bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A retrospective UK audit assessing the effect of the MySupport programme on patient persistence with MS treatment
Authors: Franklin Kathy , Matthews Emma , Mellors Karen 
Published: June 2014

Background: People with multiple sclerosis (MS) receiving disease-modifying therapy must persist with their treatment for the prescribed duration and adhere to the prescribed interval and dose to achieve the full benefits. Aim: This audit aimed to assess whether the MySupport programme for patients with MS could improve persistence with subcutaneous (sc) interferon (IFN) β-1a. Methods: Anonymised data was retrospectively supplied by homecare providers for patients registered to receive sc IFN β-1a in January 2010. The number of ‘active’ patients (those continuing to receive scheduled deliveries) was recorded monthly for 24 months for patients receiving NHS treatment alone and those receiving both NHS treatment and MySupport. Results: A greater proportion of patients receiving NHS treatment and MySupport than of patients receiving NHS support only were on treatment at 12 months (90.0% vs 79.3%) and 24 months (74.9% vs 61.8%). The odds of being on treatment were significantly greater in patients receiving NHS treatment and MySupport than NHS support only at all time points (P<0.0001). Conclusion: A personalised support programme using one-to-one nursing support and additional support media can increase the likelihood of patients with MS remaining on sc IFN β-1a.
Nurses’ views of the causes of ethical dilemmas during treatment cessation in the ICU: a qualitative study
Authors: McLeod Anne 
Published: June 2014

Background:Technological advances in intensive care units (ICUs) have prolonged the dying process, with an increased number of patients dying after treatment has been withheld or withdrawn. Often the patient is unable to participate in decisions being made about their treatment. This creates an ethical dilemma for those involved and can create discord.Aim:The aim of this study was to explore ICU nurses’ experiences of caring for patients having treatment withheld or withdrawn, with an emphasis on their perceptions of the ethical principles used in decision making.Methods:A qualitative exploratory approach was used to gain insight into the ethics of withholding and withdrawing treatment. A purposive sample of six ICU nurses participated in the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and thematically analysed.Results:The participants identified three interacting themes as forming the ethical foundation of treatment cessation: their personal set of moral beliefs, their experience and the decision-making process. An ethical dilemma emerges when the relationship between these breaks down.Conclusion:Caring for patients for whom treatment is withheld or withdrawn can create significant professional and personal dilemmas. Open discussion, collaborative decision making and consistency in practice are crucial to avoiding moral distress during treatment cessation. Consensus in decision making is key to minimising ethical discord, and personal beliefs and experience are crucial factors.
T2 Magnetic Resonance: A Diagnostic Platform for Studying Integrated Hemostasis in Whole Blood—Proof of Concept
Authors: Skewis Lynell R , Lebedeva Tatiana , Papkov Vyacheslav , Thayer Edward C , Massefski Walter , Cuker Adam , Nagaswami Chandrasekaran , Litvinov Rustem I , Kowalska M Anna , Rauova Lubica , Poncz Mortimer , Weisel John W , Lowery Thomas J , Cines Douglas B 
Published: June 2014

AbstractBACKGROUNDExisting approaches for measuring hemostasis parameters require multiple platforms, can take hours to provide results, and generally require 1–25 mL of sample. We developed a diagnostic platform that allows comprehensive assessment of hemostatic parameters on a single instrument and provides results within 15 min using 0.04 mL of blood with minimal sample handling.METHODST2 magnetic resonance (T2MR) was used to directly measure integrated reactions in whole blood samples by resolving multiple water relaxation times from distinct sample microenvironments. Clotting, clot contraction, and fibrinolysis stimulated by thrombin or tissue plasminogen activator, respectively, were measured. T2MR signals of clotting samples were compared with images produced by scanning electron microscopy and with standard reference methods for the following parameters: hematocrit, prothrombin time, clot strength, and platelet activity.RESULTSApplication of T2MR methodology revealed conditions under which a unique T2MR signature appeared that corresponded with the formation of polyhedral erythrocytes, the dynamics and morphology of which are dependent on thrombin, fibrinogen, hematocrit, and platelet levels. We also showed that the T2MR platform can be used for precise and accurate measurements of hematocrit (%CV, 4.8%, R2 = 0.95), clotting time (%CV, 3.5%, R2 = 0.94), clot strength (R2 = 0.95), and platelet function (93% agreement with light transmission aggregometry).CONCLUSIONSThis proof-of-concept study demonstrates that T2MR has the potential to provide rapid and sensitive identification of patients at risk for thrombosis or bleeding and to identify new biomarkers and therapeutic targets with a single, simple-to-employ analytic approach that may be suitable for routine use in both research and diverse clinical settings.
Dragons and art education: Pre-service elementary teachers memories of early art experiences
Authors: Smith-Shank Deborah L. 
Published: June 2014

