bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The evaluation of an interactive web-based Pulmonary Rehabilitation programme: protocol for the WEB SPACE for COPD feasibility study
Authors: Chaplin Emma , Hewitt Stacey , Apps Lindsay , Edwards Kelly , Brough Chris , Glab Aga , Bankart John , Jacobs Ruth , Boyce Sally , Williams Johanna , Singh Sally
Published: August 2015

Introduction

Pulmonary Rehabilitation (PR) is an evidence-based intervention that has been recommended in guidelines to be available to those who may benefit. However, not all patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have access to this service. Healthcare services have shown the need for the provision of PR in other forms to enable patient choice and service capacity. There is an increase in evidence for the use of the internet in the management of long-term conditions to provide education and promote self-management. The aim of this study is to see if an interactive web-based PR programme is a feasible alternative compared with conventional PR.

Methods and analysis

This is a feasibility study designed to evaluate the efficacy of providing a web-based PR programme to improve patients exercise capacity, quality of life and promote self-management in patients with moderate to severe COPD compared with conventional PR programmes. Eligible patients will be randomly allocated to receive either the web-based programme or conventional rehabilitation programme for 7 weeks using an internet-based randomisation system. Participants will be recruited from PR assessments, primary care and community rehabilitation programmes. Those randomised to the web-based programme work through the website which contains all the information that the patients receive in the PR classes. They receive weekly phone calls by a professional to help progress through the course on line. The outcome measures will be recruitment rates and eligibility as well as that standard for a PR assessment including measures of exercise capacity, quality of life questionnaires and physical activity.

Ethics and dissemination

The research ethics committee for Northampton has provided ethical approval for the conduct of the study. The results of the study will be disseminated through appropriate conference presentations and peer reviewed journals.

Trial registration number

ISRCTN03142263.
Time-driven activity-based costing of multivessel coronary artery bypass grafting across national boundaries to identify improvement opportunities: study protocol
Authors: Erhun F , Mistry B , Platchek T , Milstein A , Narayanan V G , Kaplan R S
Published: August 2015

Introduction

Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery is a well-established, commonly performed treatment for coronary artery disease—a disease that affects over 10% of US adults and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. In 2005, the mean cost for a CABG procedure among Medicare beneficiaries in the USA was $32 201±$23 059. The same operation reportedly costs less than $2000 to produce in India. The goals of the proposed study are to (1) identify the difference in the costs incurred to perform CABG surgery by three Joint Commission accredited hospitals with reputations for high quality and efficiency and (2) characterise the opportunity to reduce the cost of performing CABG surgery.

Methods and analysis

We use time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) to quantify the hospitals’ costs of producing elective, multivessel CABG. TDABC estimates the costs of a given clinical service by combining information about the process of patient care delivery (specifically, the time and quantity of labour and non-labour resources utilised to perform each activity) with the unit cost of each resource used to provide the care. Resource utilisation was estimated by constructing CABG process maps for each site based on observation of care and staff interviews. Unit costs were calculated as a capacity cost rate, measured as a $/min, for each resource consumed in CABG production. Multiplying together the unit costs and resource quantities and summing across all resources used will produce the average cost of CABG production at each site. We will conclude by conducting a variance analysis of labour costs to reveal opportunities to bend the cost curve for CABG production in the USA.

Ethics and dissemination

All our methods were exempted from review by the Stanford Institutional Review Board. Results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at scientific meetings.
‘We might as well be speaking different languages’: an innovative interprofessional education tool to teach and assess communication skills critical to patient safety
Authors: Gillespie Colleen , Adams Jennifer , Hanley Kathleen , Wagner Ellen , Shaker-Brown Amara , Naidu Mrudula , Kalet Adina , Zabar Sondra
Published: August 2015

Introduction

All practicing health professionals must be able to communicate effectively with their colleagues around the care of patients. Better communication between health professionals not only improves patient outcomes, but also cuts down on costly and unnecessary tests or healthcare services. At New York University (NYU), we have addressed the need for interprofessional education (IPE) by incorporating a set of interprofessional objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) cases into our performance-based assessment programme to expand the educational tools for interprofessional collaborative (IPC) practice, assessment and feedback.

Methods

We identified and operationalised IPC competencies to create an assessment tool for use in IPC clinical cases, delineating core domains and then identifying observable behaviours that represented the broader competencies. IPC cases (for use in OSCEs) were designed in a way that required medical students and residents to collaborate effectively with a health professional from another discipline (standardised registered nurse (RN)) in order to provide quality care to a (standardised) patient. Feedback from the standardised RN and the participants was content analysed and our own experience in implementing was described.

Results

This method demonstrates that IPC practice can effectively be incorporated into medical education training and assessment, at the undergraduate and graduate level. We found high internal consistency among items within each of the core IPC competency domains (Cronbach's α 0.80–0.85). Based on both standardised RN and faculty feedback, the cases were effective in discriminating among learners within and across undergraduate medical education (UME) and graduate medical education (GME) levels, and within learners, in identifying individual strengths and weaknesses. Learners found these cases to be realistic, challenging and stimulating.

