bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
CAFÉ: a multicomponent audit and feedback intervention to improve implementation of healthy food policy in primary school canteens: protocol of a randomised controlled trial
Authors: Williams Christopher M , Nathan Nicole , Delaney Tessa , Yoong Sze Lin , Wiggers John , Preece Sarah , Lubans Nicole , Sutherland Rachel , Pinfold Jessica , Smith Kay , Small Tameka , Reilly Kathryn L , Butler Peter , Wyse Rebecca J , Wolfenden Luke 
Published: June 2015

IntroductionA number of jurisdictions internationally have policies requiring schools to implement healthy canteens. However, many schools have not implemented such policies. One reason for this is that current support interventions cannot feasibly be delivered to large numbers of schools. A promising solution to support population-wide implementation of healthy canteen practices is audit and feedback. The effectiveness of this strategy has, however, not previously been assessed in school canteens. This study aims to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an audit and feedback intervention, delivered by telephone and email, in increasing the number of school canteens that have menus complying with a government healthy-canteen policy.Methods and analysisSeventy-two schools, across the Hunter New England Local Health District in New South Wales Australia, will be randomised to receive the multicomponent audit and feedback implementation intervention or usual support. The intervention will consist of between two and four canteen menu audits over 12 months. Each menu audit will be followed by two modes of feedback: a written feedback report and a verbal feedback/support via telephone. Primary outcomes, assessed by dieticians blind to group status and as recommended by the Fresh Tastes @ School policy, are: (1) the proportion of schools with a canteen menu containing foods or beverages restricted for sale, and; (2) the proportion of schools that have a menu which contains more than 50% of foods classified as healthy canteen items. Secondary outcomes are: the proportion of menu items in each category (‘red’, ‘amber’ and ‘green’), canteen profitability and cost-effectiveness.Ethics and disseminationEthical approval has been obtained by from the Hunter New England Human Research Ethics Committee and the University of Newcastle Human Research Ethics Committee. The findings will be disseminated in usual forums, including peer-reviewed publication and conference presentations.Trial registration numberACTRN12613000543785.
Video decision aids to assist with advance care planning: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Authors: Jain Ashu , Corriveau Sophie , Quinn Kathleen , Gardhouse Amanda , Vegas Daniel Brandt , You John J 
Published: June 2015

ObjectiveAdvance care planning (ACP) can result in end-of-life care that is more congruent with patients’ values and preferences. There is increasing interest in video decision aids to assist with ACP. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of video decision aids on patients’ preferences regarding life-sustaining treatments (primary outcome).DesignSystematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.Data sourcesMEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycInfo, CINAHL, AMED and CENTRAL, between 1980 and February 2014, and correspondence with authors.Eligibility criteria for selecting studiesRandomised controlled trials of adult patients that compared a video decision aid to a non-video-based intervention to assist with choices about use of life-sustaining treatments and reported at least one ACP-related outcome.Data extractionReviewers worked independently and in pairs to screen potentially eligible articles, and to extract data regarding risk of bias, population, intervention, comparator and outcomes. Reviewers assessed quality of evidence (confidence in effect estimates) for each outcome using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation framework.Results10 trials enrolling 2220 patients were included. Low-quality evidence suggests that patients who use a video decision aid are less likely to indicate a preference for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (pooled risk ratio, 0.50 (95% CI 0.27 to 0.95); I2=65%). Moderate-quality evidence suggests that video decision aids result in greater knowledge related to ACP (standardised mean difference, 0.58 (95% CI 0.38 to 0.77); I2=0%). No study reported on the congruence of end-of-life treatments with patients’ wishes. No study evaluated the effect of video decision aids when integrated into clinical care.ConclusionsVideo decision aids may improve some ACP-related outcomes. Before recommending their use in clinical practice, more evidence is needed to confirm these findings and to evaluate the impact of video decision aids when integrated into patient care.
Comparison of methodological quality of positive versus negative comparative studies published in Indian medical journals: a systematic review
Authors: Charan Jaykaran , Chaudhari Mayur , Jackson Ryan , Mhaskar Rahul , Reljic Tea , Kumar Ambuj 
Published: June 2015