Abstract
Many primary school teachers are not comfortable with making art, nor are they comfortable teaching art to children. Some are even uncomfortable using art to reinforce ideas and learning in other subjects. This article reports on an ongoing conversation with groups of pre-service primary/elementary teachers enrolled in a required university course in art pedagogy in the Midwest United States. This course is required for their elementary education licensure requirements. Over a twenty-year period, I asked these students to share memories of their early experiences with formal art education and informal art making. Their stories serve as the foundation of a fairy tale focusing on their relationship(s) with art, art education and art teachers. Some pre-service teachers reported good experiences that resulted in happy endings but many others shared stories of bad art education practices that have negatively impacted a pre-service teacher’s life for years. As pedagogical tools, these memories of art experiences by non-art professionals are useful because in nearly every single saga, art teachers play a central role as either heroes or villains. As a cautionary tale, Dragon teachers are the focus of this article.
A model for dance education: Promoting personal voice and communal learning
Authors: Kipling Brown Ann 
Published: June 2014

Abstract
This paper encourages a reconsideration of the hierarchy of skills, knowledge and learning in dance. In dance the debate has been that teaching is somewhat inferior to the acts of performing and choreographing. Conversely, anyone can teach and that knowing our art form as a performer and/or choreographer prepares us for the implementation of curriculum and the politics of the teaching contexts. In particular, there has been much dispute about who should teach and how and what should be taught to children. In 1948 Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) presented educators with a revolutionary idea of ‘modern educational dance’, later termed ‘creative dance’. With the publication of his book, Modern Educational Dance, he offered a dance form that aimed to foster and promote children’s unconscious dance-like movements, preserve their spontaneity and foster artistic expression. He also offered a way of teaching, a pedagogy that supports a child-centred context for learning.
Narrating the Prophet’s life: Mohammed in North African novels
Authors: Bourget Carine 
Published: June 2014

Abstract
The importance of the Prophet Mohammed cannot be overestimated for Muslims all over the world, not only as the historical figure who spread the third Abrahamic religion, but also because all aspects of his life were recorded and used to weigh in on exegetical, legislative and theological debates. Since the 1990s, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in various contexts prompted a few Francophone North African writers to revisit Mohammed’s life creatively. This article examines three historical novels about Mohammed: Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine (1991), Driss Chraïbi’s L’homme du livre (1995) and Salim Bachi’s Le silence de Mahomet (2008). When a writer embarks on such well-trodden ground that is the life of the Prophet Mohammed, what stands out are two elements: first, the liberties taken in terms of content from the accepted mainstream accounts of his life; and second, the narrative choices made by the writers to tell the story. This study situates these novels in the various contexts that prompted their writings, examines the convergences and divergences among Djebar’s, Chraïbi’s and Bachi’s novels, paying particular attention to the implications of various content and form choices for their creative renderings of Mohammed’s life.
On ne peut surestimer l’importance du prophète Mohammed pour les musulmans du monde entier, non seulement en tant que personnage historique qui répandit la troisième religion abrahamique, mais surtout parce que tous les aspects de sa vie furent enregistrés afin d’influer sur les débats exégétiques, législatifs et théologiques. Dès les années 1990, la montée de l’intégrisme islamiste dans divers contextes a incité quelques écrivains francophones maghrébins à revoir la vie de Mohammed de manière créative. Cet article analyse trois romans historiques sur Mohammed: Loin de Médine (1991) d’Assia Djebar, L’homme du livre (1995) de Driss Chraïbi et Le silence de Mahomet (2008) de Salim Bachi. Lorsqu’un écrivain sort des sentiers battus de la biographie du prophète Mohammed, deux éléments ressortent: tout d’abord, les libertés prises en ce qui concerne le contenu par rapport aux récits traditionnels, et ensuite les choix narratifs de l’écrivain pour raconter l’histoire. Cet essai situe ces romans dans les divers contextes qui ont suscité leur écriture ; il examine leurs convergences et divergences, en faisant tout particulièrement attention aux choix de contenu et de forme pour ces récits créatifs inspirés de la vie de Mohammed et ce qu’ils impliquent.
Using videoconferencing mediated mentoring to support an adjunct faculty
Authors: Aldemir Jale , Ardley Jillian 
Published: June 2014