Conclusions

OSCE-based IPC training is a feasible and useful methodology. Ultimately, IPC OSCE cases are training tools that provide learners with a safe environment to practice, receive feedback and develop the critical skills needed for our evolving healthcare system. The next steps are to expand the scope of IPE cases to include more team members, and team work to also incorporate faculty development to ensure that our teachers and role models are effective in providing feedback on IPC practice.
Role of immunohistochemistry in the era of genetic testing inMYC-positive aggressive B-cell lymphomas: a study of 209 cases
Authors: Agarwal Rishu , Lade Stephen , Liew Danny , Rogers Toni-Maree , Byrne David , Feleppa Frank , Juneja Surender , Westerman David A
Published: August 2015

Aims

MYCrearrangements with or withoutBCL2rearrangements have been shown to be associated with poor prognosis and inferior survival in diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCL). Most of these cases are still diagnosed by fluorescent in situ hybridisation (FISH) testing, which is expensive, requires expertise and is not routinely available in all laboratories. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is widely available and has the potential to be used as a screening test to identify cases with increased protein expression and select cases that require confirmatory testing. We correlated the expression ofMYCandBCL2by IHC with FISH studies in an attempt to define a cut-off value, which can be used by laboratories to select cases requiring confirmatory FISH testing. The prevalence ofMYC-positive DLBCL and double-hit lymphoma (DHL) has also been studied.

Methods

209 cases comprising of 15 cases of Burkitt lymphoma (BL), 13 cases of intermediate BL/DLBCL and 181 cases of DLBCL were included. IHC and FISH forMYCandBCL2were performed and the results were correlated.

Results

The prevalence ofMYC-positive DLBCL andMYC/BCL2DHL was 13.4% and 7.4%, respectively, in our study. Germinal-centre subtype was more common inMYC-positive DLBCL and DHL.MYC-positive DLBCL also showed higher median Ki-67 (>90%) and CD10 positivity as compared withMYC-negative cases.

Conclusions

IHC can be used for screening cases, which require further confirmatory FISH testing. We recommend a cut-off value of ≥30% forMYCby IHC; however, international standardisation of these values is necessary to provide uniformity among laboratories.
Efficacy and follow-up of transcatheter aortic valve implantation in patients with radiation-induced aortic stenosis
Authors: Dijos Marina , Reynaud Amélie , Leroux Lionel , Réant Patricia , Cornolle Claire , Roudaut Raymond , Dos Santos Pierre , Lafitte Stéphane
Published: August 2015

Objective

To investigate transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) feasibility, effectiveness and safety in radiation-induced aortic valve stenosis cases.

Methods

198 consecutive patients referred for TAVI were prospectively enrolled. They were divided into two groups: patients with a history of chest radiation therapy with suspected radiation-induced valvular disease (RXT) and others with suspected degenerative aortic valve stenosis (NRXT). Procedural, early and mid-term clinical outcomes were compared.

Results

Of the 198 patients enrolled in our study, 9.6% qualified for inclusion in the RXT group. A comparison of baseline characteristics revealed that patients with RXT were younger than patients with NRXT (68.3 vs 82.5 years; p<0.05) and exhibited a lower surgical risk score (Euroscore: 7.1% vs 21.8%; p<0.05) and a higher frequency of hostile thorax and porcelain aorta (52.6% vs 28.5%; p<0.05; 63.2% vs 10.6%; p<0.05, respectively). In both groups, the implantation success rate was high and the 30-day safety end point acceptable (RXT: 94.7% and 83.3%; NRXT: 93.9% and 75.6%, respectively). At 6 months, overall mortality was significantly lower in the RXT group (0% vs 18%; p=0.048).

Conclusions

In patients suffering from radiation-induced aortic valve stenosis and contraindicated for surgery, TAVI is a promising approach, with high feasibility, acceptable risk, low mortality and high clinical effectiveness at mid-term follow-up.
Internal phase transition induced by external forces in Finsler geometric model for membranes
Authors: Koibuchi Hiroshi , Shobukhov Andrey
Published: August 2015

In this paper, we numerically study an anisotropic shape transformation of membranes under external forces for two-dimensional triangulated surfaces on the basis of Finsler geometry. The Finsler metric is defined by using a vector field, which is the tangential component of a three-dimensional unit vector [Formula: see text] corresponding to the tilt or some external macromolecules on the surface of disk topology. The sigma model Hamiltonian is assumed for the tangential component of [Formula: see text] with the interaction coefficient [Formula: see text]. For large (small) [Formula: see text], the surface becomes oblong (collapsed) at relatively small bending rigidity. For the intermediate [Formula: see text], the surface becomes planar. Conversely, fixing the surface with the boundary of area A or with the two-point boundaries of distance L, we find that the variable [Formula: see text] changes from random to aligned state with increasing of A or L for the intermediate region of [Formula: see text]. This implies that an internal phase transition for [Formula: see text] is triggered not only by the thermal fluctuations, but also by external mechanical forces. We also find that the frame (string) tension shows the expected scaling behavior with respect to [Formula: see text] ([Formula: see text]) at the intermediate region of A (L) where the [Formula: see text] configuration changes between the disordered and ordered phases. Moreover, we find that the string tension [Formula: see text] at sufficiently large [Formula: see text] is considerably smaller than that at small [Formula: see text]. This phenomenon resembles the so-called soft-elasticity in the liquid crystal elastomer, which is deformed by small external tensile forces.
MODELING PARASITE REDUCTION MECHANISMS IN CHAGAS DISEASE
Authors: VEGA-ROYERO S. , SIBONA G. J. , CASTAÑO S. , CONDAT C. A.
Published: August 2015

