The aims of this thesis were to expand the knowledge about sexual and reproductive health among urban Ugandan youths, living in a slum, and to evaluate the national flow-chart for management of the abnormal vaginal discharge (AVD) syndrome in adolescent girls. Data collection included individual interviews, focus-group discussions and clinical investigations with tests for chlamydia trachomatis (CT), neisseria gonorrhoea (NG), trichomonas vaginalis (TV), syphilis, and HIV infection. Poverty, peer pressure and gender power imbalance were obstacles to safe sexual practices: to abstain from sex, be faithful or to use condoms. Prevalence among the 199 female and 107 male adolescents for CT, NG, TV, syphilis and HIV was 4.5%, 9.0%, 8.0%, 4.0% and 15.2% for females and 4.7%, 5.7%, 0%, 2.8% and 5.8% for males. The national AVD flow-chart had a sensitivity of 61%, a specificity of 38.5% and a positive predictive value (PPV) of 11.6%. A flow-chart using risk factors, rather than symptoms, implicated a sensitivity/specificity and PPV of 82.6%/47% and 17.3% respectively. Socially disadvantaged females had a high risk to be HIV infected and HIV infection was associated to other STIs. Females were more likely than males to have any of the infections studied. Voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) for HIV was considered as helpful in preventing the spread of HIV. Obstacles for testing were: lack of time and money, fear of stigmatisation and fear that the knowledge of HIV positive status could shorten someone's life. An alternative flow-chart for management of AVD among adolescent girls should be evaluated. Girl's opportunities for education and income generating work should be a priority. VCT services for young people should be made accessible in terms of cost, time and quality of counselling.

Shadow shielding is a novel and practical concept for waste heat rejection from lunar surface spacecraft systems. A shadow shield is a light shield that shades the radiator from parasitic thermal radiation emanating from the sun or lunar surface. Radiator size and mass can reduce if the radiator is not required to account for parasitic heat loads in addition to system energy rejection requirements. The lunar thermal environment can be very harsh towards radiative heat rejection. Parasitic heat loads force the radiator to expand in size and mass to compensate. On the Moon, there are three types: surface infrared, solar insulation, and albedo. This thesis tests shadow shielding geometry and its effect on the radiator and nuclear reactor in a reactor-powered Carnot heat engine. Due to the nature of cooling by radiative heat transfer, the maximum shaft work a Carnot system can produce and the minimal required radiator area occurs when the Carnot efficiency is 25%. First, a case for shadow shielding is made using an isothermal, control radiator model in Thermal Desktop. Six radiator temperatures and three latitudes are considered in the tests. Test variables in this section include radiator shapes and shade geometry. The simulations found that shadow shielding is best suited for a low-temperature radiator at the lunar equator. Optimized parabolic shade geometry includes a focus right above or at the top of the radiator and full to three-quarters shade height. The most useful rectangular radiator shape for shadow shielding is that which has a low height and long width. All simulations were conducted using a shade with a 10 kg/m2 area mass. A sensitivity study was conducted for different shade area masses using high and low values found in the literature. The shade is the most useful when the shade's area mass is less than or equal to that of the radiator. If the shade mass is below this threshold, the shade would be applicable to all radiator temperatures tested. Optimized shade and radiator geometry results were then factored into a second model where the radiator is comprised of heat pipes which is similar to radiators from actual system designs. Further simulations were conducted implementing the SAFE-4001 fast fission nuclear reactor design. The study found that shadow shielding allowed the system to use a low-temperature radiator where other configurations were not viable because shadow shielding drastically improves radiative heat transfer from the radiator, but at the consequence of raising radiator mass.

No description available.

