The role of self-compassion and self-criticism in binge eating behaviour

Self-criticism and low self-compassion are implicated in the development and maintenance of binge eating. However, the association between these self-attitudes and binge eating symptoms remains unclear. Women with symptoms of Bulimia Nervosa (BN) or Binge Eating Disorder (BED) were randomised to either a self-compassion (n = 30) or self-critical rumination (n = 30) strategy following a negative mood induction. Responses to food cues (cue reactivity and affect) and calorie consumption in a ‘taste test’ were assessed. The self-compassion strategy was associated with a greater improvement in positive and negative affect following the negative mood induction. Despite the differential effects on mood, self-compassion and self-critical rumination led to similar self-reported food cravings and physiological reactivity to cues. However, participants in the self-compassion condition consumed significantly fewer calories, rated the consumed food as less pleasurable, and reported less desire to continue eating. The findings suggest that therapeutic strategies for cultivating self-compassion are associated with improved food-related self-regulation in the context of negative mood

Heap Reference Analysis Using Access Graphs

Despite significant progress in the theory and practice of program analysis, analysing properties of heap data has not reached the same level of maturity as the analysis of static and stack data. The spatial and temporal structure of stack and static data is well understood while that of heap data seems arbitrary and is unbounded. We devise bounded representations which summarize properties of the heap data. This summarization is based on the structure of the program which manipulates the heap. The resulting summary representations are certain kinds of graphs called access graphs. The boundedness of these representations and the monotonicity of the operations to manipulate them make it possible to compute them through data flow analysis. An important application which benefits from heap reference analysis is garbage collection, where currently liveness is conservatively approximated by reachability from program variables. As a consequence, current garbage collectors leave a lot of garbage uncollected, a fact which has been confirmed by several empirical studies. We propose the first ever end-to-end static analysis to distinguish live objects from reachable objects. We use this information to make dead objects unreachable by modifying the program. This application is interesting because it requires discovering data flow information representing complex semantics. In particular, we discover four properties of heap data: liveness, aliasing, availability, and anticipability. Together, they cover all combinations of directions of analysis (i.e. forward and backward) and confluence of information (i.e. union and intersection). Our analysis can also be used for plugging memory leaks in C/C++ languages.Comment: Accepted for printing by ACM TOPLAS. This version incorporates referees' comment

Program Synthesis using Natural Language

Interacting with computers is a ubiquitous activity for millions of people. Repetitive or specialized tasks often require creation of small, often one-off, programs. End-users struggle with learning and using the myriad of domain-specific languages (DSLs) to effectively accomplish these tasks. We present a general framework for constructing program synthesizers that take natural language (NL) inputs and produce expressions in a target DSL. The framework takes as input a DSL definition and training data consisting of NL/DSL pairs. From these it constructs a synthesizer by learning optimal weights and classifiers (using NLP features) that rank the outputs of a keyword-programming based translation. We applied our framework to three domains: repetitive text editing, an intelligent tutoring system, and flight information queries. On 1200+ English descriptions, the respective synthesizers rank the desired program as the top-1 and top-3 for 80% and 90% descriptions respectively

Slum rehabilitation in the context of urban sustainability: a case study of Mumbai, India

In the last two decades, migration from villages and small towns to metropolitan areas has increased tremendously in India. This leads to the degradation of urban environmental quality and sustainable development especially in the metropolitan cities. The problems faced by the people living in the urban areas of India have become major concerns for the government over the last two decades. Slums are considered to be the major issue within many urban areas; particularly problems related to transportation, population, health and safety. India is one of the fastest developing countries with many metropolitan cities (e.g. Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi and Chennai). To explore the effect of rehabilitation of slums on urban sustainability, part of Mumbai was selected as a case study. Compared to the other metropolitan cities in India, Mumbai is one of the biggest metropolitan regions and capital of the state of Maharashtra with many slums varying in sizes. In addition, every year millions of rupees are being spent to resettle and rehabilitate slums to make Mumbai sustainable. It is reported that around 6 percent of the total land holds nearly 60 percent of the total Mumbai population (CBC, 2006). From 1980 onwards, the rate of migration and the sprawling nature of slums into the city has become an major issue, although many organisations are working towards development of Mumbai, the conditions are not conducive to achieving urban sustainable environment as most of the organisations are not working on a united front. Also, various researchers have reported that to maintain the pace of sustainable urbanisation, a holistic approach to sustainable development needs to be considered. Considering today’s poor urban environmental quality in Mumbai, there are many projects under development and execution to improve the poor conditions. Also, the World Bank has funded many projects with the primary aim of improving the city’s land transport, health and education which affect thousands of families. The majority of families affected by urban development projects are located in slum areas which are under consideration for resettlement and/ or rehabilitation. The aim of this research is to examine slum areas and their effects on sustainable urban development. To accomplish the above aim, a case study based approach, engaging a series of face‐to‐face interviews, was used. As a part of this research, an urban development project funded by the World Bank to achieve urban sustainability in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) was explored. Also, several visits to other slums and rehabilitated areas were conducted to identify the quality of life in slums and rehabilitated areas. The data collected during the face‐to‐face interviews, was used for descriptive analysis considering various aspects (i.e. social, educational) of urban sustainability. Through this research, the reasons for slums and problems related to slums were explored. During the research, it is revealed that some people still think that urbanisation is responsible for unsustainable development and they are not in favour of resettlement and rehabilitation. This suggests that to achieve successful urban sustainability, other issues such as employment, education and general awareness are also required along with low‐cost mass housing

