Evaluation of a Sleep Knowledge Translation Strategy for Occupational Therapists Working with Persons who have Dementia

Introduction: Sleep deficiency is a significant, largely overlooked issue for persons with dementia (PWD), and is associated with physical and mental health problems, increased caregiver burden, and increased likelihood of institutionalization. Despite the high prevalence of sleep deficiency in PWD, most health care professionals lack knowledge of the relationship between sleep problems and dementia. This project aimed to determine the feasibility of an archived online presentation, a knowledge translation (KT) strategy to increase therapists’ understanding of the impact of blue-spectrum light on sleep in PWD. Method: Therapists who participated in a previous sleep and dementia survey were recruited via email. Participants completed a pre-knowledge test, accessed an online presentation regarding the relationship between sleep and light, and completed a post-test. Results: On average there was a 22% improvement in knowledge scores and participants were positive about the KT strategy being accessible, applicable, and evidence based. Conclusion: For a sample of therapists self-identified as specializing in geriatric rehabilitation, online audio-visual resources appear to be a feasible KT strategy to disseminate information and increase occupational therapists’ knowledge regarding the evidence-based relationship between blue-spectrum light and sleep in PWD. Further study is required to determine if this increased knowledge translates to practice settings

Private insurance versus medicaid and adherence to medication in older adults with fibromyalgia

Background: Fibromyalgia, defined as chronic, wide-spread musculoskeletal pain, affects 4 to 10 million Americans and up to 6% of the world population. Medication nonadherence results in $100 to$300 billion in US health expenditures annually. Previous studies have examined medication adherence in commercial health plans or public health plans, but relatively few have compared both populations. The purpose of this study was to estimate the effect of type of insurance on adherence to medication for older adults with fibromyalgia. Methods: The retrospective cohort study analyzed medical claims of fibromyalgia patients collected between January 1, 2005 to June 30, 2011 from the Blue Cross Blue Shield South Carolina State Health Plan (BCBS) and Medicaid data. Older adults age 60 and older were included if they were prescribed duloxetine, milnacipran, or pregabalin (N=3,187). The primary outcome, medication adherence, was defined as having a medication possession ratio (MPR) of ≥ 80%. Independent variables included health insurance, FMS medication, selected comorbidities (FMS-related, musculoskeletal pain, or neuropathic pain), gender, age, and the interaction between health insurance type and treatment. Results: Logistic regression showed older adults with fibromyalgia on Medicaid were over 3 times more likely to be adherent when compared to BCBS in both unadjusted (OR: 3.21, p<0.0001) and adjusted models (OR: 3.74, p<0.0001). Conclusion: Most states do not require a Medicaid prescription co-pay; whereas, private insurers, like Blue Cross Blue Shield, require more out-of-pocket costs. Our study suggests that the co-pays for medications in private plans may present a barrier to patient adherence

Exact solutions for a mean-field Abelian sandpile

We introduce a model for a sandpile, with N sites, critical height N and each site connected to every other site. It is thus a mean-field model in the spin-glass sense. We find an exact solution for the steady state probability distribution of avalanche sizes, and discuss its asymptotics for large N.Comment: 10 pages, LaTe

Two-Speed Rotorcraft Research Transmission Power-Loss Associated with the Lubrication and Hydraulic Rotating Feed-Through Design Feature

An investigation was completed into the power loss associated with a rotating feed-through (RFT) design feature used to transfer lubrication and a hydraulic control signal from the static reference frame to a rotating reference frame in the NASA GRC two-speed transmission tests conducted in the Variable-Speed Drive Test Rig. The RFT feature, not commercially available, was created specifically for this research project and is integral to all two-speed transmission configurations tested, as well as a variant concept design for a geared variable-speed transmission presented at AHS Forum 71 in 2015. The experimental set-up and results from measurements in the isolated rotating-feed-through (RFT) experiments are presented. Results were used in an overall power loss assessment for a scaled conceptual 1,000 horsepower inline concentric two-speed transmission to support a NASA Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technologies (RVLT) Technical Challenge, demonstrating 50% speed change with less than 2% power loss while maintaining current power-to-weight ratios

Two-Speed Rotorcraft Research Transmission Power-Loss Associated with the Lubrication and Hydraulic Rotating Feed-Through Design Feature

An investigation was completed into the power loss associated with a rotating feed-through (RFT) design feature used to transfer lubrication and a hydraulic control signal from the static reference frame to a rotating reference frame in the NASA GRC two-speed transmission tests conducted in the Variable-Speed Drive Test Rig. The RFT feature, not commercially available, was created specifically for this research project and is integral to all two-speed transmission configurations tested, as well as a variant concept design for a geared variable-speed transmission presented at AHS Forum 71 in 2015. The experimental set-up and results from measurements in the isolated rotating-feed-through (RFT) experiments are presented. Results were used in an overall power loss assessment for a scaled conceptual 1,000 horsepower inline concentric two-speed transmission to support a NASA Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technologies (RVLT) Technical Challenge, demonstrating 50% speed change with less than 2% power loss while maintaining current power-to-weight ratios

Integrable Supersymmetry Breaking Perturbations of N=1,2 Superconformal Minimal Models

We display a new integrable perturbation for both N=1 and N=2 superconformal minimal models. These perturbations break supersymmetry explicitly. Their existence was expected on the basis of the classification of integrable perturbations of conformal field theories in terms of distinct classical KdV type hierarchies sharing a common second Hamiltonian structure.Comment: 10 pages (harvmac), LAVAL PHY-20-9

Scheduling optimization of parallel linear algebra algorithms using Supervised Learning

Linear algebra algorithms are used widely in a variety of domains, e.g machine learning, numerical physics and video games graphics. For all these applications, loop-level parallelism is required to achieve high performance. However, finding the optimal way to schedule the workload between threads is a non-trivial problem because it depends on the structure of the algorithm being parallelized and the hardware the executable is run on. In the realm of Asynchronous Many Task runtime systems, a key aspect of the scheduling problem is predicting the proper chunk-size, where the chunk-size is defined as the number of iterations of a for-loop assigned to a thread as one task. In this paper, we study the applications of supervised learning models to predict the chunk-size which yields maximum performance on multiple parallel linear algebra operations using the HPX backend of Blaze's linear algebra library. More precisely, we generate our training and tests sets by measuring performance of the application with different chunk-sizes for multiple linear algebra operations; vector-addition, matrix-vector-multiplication, matrix-matrix addition and matrix-matrix-multiplication. We compare the use of logistic regression, neural networks and decision trees with a newly developed decision tree based model in order to predict the optimal value for chunk-size. Our results show that classical decision trees and our custom decision tree model are able to forecast a chunk-size which results in good performance for the linear algebra operations.Comment: Accepted at HPCML1

Novel Quenched Disorder Fixed Point in a Two-Temperature Lattice Gas

We investigate the effects of quenched randomness on the universal properties of a two-temperature lattice gas. The disorder modifies the dynamical transition rates of the system in an anisotropic fashion, giving rise to a new fixed point. We determine the associated scaling form of the structure factor, quoting critical exponents to two-loop order in an expansion around the upper critical dimension d$_c=7$. The close relationship with another quenched disorder fixed point, discovered recently in this model, is discussed.Comment: 11 pages, no figures, RevTe