Various procedures have been proposed to reduce parasitemia during Chagas disease. Here we analyze in detail models developed to predict the possible outcomes of two of these treatments. The model solutions reproduce available experimental population data and can be used as tools to help researchers to find a cure or, at least, an optimal treatment to reduce cardiac cell damage. In particular, we study how the phase diagram describing the infection outcome is modified by the application of the ganglioside GM1, finding the optimum concentration of the drug in terms of the parameters characterizing its influence on the parasite-host interaction. We also investigate the use of the non-pathogenic parasite T. rangeli to reduce T. cruzi load in a mixed infection, finding that this method is not effective against all T. cruzi strains. Furthermore, we compare phase portraits of the evolution of the disease for a single and a mixed infection, and evaluate the cell damage as a function of the time elapsed between both infections, remarking on the temporary protective effect of the reaction to T. rangeli.
Compensation and Convergence — Comparing and Combining Deployment Automation Approaches
Authors: Wettinger Johannes , Breitenbücher Uwe , Leymann Frank
Published: August 2015

Leading paradigms to develop, deploy, and operate applications such as continuous delivery, configuration management, and the merge of development and operations (DevOps) are the foundation for various techniques and tools to implement automated deployment. To make such applications available for users and customers, these approaches are typically used in conjunction with Cloud computing to automatically provision and manage underlying resources such as storage and virtual servers. A major class of these automation approaches follow the idea of converging toward a desired state of a resource (e.g. a middleware component deployed on a virtual machine). This is achieved by repeatedly executing idempotent scripts to reach the desired state. Because of major drawbacks of this approach, we discuss an alternative deployment automation approach based on compensation and fine-grained snapshots using container virtualization. We perform an evaluation comparing both approaches in terms of difficulties at design time and performance at runtime. Moreover, we discuss concepts, strategies, and implementations to effectively combine different deployment automation approaches.
Dirac-harmonic maps with torsion
Authors: Branding Volker
Published: August 2015

We study Dirac-harmonic maps from surfaces to manifolds with torsion, which is motivated from the superstring action considered in theoretical physics. We discuss analytic and geometric properties of such maps and outline an existence result for uncoupled solutions.
Self-gravitating cosmic strings and the Alexandrov’s inequality for Liouville-type equations
Authors: Bartolucci Daniele , Castorina Daniele
Published: August 2015

Motivated by the study of self-gravitating cosmic strings, we pursue the well-known method by Bandle to obtain a weak version of the classical Alexandrov’s isoperimetric inequality. In fact, we derive some quantitative estimates for weak subsolutions of a Liouville-type equation with conical singularities. Actually, we succeed in generalizing previously known results, including Bol’s inequality and pointwise estimates, to the case where the solutions solve the equation just in the sense of distributions. Next, we derive some new pointwise estimates suitable to be applied to a class of singular cosmic string equations. Finally, interestingly enough, we apply these results to establish a minimal mass property for solutions of the cosmic string equation which are supersolutions of the singular Liouville-type equation.
A criterion for the properness of the K-energy in a general Kähler class (II)
Authors: Li Haozhao , Shi Yalong
Published: August 2015

In this paper, we give a result on the properness of the [Formula: see text]-energy, which answers a question of Song–Weinkove [On the convergence and singularities of the [Formula: see text]-flow with applications to the Mabuchi energy, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 61(2) (2008) 210–229] in any dimensions. Moreover, we extend our previous result on the properness of [Formula: see text]-energy in [H. Li, Y. Shi and Y. Yao, A criterion for the properness of the [Formula: see text]-energy in a general Kähler class, Math. Ann. 361(1–2) (2015) 135–156] to the case of extremal [Formula: see text]-energy associated to extremal Kähler metrics.
Weighted Hardy inequality on Riemannian manifolds
Authors: Thiam El Hadji Abdoulaye
Published: August 2015

Let [Formula: see text] be a smooth compact Riemannian manifold of dimension [Formula: see text] and let [Formula: see text] to be a closed submanifold of dimension [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we study existence and non-existence of minimizers of Hardy inequality with weight function singular on [Formula: see text] within the framework of Brezis–Marcus–Shafrir [Extremal functions for Hardy’s inequality with weight, J. Funct. Anal. 171 (2000) 177–191]. In particular, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of minimizers.
ABP and global Hölder estimates for fully nonlinear elliptic equations in unbounded domains
Authors: Birindelli I. , Capuzzo Dolcetta I. , Vitolo A.
Published: August 2015

