19 research outputs found

    Epilepsy

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    Epilepsy is the most common neurological disorder globally, affecting approximately 50 million people of all ages. It is one of the oldest diseases described in literature from remote ancient civilizations 2000-3000 years ago. Despite its long history and wide spread, epilepsy is still surrounded by myth and prejudice, which can only be overcome with great difficulty. The term epilepsy is derived from the Greek verb epilambanein, which by itself means to be seized and to be overwhelmed by surprise or attack. Therefore, epilepsy is a condition of getting over, seized, or attacked. The twelve very interesting chapters of this book cover various aspects of epileptology from the history and milestones of epilepsy as a disease entity, to the most recent advances in understanding and diagnosing epilepsy

    Topology matters: characteristics of functional brain networks in healthy subjects and patients with Epilepsy, Diabetes, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis during a resting-state paradigm.

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    The brain can be seen as a complex structural and functional network. Cognitive functioning strongly depends on the organization of functional brain networks. EEG/MEG resting-­‐state functional connectivity and functional brain networks studies attempt to characterize normal brain organization as well as deviation from it due to brain diseases. Despite the impact on the understanding of brain functioning that these tools provided, there are still methodological hurdles that might compromise the quality of the results. The main aim of this thesis was to gain an understanding of the role of functional connectivity and network topology on brain functioning by: (i) addressing the methodological issues intrinsic in the analysis that can bias the results; (ii) quantifying functional connectivity differences possibly induced by brain impairments; (iii) detecting and quantifying how network topology changes, due to brain impairments. In order to achieve these objectives, functional connectivity and functional brain networks obtained by empirical recordings were reconstructed. Recordings were acquired with different modalities (EEG or MEG) and under different pathologies: epilepsy, diabetes and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Specifically three research questions were addressed: • Do functional brain network architectures obtained from pharmaco-­‐resistant epileptic patients responding to vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) change compared to patients not responding to VNS? • Are functional connectivity alterations related to cognitive performance and clinical status in type I diabetes mellitus patients? • Is functional network topology related to disease duration in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients? In order to answer these questions, avoiding possible biases which may affect the results, two key choices were made: first, the selection of the phase lag index [1] as functional connectivity estimator because it is less sensible to common sources problem; second, the application of minimum spanning tree (MST) [2] approach to overcome the problem of network comparison and characterize network topology reliably. In summary, this thesis confirms that alterations of functional connectivity and functional brain networks in disease may be used as potential biomarkers for more objective diagnosis and the choice of effective treatment options. Specifically, in epileptic patients implanted with VNS the relation between network measures and clinical benefit suggest that these measures can be used as a marker in monitoring the efficacy of the treatment; in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis the relation between disease duration and whole brain network disruption suggests diagnostic relevance of network measures in evaluating and monitoring the disease; and finally in type 1 diabetic mellitus patients functional connectivity measures can be complementary to cognitive tests and may help to monitor the effect of T1DM on brain functions

    International Emergency Response: Forming Effective Post-Extreme Event Stabilization and Reconstruction Missions

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    Debates about whether or not to engage in interventions to stabilize and rebuild states that have suffered extreme events, such as wars and large-scale natural disasters include questions about whether or not the intervening force can complete the mission. Intervening is a complex task that faces considerable political and military obstacles, even when the intervention is welcome. The situation is only more complex and difficult when the force is not welcome. This requires the reconstruction, and often construction, of governance capacity in the situation when all, or nearly all, capacity has been destroyed, but the situation is rapidly changing. To be effective, the missions and the governance structures that those missions are trying to build must have not only the capacity to govern, but also the resilience to respond and adapt to that changing environment. This research examines the relationship between resilience, capacity, and a mission’s effectiveness. Capacity is the total amount of resources available to the mission, including the funds, materiel, and personnel that each organization devotes to the effort of completing mission tasks. Resilience is the mission’s ability to identify changes in the environment and adapt to them. Effectiveness is the mission’s ability to meet its formally stated goals, as well implicitly understood goals. Analyzing these relationships requires first answering these questions: • Who are the actors? • What are the system rules? • What are the patterns of interaction? • How do actors select actions? • How do actors select which actors with whom they will interact? • What are the patterns of variation in the data covered in the preceding questions? The data to answer all of these questions is gathered both from existing data sources, including situation and newspaper reports, and from interviews with the individuals involved in the decision making during two reconstruction efforts: the 1992-2002 UN intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the on-going UN intervention in Haiti, which began in 2004. The research constructs models of these events using qualitative systems analysis, network analysis, statistical analysis, and simulation analysis to show that increasing resilience increases effectiveness, after controlling for capacity

    A Quantitative Methodology for Vetting Dark Network Intelligence Sources for Social Network Analysis

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    Social network analysis (SNA) is used by the DoD to describe and analyze social networks, leading to recommendations for operational decisions. However, social network models are constructed from various information sources of indeterminate reliability. Inclusion of unreliable information can lead to incorrect models resulting in flawed analysis and decisions. This research develops a methodology to assist the analyst by quantitatively identifying and categorizing information sources so that determinations on including or excluding provided data can be made. This research pursued three main thrusts. It consolidated binary similarity measures to determine social network information sources\u27 concordance and developed a methodology to select suitable measures dependent upon application considerations. A methodology was developed to assess the validity of individual sources of social network data. This methodology utilized source pairwise comparisons to measure information sources\u27 concordance and a weighting schema to account for sources\u27 unique perspectives of the underlying social network. Finally, the developed methodology was tested over a variety of generated networks with varying parameters in a design of experiments paradigm (DOE). Various factors relevant to conditions faced by SNA analysts potentially employing this methodology were examined. The DOE was comprised of a 24 full factorial design augmented with a nearly orthogonal Latin hypercube. A linear model was constructed using quantile regression to mitigate the non-normality of the error terms

