Increased plasticity of the bodily self in eating disorders

Background: The rubber hand illusion (RHI) has been widely used to investigate the bodily self in healthy individuals. The aim of the present study was to extend the use of the RHI to examine the bodily self in eating disorders. Methods: The RHI and self-report measures of eating disorder psychopathology (EDI-3 subscales of Drive for Thinness, Bulimia, Body Dissatisfaction, Interoceptive Deficits, and Emotional Dysregulation; DASS-21; and the Self-Objectification Questionnaire) were administered to 78 individuals with an eating disorder and 61 healthy controls. Results: Individuals with an eating disorder experienced the RHI significantly more strongly than healthy controls on both perceptual (i.e., proprioceptive drift) and subjective (self-report questionnaire) measures. Furthermore, both the subjective experience of the RHI and associated proprioceptive biases were correlated with eating disorder psychopathology. Approximately 20% of the variance for embodiment of the fake hand was accounted for by eating disorder psychopathology, with interoceptive deficits and self-objectification significant predictors of embodiment. Conclusions: These results indicate that the bodily self is more plastic in people with an eating disorder. These findings may shed light on both aetiological and maintenance factors involved in eating disorders, particularly visual processing of the body, interoceptive deficits, and self-objectification

POLYPHONY IN THE EGYPTIAN CONTEMPORARY ARABIC NOVEL (A CASE STUDY OF GUANTANAMO)

Novel is one of the important written forms of the narrative fiction and due to being relatively long, creates a suitable atmosphere to bring different ideas and worldviews to the text and helps the writer mention different ideas and introduce different characters in the text. This paper aims at studying Guantanamo Novel by Youssef Ziedan, the famous Egyptian writer. The paper tries to apply Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony to Guantanamo novel and depicts the existing features of polyphony in it. The findings show that in Guantanamo, if a voice expresses its ideas, other voices will agree or criticize it. However, with further consideration, it is understood that the voices of the American characters are dominant over the Muslim characters and even the protagonist of the play. One of the significant features of the polyphony is the existence of intertextuality throughout the text. The writer brings quotations of Quran, hadith, poems and news and historical points in the first two hundred pages of the novel. The strongest contrast is between the American and Islamic characters and is seen between Sarah Klaus as an American psychologist and the Sudanic-Egyptian character of the play who is the novel’s protagonist. Youssef Ziedan has been successful in creating a polyphonic novel by Using different narrative modes and techniques such as stream of consciousness, religious and historic intertextuality, poetic language, decentralization, disinterestedness in presenting the voices and worldviews of characters