We prove global Hölder estimates for solutions of fully nonlinear elliptic or degenerate elliptic equations in unbounded domains under geometric conditions à la Cabré.
Exponentially harmonic maps, exponential stress energy and stability
Authors: Chiang Yuan-Jen
Published: August 2015

We study the exponential stress energy associated to an exponentially harmonic map between Riemannian manifolds. We prove three equivalent statements for a horizontally weakly conformal exponentially harmonic map between Riemannian manifolds. We also investigate the stability of exponentially harmonic maps.
Green kernel for a random Schrödinger operator
Authors: Pacheco Carlos G.
Published: August 2015

We find explicitly the Green kernel of a random Schrödinger operator with Brownian white noise. To do this, we first handle the random operator by defining it weakly using the inner product of a Hilbert space. Then, using classic Sturm–Liouville theory, we can build the Green kernel with linearly independent solutions of a homogeneous problem. As a corollary, we have that the random operator has a discrete spectra.
Dielectric relaxation in pure and Co-doped Bi12GeO20 single crystals
Authors: Filipič C. , Klos A. , Gajc M. , Pawlak D. A. , Dolinšek J. , Levstik A.
Published: August 2015

We report the results of investigation of dielectric spectroscopy study of single crystals of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] doped with Co nanoparticles. The complex dielectric constant was measured in the temperature interval from 5 to 450 K and frequencies from 1 Hz to 1 MHz. The electrical conductivity of both samples was thermally activated with potential barriers of 0.55 eV and 0.59 eV, respectively. Doped samples had bigger complex dielectric constants and [Formula: see text] exhibited slightly steeper temperature dependence than in the pure sample. The dielectric relaxation was observed in pure and doped single crystals and relaxation frequencies showed similar activation energies as electrical conductivities.
Debugging high-performance computing applications at massive scales
Authors: Laguna Ignacio , Ahn Dong H. , de Supinski Bronis R. , Gamblin Todd , Lee Gregory L. , Schulz Martin , Bagchi Saurabh , Kulkarni Milind , Zhou Bowen , Chen Zhezhe , Qin Feng
Published: August 2015

Dynamic analysis techniques help programmers find the root cause of bugs in large-scale parallel applications.
QoE-Based SVC Layer Dropping in LTE Networks Using Content-Aware Layer Priorities
Authors: Fu Bo , Staehle Dirk , Kunzmann Gerald , Steinbach Eckehard , Kellerer Wolfgang
Published: August 2015

The increasing popularity of mobile video streaming applications has led to a high volume of video traffic in mobile networks. As the base station, for instance, the eNB in LTE networks, has limited physical resources, it can be overloaded by this traffic. This problem can be addressed by using Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which allows the eNB to drop layers of the video streams to dynamically adapt the bitrate. The impact of bitrate adaptation on the Quality of Experience (QoE) for the users depends on the content characteristics of videos. As the current mobile network architectures do not support the eNB in obtaining video content information, QoE optimization schemes with explicit signaling of content information have been proposed. These schemes, however, require the eNB or a specific optimization module to process the video content on the fly in order to extract the required information. This increases the computation and signaling overhead significantly, raising the OPEX for mobile operators. To address this issue, in this article, a content-aware (CA) priority marking and layer dropping scheme is proposed. The CA priority indicates a transmission order for the layers of all transmitted videos across all users, resulting from a comparison of their utility versus rate characteristics. The CA priority values can be determined at the P-GW on the fly, allowing mobile operators to control the priority marking process. Alternatively, they can be determined offline at the video servers, avoiding real-time computation in the core network. The eNB can perform content-aware SVC layer dropping using only the priority values. No additional content processing is required. The proposed scheme is lightweight both in terms of architecture and computation. The improvement in QoE is substantial and very close to the performance obtained with the computation and signaling-intensive QoE optimization schemes.
Predicting User Performance and Learning in Human--Computer Interaction with the Herbal Compiler
Authors: Paik Jaehyon , Kim Jong W. , Ritter Frank E. , Reitter David
Published: August 2015

We report a way to build a series of GOMS-like cognitive user models representing a range of performance at different stages of learning. We use a spreadsheet task across multiple sessions as an example task; it takes about 20--30 min. to perform. The models were created in ACT-R using a compiler. The novice model has 29 rules and 1,152 declarative memory task elements (chunks)—it learns to create procedural knowledge to perform the task. The expert model has 617 rules and 614 task chunks (that it does not use) and 538 command string chunks—it gets slightly faster through limited declarative learning of the command strings and some further production compilation; there are a range of intermediate models. These models were tested against aggregate and individual human learning data, confirming the models’ predictions. This work suggests that user models can be created that learn like users while doing the task.
Sensing emotions
Authors: Mone Gregory
Published: August 2015

