Sharing Social Research Data in Ireland: A Practical Tool

Your data is valuable and has an importance outside your own original project. Allowing other researchers to reuse your data maximises the impact of your work, and benefits both the scholarly community and society in general. Sharing your data allows other researchers to use your material in ways you may not have thought of, or may not have been able to do within your research project. It allows other researchers to replicate your findings, to verify your results, test your instruments and compare with other studies. It also allows them to use your work to expand knowledge in important areas. It provides value for money by reducing duplication and advancing knowledge and also has a significant value in education, as it allows both graduate and under-graduate students to develop their skills in qualitative and quantitative research by using high-quality data in their studies, without having to conduct their own surveys.Archiving your data also guarantees its long-term preservation and accessibility. As many research teams are assembled only for individual projects, long-term preservation and access to research data collections can only be guaranteed if they are deposited in an archive which will manage them, ensure access and provide user-support. In addition, the archives will ensure that the datasets do not become obsolescent or corrupted.Finally, increasingly funders require that you make your research data available as a condition of their funding your research, so that other researchers can test your findings, and use your data to extend research in your area. Equally, publishers are also specifying access to research data as a condition for publication

New Perspectives for Anaplastic Thyroid Carcinoma Approach Improvement

O carcinoma anaplásico da tiroide é raro, no entanto representa o tipo de carcinoma da tiroide com maior mortalidade. Caracteriza-se por uma evolução rápida e o diagnóstico é habitualmente obtido num estadio avançado, apresentando mais de metade dos pacientes à distância. Consequentemente, as opções de tratamento são ineficazes e principalmente paliativas. A investigação das mutações genéticas, a par da descoberta de novos alvos terapêuticos, permite que novas formas de tratamento dirigido se encontrem em estudo. Presentemente, existe uma preferência para adoção de abordagens mais conservadoras no tratamento do bócio e de alguns carcinomas diferenciados da tiroide. Desta forma, torna-se cada vez mais importante compreender quais poderão evoluir para carcinoma anaplásico O nosso principal objetivo é rever a informação existente acerca da etiologia e fatores de risco do carcinoma anaplásico da tiroide. Estes podem contribuir para um diagnóstico precoce, bem como fornecer novas perspetivas acerca das opções de tratamento mais recentes e direções futuras, nomeadamente, inibidores multicínases, inibidores do BRAF e outros agentes dirigidos cujo objetivo é estabilizar o crescimento tumoral e permitir a realização de cirurgia radical curativa.Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma is rare but it represents the deadliest type of thyroid cancer, characterized by a rapid course. Diagnosis is usually made on a late stage, when more than half of the patients have distant metastasis. Thus, treatment options are mainly palliative and lack of efficacy. With the mutational landscape investigation and the discover of new targets, new directed treatments are also being tried. Considering the current tendency to be more conservative at multinodular goiter approach and some differentiated thyroid carcinomas treatment, it is very important to understand which may evolve to anaplastic cancers. Our main purpose is to review the current information on anaplastic thyroid aetiology and risk factors which may contribute to an earlier diagnosis, and also to give new perspectives about the most recent treatment options and future directions, in particular, multikinase inhibitors, BRAF inhibitors and other directed agents aiming to stabilize the tumour growth and enable radical surgery with curative intent

Framework for the implementation of urban big screens in the public space

In the last decade, big urban screens have appeared in town squares and on building facades across the UK. The use of these screens brings new potentials and challenges for city regulators, artists, architects, urban designers, producers, broadcasters and advertisers. Dynamic moving images form new architectural material, affecting our perception and the experience of the space around us. A new form of urban space is emerging that is fundamentally different from what we have known, and it seems that we are ill-equipped to deal with and analyse it. We are just beginning to understand the opportunities for public information, art and community engagement. Most of screens at present serve mainly commercial purposes, they do not broadcast information aimed at sharing community content nor do they support public social interactions. We need to see more negotiation between commercial, public and cultural interests. The SCREAM project addresses these new challenges by looking at the physical urban spaces and the potential spaces created by the new technologies

Analysis of runtime re-configuration systems

In recent years Programmable Logic Devices (PLD) and in particular Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have seen a tremendous increase in sales and applications in the area of embedded systems. The main advantage of FPGAs is the flexibility that they offer a designer in reconfiguring the hardware. The flexibility achieved through re-configuration of FPGAs usually incurs an overhead of extra execution time, data memory and also power dissipation; FPGAs provide an ideal template for run-time reconfigurable (RTR) designs. Only recently have RTR enabling design tools that bypass the traditional synthesis and bitstream generation process for FPGAs become available, JBits is one of them. With run-time reconfiguration of FPGAs, we can perform partial reconfiguration, which allows reconfiguration of a part of an FPGA while the other part is executing some functional computation. The partial reconfiguration of a function can be performed earlier than the time when the function is really needed. Such configuration pre-fetch can hide the reconfiguration overhead more effectively; This thesis will implement a reconfigurable system and study the effect of runtime reconfiguration using VERILOG and a new Java based tool JBITS. This work will provide pointers to high level synthesis tools targeting runtime re-configuration

