568 research outputs found
EAPC task force on education for psychologists in palliative care
It is argued that psychological aspects of care and psychosocial problems are essential components of palliative care. However, the provision of appropriate services remains somewhat arbitrary. Unlike medical and nursing care, which are clearly delivered by doctors and nurses respectively, psychological and psychosocial support in palliative care are not assigned exclusively to psychologists. It is generally expected that all professionals working in palliative care should have some knowledge of the psychological dynamics in terminal illness, as well as skills in communication and psychological risk assessment. On the one hand, palliative care education programmes for nurses and doctors comprise a considerable amount of psychological and psychosocial content. On the other hand, only a few palliative care associations provide explicit information on the role and tasks of psychologists in palliative care. Psychologists’ associations do not deal much with this issue either. If they refer to it at all, it is in the context of the care of the aged, end-of-life care or how to deal with grief
Ordered Level Planarity, Geodesic Planarity and Bi-Monotonicity
We introduce and study the problem Ordered Level Planarity which asks for a
planar drawing of a graph such that vertices are placed at prescribed positions
in the plane and such that every edge is realized as a y-monotone curve. This
can be interpreted as a variant of Level Planarity in which the vertices on
each level appear in a prescribed total order. We establish a complexity
dichotomy with respect to both the maximum degree and the level-width, that is,
the maximum number of vertices that share a level. Our study of Ordered Level
Planarity is motivated by connections to several other graph drawing problems.
Geodesic Planarity asks for a planar drawing of a graph such that vertices
are placed at prescribed positions in the plane and such that every edge is
realized as a polygonal path composed of line segments with two adjacent
directions from a given set of directions symmetric with respect to the
origin. Our results on Ordered Level Planarity imply -hardness for any
with even if the given graph is a matching. Katz, Krug, Rutter and
Wolff claimed that for matchings Manhattan Geodesic Planarity, the case where
contains precisely the horizontal and vertical directions, can be solved in
polynomial time [GD'09]. Our results imply that this is incorrect unless
. Our reduction extends to settle the complexity of the Bi-Monotonicity
problem, which was proposed by Fulek, Pelsmajer, Schaefer and
\v{S}tefankovi\v{c}.
Ordered Level Planarity turns out to be a special case of T-Level Planarity,
Clustered Level Planarity and Constrained Level Planarity. Thus, our results
strengthen previous hardness results. In particular, our reduction to Clustered
Level Planarity generates instances with only two non-trivial clusters. This
answers a question posed by Angelini, Da Lozzo, Di Battista, Frati and Roselli.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Universality-class dependence of energy distributions in spin glasses
We study the probability distribution function of the ground-state energies
of the disordered one-dimensional Ising spin chain with power-law interactions
using a combination of parallel tempering Monte Carlo and branch, cut, and
price algorithms. By tuning the exponent of the power-law interactions we are
able to scan several universality classes. Our results suggest that mean-field
models have a non-Gaussian limiting distribution of the ground-state energies,
whereas non-mean-field models have a Gaussian limiting distribution. We compare
the results of the disordered one-dimensional Ising chain to results for a
disordered two-leg ladder, for which large system sizes can be studied, and
find a qualitative agreement between the disordered one-dimensional Ising chain
in the short-range universality class and the disordered two-leg ladder. We
show that the mean and the standard deviation of the ground-state energy
distributions scale with a power of the system size. In the mean-field
universality class the skewness does not follow a power-law behavior and
converges to a nonzero constant value. The data for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick
model seem to be acceptably well fitted by a modified Gumbel distribution.
