An international study of the prevalence of substance use in patients with delusional infestation

To the Editor: Delusional infestation (DI) is a disorder characterised by the belief of being infested with living organisms or objects.1 Insects and worms are the most common concerns. Objects, such as fibers or threads, are increasingly reported by patients. DI can be primary or secondary to mental illness, physical illness, prescribed medication, and misuse of substances such as amphetamines, cannabis, codeine, cocaine, or opiates. Dermatologists are usually the specialists to whom a patient with DI is referred because patients believe that they have primarily a skin diseas

A Genome-Wide Association Study of Diabetic Kidney Disease in Subjects With Type 2 Diabetes

dentification of sequence variants robustly associated with predisposition to diabetic kidney disease (DKD) has the potential to provide insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms responsible. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of DKD in type 2 diabetes (T2D) using eight complementary dichotomous and quantitative DKD phenotypes: the principal dichotomous analysis involved 5,717 T2D subjects, 3,345 with DKD. Promising association signals were evaluated in up to 26,827 subjects with T2D (12,710 with DKD). A combined T1D+T2D GWAS was performed using complementary data available for subjects with T1D, which, with replication samples, involved up to 40,340 subjects with diabetes (18,582 with DKD). Analysis of specific DKD phenotypes identified a novel signal near GABRR1 (rs9942471, P = 4.5 x 10(-8)) associated with microalbuminuria in European T2D case subjects. However, no replication of this signal was observed in Asian subjects with T2D or in the equivalent T1D analysis. There was only limited support, in this substantially enlarged analysis, for association at previously reported DKD signals, except for those at UMOD and PRKAG2, both associated with estimated glomerular filtration rate. We conclude that, despite challenges in addressing phenotypic heterogeneity, access to increased sample sizes will continue to provide more robust inference regarding risk variant discovery for DKD.Peer reviewe

Program understanding, the narrative hypothesis

La compréhension de programmes, jouant un rôle clé dans le développement et la maintenance de logiciels, a été abondamment détaillée et étudiée durant les dernières décennies. Beaucoup de modèles ont été proposés pour représenter les processus et techniques impliqués dans cette activité fondamentale. Pourtant, plutôt que de modéliser ce qu’est la compréhension à proprement parler, la plupart de ces études se concentrent sur les stratégies et techniques utilisées par les ingénieurs durant la maintenance d’un logiciel. Malheureusement, identifier les méthodes et techniques utilisés n’apporte que très peu d’information sur la compréhension elle-même. Ainsi, comment améliorer ou optimiser un tel processus sans connaître l’objectif de ce processus : comment évaluer la validité et l’efficacité de nouvelles méthodes proposées ou identifiées ? L’objectif de cette thèse est de proposer une définition opérationnelle de la compréhension de logiciels au travers d'un modèle cognitif et d’étudier les contraintes et limitations qui en découle

Program understanding models ::an historical overview and a classification

During the last three decades several hundred papers have been published on the broad topic of “program comprehension”. The goal was always the same: to develop models and tools to help developers with program understanding during program maintenance. However few authors targeted the more fundamental question: “what is program understanding” or, other words, proposed a model of program understanding. Then we reviewed the proposed program understanding models. We found the papers to be classifiable in three period of time in accordance with the following three subtopics: the process, the tools and the goals. Interestingly, studying the fundamental goal came after the tools. We conclude by highlighting that it is required to go back to the fundamental question to have any chance to develop effective tools to help with program understanding which is the most costly part of program maintenance

WebSound: a generic Web sonification tool allowing HCI researchers to dynamically create new access modalities

The World Wide Web (WWW) has recently become the main source of digital information accessible everywhere and by everyone. Nevertheless, the inherent visual nature of Internet browsers makes the Web inaccessible to the visually impaired. To solve this problem, non-visual browsers have been developed. One of the new problems, however, with those non-visual browsers is that they often transform the visual content of HTML documents into textual information only, that can be restituted by a text-tospeech converter or a Braille device. The loss of spatial layout, and textual attributes such as boldface, italic, underline, color or even size should be avoided since they often bear visually important information. Moreover, typical non-visual Internet browsers do not allow visually impaired and sighted individuals to easily work together using the same environment. These new problems have to be solved with new alternative non-visual display techniques. This paper presents WebSound, a new gener..

Websound: A generic web sonification tool, and its application to an auditory web browser for blind and visually impaired users

Presented of the 6th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Atlanta, GA, April 2-5, 2000The inherent visual nature of Internet browsers makes the Web inaccessible to the visually impaired. Although several nonvisual browsers have been developed, they usually transform the visual content of HTML documents into textual information only, that can be rendered by a text-to-speech converter or a Braille device. The loss of spatial layout and of textual attributes should be avoided since they often bear visually important information. Moreover, typical non-visual Internet browsers do not allow visually impaired and sighted individuals to easily work together using the same environment. This paper presents WebSound, a new generic Web sonification tool and its application to a 3D audio augmented Internet browser (Internet Explorer 5.0) developed by the Computer Vision Group at the University of Geneva

Une démarche ontoterminologique pour la rétro-ingénierie de logiciels

International audienc

Visual analysis of density and velocity profiles in dense 3D granular gases

Granular multiparticle ensembles are of interest from fundamental statistical viewpoints as well as for the understanding of collective processes in industry and in nature. Extraction of physical data from optical observations of three-dimensional (3D) granular ensembles poses considerable problems. Particle-based tracking is possible only at low volume fractions, not in clusters. We apply shadow-based and feature-tracking methods to analyze the dynamics of granular gases in a container with vibrating side walls under microgravity. In order to validate the reliability of these optical analysis methods, we perform numerical simulations of ensembles similar to the experiment. The simulation output is graphically rendered to mimic the experimentally obtained images. We validate the output of the optical analysis methods on the basis of this ground truth information. This approach provides insight in two interconnected problems: the confirmation of the accuracy of the simulations and the test of the applicability of the visual analysis. The proposed approach can be used for further investigations of dynamical properties of such media, including the granular Leidenfrost effect, granular cooling, and gas-clustering transitions.ESA Topical Team No. 400010346