Standard of Living, Well-Being and Community Development: The Case of Botswana

There is considerable evidence in literature that suggests that the concept of standard of living has tended to be predicated on the notion of income alone. However, exploring this concept further, evidence suggests that the notion of standard of living goes beyond simply looking at income to include Gross Domestic Product (GDP), life expectancy, and economic opportunities available to individuals. This suggests that in a given country, when the above-mentioned ‘components’ are accessible to individuals, the expectation is that these will translate into realization of meaningful standards of living and wellbeing. This chapter seeks to explore how standard of living and well-being in Botswana have metamorphosed over time, from the pre-colonial period, through the early years of independence and the time of the discovery of diamonds, up to the present. Additionally, the article examines how community development initiatives across the country, have impacted standard of living and wellbeing of the population. The chapter concludes by suggesting strategies the government of Botswana could adopt in efforts to strengthen community development, with a view, ultimately, to further improve standard of living and wellbeing of the country’s population.

Blinding in electric current stimulation in subacute neglect patients with current densities of 0.8 A/m2: a cross-over pilot study

Objective Neglect after stroke is a disabling disorder and its rehabilitation is a major challenge. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) seems to be a promising adjuvant technique to improve standard care neglect therapy. Since electric fields are influenced by age-related factors, higher current densities are probably needed for effective treatment in aged stroke patients. Validation of treatment efficacy requires sham-controlled experiments, but increased current densities might comprise blinding. Therefore, a pilot study was conducted to test sham adequacy when using current density of 0.8 A/m2. Whether especially neglect patients who mainly suffer from perceptual and attentional deficits are able to differentiate beyond chance active from sham tDCS was investigated in a randomized cross-over design (active/sham stimulation) in 12 early subacute patients with left-sided hemineglect. Stimulation (0.8 A/m2) was performed simultaneous to standard care neglect therapy. Results Odds ratio of correct guessing an atDCS condition compared to wrongly judge an atDCS condition as sham was 10.00 (95%CI 0.65–154.40, p = 0.099). However, given the small sample size and high OR, although likely somewhat overestimated, results require careful interpretation and blinding success in neglect studies with current densities of 0.8 A/m2 should be further confirmed.

Blinding in electric current stimulation in subacute neglect patients with current densities of 0.8 A/m²: A cross-over pilot study

Objective Neglect after stroke is a disabling disorder and its rehabilitation is a major challenge. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) seems to be a promising adjuvant technique to improve standard care neglect therapy. Since electric fields are influenced by age-related factors, higher current densities are probably needed for effective treatment in aged stroke patients. Validation of treatment efficacy requires sham-controlled experiments, but increased current densities might comprise blinding. Therefore, a pilot study was conducted to test sham adequacy when using current density of 0.8 A/m2. Whether especially neglect patients who mainly suffer from perceptual and attentional deficits are able to differentiate beyond chance active from sham tDCS was investigated in a randomized cross-over design (active/sham stimulation) in 12 early subacute patients with left-sided hemineglect. Stimulation (0.8 A/m²) was performed simultaneous to standard care neglect therapy. Results Odds ratio of correct guessing an atDCS condition compared to wrongly judge an atDCS condition as sham was 10.00 (95%CI: 0.65 - 154.40, p = 0.099). However, given the small sample size and high OR, although likely somewhat overestimated, results require careful interpretation and blinding success in neglect studies with current densities of 0.8 A/m² should be further confirmed.

Blinding in electric current stimulation in subacute neglect patients with current densities of 0.8 A/m²: A cross-over pilot study

Objective Neglect after stroke is a disabling disorder and its rehabilitation is a major challenge. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) seems to be a promising adjuvant technique to improve standard care neglect therapy. Since electric fields are influenced by age-related factors higher current densities are probably needed for effective treatment in aged stroke patients. The validation of treatment efficacy requires sham-controlled experiments but increased current densities might comprise blinding. Therefore, we conducted a pilot study to test sham adequacy when using current density of 0.8 A/m2. Whether especially neglect patients who mainly suffer from perceptual and attentional deficits are able to differentiate beyond chance active from sham tDCS was investigated in a cross-over design (active/sham stimulation, randomized order) in 12 early subacute patients with left-sided hemineglect. Stimulation was performed simultaneous to standard care neglect therapy with 0.8 A/m². Progress of neglect symptomatology was also monitored during inpatient rehabilitation.Results Higher odds of correct guessing an active tDCS condition compared to wrongly judge an active tDCS condition as sham stimulation (Odds ratio 10.00, 95%CI: 0.65 - 154.40, p = 0.099) were observed. Therefore, blinding success remains debatable in neglect studies with current densities of 0.8 A/m² and still warrants further investigation.

Value Orientation of Introducing Social Capital in Medical and Health Services

Introduction of social capital into medical and health services can effectively alleviate the problems of insufficient resources, poor allocation and unbalanced structure in developing medical institutions. Social capital entering medical institutions, through reasonable guidance, differentiated development and fair competition, can effectively promote optimal allocation of medical resources, improve balanced development of medical structures, continuously expand the scale and scope of medical service targets, and improve standard and effectiveness of medical services. The nature of capital is to chase profits. Therefore, after introducing social capital, medical institutions should combine and strengthen self-discipline and heteronomy supervisions, guide this part of capital to actively assume social responsibilities, to fulfill social obligations, and to serve the public, in order to ensure the medical industry to have sustainable growth.

Blinding in electric current stimulation in subacute neglect patients with current densities of 0.8 A/m²: A cross-over pilot study

Objective Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a promising adjuvant technique to improve standard care neglect therapy in patients suffering from stroke. Current densities in tDCS are modeled by tissue distribution in the brain. Therefore, we hypothesized that higher current densities are needed in aged stroke population to counteract age related brain volume loss. Here it is still unresolved whether blinding of participants can be achieved. Our aim was to test whether stroke patients with left-sided hemineglect are able to differentiate beyond chance active tDCS from sham stimulation at a current density of 0.8 A/m². Therefore, we investigated 12 early subacute stroke patients with left-sided hemineglect in a cross-over design with two stimulation settings (active/sham stimulation in randomized order). Stimulation was performed simultaneous to standard care neglect therapy with 0.8 A/m² and progress of neglect symptomatology was monitored during inpatient rehabilitation.Results Our sample exhibited higher odds of correct guessing an active tDCS condition compared to wrongly judge an active tDCS condition as sham stimulation (Odds ratio 10.00, 95%CI: 0.65 - 154.40, p = 0.099). Therefore, we must question the feasibility of blinding success in studies with current densities of 0.8 A/m². Assessment in multisession protocols still warrants further investigation.

Improving Deconvolution Methods in Biology through Open Innovation Competitions: An Application to the Connectivity Map

Do machine learning methods improve standard deconvolution techniques for gene expression data? This paper uses a unique new dataset combined with an open innovation competition to evaluate a wide range of gene-expression deconvolution approaches developed by 294 competitors from 20 countries. The objective of the competition was to separate the expression of individual genes from composite measures of gene pairs. Outcomes were evaluated using direct measurements of single genes from the same samples. Results indicate that the winning algorithm based on random forest regression outperformed the other methods in terms of accuracy and reproducibility. More traditional gaussian-mixture methods performed well and tended to be faster. The best deep learning approach yielded outcomes slightly inferior to the above methods. We anticipate researchers in the field will find the dataset and algorithms developed in this study to be a powerful research tool for benchmarking their deconvolution methods and a useful resource for multiple applications.