<p>This study assesses the present level of household water access and the willingness to pay in South Africa. Although the general literature informs that progress has been made in positing South Africa above the levels found in most African countries, there are some marked inequalities among the population groups and across the provinces, with some performing well and others poorly in this regard. The study looks at the extent to which households differ in terms of water access and willingness to pay according to the province of residence. The study focuses on household heads / male and female, through different social and demographic attributes, by taking account of variables such as age, education&nbsp / attainment, geographic areas, and population group to name but a few. The data used in this study comes from the 2007 General Household Survey (GHS) conducted by Statistics South Africa. The scope is national and employs cross tabulation and logistic regression to establish relationships and the likelihood of living in a household with access to safe&nbsp / drinking water in South Africa. Results presented in this study suggest that the difference is determined by socio- demographic characteristics of each household such as age, gender, population group, level of education, employment status income, dwelling unit, dwelling ownership, living quarters,household size and income. It throws more light as to what needs to be taken into account when considering demand and supply of and priorities for water intervention from the household perspective.</p>

The numerous man-made disasters and natural catastrophes that menace major communities accentuate the need for proper planning for emergency evacuation. Transportation networks in cities evolve over long time spans in tandem with population growth and evolution of travel patterns. In emergencies, travel demand and travel patterns drastically change from the usual everyday volumes and patterns. Given that most US and Canadian cities are already congested and operating near capacity during peak periods, network performance can severely deteriorate if drastic changes in Origin-Destination (O-D) demand patterns occur during or after a disaster. Also, loss of capacity due to the disaster and associated incidents can further complicate the matter. Therefore, the primary goal when a disaster or hazardous event occurs is to coordinate, control, and possibly optimize the utilization of the existing transportation network capacity. Emergency operation management centres face multi-faceted challenges in anticipating evacuation flows and providing proactive actions to guide and coordinate the public towards safe shelters. Numerous studies have contributed to developing and testing strategies that have the potential to mitigate the consequences of emergency situations. They primarily investigate the effect of some proposed strategies that have the potential of improving the performance of the evacuation process with modelling and optimization techniques. However, most of these studies are inherently restricted to evacuating automobile traffic using a certain strategy without considering other modes of transportation. Moreover, little emphasis is given to studying the interaction between the various strategies that could be potentially synergized to expedite the evacuation process. Also, the absence of an accurate representation of the spatial and temporal distribution of the population and the failure to identify the available modes and populations that are captive to certain modes contribute to the absence of multimodal evacuation procedures. Incorporating multiple modes into emergency evacuation has the potential to expedite the evacuation process and is essential to assuring the effective evacuation of transit-captive and special-needs populations . This dissertation presents a novel multimodal optimization framework that combines vehicular traffic and mass transit for emergency evacuation. A multi-objective approach is used to optimize the multimodal evacuation problem. For automobile evacuees, an Optimal Spatio-Temporal Evacuation (OSTE) framework is presented for generating optimal demand scheduling, destination choices and route choices, simultaneously. OSTE implements Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) techniques coupled with parallel distributed genetic optimization to guarantee a near global optimal solution. For transit evacuees, a Multi-Depots, Time Constrained, Pick-up and Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem (MDTCPD-VRP) framework is presented to model the use of public transit vehicles in evacuation situations. The MDTCPD-VRP implements constraint programming and local search techniques to optimize certain objective functions and satisfy a set of constraints. The OSTE and MDTCPD-VRP platforms are integrated into one framework to replicate the impact of congestion caused by traffic on transit vehicle travel times. A proof-of-concept prototype has been tested; it investigates the optimization of a multimodal evacuation of a portion of the Toronto Waterfront area. It also assesses the impact of multiple objective functions on emergency evacuation while attempting to achieve an equilibrium state between transit modes and vehicular traffic. Then, a large-scale application, including a demand estimation model from a regional travel survey, is conducted for the evacuation of the entire City of Toronto. This framework addresses many limitations of existing evacuation planning models by: 1) synergizing multiple evacuation strategies; 2) utilizing robust optimization and solution algorithms that can tackle such multi-dimensional non deterministic problem; 3) estimating the spatial and temporal distribution of evacuation demand; 4) identifying the transit-dependent population; 5) integrating multiple modes in emergency evacuation. The framework presents a significant step forward in emergency evacuation optimization.

