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The HIV prevalence rate in Malawi, currently estimated to be 15%, is among the highest in the world. There is a growing realization that in order to understand the underlying causes and devise more effective prevention strategies focus should be placed on economic, political, social, and cultural forces as well as perceptions of individual risk to HIV/AIDS. During 2003 we conducted field work in Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi, to examine perceptions of individuals as to their risk to HIV infection using the structured interviews and the focus group discussions with men from five areas of Lilongwe. The discussion in this paper focuses on the perception of risk to HIV infection among men in low socioeconomic income areas that we interviewed. Our findings indicate that while knowledge about HIV/AIDS and the best ways in which one can protect oneself from getting HIV is very high, people continue to engage in at-risk behaviors without using the necessary protection. Many of the men in our sample indicated that they were indeed at risk of getting infected with HIV. In spite of this, some of the respondents in both the structured interviews and the focus group discussions pointed out that some people had began taking measures to protect themselves, such as using condoms with nonregular partners, women leaving their husbands where cheating was obvious, and, for men, reducing the number of extra-marital sexual relations. Keywords: Perception of Risk, HIV/AIDS, Malawi

Learning control is a very effective approach for tracking repetitive processes. In this paper, the stable-inversion based learning controller as presented in (Ghosh, J. and Paden, B., 1999, 'Iterative Learning Control for Nonlinear Nonminimum Phase Plants with Input Disturbances,' in Proc. of American Control Conference; Ghosh, J. and Paden, B., 1999, 'A pseudo-inverse based Iterative Learning Control for Nonlinear Plants with Disturbances, 'in Proc. of 38th Conference on Decision and Control.) is modified to accommodate linear nonminimum phase plants with uncertainties. The design of the learning controller is based on the computation of an approximate inverse of the nominal model of the linear plant, rather than its exact inverse. The advantages of this approach are that the output of the plant need not be differentiated and also the plant model need not be exact. A low pass zero-phase filter is used in the iteration loop to achieve robustness to plant uncertainty. The structure of the controller is such that the low frequency components of the trajectory converge faster than the high frequency components.

Les conditionnalités des programmes d'allègement de la dette extérieure des pays en développement sont généralement aveugles au genre. Or les effets des programmes d'austérité qu'elles imposent contribuent à la précarisation de la situation des femmes dans leurs différents rôles économiques et sociaux. L'attention au genre ne devrait pas se limiter à des mesures ciblées, mais déterminer la nature même des réformes économiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning control is a very effective approach for tracking control in processes occuring repetitively over a fixed interval of time. In this note, an iterative learning control (ILC) algorithm is proposed to accommodate a general class of nonlinear, nonminimum-phase plants with disturbances and initialization errors. The algorithm requires the computation of an approximate inverse of the linearized plant rather than the exact inverse. An advantage of this approach is that the output of the plant need not be differentiated. A bound on the asymptotic trajectory error is exhibited via a concise proof and is shown to grow continuously with a bound on the disturbances. The structure of the controller is such that the low frequency components of the trajectory converge faster than the high frequency components. Index Terms--Iterative learning control (ILC), nonlinear tracking, pseudo inverse.