Health warning: might contain multiple personalities - the problem of homonyms in Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators

Author name ambiguity is a crucial problem in any type of bibliometric analysis. It arises when several authors share the same name, but also when one author expresses their name in different ways. This article focuses on the former, also called the “namesake” problem. In particular, we assess the extent to which this compromises the Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators (ESI) ranking of the top 1% most cited authors worldwide. We show that three demographic characteristics that should be unrelated to research productivity – name origin, uniqueness of one’s family name, and the number of initials used in publishing – in fact have a very strong influence on it. In contrast to what could be expected from Web of Science publication data, researchers with Asian names – and in particular Chinese and Korean names – appear to be far more productive than researchers with Western names. Furthermore, for any country, academics with common names and fewer initials also appear to be more productive than their more uniquely named counterparts. However, this appearance of high productivity is caused purely by the fact that these “academic superstars” are in fact composites of many individual academics with the same name. We thus argue that it is high time that Thomson Reuters starts taking name disambiguation in general, and non-Anglophone names in particular, more seriously

The JKind Model Checker

JKind is an open-source industrial model checker developed by Rockwell Collins and the University of Minnesota. JKind uses multiple parallel engines to prove or falsify safety properties of infinite state models. It is portable, easy to install, performance competitive with other state-of-the-art model checkers, and has features designed to improve the results presented to users: inductive validity cores for proofs and counterexample smoothing for test-case generation. It serves as the back-end for various industrial applications.Comment: CAV 201

Theoretical Study of the Ti-Cl Bond Cleavage Reaction in TiCl4

In this work the kinetics of the TiCl4 TiCl3 + Cl reaction is studied theoretically. A variable-reaction coordinate transition-state theory (VRC-TST) is used to calculate the high-pressure limit rate coefficients. The interaction energy surface for the VRC-TST step is sampled directly at the CASPT2(6e,4o)/cc-pVDZ level of theory including an approximate treatment of the spin-orbit coupling. The pressure-dependence of the reaction in an argon bath gas is explored using the master equation in conjunction with the optimised VRC-TST transition-state number of states. The collisional energy transfer parameters for the TiCl 4-Ar system are estimated via a "one-dimensional minimisation" method and classical trajectories. The Ti-Cl bond dissociation energy is computed using a complete basis set extrapolation technique with cc-pVQZ and cc-pV5Z basis sets. Good quantitative agreement between the estimated rate constants and available literature data is observed. However, the fall-off behaviour of the model results is not seen in the current experimental data. Sensitivity analysis shows that the fall-off effect is insensitive to the choice of model parameters and methods. More experimental work and development of higher-level theoretical methods are needed to further investigate this discrepancy

An implementation of Deflate in Coq

The widely-used compression format "Deflate" is defined in RFC 1951 and is based on prefix-free codings and backreferences. There are unclear points about the way these codings are specified, and several sources for confusion in the standard. We tried to fix this problem by giving a rigorous mathematical specification, which we formalized in Coq. We produced a verified implementation in Coq which achieves competitive performance on inputs of several megabytes. In this paper we present the several parts of our implementation: a fully verified implementation of canonical prefix-free codings, which can be used in other compression formats as well, and an elegant formalism for specifying sophisticated formats, which we used to implement both a compression and decompression algorithm in Coq which we formally prove inverse to each other -- the first time this has been achieved to our knowledge. The compatibility to other Deflate implementations can be shown empirically. We furthermore discuss some of the difficulties, specifically regarding memory and runtime requirements, and our approaches to overcome them

Diagnosis and Decision-Making in Telemedicine

This article provides an analysis of the skills that health professionals and patients employ in reaching diagnosis and decision-making in telemedicine consultations. As governmental priorities continue to emphasize patient involvement in the management of their disease, there is an increasing need to accurately capture the provider–patient interactions in clinical encounters. Drawing on conversation analysis of 10 video-mediated consultations in 3 National Health Service settings in England, this study examines the interaction between patients, General Practitioner (GPs), nurses, and consultants during diagnosis and decision-making, with the aim to identify the range of skills that participants use in the process and capture the interprofessional communication and patient involvement in the diagnosis and decision-making phases of telemedicine consultations. The analysis shows that teleconsultations enhance collaborative working among professionals and enable GPs and nurses to develop their skills and actively participate in diagnosis and decision-making by contributing primary care–specific knowledge to the consultation. However, interprofessional interaction may result in limited patient involvement in decisionmaking. The findings of this study can be used to inform training programs in telemedicine that focus on the development of effective skills for professionals and the provision of information to patients