The numerous man-made disasters and natural catastrophes that menace major communities accentuate the need for proper planning for emergency evacuation. Transportation networks in cities evolve over long time spans in tandem with population growth and evolution of travel patterns. In emergencies, travel demand and travel patterns drastically change from the usual everyday volumes and patterns. Given that most US and Canadian cities are already congested and operating near capacity during peak periods, network performance can severely deteriorate if drastic changes in Origin-Destination (O-D) demand patterns occur during or after a disaster. Also, loss of capacity due to the disaster and associated incidents can further complicate the matter. Therefore, the primary goal when a disaster or hazardous event occurs is to coordinate, control, and possibly optimize the utilization of the existing transportation network capacity. Emergency operation management centres face multi-faceted challenges in anticipating evacuation flows and providing proactive actions to guide and coordinate the public towards safe shelters. Numerous studies have contributed to developing and testing strategies that have the potential to mitigate the consequences of emergency situations. They primarily investigate the effect of some proposed strategies that have the potential of improving the performance of the evacuation process with modelling and optimization techniques. However, most of these studies are inherently restricted to evacuating automobile traffic using a certain strategy without considering other modes of transportation. Moreover, little emphasis is given to studying the interaction between the various strategies that could be potentially synergized to expedite the evacuation process. Also, the absence of an accurate representation of the spatial and temporal distribution of the population and the failure to identify the available modes and populations that are captive to certain modes contribute to the absence of multimodal evacuation procedures. Incorporating multiple modes into emergency evacuation has the potential to expedite the evacuation process and is essential to assuring the effective evacuation of transit-captive and special-needs populations . This dissertation presents a novel multimodal optimization framework that combines vehicular traffic and mass transit for emergency evacuation. A multi-objective approach is used to optimize the multimodal evacuation problem. For automobile evacuees, an Optimal Spatio-Temporal Evacuation (OSTE) framework is presented for generating optimal demand scheduling, destination choices and route choices, simultaneously. OSTE implements Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) techniques coupled with parallel distributed genetic optimization to guarantee a near global optimal solution. For transit evacuees, a Multi-Depots, Time Constrained, Pick-up and Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem (MDTCPD-VRP) framework is presented to model the use of public transit vehicles in evacuation situations. The MDTCPD-VRP implements constraint programming and local search techniques to optimize certain objective functions and satisfy a set of constraints. The OSTE and MDTCPD-VRP platforms are integrated into one framework to replicate the impact of congestion caused by traffic on transit vehicle travel times. A proof-of-concept prototype has been tested; it investigates the optimization of a multimodal evacuation of a portion of the Toronto Waterfront area. It also assesses the impact of multiple objective functions on emergency evacuation while attempting to achieve an equilibrium state between transit modes and vehicular traffic. Then, a large-scale application, including a demand estimation model from a regional travel survey, is conducted for the evacuation of the entire City of Toronto. This framework addresses many limitations of existing evacuation planning models by: 1) synergizing multiple evacuation strategies; 2) utilizing robust optimization and solution algorithms that can tackle such multi-dimensional non deterministic problem; 3) estimating the spatial and temporal distribution of evacuation demand; 4) identifying the transit-dependent population; 5) integrating multiple modes in emergency evacuation. The framework presents a significant step forward in emergency evacuation optimization.

The purpose of this study is to find existing circumstances in our country and a elder long-term care system of preventing transitions. Through the existing social insurance, for example: health insurance, national pension, labor insurance and the elderly welfare legal in our country, to compare with the other social countries, I hope to use the research analysis to find the problems of policies or legislated process that we need to prevent before the elder long-term care insurance started. Through the generalize analysis and history development of elder long-term care in many countries, use the Constitution and the Administrative Law to examine what Council of Grand Justices about Social Insurance interpretation and compare with the official policy offered by our government. I expect to avoid making mistakes and dispute like before and establishing the elder long-term care system which relieving burdens. After the analysis, I found that all of the advanced countries are almost confronting by problems like aging of population and the birthrate has been decreasing, and also confronting lack of care members and long-term care needed huge monetary payment issues. The key core of all the problems is whether it has enough money to the whole social welfare countries to be successful. Social welfare in democratic countries also face election activities carrying on social welfare politics. Ignoring national finance situations and majority political men were merely thinking off-the-shelf votes. It is priority for elder¡¦s policy but ignores the generation justice issues. Let me worry about whether descendant whom need care, not these elders, are there generations conflict being happened? In my opinion, to solve these problems is strengthening family function. If the whole social and nation wants to be stable, it is important to strengthen the family function. Therefore, the elder long-term care should be considered main family basis, in addition to ought to maintain the elder long-term care system and dualism and co-operate with National Health Insurance to work in coordination. The other elder social insurances have to adjust to unity, includes all kinds of old-age pensions similar nouns. Finally, it should be a definite principle and laws, and decrease indefinite concepts of law and reduce administrative discretion rights regarding pay items, thus it will protect people¡¦s rights instead of incurring damage beyond that could bring supervisory mechanism functions into full play after that.