Finally, we discuss the distribution of the internal energy of the
Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model at finite temperatures and show that it behaves
similar to the ground-state energy of the system if the temperature is smaller
than the critical temperature.Comment: 15 pages, 20 figures, 1 tabl
Optimization by thermal cycling
Thermal cycling is an heuristic optimization algorithm which consists of
cyclically heating and quenching by Metropolis and local search procedures,
respectively, where the amplitude slowly decreases. In recent years, it has
been successfully applied to two combinatorial optimization tasks, the
traveling salesman problem and the search for low-energy states of the Coulomb
glass. In these cases, the algorithm is far more efficient than usual simulated
annealing. In its original form the algorithm was designed only for the case of
discrete variables. Its basic ideas are applicable also to a problem with
continuous variables, the search for low-energy states of Lennard-Jones
clusters.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the Workshop "Complexity, Metastability
and Nonextensivity", held in Erice 20-26 July 2004. Latex, 7 pages, 3 figure
Intermediate states in Andreev bound state fusion
Hybridization is a very fundamental quantum mechanical phenomenon, with the
text book example of binding two hydrogen atoms in a hydrogen molecule. In
semiconductor physics, a quantum dot (QD) can be considered as an artificial
atom, with two coupled QDs forming a molecular state, and two electrons on a
single QD the equivalent of a helium atom. Here we report tunnel spectroscopy
experiments illustrating the hybridization of another type of discrete quantum
states, namely of superconducting subgap states that form in segments of a
semiconducting nanowire in contact with superconducting reservoirs. We show and
explain a collection of intermediate states found in the process of merging
individual bound states, hybridizing with a central QD and eventually
coherently linking the reservoirs. These results may serve as a guide in future
Majorana fusion experiments and explain a large variety of recent bound state
experiments
The critical exponents of the two-dimensional Ising spin glass revisited: Exact Ground State Calculations and Monte Carlo Simulations
The critical exponents for of the two-dimensional Ising spin glass
model with Gaussian couplings are determined with the help of exact ground
states for system sizes up to and by a Monte Carlo study of a
pseudo-ferromagnetic order parameter. We obtain: for the stiffness exponent
, for the magnetic exponent
and for the chaos exponent . From Monte Carlo simulations we
get the thermal exponent . The scaling prediction is
fulfilled within the error bars, whereas there is a disagreement with the
relation .Comment: 8 pages RevTeX, 7 eps-figures include
Magnetic field independent sub-gap states in hybrid Rashba nanowires
Sub-gap states in semiconducting-superconducting nanowire hybrid devices are
controversially discussed as potential topologically non-trivial quantum
states. One source of ambiguity is the lack of an energetically and spatially
well defined tunnel spectrometer. Here, we use quantum dots directly integrated
into the nanowire during the growth process to perform tunnel spectroscopy of
discrete sub-gap states in a long nanowire segment. In addition to sub-gap
states with a standard magnetic field dependence, we find topologically trivial
sub-gap states that are independent of the external magnetic field, i.e. that
are pinned to a constant energy as a function of field. We explain this effect
qualitatively and quantitatively by taking into account the strong spin-orbit
interaction in the nanowire, which can lead to a decoupling of Andreev bound
states from the field due to a spatial spin texture of the confined
eigenstates
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The Drosophila Forkhead Transcription Factor FOXO Mediates the Reduction in Cell Number Associated with Reduced Insulin Signaling
Background: Forkhead transcription factors belonging to the FOXO subfamily are negatively regulated by protein kinase B (PKB) in response to signaling by insulin and insulin-like growth factor in Caenorhabditis elegans and mammals. In Drosophila, the insulin-signaling pathway regulates the size of cells, organs, and the entire body in response to nutrient availability, by controlling both cell size and cell number. In this study, we present a genetic characterization of dFOXO, the only Drosophila FOXO ortholog. Results: Ectopic expression of dFOXO and human FOXO3a induced organ-size reduction and cell death in a manner dependent on phosphoinositide (PI) 3-kinase and nutrient levels. Surprisingly, flies homozygous for dFOXO null alleles are viable and of normal size. They are, however, more sensitive to oxidative stress. Furthermore, dFOXO function is required for growth inhibition associated with reduced insulin signaling. Loss of dFOXO suppresses the reduction in cell number but not the cell-size reduction elicited by mutations in the insulin-signaling pathway. By microarray analysis and subsequent genetic validation, we have identified d4E-BP, which encodes a translation inhibitor, as a relevant dFOXO target gene. Conclusion: Our results show that dFOXO is a crucial mediator of insulin signaling in Drosophila, mediating the reduction in cell number in insulin-signaling mutants. We propose that in response to cellular stresses, such as nutrient deprivation or increased levels of reactive oxygen species, dFOXO is activated and inhibits growth through the action of target genes such as d4E-BP
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