BACKGROUND An international NGO, with financial and managerial support from "partner" communities, established Casas Maternas (birthing facilities) in 3 municipalities in the isolated northwestern highlands of the department of Huehuetenango in Guatemala-an area with high maternal mortality ratio (338 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births). Traditional birth attendants are encouraged to bring...

Spectrum agility (SA) is a novel way of improving spectrum utilization efficiency and making greater bandwidth available to network applications. Despite its advantages, the fundamental operations (e.g., periodic spectrum sensing) involved in realizing SA can also adversely affect application performance. We propose Context-Aware Spectrum Agility (CASA), which uses application hints together wi...

This report describes a short performance evaluation of a prototype of the CASA framework. The prototype consists of the CASA runtime environment and a simple application that runs on that runtime environment. All these parts have been implemented in Java. Changes in the availability of the resources can be simulated using a graphical user interface. The influence of multiple applications runni...

Correspondence Casa Sollievo della Soefferenza; and Department of Medical and Pediatric Sciences (Drs Catalano and Trovato), University of Catania. Financial/nonfi nancial disclosures : The authors have reported to CHEST that no potential confl icts of interest exist with any companies/organizations whose products or services may be discussed in this article. Correspondence to: Michele Maggi, M...

Aida Cristina Suozzo, Stella Maria Malta, Gislaine Gil, Fabiana Tintori, Shirley Silva Lacerda, Luiz Antonio Nogueira-Martins I Emergency Room of Hospital Central of Irmandade da Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo (ISCMSP), Department of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, School of Medical Science of Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo (FCMSCSP). II Neuropsychologist; Interdisciplinary...

A fundamental problem in auditory and speech processing is the segregation of speech from concurrent sounds. This problem has been a focus of study in computational auditory scene analysis (CASA), and it has also been recently investigated from the perspective of blind source separation. Using a standard corpus of voiced speech mixed with interfering sounds, we report a comparison between CASA ...