Because software systems are imperfect, developers are forced to fix bugs and add new features. The common way of applying changes to a running system is to stop the application or machine and restart with the new version. Stopping and restarting causes a disruption in service that is at best inconvenient and at worst causes revenue loss and compromises safety. Dynamic software updating (DSU) addresses these problems by updating programs while they execute. Prior DSU systems for managed languages like Java and C# lack necessary functionality: they are inefficient and do not support updates that occur commonly in practice. This dissertation presents the design and implementation of Jvolve, a DSU system for Java. Jvolve's combination of flexibility, safety, and efficiency is a significant advance over prior approaches. Our key contribution is the extension and integration of existing Virtual Machine services with safe, flexible, and efficient dynamic updating functionality. Our approach is flexible enough to support a large class of updates, guarantees type-safety, and imposes no space or time overheads on steady-state execution. Jvolve supports many common updates. Users can add, delete, and change existing classes. Changes may add or remove fields and methods, replace existing ones, and change type signatures. Changes may occur at any level of the class hierarchy. To initialize new fields and update existing ones, Jvolve applies class and object transformer functions, the former for static fields and the latter for object instance fields. These features cover many updates seen in practice. Jvolve supports 20 of 22 updates to three open-source programs---Jetty web server, JavaEmailServer, and CrossFTP server---based on actual releases occurring over a one to two year period. This support is substantially more flexible than prior systems. Jvolve is safe. It relies on bytecode verification to statically type-check updated classes. To avoid dynamic type errors due to the timing of an update, Jvolve stops the executing threads at a DSU safe point and then applies the update. DSU safe points are a subset of VM safe points, where it is safe to perform garbage collection and thread scheduling. DSU safe points further restrict the methods that may be on each thread's stack, depending on the update. Restricted methods include updated methods for code consistency and safety, and user-specified methods for semantic safety. Jvolve installs return barriers and uses on-stack replacement to speed up reaching a safe point when necessary. While Jvolve does not guarantee that it will reach a DSU safe point, in our multithreaded benchmarks it almost always does. Jvolve includes a tool that automatically generates default object transformers which initialize new and changed fields to default values and retain values of unchanged fields in heap objects. If needed, programmers may customize the default transformers. Jvolve is the first dynamic updating system to extend the garbage collector to identify and transform all object instances of updated types. This dissertation introduces the concept of object-specific state transformers to repair application heap state for certain classes of bugs that corrupt part of the heap, and a novel methodology that employes dynamic analysis to automatically generate these transformers. Jvolve's eager object transformation design and implementation supports the widest class of updates to date. Finally, Jvolve is efficient. It imposes no overhead during steady-state execution. During an update, it imposes overheads to classloading and garbage collection. After an update, the adaptive compilation system will incrementally optimize the updated code in its usual fashion. Jvolve is the first full-featured dynamic updating system that imposes no steady-state overhead. In summary, Jvolve is the most-featured, most flexible, safest, and best-performing dynamic updating system for Java and marks a significant step towards practical support for dynamic updates in managed language virtual machines. / text