Safe abstractions of data encodings in formal security protocol models

When using formal methods, security protocols are usually modeled at a high level of abstraction. In particular, data encoding and decoding transformations are often abstracted away. However, if no assumptions at all are made on the behavior of such transformations, they could trivially lead to security faults, for example leaking secrets or breaking freshness by collapsing nonces into constants. In order to address this issue, this paper formally states sufficient conditions, checkable on sequential code, such that if an abstract protocol model is secure under a Dolev-Yao adversary, then a refined model, which takes into account a wide class of possible implementations of the encoding/decoding operations, is implied to be secure too under the same adversary model. The paper also indicates possible exploitations of this result in the context of methods based on formal model extraction from implementation code and of methods based on automated code generation from formally verified model

Field theories of paramagnetic Mott insulators

This is a summary of a central argument in recent review articles by the author (cond-mat/0109419, cond-mat/0211005, and cond-mat/0211027). An effective field theory is derived for the low energy spin singlet excitations in a paramagnetic Mott insulator with collinear spin correlations.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of the International Conference on Theoretical Physics, Paris, UNESCO, July 200

Diagnostic accuracy of Doppler ultrasound technique of the penile arteries in correlation to selective arteriography

In 63% of 265 patients with erectile dysfunction a relevant arterial inflow disturbance was found by Doppler ultrasound examination. Correlation between Doppler and arteriography in 58 patients showed an accuracy of 95% in detecting penile arteries and an accuracy of 91% in discovering a pathological arterial pattern (arterial anomaly or arteriosclerotic obstruction). In 15 patients the arterial inflow was measured additionally by Doppler ultrasound technique after intracavernosal injection of vasoactive drugs (IIVD) (7.5 mg papaverine and 0.25 mg phentolamine). This technique proved to be more reliable than in the flaccid state and markedly facilitated localization and assessment of pathological changes of the cavernosal arteries

Fetal abdominal wall defects in an Australian tertiary setting: contemporary characteristics, ultrasound accuracy, and outcome

Purpose: In this study, we aimed to comprehensively evaluate risk factors, ultrasound estimation of fetal weight, prenatal management, and pregnancy outcomes of gastroschisis and omphalocele at a metropolitan Australian hospital. Material and methods: This was a retrospective single-center cohort study from 2006 to 2014 at a tertiary hospital with colocated neonatal surgical facilities. Demographic, pregnancy, ultrasound, birth and neonatal data were compared between gastroschisis and omphalocele. Correlation between routine (Hadlock 1 &2) and specific (Siemer) estimated fetal weight (EFW) estimation formulae with birth weight (BW) was made for those 50 gastroschisis cases with ≥2 third trimester scans and last scan ≤2 weeks prior to birth. Results: There were 126 abdominal wall defects: 83 gastroschisis and 43 omphalocele. Consistent with international literature, the average maternal age was lower for gastroschisis and rates of smoking higher, while there were more intrauterine deaths and pregnancy terminations in omphalocele. Gastroschisis mothers were more likely living outside Sydney, had more infections in pregnancy and were followed with a larger number of antenatal visits, with a shorter period from the last visit to birth. In omphalocele pregnancies, amniocentesis was more likely performed, with more abnormal results than in gastroschisis fetuses. All EFW formulae had a good correlation between Z score for the last US and actual BW (ICC 0.693–0.815), with Hadlock 2 being the best. Siemer formula had the best correlation from first to the last scan. Gastroschisis newborns were born earlier (36.8 versus 38.2 wks p =.001), with smaller birthweight (2.52 versus 3.03 kg, p <.001), a longer request of intensive care (central line, parenteral nutrition, intubation) and second surgery, along with more multisystem complications (average 1.5 versus 0.7, p =.004) and a longer hospital stay (58.8 versus 36.8 d, p <.001). Conclusion: Demographic, antenatal, and pregnancy outcome data for abdominal wall defects correlated well with the international literature. Hadlock 1–2 gave the most consistent EFW estimate, with all formulae showing good correlation

Two-way multi-lane traffic model for pedestrians in corridors

We extend the Aw-Rascle macroscopic model of car traffic into a two-way multi-lane model of pedestrian traffic. Within this model, we propose a technique for the handling of the congestion constraint, i.e. the fact that the pedestrian density cannot exceed a maximal density corresponding to contact between pedestrians. In a first step, we propose a singularly perturbed pressure relation which models the fact that the pedestrian velocity is considerably reduced, if not blocked, at congestion. In a second step, we carry over the singular limit into the model and show that abrupt transitions between compressible flow (in the uncongested regions) to incompressible flow (in congested regions) occur. We also investigate the hyperbolicity of the two-way models and show that they can lose their hyperbolicity in some cases. We study a diffusive correction of these models and discuss the characteristic time and length scales of the instability