Factitious Disorders and Cardiothoracic Surgery: The Ongoing Multidisciplinary Challenges of a Complex Case

Chronic factitious disorder, Munchausen's syndrome, can be challenging to manage—particularly when complaints and symptoms suggest medical or surgical emergencies. We present a patient whose problems have spanned many years and a great distance. Hopefully, with a greater awareness of this disease, as this patient continues to seek health care in many different hospitals, the implications of timely access to information, good histories and physical exams, and an index of suspicion can assist in potentially avoiding unnecessary, expensive, and invasive evaluations

Transparent system call based performance debugging for cloud computing

Abstract Problem diagnosis and debugging in distributed environments such as the cloud and popular distributed systems frameworks has been a hard problem. We explore an evaluation of a novel way of debugging distributed systems, such as the MapReduce framework, by using system calls. Performance problems in such systems can be hard to diagnose and to localize to a specific node or a set of nodes. Additionally, most debugging systems often rely on forms of instrumentation and signatures that sometimes cannot truthfully represent the state of the system (logs or application traces for example). We focus on evaluating the performance debugging of these frameworks using a low level of abstraction -system calls. By focusing on a small set of system calls, we try to extrapolate meaningful information on the control flow and state of the framework, providing accurate and meaningful automated debugging

Health and social problems associated with recent Novel Psychoactive Substance (NPS) use amongst marginalised, nightlife and online users in six European countries.

Continued diversification and use of new psychoactive substances (NPS) across Europe remains a public health challenge. The study describes health and social consequences of recent NPS use as reported in a survey of marginalised, nightlife and online NPS users in the Netherlands, Hungary, Portugal, Ireland, Germany and Poland (n = 3023). Some respondents were unable to categorise NPS they had used. Use of ‘herbal blends’ and ‘synthetic cannabinoids obtained pure’ was most reported in Germany, Poland and Hungary, and use of ‘branded stimulants’ and ‘stimulants/empathogens/nootropics obtained pure’ was most reported in the Netherlands. Increased heart rate and palpitation, dizziness, anxiety, horror trips and headaches were most commonly reported acute side effects. Marginalised users reported substantially more acute side effects, more mid- and long-term mental and physical problems, and more social problems. Development of country-specific NPS awareness raising initiatives, health and social service needs assessments, and targeted responses are warranted

Simultaneous CO2 Reduction/C2H6 Oxidation on a Solid Oxide Cell

The work describes the use of a single solid oxide cell design to produce value-added ethylene and carbon monoxid

Electrochemical-Oxidative Dehydrogenation (e-ODH) of Ethane

Ethane is upgraded to ethylene by this process. Reaction results and materials characterization will be presented

Black-Box Problem Localization in Parallel File Systems

Parallel file systems target large, high-performance storage systems. Since these storage systemsare comprised of a significant number of components (i.e., hundreds of file servers, thousands ofdisks, etc.), they are expected to (and in practice do) frequently exhibit “problems”, from degradedperformance to outright failure of one or more components. The sheer number of components,and thus, potential problems, makes manual diagnosis of these problems difficult. Of particularconcern are system-wide performance degradations, which may arise from a single misbehavingcomponent, and thus, pose a challenge for problem localization. Even failure of a redundant componentwith a less-significant performance impact is worrisome as it may, in absence of explicitchecks, go unnoticed for some time and increase risk of system unavailability.As a solution, this thesis defines a novel problem-diagnosis approach, capitalizing upon theparallel-file-system design criterion of balanced performance, that peer-compares the performanceof system components to localize problems within storage systems running unmodified, “off-theshelf”parallel file systems. Performed in support of this thesis is a set of laboratory experimentsthat demonstrate proof-of-concept of the peer-comparison approach by injecting four realisticproblems into 12-server, test-bench PVFS and Lustre clusters. This thesis is further validatedby taking the diagnosis approach and adapting it to to work on a very-large, production GPFS storagesystem consisting of 128 file servers, 32 storage controllers, 1152 disk arrays, and 11,520 totaldisks. Presented in a 15-month case study is the problems observed through analysis of 624GB ofinstrumentation data, in which a variety of performance-related storage-system problems are localizedand diagnosed, in a matter of hours, as compared to days or longer with manual approaches