Kūdikių saugaus prieraišumo ugdymas susideda iš daugybės vienas su kitu susijusių dalykų. Visų pirma, kad vaikas jaustųsi saugus, jam reikalingi artimiausi žmonės – mama, tėvas. Daugelis šaltinių, neatmesdami tėvo vaidmens, pirmaisiais gyvenimo metais išskiria motinos vaidmenį. Būtent motina kūdikiui esti tarsi malonumų šaltinis. Pirmaisiais gyvenimo metais motinos skatinti natūraliai maitinti naujagimius. Tam net yra kuriami specialūs įstatymai, kurie įvedami kūdikiui palankiose ligoninėse. Per žindymą naujagimis apgaubiamas gerosiomis mamos bakterijomis (mikloflora). Nepertraukiamas pirmasis kūdikio ir mamos kontaktas turėtų tęstis ne trumpiau 2 valandų ar iki to momento, kol kūdikis randa spenelį. Kūdikis atsipalaiduoja, nurimsta. Užsimezga tamprus mamos ir kūdikio emocinis ryšys. Mamos organizme išsiskiriantys hormonai (oksitocinas ir endorfinas) lemia tai, kad pirmosiomis akimirkomis mama jaučiasi itin laiminga. Pastebėta, kad motinų vidinė darna priklauso nuo vidinių išgyvenimų, situacijų. Esant planuotam nėštumui, mamos paprastai pasižymi stipresne vidine darna. Pastebėta, kad motinos, turinčios aukštąjį išsilavinimą pasižymi stipresniu suprantamumo ir kontroliavimo jausmu. Motinos, turinčios daugiau nei vieną vaiką, pasižymi stipresniu prasmingumo ir suprantamumo jausmu. Moterys, linkusios į depresiškumą, nerimą, pasižymi silpnu kontroliavimo bei prasmingumo jausmu, tai gali lemti gimdymo komplikacijas. Atlikus empirinį tyrimą, nepastebėta, kad vaikams būtų... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / If parents wanted to train Child safe attachment they shoud do a lot of important things. First of all, child should feel safely. Mother and father can create safety of child. Various authors say that mother is the most important person in begining of child life. Also they admited the importance of the father. There are special hospitals, there doctors pay a greater attention to breasting in the begining of baby life. They try to provide parents with a lot of information about breasting. The first contact between baby and his mother and the duration of breasting is so important for future child and mother relationship. Baby calms down, relaxes in this contact with mother. Breasting gives a lot of benefits for child and his mother. During the breasting period child recieves all the good bacterium from his mother‘s milk. The activated hormons leaves a great influence on mother‘s good emotions. The mother‘s self coherence depends on deep inners experience, situations. If baby was planned, the self coherence of mother will be stronger. Mothers with higher education have stronger meaningfulness and comprehensibility components. Mothers which tend to be depressive, feel worry have weak meaningfulness and comprehensibility components. These factors could determine complication of labour. The research had shown that the child common safe attachment. So you can say, that child safe attachment could form in every conditions. The family status has no influence on safe attachment. It was... [to full text]

This dissertation presents the design and case study application of a participatory decision-making support tool for appropriate safe water systems development in marginalized low-income communities of the global South. The tool focuses on the resolution of two key design decisions: 1) selecting the appropriate level of application (i.e. household or community level) for a safe water system; and 2) selecting an appropriate water treatment technology (or technologies). The tool breaks the process down into four stages. First are pre-implementation steps which develop a contextualized, baseline understanding of the local community. Second is community-based field research, including focus groups and key informant/informal interviews, to investigate the two key design questions by exploring local preferences, capacities, and circumstances with community-members, government officers, NGO workers, and other stakeholders. Third are analytical steps to integrate information from baseline, informal, and primary research to generate recommendations on the two key design questions. This includes a comparative analysis of household and community level systems; a technology feasibility flowchart; performance assessments of technological alternatives with respect to appropriate technology criteria; and a multi-factor analysis to integrate information from the preceding analytical steps. Fourth are community forums in which further participatory action and research is planned on the basis of the recommendations emerging from the tool. Through these steps, the decision-making support tool guides implementing organizations through the stages of safe water systems design and planning in a manner that centres local people in the process. The tool weaves together several theoretical and methodological strands including humanitarian engineering, post-normal science, appropriate technology, participatory development, grounded theory, engineering decision-making, and water treatment engineering. The case study application of the decision-making support tool was conducted in a marginalized peri-urban community called Mylai Balaji Nagar in Chennai, India. This indicated that a household level approach is more appropriate for the case study community and that the TATA Swach filter, alum coagulation with chlorination, or boiling, in order of decreasing suitability, may be appropriate technologies for household application in the case study community. / Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Department: School of Engineering Advisor: Hall, Kevin / International Development Research Centre (IDRC)