Ab.l'tract.Despite the frequent associ;.ntl..-m of respiratory symptoms and signs with malarial morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, the value of m..ii\.idual symptoms and signs has rarely been assessed. We have prospectively examined the association of indivt~u3.\ clinical findings with the summary diagnosis of respiratory distress, outcome, and the presence of metabolic aL=:ldl..'~is in children admitted with severe malaria to a Kenyan district hospital. Respiratory distress was present in 119 (.'r:-the 350 children included in the study and in 23 of the 30 deaths (relative risk := 6.5, 95% confidence interval = ::~-14.4).The features of a history of dyspnea, nasal flaring, and indrawing or deep breathing (Kussmaul's respiration-. ' \\'ere individually most closely associated with the summary diagnosis of respiratory distress. Of these, deep breatlnm~. which was sensitive (91 %) and specific (83%) for the presence of severe metabolic acidosis (base excess :5 -12). ~:,; the best candidate sign to represent the prognostically important syndrome of malarial respiratory distress, Therefo~-, it warrants further prospective evaluation in different clinical settings and areas of different malaria endemicity.

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Concept location, the problem of associating human oriented concepts with their counterpart solution domain concepts, is a fundamental problem that lies at the heart of software comprehension. Recent research has attempted to alleviate the impact of the concept location problem through the application of methods drawn from the information retrieval (IR) community. Here we present a new approach based on a complimentary IR method which also has a sound basis in cognitive theory. We compare our approach to related work through an experiment and present our conclusions. This research adapts and expands upon existing language modelling frameworks in IR for use in concept location, in software systems. In doing so it is novel in that it leverages implicit information available in system documentation. Surprisingly, empirical evaluation of this approach showed little performance benefit overall and several possible explanations are forwarded for this finding.

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