Mentoring is an effective way to orient new employees to an organization’s work climate. Many colleges operating in multiple locations and providing programs for working adults through evening classes rely on the expertise of adjunct faculty to provide instructional methods. The research literature about mentoring in a higher education context mainly focuses on mentoring full time faculty members. Therefore, this case study is believed to address the gap as it focuses on understanding the mentoring of adjunct faculty. The researchers of the present study believe that utilizing videoconferencing as a tool to mentor new adjunct faculty could be beneficial in the context of any college serving in multiple sites. The purpose of the study is to (a) to determine if videoconferencing is an effective tool in mentoring adjunct faculty, and (b) to determine if videoconferencing mediated mentoring (VMM) is effective for full time faculty in disseminating the strategies and skills to qualified adjunct faculty. VMM implemented in the study includes essential segments – pre-course professional development section, interim course hands-on training and support section, and the post course section to evaluate findings. Data analysis through mentor and mentee logs and surveys proved that VMM is a valuable medium to utilize for training purposes. This type of technology provides a platform for the full time faculty member to build a professional relationship and share the standard of excellence for a given field of study to new adjunct faculty member.
Mining search engine query logs via suggestion sampling
Authors: Bar-Yossef Ziv , Gurevich Maxim 
Published: June 2014

Many search engines and other web applications suggest auto-completions as the user types in a query. The suggestions are generated from hidden underlying databases, such as query logs, directories, and lexicons. These databases consist of interesting and useful information, but they are typically not directly accessible.
In this paper we describe two algorithms for sampling suggestions using only the public suggestion interface. One of the algorithms samples suggestions uniformly at random and the other samples suggestions proportionally to their popularity. These algorithms can be used to mine the hidden suggestion databases. Example applications include comparison of popularity of given keywords within a search engine's query log, estimation of the volume of commercially-oriented queries in a query log, and evaluation of the extent to which a search engine exposes its users to negative content.
Our algorithms employ Monte Carlo methods in order to obtain unbiased samples from the suggestion database. Empirical analysis using a publicly available query log demonstrates that our algorithms are efficient and accurate. Results of experiments on two major suggestion services are also provided.
Optimization of multi-domain queries on the web
Authors: Braga Daniele , Ceri Stefano , Daniel Florian , Martinenghi Davide 
Published: June 2014

Where can I attend an interesting database workshop close to a sunny beach? Who are the strongest experts on service computing based upon their recent publication record and accepted European projects? Can I spend an April weekend in a city served by a low-cost direct flight from Milano offering a Mahler's symphony? We regard the above queries as multi-domain queries, i.e., queries that can be answered by combining knowledge from two or more domains (such as: seaside locations, flights, publications, accepted projects, conference offerings, and so on). This information is available on the Web, but no general-purpose software system can accept the above queries nor compute the answer. At the most, dedicated systems support specific multi-domain compositions (e.g., Google-local locates information such as restaurants and hotels upon geographic maps).
This paper presents an overall framework for multi-domain queries on the Web. We address the following problems: (a) expressing multi-domain queries with an abstract formalism, (b) separating the treatment of "search" services within the model, by highlighting their differences from "exact" Web services, (c) explaining how the same query can be mapped to multiple "query plans", i.e., a well-defined scheduling of service invocations, possibly in parallel, which complies with their access limitations and preserves the ranking order in which search services return results; (d) introducing cross-domain joins as first-class operation within plans; (e) evaluating the query plans against several cost metrics so as to choose the most promising one for execution. This framework adapts to a variety of application contexts, ranging from end-user-oriented mash-up scenarios up to complex application integration scenarios.
A practical scalable distributed B-tree
Authors: Aguilera Marcos K. , Golab Wojciech , Shah Mehul A. 
Published: June 2014

Internet applications increasingly rely on scalable data structures that must support high throughput and store huge amounts of data. These data structures can be hard to implement efficiently. Recent proposals have overcome this problem by giving up on generality and implementing specialized interfaces and functionality (e.g., Dynamo [4]). We present the design of a more general and flexible solution: a fault-tolerant and scalable distributed B-tree. In addition to the usual B-tree operations, our B-tree provides some important practical features: transactions for atomically executing several operations in one or more B-trees, online migration of B-tree nodes between servers for load-balancing, and dynamic addition and removal of servers for supporting incremental growth of the system.
Our design is conceptually simple. Rather than using complex concurrency and locking protocols, we use distributed transactions to make changes to B-tree nodes. We show how to extend the B-tree and keep additional information so that these transactions execute quickly and efficiently. Our design relies on an underlying distributed data sharing service, Sinfonia [1], which provides fault tolerance and a light-weight distributed atomic primitive. We use this primitive to commit our transactions. We implemented our B-tree and show that it performs comparably to an existing open-source B-tree and that it scales to hundreds of machines. We believe that our approach is general and can be used to implement other distributed data structures easily.
Analyzing and revising data integration schemas to improve their matchability
Authors: Chai Xiaoyong , Sayyadian Mayssam , Doan AnHai , Rosenthal Arnon , Seligman Len 
Published: June 2014