How computer systems detect the internal emotional states of users.
Wireless Multicast for Zoomable Video Streaming
Authors: Wang Hui , Chan Mun Choon , Ooi Wei Tsang
Published: August 2015

Zoomable video streaming refers to a new class of interactive video applications, where users can zoom into a video stream to view a selected region of interest in higher resolutions and pan around to move the region of interest. The zoom and pan effects are typically achieved by breaking the source video into a grid of independently decodable tiles. Streaming the tiles to a set of heterogeneous users using broadcast is challenging, as users have different link rates and different regions of interest at different resolution levels. In this article, we consider the following problem: Given the subset of tiles that each user requested, the link rate of each user, and the available time slots, at which resolution should each tile be sent, to maximize the overall video quality received by all users. We design an efficient algorithm to solve this problem and evaluate the solution on a testbed using 10 mobile devices. Our method is able to achieve up to 12dB improvements over other heuristic methods.
Innovators assemble
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark
Published: August 2015

Can computing history be both inspiring and accurate?
The rise of the robo notice
Authors: Karaganis Joe , Urban Jennifer
Published: August 2015

Examining the conflicting claims involving the use of automated tools in copyright-related notice-and-takedown procedures.
HSPT
Authors: Wang Zhe , Li Jianjun , Wu Chenggang , Yang Dongyan , Wang Zhenjiang , Hsu Wei-Chung , Li Bin , Guan Yong
Published: August 2015

Cross-ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) system-level virtual machine has a significant research and practical value. For example, several recently announced virtual smart phones for iOS which run smart phone applications on x86 based PCs are deployed on cross-ISA system level virtual machines. Also, for mobile device application development, by emulating the Android/ARM environment on the more powerful x86-64 platform, application development and debugging become more convenient and productive. However, the virtualization layer often incurs high performance overhead. The key overhead comes from memory virtualization where a guest virtual address (GVA) must go through multi-level address translation to become a host physical address (HPA). The Embedded Shadow Page Table (ESPT) approach has been proposed to effectively decrease this address translation cost. ESPT directly maps GVA to HPA, thus avoid the lengthy guest virtual to guest physical, guest physical to host virtual, and host virtual to host physical address translation. However, the original ESPT work has a few drawbacks. For example, its implementation relies on a loadable kernel module (LKM) to manage the shadow page table. Using LKMs is less desirable for system virtual machines due to portability, security and maintainability concerns. Our work proposes a different, yet more practical, implementation to address the shortcomings. Instead of relying on using LKMs, our approach adopts a shared memory mapping scheme to maintain the shadow page table (SPT) using only ''mmap'' system call. Furthermore, this work studies the support of SPT for multi-processing in greater details. It devices three different SPT organizations and evaluates their strength and weakness with standard and real Android applications on the system virtual machine which emulates the Android/ARM platform on x86-64 systems.
A Comprehensive Implementation and Evaluation of Direct Interrupt Delivery
Authors: Tu Cheng-Chun , Ferdman Michael , Lee Chao-tung , Chiueh Tzi-cker
Published: August 2015

As the performance overhead associated with CPU and memory virtualization becomes largely negligible, research efforts are directed toward reducing the I/O virtualization overhead, which mainly comes from two sources: DMA set-up and payload copy, and interrupt delivery. The advent of SRIOV and MRIOV effectively reduces the DMA-related virtualization overhead to a minimum. Therefore, the last battleground for minimizing virtualization overhead is how to directly deliver every interrupt to its target VM without involving the hypervisor.

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a KVM-based direct interrupt delivery system called DID. DID delivers interrupts from SRIOV devices, virtual devices, and timers to their target VMs directly, completely avoiding VM exits. Moreover, DID does not require any modifications to the VM's operating system and preserves the correct priority among interrupts in all cases. We demonstrate that DID reduces the number of VM exits by a factor of 100 for I/O-intensive workloads, decreases the interrupt invocation latency by 80%, and improves the throughput of a VM running Memcached by a factor of 3.
PARS
Authors: Cui Lei , Wo Tianyu , Li Bo , Li Jianxin , Shi Bin , Huai Jinpeng
Published: August 2015

Virtual machine (VM) snapshot enhances the system availability by saving the running state into stable storage during failure-free execution and rolling back to the snapshot point upon failures. Unfortunately, the snapshot state may be lost due to disk failures, so that the VM fails to be recovered. The popular distributed file systems employ replication technique to tolerate disk failures by placing redundant copies across disperse disks. However, unless user-specific personalization is provided, these systems consider the data in the file as of same importance and create identical copies of the entire file, leading to non-trivial additional storage overhead.

