Internal administrative divisions of countriesNatural Earth shows de facto boundaries by default according to who controls the territory, versus de jure. Adjusted to taste which boundaries are shown, hidden, and how they are rendered using the fclass_* properties to create POV worldviews.[drain file 127 show nev_download][drain file 269 show nev_download][drain file 126 show nev_download][drain file 355 show nev_download]
There are 258 countries in the world. Greenland as separate from Denmark. Most users will want this file instead of sovereign states, though some users will want map units instead when needing to distinguish overseas regions of France.Natural Earth shows de facto boundaries by default according to who controls the territory, versus de jure. Optional point-of-view (POV) variants are available for several dozen countries in the next section. [drain file 21 show nev_download][drain file 335 show nev_download]
Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.
The pathogens, vectors and hosts associated with vector-borne diseases are highly responsive to the environments they inhabit. This means that changes in temperature and precipitation as a result of climate change can have significant impacts on the spread of vector-borne diseases.
Temperature change can affect the behaviour of vectors. For example, increased temperatures change the biting behaviour of mosquitoes, reducing the effectiveness of barriers such as bed nets.
However, it can be challenging to attribute these impacts to climate change, as other factors are also at play. For example, changes in land-use, control measures and human movement can also influence the distribution of vectors and spread of disease.
The geographic distribution of dengue, a mosquito-borne viral infection, has expanded globally since the 1990s. And while this can be largely attributed to human movement so far, by 2030, one of the dominant causes of expansion of these vectors is predicted to be climate change.
Similarly, malaria is a climate-sensitive vector-borne disease that responds to short-term changes in rainfall, humidity, and temperature. In the highlands of Colombia and Ethiopia, temperature increases of just 0.2C per decade have been associated with the spread of malaria to higher elevations.
Ticks are another vector capable of transmitting pathogens, including zoonotic viruses like Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis. Tick expansion is promoted by the warmer winters in the last decade due to global warming.
GloVe is an unsupervised learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations for words. Training is performed on aggregated global word-word co-occurrence statistics from a corpus, and the resulting representations showcase interesting linear substructures of the word vector space.
In order to capture in a quantitative way the nuance necessary to distinguish man from woman, it is necessary for a model to associate more than a single number to the word pair. A natural and simple candidate for an enlarged set of discriminative numbers is the vector difference between the two word vectors. GloVe is designed in order that such vector differences capture as much as possible the meaning specified by the juxtaposition of two words.
The underlying concept that distinguishes man from woman, i.e. sex or gender, may be equivalently specified by various other word pairs, such as king and queen or brother and sister. To state this observation mathematically, we might expect that the vector differences man - woman, king - queen, and brother - sister might all be roughly equal. This property and other interesting patterns can be observed in the above set of visualizations.
As one might expect, ice co-occurs more frequently with solid than it does with gas, whereas steam co-occurs more frequently with gas than it does with solid. Both words co-occur with their shared property water frequently, and both co-occur with the unrelated word fashion infrequently. Only in the ratio of probabilities does noise from non-discriminative words like water and fashioncancel out, so that large values (much greater than 1) correlate well with properties specific to ice, and small values (much less than 1) correlate well with properties specific of steam. In this way, the ratio of probabilities encodes some crude form of meaning associated with the abstract concept of thermodynamic phase.
The training objective of GloVe is to learn word vectors such that their dot product equals the logarithm of the words' probability of co-occurrence. Owing to the fact that the logarithm of a ratio equals the difference of logarithms, this objective associates (the logarithm of) ratios of co-occurrence probabilities with vector differences in the word vector space. Because these ratios can encode some form of meaning, this information gets encoded as vector differences as well. For this reason, the resulting word vectors perform very well on word analogy tasks, such as those examined in the word2vec package.
The horizontal bands become more pronounced as the word frequency increases. Indeed, there are noticeable long-range trends as a function of word frequency, and they are unlikely to have a linguistic origin. This feature is not unique to GloVe -- in fact, I'm unaware of any model for word vector learning that avoids this issue.
Gene therapy is a rapidly evolving field. So far, there have been >2,400 gene therapy products in clinical trials and four products on the market. A prerequisite for producing gene therapy products is ensuring their quality and safety. This requires appropriately controlled and standardized production and testing procedures that result in consistent safety and efficacy. Assuring the quality and safety of lentivirus-based gene therapy products in particular presents a great challenge because they are cell-based multigene products that include viral and therapeutic proteins as well as modified cells. In addition to the continuous refinement of a product, changes in production sites and manufacturing processes have become more and more common, posing challenges to developers regarding reproducibility and comparability of results. This paper discusses the concept of developing a first World Health Organization International Standard, suitable for the standardization of assays and enabling comparison of cross-trial and cross-manufacturing results for this important vector platform. The standard will be expected to optimize the development of gene therapy medicinal products, which is especially important, given the usually orphan nature of the diseases to be treated, naturally hampering reproducibility and comparability of results.
Land: The Land/Not Ice layer has highly customized opacity. It starts off at the global scale as a sold white. Then as you zoom (and you want to see more of the imagery) the opacity lowers until at Scale 18 it is at 0%. Using the land layer to soften the imagery is a good way to get the best of both worlds.
MAP International is a Christian organization providing medicines and health supplies to those in need around the world so they might experience life to the fullest. MAP serves all people regardless of religion, gender, race, nationality or ethnic background.
Description:
No changes here since version 2.1. Blank world map available in vector and raster formats. National borders are not indicated. Major lakes not included.
JPG Preview: World Map (Blank) (1,026KB)
I'm looking for a vector layer of all countries in the world and (only) their mainland borders, to be used in QGIS 3.10.11. I've searched in a quite few places, including Eurostat, MapTiler and Natural Earth - which I found via various questions and answers on this site.
With joint collaborative work from RBM VCWG, AMP, PATH, RBM SMERG, IVCC, Tropical Health, this document is meant to be a guide for national malaria programs to inform requests for staff and/or technical assistance for evaluations of the impact of vector control interventions on malaria burden or transmission as part of Global Fund applications. The description of the positions/roles in the table below can be used to develop terms of reference.
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The RBM Vector Control Working Group (VCWG) and Multi-Sectoral Working Group (MSWG) are pleased to issue a joint consensus statement on the Global Vector Control Response to invasive Anopheles stephensi. In the past decade, the malaria vector An. stephensi has spread to Africa and Sri Lanka and there are concerns about its impact on malaria transmission. Urgent efforts are needed to prevent further spread and reduce the impact of An. stephensi where it now exists. With this Consensus Statement, the RBM VCWG and MSWG seek to complement the work of WHO, UN-Habitat and others by facilitating the exchange of knowledge and best practices to address this invasive species to build a common understanding and identify gaps in our collective response. The RBM Working Groups and their diverse membership of malaria control programmes, representatives of other ministries, the private sector, implementing partners, and research and academic organisations stand ready to contribute to this fight.
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