While knowledge is viewed by many as an asset, it is often difficult to locate particular items within a large electronic corpus. This paper presents an agent based framework for the location of resources to resolve a specific query, and considers the associated design issue. Aspects of the work

We exploit differences in early colonial experience to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of colonization strategy was, at least in part, determined by the feasibility of whether Europeans could settle in the colony. In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they could not settle and they were more likely to set up worse (extractive) institutions. These early institutions persisted to the present. We document these hypotheses in the data. Exploiting differences in mortality rates faced by soldiers, bishops and sailors in the colonies during the 18th and 19th centuries as an instrument for current institutions, we estimate large effects of institutions on income per capita. Our estimates imply that a change from the worst (Zaire) to the best (US or New Zealand) institutions in our sample would be associated with a five fold increase in income per capita.

Algorithms developed by the author for recogniz-ing persons by their iris patterns have now been tested in six field and laboratory trials, producing no false matches in several million comparison tests. The recognition principle is the failure of a test of statis-tical independence on iris phase structure encoded by multi-scale quadrature wavelets. The combinatorial complexity of this phase information across different persons spans about 244 degrees of freedom and gen-erates a discrimination entropy of about 3.2 bits/mm over the iris, enabling real-time decisions about per-sonal identity with extremely high confidence. The high confidence levels are important because they al-low very large databases to be searched exhaustively (one-to-many “identification mode”) without making any false matches, despite so many chances. Biomet-rics lacking this property can only survive one-to-one (“verification”) or few comparisons. This paper ex-plains the algorithms for iris recognition, and presents the results of 2.3 million comparisons among eye im-ages acquired in trials in Britain, the USA, and Japan. 1

This is a digitized copy derived from an ACM copyrighted work. It is not guaranteed to be an accurate copy of the author's original work. This paper develops Brinch-Hansen's concept of a monitor as a method of structuring an operating system. It introduces a form of synchronization

ABSTRACT: The Island of Mauritius was affected by a large scale epidemic outbreak of Chikungunya Fever (CHIKF) from February to April 2006. It was observed that this epidemic was associated with an excess mortality during the months of March to May 2006 in Mauritius. This study was aimed to analyze the gender and age group distribution of the excess mortality. Population and mortality data were obtained from the Mauritius Central Statistics Office for the years 2000 to 2006. The excess monthly mortality was computed for 2006 and the distribution of excess mortality according to gender and age groups was analyzed. For both genders combined, the excess mortality was 91.5 % in the age group ≥50 years. For the ≥ 50-year age group, the total male excess death rate (EDR) exceeded the total female EDR by 66%. Our results indicate that CHIKF is associated with an increased mortality particularly in the ≥ 50-year age group with males being more vulnerable than females to mortality. Although there have been reports of CHIKF related deaths in other studies, the profile of the excess mortality during a CHIKF outbreak has not been previously described.

commons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

Resistance patterns of Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolated from HIV and Non-HIV patients with lower respiratory tract infections

ABSTRACT: Chikungunya fever, an emerging mosquito-borne viral disease, has affected Mauritius with two recent outbreaks in 2005 and 2006 respectively. A study was carried out in 2007 to describe the clinical complications post-Chikungunya infection. Ethical clearance was obtained for this study. Data collection was carried out in February and March 2007 on a sample of people who had suffered from Chikungunya fever by means of a comprehensive questionnaire. Participants comprised 77 people; there were 41 males and 36 females. Participants ranged from 6 to 69 years. 70 participants experienced persisting joint pains for at least 6 months following the acute phase. Of these, 35 had residual joint complaints after 6 months. 44 participants suffered from psychological sequelae. 10 participants had dermatological sequelae, 6 had iatrogenic complications due to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-induced gastritis, and 3 participants with serologically confirmed Chikungunya fever had neurological manifestations and changes on CT/MRI which could correspond to demyelination. Statistical

Does the clinical profile of Gujarati patients with Takayasu’s aortoarteritis differ from other Indians?

Pérdida de la actividad antibacteriana de quinolonas por efecto de la radiación UVA UVA-induced loss of quinolone antibacterial activity