This paper proposes a page-aware replication system (PARS) to store VM snapshots efficiently. PARS employs VM introspection technique to explore how a page is used by guest, and classifies the pages by their importance to system execution. If a page is critical, PARS replicates it multiple copies to ensure high availability and long-term durability. Otherwise, the loss of this page causes no harm for system to work properly, PARS therefore saves only one copy of the page. Consequently, PARS improves storage efficiency without compromising availability. We have implemented PARS to justify its practicality. The experimental results demonstrate that PARS achieves 53.9% space saving compared to the native replication approach in HDFS which replicates the whole snapshot file fully and identically.
AppSec
Authors: Ren Jianbao , Qi Yong , Dai Yuehua , Wang Xiaoguang , Shi Yi
Published: August 2015

Malicious OS kernel can easily access user's private data in main memory and pries human-machine interaction data, even one that employs privacy enforcement based on application level or OS level. This paper introduces AppSec, a hypervisor-based safe execution environment, to protect both the memory data and human-machine interaction data of security sensitive applications from the untrusted OS transparently.

AppSec provides several security mechanisms on an untrusted OS. AppSec introduces a safe loader to check the code integrity of application and dynamic shared objects. During runtime, AppSec protects application and dynamic shared objects from being modified and verifies kernel memory accesses according to application's intention. AppSec provides a devices isolation mechanism to prevent the human-machine interaction devices being accessed by compromised kernel. On top of that, AppSec further provides a privileged-based window system to protect application's X resources. The major advantages of AppSec are threefold. First, AppSec verifies and protects all dynamic shared objects during runtime. Second, AppSec mediates kernel memory access according to application's intention but not encrypts all application's data roughly. Third, AppSec provides a trusted I/O path from end-user to application. A prototype of AppSec is implemented and shows that AppSec is efficient and practical.
Alterations of plasma metabolite profiles related to adipose tissue distribution and cardiometabolic risk
Authors: Boulet Marie Michèle , Chevrier Geneviève , Grenier-Larouche Thomas , Pelletier Mélissa , Nadeau Mélanie , Scarpa Julia , Prehn Cornelia , Marette André , Adamski Jerzy , Tchernof André
Published: August 2015

Metabolomic profiling of obese individuals revealed altered concentrations of many metabolites, especially branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), possibly linked to altered adipose tissue BCAA catabolism. We tested the hypothesis that some features of this metabolite signature relate closely to visceral obesity and concomitant alterations in cardiometabolic risk factors. We also postulated that alterations in BCAA-catabolizing enzymes are predominant in visceral adipose tissue. Fifty-nine women (BMI 20–41 kg/m2) undergoing gynecologic surgery were recruited and characterized for overall and regional adiposity, blood metabolite levels using targeted metabolomics, and cardiometabolic risk factors. Adipose samples (visceral and subcutaneous) were obtained and used for gene expression and Western blot analyses. Obese women had significantly higher circulating BCAA and kynurenine/tryptophan (Kyn/Trp) ratio than lean or overweight women ( P < 0.01). Principal component analysis confirmed that factors related to AA and the Kyn/Trp ratio were positively associated with BMI, fat mass, visceral or subcutaneous adipose tissue area, and subcutaneous adipocyte size ( P ≤ 0.05). AA-related factor was positively associated with HOMA-IR ( P ≤ 0.01). Factors reflecting glycerophospholipids and sphingolipids levels were mostly associated with altered blood lipid concentrations ( P ≤ 0.05). Glutamate level was the strongest independent predictor of visceral adipose tissue area ( r = 0.46, P < 0.001). Obese women had lower expression and protein levels of BCAA-catabolizing enzymes in visceral adipose tissue than overweight or lean women ( P ≤ 0.05). We conclude that among metabolites altered in obesity plasma concentrations of BCAA and the Kyn/Trp ratio are closely related to increased adiposity. Alterations in expression and protein levels of BCAA-catabolizing enzymes are predominant in visceral adipose tissue.
Input Calibration and Validation of RELAP5 Against CIRCUS-IV Single Channel Tests on Natural Circulation Two-Phase Flow Instability
Authors: Phung Viet-Anh , Kudinov Pavel , Grishchenko Dmitry , Rohde Martin
Published: August 2015

RELAP5 is a system thermal-hydraulic code that is used to perform safety analysis on nuclear reactors. Since the code is based on steady state, two-phase flow regime maps, there is a concern that RELAP5 may provide significant errors for rapid transient conditions. In this work, the capability of RELAP5 code to predict the oscillatory behavior of a natural circulation driven, two-phase flow at low pressure is investigated. The simulations are compared with a series of experiments that were performed in the CIRCUS-IV facility at the Delft University of Technology. For this purpose, we developed a procedure for calibration of the input and code validation. The procedure employs (i) multiple parameters measured in different regimes, (ii) independent consideration of the subsections of the loop, and (iii) assessment of importance of the uncertain input parameters. We found that predicted system parameters are less sensitive to variations of the uncertain input and boundary conditions in high frequency oscillations regime. It is shown that calculation results overlap experimental values, except for the high frequency oscillations regime where the maximum inlet flow rate was overestimated. This finding agrees with the idea that steady state, two-phase flow regime maps might be one of the possible reasons for the discrepancy in case of rapid transients in two-phase systems.
The Pathogenesis and Treatment of Emotion Dysregulation in Borderline Personality Disorder
Authors: Laddis Andreas
Published: August 2015

