Samtla (Search And Mining Tools with Linguistic Analysis) is an online integrated research environment designed in collaboration with historians and linguists to facilitate the study of digitised texts written in any language. It currently supports the research of two corpora: the Genizah collection held by the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit in Cambridge University, and a collection of Aramaic incantation texts from late antiquity. In contrast to standard search engines and text mining systems that rely on the bag-of-words representation of text, Samtla provides the retrieval and discovery of fuzzy text patterns/motifs (aka "formulae" to historians), which is achieved through applying a character-based n-gram statistical language model built on top of a powerful generalised suffix tree data structure. This paper briefly describes the major components of Samtla and their underlying techniques.
Background: Providing medical care for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in rural sub-Saharan Africa has proved to be difficult because of poor treatment adherence and frequent loss to follow-up (LTFU). The reasons for this are poorly understood.Objective: To investigate LTFU among patients with two different but common NCDs who attended rural Ethiopian health centres.Method: The study was based in five health centres in southern Ethiopia with established NCD clinics run by nurses and health officers. Patients with epilepsy or hypertension who were lost to follow-up and non-LTFU comparison patients were identified and traced; a questionnaire was administered enquiring about the reasons for LTFU.Results: Of the 147 LTFU patients successfully located, 62 had died, moved away or were attending other medical facilities. The remaining 85 patients were compared with 211 non-LFTU patients. The major factors associated with LTFU were distance from the clinic, associated costs and a preference for traditional treatments, together with a misunderstanding of the nature of NCD management.Conclusions: The delivery of affordable care closer to the patients' homes has the greatest potential to address the problem of LTFU. Also needed are increased levels of patient education and interaction with traditional healers to explain the nature of NCDs and the need for life-long management.
It is of great interest to researchers and scholars in many disciplines (particularly those working on cultural heritage projects) to study parallel passages (i.e., identical or similar pieces of text describing the same thing) in digital text archives. Although there exist a few software tools for this purpose, they are restricted to a specific domain (e.g., the Bible) or a specific language (e.g., Hebrew). In this paper, we present in detail how we build a digital infrastructure that can facilitate the search and discovery of parallel passages for any domain in any language. It is at the core of our Samtla (Search And Mining Tools with Linguistic Analysis) system designed in collaboration with historians and linguists. The system has already been used to support research on five large text corpora that span a number of different domains and languages. The key to such a domain-independent and language-independent digital infrastructure is a novel combination of a character-based n-gram language model, space-optimised suffix tree, generalised edit distance. A comprehensive evaluation through crowd-sourcing shows that the effectiveness of our system's search functionality is on par with the human-level performance.
Rudolf Maté's The 300 Spartans (1962) was a commercial success and has enjoyed perennial popularity. More people in the 20th-century world acquired an understanding of the Persian Wars from this film than from any other single source. This chapter draws on archival research into journalistic responses to the film in the USA at the time of its release, and discovers alternative political resonance far more in tune with the domestic concerns of the American heartland than those which have dominated the discussion: Thermopylae has always held a special place in the American imagination as the classical forerunner of the heroic deeds of 1836 when the Catholic mission- cum-fortress known as the Alamo became the ‘cradle of Texan Liberty’. Persia was identified with Mexico and Leonidas with David Crockett and the other heroes of Texas.
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