Coping with Persistent Pain, Effectiveness Research into Self-management (COPERS): statistical analysis plan for a randomised controlled trial

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated

Robust priors for regularized regression

Induction benefits from useful priors. Penalized regression approaches, like ridge regression, shrink weights toward zero but zero association is usually not a sensible prior. Inspired by simple and robust decision heuristics humans use, we constructed non-zero priors for penalized regression models that provide robust and interpretable solutions across several tasks. Our approach enables estimates from a constrained model to serve as a prior for a more general model, yielding a principled way to interpolate between models of differing complexity. We successfully applied this approach to a number of decision and classification problems, as well as analyzing simulated brain imaging data. