5,399 research outputs found
The Libyan civil conflict : selected case series of orthopaedic trauma managed in Malta in 2014
Aim: The purpose of this series of cases was to analyse our management of orthopaedic trauma casualties in the
Libyan civil war crisis in the European summer of 2014. We looked at both damage control orthopaedics and for
case variety of war trauma at a civilian hospital. Due to our geographical proximity to Libya, Malta was the closest
European tertiary referral centre. Having only one Level 1 trauma care hospital in our country, our Trauma and
Orthopaedics department played a pivotal role in the management of Libyan battlefield injuries. Our aims were to
assess acute outcomes and short term mortality of surgery within the perspective of a damage control orthopaedic
strategy whereby aggressive wound management, early fixation using relative stability principles, antibiotic cover
with adequate soft tissue cover are paramount. We also aim to describe the variety of war injuries we came across,
with a goal for future improvement in regards to service providing.Methods: Prospective collection of six interesting cases with severe limb and spinal injuries sustained in Libya
during the Libyan civil war between June and November 2014.Conclusions: We applied current trends in the treatment of war injuries, specifically in damage control orthopaedic
strategy and converting to definitive treatment where permissible. The majority of our cases were classified as most
severe (Type IIIB/C) according to the Gustilo-Anderson classification of open fractures. The injuries treated reflected
the type of standard and improved weaponry available in modern warfare affecting both militants and civilians
alike with increasing severity and extent of damage. Due to this fact, multidisciplinary team approach to patient
centred care was utilised with an ultimate aim of swift recovery and early mobilisation. It also highlighted the
difficulties and complex issues required on a hospital management level as a neighbouring country to war zone
countries in transforming care of civil trauma to military trauma.peer-reviewe
Extending Gossip Algorithms to Distributed Estimation of U-Statistics
Efficient and robust algorithms for decentralized estimation in networks are
essential to many distributed systems. Whereas distributed estimation of sample
mean statistics has been the subject of a good deal of attention, computation
of -statistics, relying on more expensive averaging over pairs of
observations, is a less investigated area. Yet, such data functionals are
essential to describe global properties of a statistical population, with
important examples including Area Under the Curve, empirical variance, Gini
mean difference and within-cluster point scatter. This paper proposes new
synchronous and asynchronous randomized gossip algorithms which simultaneously
propagate data across the network and maintain local estimates of the
-statistic of interest. We establish convergence rate bounds of and
for the synchronous and asynchronous cases respectively, where
is the number of iterations, with explicit data and network dependent
terms. Beyond favorable comparisons in terms of rate analysis, numerical
experiments provide empirical evidence the proposed algorithms surpasses the
previously introduced approach.Comment: to be presented at NIPS 201
Gossip Dual Averaging for Decentralized Optimization of Pairwise Functions
In decentralized networks (of sensors, connected objects, etc.), there is an
important need for efficient algorithms to optimize a global cost function, for
instance to learn a global model from the local data collected by each
computing unit. In this paper, we address the problem of decentralized
minimization of pairwise functions of the data points, where these points are
distributed over the nodes of a graph defining the communication topology of
the network. This general problem finds applications in ranking, distance
metric learning and graph inference, among others. We propose new gossip
algorithms based on dual averaging which aims at solving such problems both in
synchronous and asynchronous settings. The proposed framework is flexible
enough to deal with constrained and regularized variants of the optimization
problem. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the proposed algorithms preserve
the convergence rate of centralized dual averaging up to an additive bias term.
We present numerical simulations on Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) maximization
and metric learning problems which illustrate the practical interest of our
approach
Pinocchio's Pupil: Using Eyetracking and Pupil Dilation to Understand Truth Telling and Deception in Sender-Receiver Games
We report experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate. Subjects "overcommunicate" -- messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium. Eyetracking shows that senders look at payoffs in a way that is consistent with a level-k model. A combination of sender messages and lookup patterns predicts the true state about twice as often as predicted by equilibrium. Using these measures to infer the state would enable receiver subjects to hypothetically earn 16-21 percent more than they actually do, an economic value of 60 percent of the maximum increment
Members Only: The Need for Reform in U.S. Intercountry Adoption Policy
In the last five years, Americans have adopted nearly seventy thousand children from foreign countries. The trend of intercountry adoption, âthe process by which a married couple or single individual of one country adopts a child from another country,â is representative of the new globalized world, where families are formed and dissolved beyond the bounds of national borders. Although intercountry adoption has enabled many adoptive parents to form loving families and provide caring living environments for countless children, intercountry adoption is not without its share of problems. Corruption and abuse, such as child trafficking, have in many cases marred the process of intercountry adoption. These impediments to safe intercountry adoption led the international community to pass the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption in 1993. By signing the Convention, countries agree to âensure that intercountry adoptions are made in the best interest of the child and with respect for his or her fundamental rights, and to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children.â The Convention requires its members, who have signed and ratified the treaty, to follow certain protocols and procedures for intercountry adoptions between two countries that are members to the Convention. However, the Convention does not prohibit member countries from engaging in intercountry adoptions with nonmember countries. Thus, although the United States officially joined the Convention on December 12, 2007, and the Conventionâs rules went into effect on April 1, 2008, the United States still allows intercountry adoptions from countries that are nonmembers to the Convention. This Comment will examine the Convention in the context of intercountry adoption in the United States. Specifically, this Comment will focus on the effect that permitting the United States to continue intercountry adoption with nonmember countries has on attaining the Conventionâs goals. This Comment will argue that to effectuate the goals of the Convention, the United States must encourage nonmember countries to join the Convention and must eventually cease intercountry adoptions with nonmember countries that refuse to join. But to promote the best interests of the prospective adoptive children in nonmember countries, such a cessation must be done through a long-term, structured withdrawal, allowing nonmember countries time to develop their adoption infrastructure
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