ObjectivesPublished negative studies should have the same rigour of methodological quality as studies with positive findings. However, the methodological quality of negative versus positive studies is not known. The objective was to assess the reported methodological quality of positive versus negative studies published in Indian medical journals.DesignA systematic review (SR) was performed of all comparative studies published in Indian medical journals with a clinical science focus and impact factor >1 between 2011 and 2013. The methodological quality of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) was assessed using the Cochrane risk of bias tool, and the Newcastle-Ottawa scale for observational studies. The results were considered positive if the primary outcome was statistically significant and negative otherwise. When the primary outcome was not specified, we used data on the first outcome reported in the history followed by the results section. Differences in various methodological quality domains between positive versus negative studies were assessed by Fisher's exact test.ResultsSeven journals with 259 comparative studies were included in this SR. 24% (63/259) were RCTs, 24% (63/259) cohort studies, and 49% (128/259) case–control studies. 53% (137/259) of studies explicitly reported the primary outcome. Five studies did not report sufficient data to enable us to determine if results were positive or negative. Statistical significance was determined by p value in 78.3% (199/254), CI in 2.8% (7/254), both p value and CI in 11.8% (30/254), and only descriptive in 6.3% (16/254) of studies. The overall methodological quality was poor and no statistically significant differences between reporting of methodological quality were detected between studies with positive versus negative findings.ConclusionsThere was no difference in the reported methodological quality of positive versus negative studies. However, the uneven reporting of positive versus negative studies (72% vs 28%) indicates a publication bias in Indian medical journals with an impact factor of >1.
A multicentre, randomised controlled, non-inferiority trial, comparing high flow therapy with nasal continuous positive airway pressure as primary support for preterm infants with respiratory distress (the HIPSTER trial): study protocol
Authors: Roberts Calum T , Owen Louise S , Manley Brett J , Donath Susan M , Davis Peter G 
Published: June 2015

IntroductionHigh flow (HF) therapy is an increasingly popular mode of non-invasive respiratory support for preterm infants. While there is now evidence to support the use of HF to reduce extubation failure, there have been no appropriately designed and powered studies to assess the use of HF as primary respiratory support soon after birth. Our hypothesis is that HF is non-inferior to the standard treatment—nasal continuous positive airway pressure (NCPAP)— as primary respiratory support for preterm infants.Methods and analysisThe HIPSTER trial is an unblinded, international, multicentre, randomised, non-inferiority trial. Eligible infants are preterm infants of 28–36+6weeks’ gestational age (GA) who require primary non-invasive respiratory support for respiratory distress in the first 24 h of life. Infants are randomised to treatment with either HF or NCPAP. The primary outcome is treatment failure within 72 h after randomisation, as determined by objective oxygenation, blood gas, and apnoea criteria, or the need for urgent intubation and mechanical ventilation. Secondary outcomes include the incidence of intubation, pneumothorax, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, nasal trauma, costs associated with hospital care and parental stress. With a specified non-inferiority margin of 10%, using a two-sided 95% CI and 90% power, the study requires 375 infants per group (total 750 infants).Ethics and disseminationEthical approval has been granted by the relevant human research ethics committees at The Royal Women's Hospital (13/12), The Royal Children's Hospital (33144A), The Mercy Hospital for Women (R13/34), and the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority (2013/1657). The trial is currently recruiting at 9 centres in Australia and Norway. The trial results will be published in peer-reviewed international journals, and presented at national and international conferences.Trial registration numberAustralian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ID: ACTRN12613000303741.
The dangers of military robots, the risks of online voting
Authors: Arquilla John , Buell Duncan A. 
Published: June 2015

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John Arquilla considers the evolution of defense drones, and why Duncan A. Buell thinks we are not ready for e-voting.
Query Scheduling Techniques and Power-Latency Trade-off Model for Large-Scale Search Engines
Authors: Freire Ana 
Published: June 2015

Web search engines have to deal with a huge increase of information, demanded by high incoming query traffic. This situation has driven companies to build large, geographically distributed data centres housing thousands of servers and consuming enormous amounts of electricity. At this scale, even minor efficiency improvements may result in large financial and power savings.
This thesis represents a novel contribution to the state-of-the-art of Query Scheduling and Green Information Retrieval (Green IR), by assisting large-scale data centres to build more efficient and environmentally-friendly search engines.

The main contributions of this work are the following:

Query Scheduling. We introduce query efficiency predictors as suitable estimators to improve Query Scheduling. We estimate the processing time of the queries waiting in each query server and we calculate an approximate time that a new query must spend in each queue. Based on this estimation, the fastest query server is selected.

Green IR. Once we have developed new methods to improve the average response time of a search engine, we focus on reducing the power consumption of the whole system. This thesis proposes a mathematical model that establishes a trade-off between latency and power consumption. This model attempts to automatically adapt the number of active servers in the system based on the fluctuations of a daily query traffic flow.