Uncontrollable emotional lability and impulsivity are a paramount phenomenon of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This paper aims to review theories that entertain emotion dysregulation as the core deficit of BPD and a key factor in the etiology of BPD, in order, then, to propose the author’s own theory, which arguably transcends certain limitations of the earlier ones. The author asserts that his psychodynamic theory explains the symptoms of BPD more thoroughly and it inspires a more parsimonious interpretation of brain imaging findings. In closing, the author draws implications of the proposed theory for clinical practice. He reports an efficacy study for treatment of emotion dysregulation based on that theory.
Endogenous Asymmetric Dimethylarginine Pathway in High Altitude Adapted Yaks
Authors: Mizuno Shiro , Ishizaki Takeshi , Toga Hirohisa , Sakai Akio , Isakova Jainagul , Taalaibekova Elnura , Baiserkeev Zamirbek , Kojonazarov Baktybek , Aldashev Almaz
Published: August 2015

Hypoxia-induced and high altitude pulmonary hypertension are a major problem in the mountain areas of the world. The asymmetric methylarginines (ADMA) inhibit nitric oxide (NO) synthesis by competing with L-arginine, and high levels of plasma ADMA predict adverse outcomes in pulmonary hypertension. However, little is known about the regulation of the ADMA-NO pathway in animals adapted to high altitudes. We measured the plasma ADMA concentration, endothelial NO synthase (eNOS), dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolases (DDAH) protein expression, and DDAH activities in the lungs from yaks. Although the yaks are hypoxemic, cardiac function and pulmonary arterial pressures are almost normal, and we found decreased DDAH expression and activity in association with reduced plasma ADMA concentrations. The eNOS expression was significantly higher in yaks. These results indicate that augmented endogenous NO activity in yaks through the ADMA-DDAH pathway and eNOS upregulation account for the low pulmonary vascular tone observed in high altitude adapted yaks.
ModelSim/Simulink Cosimulation and FPGA Realization of a Multiaxis Motion Controller
Authors: Kung Ying-Shieh , Lin Jin-Mu , Chen Yu-Jen , Chou Hsin-Hung
Published: August 2015

This paper is to implement a multiaxis servo controller and a motion trajectory planning within one chip. At first, SoPC (system on a programmable chip) technology which is composed of an Altera FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) chip and an embedded soft-core Nios II processor is taken as the development of a multiaxis motion control IC. The multiaxis motion control IC has two modules. The first module is Nios II processor which realizes the motion trajectory planning by software. It includes the step, circular, window, star, and helical motion trajectory. The second module presents a function of the multiaxis position/speed/current controller IP (intellectual property) by hardware. And VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) is applied to describe the multiaxis servo controller behavior. Before the FPGA realization, a cosimulation work by ModelSim/Simulink is applied to test the VHDL code. Then, this IP combined by Nios II processor will be downloaded to FPGA. Therefore, a fully digital multiaxis motion controller can be realized by a single FPGA chip. Finally, to verify the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed multiaxis motion control IP, a three-axis motion platform (XYZtable) is constructed and some experimental results are presented.
Assessment of In-Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning System Performed in a Virtual Cluster
Authors: Chang Bao Rong , Tsai Hsiu-Fen , Chen Chia-Yen , Tsai Yun-Che
Published: August 2015

This paper introduces a high-performed high-availability in-cloud enterprise resources planning (in-cloud ERP) which has deployed in the virtual machine cluster. The proposed approach can resolve the crucial problems of ERP failure due to unexpected downtime and failover between physical hosts in enterprises, causing operation termination and hence data loss. Besides, the proposed one together with the access control authentication and network security is capable of preventing intrusion hacked and/or malicious attack via internet. Regarding system assessment, cost-performance (C-P) ratio, a remarkable cost effectiveness evaluation, has been applied to several remarkable ERP systems. As a result, C-P ratio evaluated from the experiments shows that the proposed approach outperforms two well-known benchmark ERP systems, namely, in-house ECC 6.0 and in-cloud ByDesign.
Efficient Channel Management Mechanism to Enhance Channel Utilization for Sensing Data Delivery in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: Tsogoo Buyandelger , Yoo Sang-Jo
Published: August 2015

IEEE 1609.4 defines MAC layer implementation in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). In IEEE 1609.4 multichannel operation, the control channel interval (CCHI) and the service channel interval (SCHI) are defined such that service channels cannot be utilized during the CCHI, and vice versa, which leads to poor utilization of scarce spectrum resources. In this paper, we propose a multi-schedule-based channel switching mechanism to improve channel utilization and uniformly distribute channel load. In our proposed mechanism, four schedules are defined to switch between the control channel and service channels. Therefore, service channels can be utilized during the CCHI, and the control channel can be utilized during the SCHI. Moreover, control channel load is distributed throughout the whole sync interval. We compared our proposed MAC protocol with IEEE802.11p for wireless access in the vehicular environment using the OMNET++ 4.5 network simulator. In the simulation results, we determined that utilization of the service channel increased and contention on the control channel was reduced, compared with the legacy standard, especially in slow motion and high-density VANETs.
Comparison of Conventional Open Thyroidectomy and Endoscopic Thyroidectomy via Breast Approach for Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma
Authors: Tan Zhuo , Gu JiaLei , Han QianBo , Wang WenDong , Wang KeJing , Ge MingHua , Shang JinBiao
Published: August 2015