Study of infective morbidity following gynecological surgeries

Background: Post-operative wound infection is a common nosocomial infection all over the world. It is responsible for increase in physical and psychological stress to the patient. It also increases the cost of treatment due to prolonged hospitalization. Present study was carried to find out the post-operative wound infection, morbidity and the risk factors.Methods: Prospective cross sectional study was carried out at tertiary care teaching hospital for a period of six months. Consecutive 57 cases of surgical site infections (SSI) following obstetric and gynecological abdominal surgery were analyzed.Results: It was observed that the incidence of SSI was 2.8 percent. Overweight, previous laparotomy scars, emergency surgery and prolong labour were the common risk factors associated with the development of SSI. Certain epidemiological and environmental factors like under nutrition, rural  area residence, poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, poor general hygiene, Surgical site infections(SSI) were more commonly observed following emergency operations; laparotomies performed for large ovarian tumours, malignancies and ruptured ectopic pregnancies. Caesarean sections performed for prolong labour, prolong premature rupture membranes, prolonged second stage had more likelihood of development of sepsis. Occurrence of SSI resulted in significant prolongation of hospital stay.Conclusions: The incidence of SSI in the present study was within acceptable limits. Regular surveillance for SSI in the hospital and sensitization of staff regarding consequences of SSI would go a long way in further reduction in the rate of SSI

Towards a method for rigorous development of generic requirements patterns

We present work in progress on a method for the engineering, validation and verification of generic requirements using domain engineering and formal methods. The need to develop a generic requirement set for subsequent system instantiation is complicated by the addition of the high levels of verification demanded by safety-critical domains such as avionics. Our chosen application domain is the failure detection and management function for engine control systems: here generic requirements drive a software product line of target systems. A pilot formal specification and design exercise is undertaken on a small (twosensor) system element. This exercise has a number of aims: to support the domain analysis, to gain a view of appropriate design abstractions, for a B novice to gain experience in the B method and tools, and to evaluate the usability and utility of that method.We also present a prototype method for the production and verification of a generic requirement set in our UML-based formal notation, UML-B, and tooling developed in support. The formal verification both of the structural generic requirement set, and of a particular application, is achieved via translation to the formal specification language, B, using our U2B and ProB tools

Automated Validation of Insurance Applications against Calculation Specifications

Insurance companies rely on their Legacy Insurance System (LIS) to govern day-to-day operations. These LIS operate as per the companys business rules that are formally specified in Calculation Specification (CS) sheets. To meet ever-changing business demands, insurance companies are increasingly transforming their outdated LIS to modern Policy Administration Systems (PAS). Quality Assurance (QA) of such PAS involves manual validation of calculations implementation against the corresponding CS sheets from the LIS. This manual QA approach is effort-intensive and error-prone, which may fail to detect inconsistencies in PAS implementations and ultimately result in monetary loss. To address this challenge, we propose a novel low-code no-code technique to automatically validate PAS implementation against CS sheets. Our technique has been evaluated on a digital transformation project of a large insurance company on 12 real-world calculations through 254 policies. The evaluation resulted in effort savings of approximately 92 percent against the conventional manual validation approach.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, 1 algorithm code block, accepted for publication at ISSRE 2022 (industrial track

Comparative study of peri-operative outcome following laparotomy versus laparoscopic technique of abdominal hysterectomy for benign gynaecological lesions

Background: Laparoscopic technique of hysterectomy is becoming increasingly popular in developing and developed world. Laparoscopic hysterectomy is a minimal access procedure that allows patients to recover faster. The study was undertaken to assess the impact of two abdominal techniques (laparoscopic and conventional laparotomy) on various variables like operative time, hospital stay, complications and convalescence period.Methods: An observational longitudinal study was carried out at tertiary care centre. Two hundred and ten women, as per inclusion and exclusion criteria, who had undergone abdominal hysterectomy for benign uterine pathology, either by laparotomy (Group A) or by laparoscopic technique (Group B) during study period were included. Data was analyzed and compared by using different variables between two methods of hysterectomy, using percentages and Chi square test for normal distribution. P value less than 0.05 was considered significant.Results: The mean duration of surgery was 100 minutes in group A and 175 minutes in Group B. There were two cases (1.90%) of minor injury to urinary bladder in Group A and one case (0.95%) of thermal injury to urinary bladder in Group B. The mean blood loss was around 240 ml and 70 ml in Group A and B respectively. The need for postoperative analgesia was observed in 100% cases from Group A and 38.09% from group B. The average duration required for out of bed ambulation was 25 hours and 14 hours in Group A and B respectively. The mean hospital stay in group A and B was 7.5 days and 3.5 days respectively.Conclusions: Following laparoscopic hysterectomy, women had less morbidity, less need for post-operative pain relief, had early ambulation, short hospital stay and early resumption of routine activities at home as compared to women who had undergone abdominal hysterectomy by conventional method