Issues related to maternal mortality have generated a lot of empirical and theoretical information. However, despite the amount of work published on the topic, maternal mortality continues to occur at high rates and solutions to the problem are still not…

Los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio, y dentro de éstos las Metas del Milenio, constituyen un plan operativo para la consecución de logros básicos dirigidos al alcance de la salud, la erradicación de la pobreza y el cumplimiento de los…

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

BACKGROUND:A variety of definitions of evidence-based practice (EBP) exist. However, definitions are in themselves insufficient to explain the underlying processes of EBP and to differentiate between an evidence-based process and evidence-based outcome. There is a need for a clear statement…

BACKGROUND:Primary prevention of breast cancer through prophylactic mastectomy can reduce the risk of malignancy in high-risk individuals. No type of mastectomy completely removes all breast tissue, but a subcutaneous mastectomy leaves more tissue in situ than does a simple mastectomy.CASE…

Most neural network learning algorithms cannot use knowledge other than what is provided in the training data. Initialized using random weights, they cannot use prior knowledge such as knowledge stored in previously trained networks. This manuscript thesis addresses this problem.…

by Kimberly G. Waters., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-46).

Conversational interfaces have received much attention as a promising natural communication channel between humans and computers. A typical conversational interface consists of three major systems: speech understanding, dialog management and spoken language generation. In such a conversational interface, speech recognition…

The undergraduate law curriculum adopted at McGill University in 1998—the transsystemic programme—was born of the unique political, social, and intellectual histories of its Faculty of Law. This essay reviews these contexts and characterizes the programme as an ongoing conversation about…

The activity of designing and developing large, complex, discrete, physical, and engineered products faces the challenges in the physical product system, the organization of people, and the larger systems in which the product resides-the natural and societal systems. This thesis…