Queueing Theory. We prove the limitation of Queueing Theory models for estimating the latency in search engines. As a consequence, we develop our trade-off model by predicting the latency using historical data. Results show the good performance of this approach.

IR evaluation. We attest that Simulation platforms are suitable for IR experimentation. We support this conclusion by establishing an exhaustive analysis of the current IR evaluation platforms.

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Text-Based Ephemeral Clustering for Web Image Retrieval on Mobile Devices
Authors: Moreno Jose G. 
Published: June 2015

Text-Based Ephemeral Clustering for Web Image Retrieval on Mobile Devices.
Our specific contributions in this dissertation are: two algorithms, two datasets and an evaluation tool. The Dual C-means algorithm is the main product of these. Dual C-means can be seen as a generalization of our previous proposal the AGK-means. Both algorithms are based on word-word similarity metrics and on the classical K-means algorithm. A new dataset for a complete evaluation of search results clustering (SRC) algorithms is developed and presented. Similarly, a new Web image dataset is developed and used together with a new metric to measure the users' effort when a set of Web images is explored. Finally, we developed an evaluation tool for the SRC problem, in which we have implemented several classical and recent SRC metrics.
In order to validate our hypothesis, we performed a great deal of different experiments with the datasets mentioned above. Three valuable characteristics are evaluated in the proposed algorithms. First, clustering quality, in which classical and recent evaluation metrics are considered. Secondly, the labelling quality of each cluster is evaluated to make sure that all possible query intents are covered. Thirdly and finally, we evaluate the user's effort in exploring the clustered results presented as horizontal image strips. For these three, we use several datasets- some of which are built to evaluate individual or combinations of these characteristics.
We have made our conclusions on the numerous factors discussed in this dissertation. In essence, the proposed Dual C-means algorithm, is capable of obtaining proper clustering partitions and simultaneously ensuring high quality labels. When images are displayed on a mobile device's interface, our results indicate that the users' effort to explore the Web image results is reduced.
A Large-Scale Study of Flash Memory Failures in the Field
Authors: Meza Justin , Wu Qiang , Kumar Sanjev , Mutlu Onur 
Published: June 2015

Servers use flash memory based solid state drives (SSDs) as a high-performance alternative to hard disk drives to store persistent data. Unfortunately, recent increases in flash density have also brought about decreases in chip-level reliability. In a data center environment, flash-based SSD failures can lead to downtime and, in the worst case, data loss. As a result, it is important to understand flash memory reliability characteristics over flash lifetime in a realistic production data center environment running modern applications and system software.
This paper presents the first large-scale study of flash-based SSD reliability in the field. We analyze data collected across a majority of flash-based solid state drives at Facebook data centers over nearly four years and many millions of operational hours in order to understand failure properties and trends of flash-based SSDs. Our study considers a variety of SSD characteristics, including: the amount of data written to and read from flash chips; how data is mapped within the SSD address space; the amount of data copied, erased, and discarded by the flash controller; and flash board temperature and bus power.
Based on our field analysis of how flash memory errors manifest when running modern workloads on modern SSDs, this paper is the first to make several major observations: (1) SSD failure rates do not increase monotonically with flash chip wear; instead they go through several distinct periods corresponding to how failures emerge and are subsequently detected, (2) the effects of read disturbance errors are not prevalent in the field, (3) sparse logical data layout across an SSD's physical address space (e.g., non-contiguous data), as measured by the amount of metadata required to track logical address translations stored in an SSD-internal DRAM buffer, can greatly affect SSD failure rate, (4) higher temperatures lead to higher failure rates, but techniques that throttle SSD operation appear to greatly reduce the negative reliability impact of higher temperatures, and (5) data written by the operating system to flash-based SSDs does not always accurately indicate the amount of wear induced on flash cells due to optimizations in the SSD controller and buffering employed in the system software. We hope that the findings of this first large-scale flash memory reliability study can inspire others to develop other publicly-available analyses and novel flash reliability solutions.
Transient and Steady-state Regime of a Family of List-based Cache Replacement Algorithms
Authors: Gast Nicolas , Van Houdt Benny 
Published: June 2015