The South African Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SA-CMR) Registry: An Interim Analysis of Clinical Utility, Indications and Baseline Characteristics of Patients Undergoing CMR in a Single Centre in South Africa

Background Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is a clinically useful imaging modality that is fast becoming a routine tool in clinical practice. In 2013, the results of the first multi-national registry, EuroCMR, were published. The study highlighted the clinical significance and impact of CMR in Europe. More recently, the global CMR registry (GCMR) has been established to standardise data from international centres in order to support the role of CMR across diverse patient demographics. Despite South Africa joining the GCMR network, the role of CMR in the South African context remains undefined and at present there is limited research pertaining to its use. The South African CMR (SA-CMR) registry was founded in 2016 with a view to gain insight into CMR in the South African setting. This interim analysis of the first 1,142 patients aims to establish the clinical use and indications for CMR, to assess the quality of CMR images and to the assess the baseline demographic and clinical characteristics of the cohort. Secondary objectives aim to ascertain the impact of CMR on patient management. Methods SA-CMR was designed to be a national registry that consists of both retrospective and prospective CMR data. This analysis reports on the single-centre experience at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town. The retrospective arm consists of patients that underwent CMR at Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH) from its introduction in 2005 to April 2017. This interim analysis will assess the first 1,142 patients in this retrospective arm. Results Of the indications for use of CMR in Cape Town, the ascertainment of the presence of cardiomyopathies or their delineation accounted for 54% of scans performed. 15% were utilised to define congenital cardiac anomalies. The average age of patients undergoing CMR was 40 years old and there was a slightly increased percentage of female to male patients (52.65% vs 47.32%). Image quality was diagnostic in 99% of cases and adverse reactions from gadolinium contrast agent use only occurred in 0.18% of patients – of which none were fatal. 34% of scans showed either an alternative diagnosis or additive information which subsequently resulted in an alteration in clinical management of the patient. Conclusion In comparison with the European cohort, where the most important indication for CMR was risk stratification in suspected coronary artery disease, SA-CMR showed that, in the South African setting, CMR was utilised predominantly for investigation of cardiomyopathies. SACMR further supported CMR as a safe imaging technique which has assisted in diagnostics and clinical management of patients with cardiovascular disease in South Africa

Lifecycle information for e-literature: full report from the LIFE project

This Report is a record of the LIFE Project. The Project has been run for one year and its aim is to deliver crucial information about the cost and management of digital material. This information should then in turn be able to be applied to any institution that has an interest in preserving and providing access to electronic collections. The Project is a joint venture between The British Library and UCL Library Services. The Project is funded by JISC under programme area (i) as listed in paragraph 16 of the JISC 4/04 circular- Institutional Management Support and Collaboration and as such has set requirements and outcomes which must be met and the Project has done its best to do so. Where the Project has been unable to answer specific questions, strong recommendations have been made for future Project work to do so. The outcomes of this Project are expected to be a practical set of guidelines and a framework within which costs can be applied to digital collections in order to answer the following questions: • What is the long term cost of preserving digital material; • Who is going to do it; • What are the long term costs for a library in HE/FE to partner with another institution to carry out long term archiving; • What are the comparative long-term costs of a paper and digital copy of the same publication; • At what point will there be sufficient confidence in the stability and maturity of digital preservation to switch from paper for publications available in parallel formats; • What are the relative risks of digital versus paper archiving. The Project has attempted to answer these questions by using a developing lifecycle methodology and three diverse collections of digital content. The LIFE Project team chose UCL e-journals, BL Web Archiving and the BL VDEP digital collections to provide a strong challenge to the methodology as well as to help reach the key Project aim of attributing long term cost to digital collections. The results from the Case Studies and the Project findings are both surprising and illuminating

Towards Robust Neural Image Compression: Adversarial Attack and Model Finetuning

Deep neural network based image compression has been extensively studied. Model robustness is largely overlooked, though it is crucial to service enabling. We perform the adversarial attack by injecting a small amount of noise perturbation to original source images, and then encode these adversarial examples using prevailing learnt image compression models. Experiments report severe distortion in the reconstruction of adversarial examples, revealing the general vulnerability of existing methods, regardless of the settings used in underlying compression model (e.g., network architecture, loss function, quality scale) and optimization strategy used for injecting perturbation (e.g., noise threshold, signal distance measurement). Later, we apply the iterative adversarial finetuning to refine pretrained models. In each iteration, random source images and adversarial examples are mixed to update underlying model. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed finetuning strategy by substantially improving the compression model robustness. Overall, our methodology is simple, effective, and generalizable, making it attractive for developing robust learnt image compression solution. All materials have been made publicly accessible at https://njuvision.github.io/RobustNIC for reproducible research.Comment: This paper has been completely rewritte