward improvement” which enables better security and better reliability on a theoretical level, may in fact, within certain operational contexts, introduce new exposures and attacks, resulting in a weaker operational cryptosystem. We demonstrate a number of such dangerous “improvements”. This i...

The recent increase in the notifications of tuberculosis infections has focused the attention of healthcare professionals on reasons for the disease's resurgence. This article describes how directly observed therapy and an enlightened approach to health promotion for groups of people perceived as being at risk, could prevent further increases in incidence.

We discuss the estimation of the asymptotic covariance matrix of semiparametric maximum likelihood estimators by the observed proole information. We show that a discretized version of the second derivative of the proole likelihood function yields consistent estimators of minus the eecient information matrix.

The ability to gather information can affect outcomes in auctions and other games of incomplete information. We investigate situations where agents have a choice about which information, or signals, to observe, and are informed about the signal choices of others. Our models cover common-value games where agents decide whether to coordinate on observed information, and games mixing privateand co...

When agents like mobile robots make observations while carrying out a course of actions, a formalization of the observed information is needed in order to reason about it. When doing so in the situation calculus, a seemingly straightforward approach turns out to be inappropriate since it leads to unintended results and has an unfortunate sensitivity with respect to different forms of successor ...

Flocks participating in sire referencing schemes can achieve greater genetic gains than those achievable by within-flock selection. However, requirements for joining these schemes can be prohibitive to some producers. The objectives of this study were to determine whether less restrictive schemes or schemes of shorter duration could achieve rates of gain and reduce inbreeding as efficiently as ...

While holding great development opportunities to be seized, Africa has been identified as particularly vulnerable to climate changes, and the ZRB is no exception to that. With increasing demands to the Zambezi system in terms or water and energy, and rising challenges in the form of less runoff due to climate change, it is paramount to plan ahead. In particular, it must be understood how major ...