Automatic Detection and Classification of Identifier Renamings

RÉSUMÉ Le lexique du code source joue un rôle primordial dans la maintenabilité des logiciels. Un lexique pauvre peut induire à une mauvaise compréhension du programme et à l'augmentation des erreurs du logiciel. Il est donc important que les développeurs maintiennent le lexique de leur code source en renommant les identifiants afin qu'ils reflètent les concepts qu'ils expriment. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions le lexique et proposons une approche pour détecter et classifier les renommages des identifiants dans le code source. La détection des renommages est basée sur la combinaison de deux techniques: la différenciation des codes sources et l'analyse de flux de données. Tandis que le classificateur de renommage utilise une base de données ontologique et un analyseur syntaxique du langage naturel pour classer les renommages selon la taxonomie que nous avons défini. Afin d'évaluer l'exactitude et l'exhaustivité du détecteur de renommage, nous avons réalisé une étude empirique sur l’historique de cinq programmes Java open-source. Les résultats de cette étude rapportent une précision de 88% et un rappel 92%. Nous avons également mené une étude exploratoire qui analyse et discute comment les identifiants sont renommés, selon la taxonomie proposée, dans les cinq programmes Java de l’étude précédente. Les résultats de cette étude exploratoire montrent qu’il existe des renommages dans chaque dimension de notre taxonomie. Afin d’appliquer l’approche proposée aux programmes PHP, nous avons adapte notre détecteur de renommages pour prendre en compte les caractéristiques inhérentes à ces programmes. Une étude préliminaire effectuée sur trois programmes PHP montre que notre approche est applicable aux programmes PHP. Cependant, ces programmes ont des tendances de renommages différentes de celles observées dans les programmes Java. Cette thèse propose deux résultats. Tout d'abord, la détection et la classification des renommages et un outil, qui peut être utilisé pour documenter les renommages. Les développeurs seront en mesure de, par exemple, rechercher des méthodes qui font partie de l’interface de programmation car celles-ci impactent les applications clientes. Ils pourront également identifier les incohérences entre le nom et la fonctionnalité d'une entité en cas de renommage dit risqué comme lors d’un renommage vers un antonyme. Deuxièmement, les résultats de nos études nous fournissent des leçons qui constituent une base de connaissance et de conseils pouvant aider les développeurs à éviter des renommages inappropriés ou inutiles et ainsi maintenir la cohérence du lexique de leur code source.----------ABSTRACT Source code lexicon plays a paramount role in software maintainability: a poor lexicon can lead to poor comprehensibility and increase software fault-proneness. For this reason, developers should maintain their source code lexicon by renaming identifiers when they do not reflect the concepts that they should express. In this thesis, we study lexicon and propose an approach to detect and classify identifier renamings in source code. The renaming detection is based on a combination of source code differencing and data flow analysis, while the renaming classifier uses an ontological database and a natural language parser to classify renamings according to a taxonomy we define. We report a study—conducted on the evolution history of five open-source Java programs—aimed at evaluating the accuracy and completeness of the renaming detector. The study reports a precision of 88% and a recall of 92%. In addition, we report an exploratory study investigating and discussing how identifiers are renamed in the five Java programs, according to our taxonomy. Moreover, we report the challenges and applicability of the proposed approach to PHP programs and report our preliminary results of renaming detection and classification for three programs. This thesis provides two outcomes. First, the renaming detection and classification approach and tool, which can be used for documenting renamings. Developers will be able to, for example, look up methods that are part of the public API (as they impact client applications), or look for inconsistencies between the name and the implementation of an entity that underwent a high risk renaming (e.g., towards the opposite meaning). Second, pieces of actionable knowledge, based on our qualitative study of renamings, that provide advice on how to avoid some unnecessary renamings

Comprehension and change impact analysis of aspect-oriented programs through declarative reasoning

In this dissertation, we discuss an approach to support declarative reasoning over aspect-oriented programs, where the AspectJ programming language is deployed as a notable (and representative) technology. The approach is based on (i) the transformation of source code into a set of facts, and (ii) the definition and implementation of relationships and dependencies between different elements of the system into rules, stored in a Prolog database. Declarative analysis allows us to extract complex information through its rich and expressive mechanisms. Our approach has two contributions. First, it can improve the comprehension of AspectJ programs, and it can be deployed for any AspectJ-like language, like e.g. AspectC#, AspectC++. The second contribution is the provision of change impact analysis for AspectJ programs. Our method is automated and tool support is available. Expected beneficiaries of our approach include system maintainers performing tasks during the "change planning" stage of evolution