Data integration systems often provide a uniform query interface, called amediated schema, to a multitude of data sources. To answer user queries, such systems employ a set ofsemantic matchesbetween the mediated schema and the data-source schemas. Finding such matches is well known to be difficult. Hence much work has focused on developing semi-automatic techniques to efficiently find the matches. In this paper we consider the complementary problem ofimproving the mediated schema, to make finding such matches easier. Specifically, a mediated schemaSwill typically be matched with many source schemas. Thus,can the developer of S analyze and revise S in a way that preserves S's semantics, and yet makes it easier to match with in the future?In this paper we provide an affirmative answer to the above question, and outline a promising solution direction, calledmSeer. Given a mediated schemaSand a matching toolM,mSeerfirst computes a matchability score that quantifies how wellScan be matched against usingM. Next,mSeeruses this score to generate a matchability report that identifies the problems in matchingS.Finally,mSeeraddresses these problems by automatically suggesting changes toS(e.g., renaming an attribute, reformatting data values, etc.) that it believes will preserve the semantics ofSand yet make it more amenable to matching. We present extensive experiments over several real-world domains that demonstrate the promise of the proposed approach.
Rewriting procedures for batched bindings
Authors: Guravannavar Ravindra , Sudarshan S. 
Published: June 2014

Queries, or calls to stored procedures/user-defined functions are often invoked multiple times, either from within a loop in an application program, or from the where/select clause of an outer query. When the invoked query/procedure/function involves database access, a naive implementation can result in very poor performance, due to random I/O. Query decorrelation addresses this problem in the special case of nested sub-queries, but is not applicable otherwise. This problem is traditionally addressed by manually rewriting the application to make it set-oriented, by creating a batch of parameters, and by rewriting the query/procedure to work on the batch instead of one parameter at a time. Such manual rewriting is time-consuming and error prone.
In this paper, we propose techniques that can be used to do the following, (a) Automatically rewrite programs to replace multiple calls to a query by a batched call to a correspondingly rewritten query, (b) Rewrite a stored procedure/function to accept a batch of bindings, instead of a single binding. Thereby, for example, a query which would have been invoked many times from different invocations of a stored procedure would be automatically replaced by one (or a few) invocations of a batched version of the query.
Our techniques can be applied to code written in any language, such as procedural versions of SQL, or Java. We have implemented the proposed rewriting techniques for a subset of Java, where database operations are performed using an API over JDBC. We demonstrate the benefits due to our rewrites with three cases from real-world applications, which faced significant performance problems due to repeated invocations of queries/procedures.
SCOPE
Authors: Chaiken Ronnie , Jenkins Bob , Larson Per-Åke , Ramsey Bill , Shakib Darren , Weaver Simon , Zhou Jingren 
Published: June 2014

Companies providing cloud-scale services have an increasing need to store and analyze massive data sets such as search logs and click streams. For cost and performance reasons, processing is typically done on large clusters of shared-nothing commodity machines. It is imperative to develop a programming model that hides the complexity of the underlying system but provides flexibility by allowing users to extend functionality to meet a variety of requirements.
In this paper, we present a new declarative and extensible scripting language, SCOPE (Structured Computations Optimized for Parallel Execution), targeted for this type of massive data analysis. The language is designed for ease of use with no explicit parallelism, while being amenable to efficient parallel execution on large clusters. SCOPE borrows several features from SQL. Data is modeled as sets of rows composed of typed columns. The select statement is retained with inner joins, outer joins, and aggregation allowed. Users can easily define their own functions and implement their own versions of operators: extractors (parsing and constructing rows from a file), processors (row-wise processing), reducers (group-wise processing), and combiners (combining rows from two inputs). SCOPE supports nesting of expressions but also allows a computation to be specified as a series of steps, in a manner often preferred by programmers. We also describe how scripts are compiled into efficient, parallel execution plans and executed on large clusters.
Closing the query processing loop in Oracle 11g
Authors: Lee Allison W. , Zait Mohamed 
Published: June 2014

The role of a query optimizer in a database system is to find the best execution plan for a given SQL statement based on statistics about the objects related to the tables referenced in the statement. These statistics include the tables themselves, their indexes, and other derived objects. Statistics include the number of rows, space utilization on disk, distribution of column values, etc. Optimization also relies on system statistics, such as the I/O bandwidth of the storage sub-system. All of this information is fed into a cost model. The cost model is used to compute the cost whenever the query optimizer needs to make a decision for an access path, join method, join order, or query transformation. The optimizer picks the alternative that yields the lowest cost.
The quality of the final execution plan depends primarily on the quality of the information fed into the cost model as well as the cost model itself. In this paper, we discuss two of the problems that affect the quality of execution plans generated by the query optimizer: the cardinality of intermediate results and host variable values. We will give details of the solutions we introduced in Oracle 11g. Our approach establishes a bridge from the SQL execution engine to the SQL compiler. The bridge brings valuable information to help the query optimizer assess the impact of its decisions and make better decisions for future executions of the SQL statement. We illustrate the merits of our solutions based on experiments using the Oracle E-Business Suite workload.