Purpose. The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of endoscopic thyroidectomy via breast approach for papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC).Methods. Between March 2008 and March 2013, 34 patients with PTC received endoscopic thyroidectomy (endo group) and 30 patients received conventional open thyroidectomy (open group). Patients in two groups underwent ipsilateral central compartment node dissection. The two groups were compared in terms of patient characteristics, perioperative clinical results, and postoperative complication.Results. The rates of lymph node metastasis in endo group and open group were 23.5% (8/34) and 13.3% (4/30), respectively, without statistically significant difference (P=0.351). The mean number of lymph nodes dissected was 2.4 ± 2.9 in endoscopic group and 2.2 ± 1.9 in open group (P=0.774). During the follow-up period, there was no recurrence or metastatic patients in two groups. All patients received the excellent cosmetic results in endo group, while 25 patients were satisfied with the cosmetic result and 5 were unsatisfied in the open group.Conclusions. The efficacy of endoscopic thyroidectomy via breast approach could be comparable to conventional open thyroidectomy in selected patients with PTC.
An Effective Hybrid of Bees Algorithm and Differential Evolution Algorithm in Data Clustering
Authors: Babrdel Bonab Mohammad , Mohd Hashim Siti Zaiton , Bazin Nor Erne Nazira , Alsaedi Ahmed Khalaf Zager
Published: August 2015

Clustering is one of the most commonly used approaches in data mining and data analysis. One clustering technique in clustering that gains big attention in clustering related research isk-means clustering such that the observation is grouped intokcluster. However, some obstacles such as the adherence of results to the initial cluster centers or the risk of getting trapped into local optimality hinder the overall clustering performance. The purpose of this research is to minimize the dissimilarity of all points of a cluster from gravity center of the cluster with respect to capacity constraints in each cluster, such that each element is allocated to only one cluster. This paper proposes an effective combination algorithm to find optimal cluster center for the analysis of data in data mining and a new combination algorithm is proposed to untangle the clustering problem. This paper presents a new hybrid algorithm, which is, based on cluster center initialization algorithm (CCIA), bees algorithm (BA), and differential evolution (DE), known as CCIA-BADE-K, aiming at finding the best cluster center. The proposed algorithm performance is evaluated with standard data set. The evaluation results of the proposed algorithm and its comparison with other alternative algorithms in the literature confirm its superior performance and higher efficiency.
Chaotic Path Planner of Autonomous Mobile Robots Based on the Standard Map for Surveillance Missions
Authors: Li Caihong , Song Yong , Wang Fengying , Liang Zhenying , Zhu Baoyan
Published: August 2015

This paper proposes a fusion iterations strategy based on the Standard map to generate a chaotic path planner of the mobile robot for surveillance missions. The distances of the chaotic trajectories between the adjacent iteration points which are produced by the Standard map are too large for the robot to track. So a fusion iterations strategy combined with the large region iterations and the small grids region iterations is designed to resolve the problem. The small region iterations perform the iterations of the Standard map in the divided small grids, respectively. It can reduce the adjacent distances by dividing the whole surveillance workspace into small grids. The large region iterations combine all the small grids region iterations into a whole, switch automatically among the small grids, and maintain the chaotic characteristics of the robot to guarantee the surveillance missions. Compared to simply using the Standard map in the whole workspace, the proposed strategy can decrease the adjacent distances according to the divided size of the small grids and is convenient for the robot to track.
Minimum Time Approach to Emergency Collision Avoidance by Vehicle Handling Inverse Dynamics
Authors: Wei Wang , Shaoyi Bei , Hui Yang , Yongzhi Wang , Lanchun Zhang
Published: August 2015

Vehicle driving safety is the urgent key problem to be solved of automobile independent development while encountering emergency collision avoidance with high speed. And it is also the premise and one of the necessary conditions of vehicle active safety. A new technique of vehicle handling inverse dynamics which can evaluate the emergency collision avoidance performance is proposed. Based on optimal control theory, the steering angle input and the traction/brake force imposed by driver are the control variables; the minimum time required to complete the fitting biker line change is the control object. By using the improved direct multiple shooting method, the optimal control problem is converted into a nonlinear programming problem that is then solved by means of the sequential quadratic programming. The simulation results show that the proposed method can solve the vehicle minimum time maneuver problem, and can compare the maneuverability of two different vehicles that complete fitting biker line change with the minimum time and the correctness of the model is verified through real vehicle test.