An investigation of the bodily self in eating disorders

The overall objective of this thesis was to examine whether individuals affected with an eating disorder (ED) have an altered experience of the bodily self in comparison to healthy control (HC) individuals. The secondary objective was to assess whether this hypothesised disturbance could be a state or trait phenomenon. This thesis proposes a transdiagnostic biopsychosocial model of the bodily self in EDs. The first three studies of the thesis used the rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm, which involves the illusion of ownership of a fake hand, to examine the proposed model. In the first study, it was found that individuals with an ED (n = 78) experienced the RHI (both perceptually and cognitively) significantly more strongly than the HC participants (n = 61). Individual differences in the experience of the RHI were significantly related to ED psychopathology, and the experience of the RHI was significantly predicted by interoceptive deficits and self-objectification after controlling for other ED and general psychopathology constructs. The second study extended on this study to examine whether these findings indicate a state or trait disturbance, by examining the RHI in individuals who had recovered from an ED (n = 28). Recovered individuals were intermediate to the acutely ill and HC group in the perceptual domain, whereas the recovered individuals were similar to acutely ill individuals in the cognitive domain, suggestive of a trait disturbance. The third study examined the effect of emotional distress on the experience of the bodily self as indexed by a modified version of the RHI task including an emotion induction component (e-RHI task). Emotional distress (whether in the form of body dissatisfaction or general distress) was not found to significantly alter the experience of the bodily self in those with an ED relative to HC individuals. The fourth study took a different methodological approach from the previous three studies and used a heartbeat detection task (HBDT) to focus specifically on interoception. The findings did not demonstrate significant differences between the ED and HC groups on interoceptive sensitivity as indexed by the HBDT. However, the HBDT did not appear to be a valid measure in this sample as floor effects were demonstrated. Overall, these findings provided preliminary support for the proposed model of an altered experience of the bodily self in individuals with an ED and the correlates of this disturbed bodily self. The findings from using the RHI task indicated an increased malleability of the bodily self in acutely affected individuals, with some evidence that this is a trait phenomenon also present in individuals recovered from an ED. More specifically, these studies provide evidence that heightened sensitivity to visual information about the body and reduced somatosensory information processing of the body are present in individuals with an ED as well as in recovered individuals, and are suggestive of a trait phenomenon. This thesis identifies the need for further research in this area, with the ultimate aim of translating these findings into clinical approaches for addressing body disturbances

Restructuring source code identifiers

In software engineering, maintenance cost 60% of overall project lifecycle costs of any software product. Program comprehension is a substantial part of maintenance and evolution cost and, thus, any advancement in maintenance, evolution, and program understanding will potentially greatly reduce the total cost of ownership of any software products. Identifiers are an important source of information during program understanding and maintenance. Programmers often use identifiers to build their mental models of the software artifacts. Thus, poorly-chosen identifiers have been reported in the literature as misleading and increasing the program comprehension effort. Identifiers are composed of terms, which can be dictionary words, acronyms, contractions, or simple strings. We conjecture that the use of identical terms in different contexts may increase the risk of faults, and hence maintenance effort. We investigate our conjecture using a measure combining term entropy and term context-coverage to study whether certain terms increase the odds ratios of methods to be fault-prone. We compute term entropy and context-coverage of terms extracted from identifiers in Rhino 1.4R3 and ArgoUML 0.16. We show statistically that methods containing terms with high entropy and context-coverage are more fault-prone than others, and that the new measure is only partially correlated with size. We will build on this study, and will apply summarization technique for extracting linguistic information form methods and classes. Using this information, we will extract domain concepts from source code, and propose linguistic based refactoring

Simplified Vehicle-Bridge Interaction for Medium to Long-span Bridges Subject to Random Traffic Load

This study introduces a simplified model for bridge-vehicle interaction for medium- to long-span bridges subject to random traffic loads. Previous studies have focused on calculating the exact response of the vehicle or the bridge based on an interaction force derived from the compatibility between two systems. This process requires multiple iterations per time step per vehicle until the compatibility is reached. When a network of vehicles is considered, the compatibility equation turns to a system of coupled equations which dramatically increases the complexity of the convergence process. In this study, we simplify the problem into two sub-problems that are decoupled: (a) a bridge subject to random Gaussian excitation, and (b) individual sensing agents that are subject to a linear superposition of the bridge response and the road profile roughness. The study provides sufficient evidence to confirm the simulation approach is valid with a minimal error when the bridge span is medium to long, and the spatio-temporal load pattern can be modeled as random Gaussian. Quantitatively, the proposed approach is over 1,000 times more computationally efficient when compared to the conventional approach for a 500 m long bridge, with response prediction errors below $0.1\%$.Comment: submitted to the Journal of Civil Structural Health Monitorin