In this paper we study the performance of a family of cache replacement algorithms. The cache is decomposed into lists. Items enter the cache via the first list. An item enters the cache via the first list and jumps to the next list whenever a hit on it occurs. The classical policies FIFO, RANDOM, CLIMB and its hybrids are obtained as special cases. We present explicit expressions for the cache content distribution and miss probability under the IRM model. We develop an algorithm with a time complexity that is polynomial in the cache size and linear in the number of items to compute the exact miss probability. We introduce lower and upper bounds on the latter that can be computed in a time that is linear in the cache size times the number of items.
We further introduce a mean field model to approximate the transient behavior of the miss probability and prove that this model becomes exact as the cache size and number of items tends to infinity. We show that the set of ODEs associated to the mean field model has a unique fixed point that can be used to approximate the miss probability in case the exact computation becomes too time consuming.
Using this approximation, we provide guidelines on how to select a replacement algorithm within the family considered such that a good trade-off is achieved between the cache reactivity and its steady-state hit probability. We simulate these cache replacement algorithms on traces of real data and show that they can outperform LRU. Finally, we also disprove the well-known conjecture that the CLIMB algorithm is the optimal finite-memory replacement algorithm under the IRM model.
Computable Bounds in Fork-Join Queueing Systems
Authors: Rizk Amr , Poloczek Felix , Ciucu Florin 
Published: June 2015

In a Fork-Join (FJ) queueing system an upstream fork station splits incoming jobs into N tasks to be further processed by N parallel servers, each with its own queue; the response time of one job is determined, at a downstream join station, by the maximum of the corresponding tasks' response times. This queueing system is useful to the modelling of multi-service systems subject to synchronization constraints, such as MapReduce clusters or multipath routing. Despite their apparent simplicity, FJ systems are hard to analyze.
This paper provides the first computable stochastic bounds on the waiting and response time distributions in FJ systems. We consider four practical scenarios by combining 1a) renewal and 1b) non-renewal arrivals, and 2a) non-blocking and 2b) blocking servers. In the case of non blocking servers we prove that delays scale as O(logN), a law which is known for first moments under renewal input only. In the case of blocking servers, we prove that the same factor of log N dictates the stability region of the system. Simulation results indicate that our bounds are tight, especially at high utilizations, in all four scenarios. A remarkable insight gained from our results is that, at moderate to high utilizations, multipath routing 'makes sense' from a queueing perspective for two paths only, i.e., response times drop the most when N = 2; the technical explanation is that the resequencing (delay) price starts to quickly dominate the tempting gain due to multipath transmissions.
Speeding up Glauber Dynamics for Random Generation of Independent Sets
Authors: Varloot Rémi , Bušíüć Ana , Bouillard Anne 
Published: June 2015

The maximum independent set (MIS) problem is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem that naturally arises in many applications, such as wireless communication, information theory and statistical mechanics.
MIS problem is NP-hard, thus many results in the literature focus on fast generation of maximal independent sets of high cardinality. One possibility is to combine Gibbs sampling with coupling from the past arguments to detect convergence to the stationary regime. This results in a sampling procedure with time complexity that depends on the mixing time of the Glauber dynamics Markov chain.
We propose an adaptive method for random event generation in the Glauber dynamics that considers only the events that are effective in the coupling from the past scheme, accelerating the convergence time of the Gibbs sampling algorithm.
The full paper is available on arXiv.
Using Immune Marker Panels to Evaluate the Role of Inflammation in Cancer: Summary of an NCI-Sponsored Workshop
Authors: Carrick Danielle M. , Chaturvedi Anil K. , Shiels Meredith S. , Divi Rao L. , Filipski Kelly K. , Hebert Elizabeth F. , Verma Mukesh , Hildesheim Allan 
Published: June 2015

Abstract
Chronic inflammation is recognized to play a role in the development of several cancers. Past investigations of inflammation and cancer have typically been small, used varied assay platforms, and included a narrow range of analytes. Multiplex technologies have now been developed to measure larger numbers of inflammatory markers using small volumes of specimens. This has created an opportunity for systematic, large-scale epidemiologic studies to evaluate the role of inflammation in cancer. However, lack of consensus on the approach to these studies, the technologies/assays to be used, and the most adequate analysis/interpretation of findings have thus far hindered progress. In June 2014, the National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, MD) convened a workshop involving epidemiologists, immunologists, statisticians, and laboratory biologists to share their experiences with new inflammation marker technologies and findings from association studies using such methods and technologies (http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/workshops/). Consensus and gaps in our understanding of the role of chronic inflammation in cancer were identified and recommendations were made to improve future efforts in this area. These recommendations are summarized herein, along with specific suggestions for how they may be implemented. By facilitating discussions among various groups and encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations, we anticipate that the pace of research in this field will be accelerated and duplication of efforts can be minimized. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 24(9); 1427–33. ©2015 AACR.