    Practical unconditionally secure signature schemes and related protocols

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    The security guarantees provided by digital signatures are vital to many modern applications such as online banking, software distribution, emails and many more. Their ubiquity across digital communications arguably makes digital signatures one of the most important inventions in cryptography. Worryingly, all commonly used schemes – RSA, DSA and ECDSA – provide only computational security, and are rendered completely insecure by quantum computers. Motivated by this threat, this thesis focuses on unconditionally secure signature (USS) schemes – an information theoretically secure analogue of digital signatures. We present and analyse two new USS schemes. The first is a quantum USS scheme that is both information-theoretically secure and realisable with current technology. The scheme represents an improvement over all previous quantum USS schemes, which were always either realisable or had a full security proof, but not both. The second is an entirely classical USS scheme that uses minimal resources and is vastly more efficient than all previous schemes, to such an extent that it could potentially find real-world application. With the discovery of such an efficient classical USS scheme using only minimal resources, it is difficult to see what advantage quantum USS schemes may provide. Lastly, we remain in the information-theoretic security setting and consider two quantum protocols closely related to USS schemes – oblivious transfer and quantum money. For oblivious transfer, we prove new lower bounds on the minimum achievable cheating probabilities in any 1-out-of-2 protocol. For quantum money, we present a scheme that is more efficient and error tolerant than all previous schemes. Additionally, we show that it can be implemented using a coherent source and lossy detectors, thereby allowing for the first experimental demonstration of quantum coin creation and verification

    "The Poles of the Western World"

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    Die vorliegende Diplomarbeit ist eine Medienanalyse, die sich mit der Darstellung osteuropäischer Einwanderer in drei irischen Zeitungen – Irish Times, Sunday Independent und Irish News - im Zeitraum zwischen Mai 2004 und Dezember 2006 befasst. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit ist auf die Darstellung historischer, politischer und religiöser Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen Irland und Osteuropa gerichtet. Diese Gemeinsamkeiten waren im 19. Jahrhunderte, zu einer Zeit als Irland und verschiedene osteuropäische Länder beträchtliche Parallelen aufwiesen, in irischen Medien vielfach hervorgestrichen worden. Der Analyseteil dieser Diplomarbeit gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Im ersten Teil wird der Frage nach der Darstellung historischer, kultureller und religiöser Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen Irland und Osteuropa nachgegangen. Es wird dabei klar, dass eine Art longue durée gegeben haben dürfte, da Verweise auf historische Parallelen zwischen den beiden Regionen zum wiederholten Male vorkamen. Schlussendlich wurde klar, dass besonders Irlands eigene Erfahrung von Emigration eine reichliche Quelle für Vergleiche bat. Es wurde von vielen Journalisten von der Tatsache, dass jahrhundertelang viel Iren nach Amerika und Großbritannien auswanderten, eine moralische Verpflichtung abgeleitet, Fremden gegenüber großzügig und mitfühlend zu sein Der zweite Teil der Inhaltsanalyse beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung osteuropäischer Einwanderer als wirtschaftlicher Faktor. Dieser Diskurs beschränkte sich zumeist auf eine einfache Kosten-Nutzen Rechnung, die dem vorrangigen Ziel des anhaltenden Wirtschaftswachstums alles andere unterordnete. Einwanderer wurden daher nur als eine volkswirtschaftliche Variable gesehen, die unter den gegebenen Umständen positiv ist, bei veränderter Wirtschaftslage aber auch negativ sein könnte. Diese Konzentration auf ökonomische Aspekte wurde jedoch auch von verschiedenen Seiten in Frage gestellt.This thesis is a media analysis with evaluates the representation of Eastern European immigrants in three Irish Newspapers – The Irish Times, The Sunday Independent and The Irish News - in the period between May 2004 and December 2006. Particular attention is focused on the perception of historical, political and religious similarities between Ireland and Eastern Europe. These similarities were often highlighted in Irish media in the 19th century, at a time when Ireland and various Eastern European countries had significant parallels. The analysis part of this thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part the representation of historical, cultural and religious similarities between Ireland and Eastern Europe were investigated. It became clear that a longue durée must have happened because references to historical parallels between the two regions occurred frequently. Eventually Ireland's own experience of emigration was often the source of comparison. Many journalists derived from the fact that for centuries many Irish people emigrated to America and Great Britain a moral obligation to be generous and compassionate to contemporary immigrants. The second part of the content analysis focuses on the representation of Eastern European immigrants as an economic commodity. This discourse was limited mostly to a simple cost-benefit calculation, which subordinates everything else to continuing economic growth. Immigrants were therefore seen simply as an economic variable that was positive under the current economic circumstances, but could easily be negative if the economic situation changed. This concentration on economic aspects, however, was also criticised from various journalists
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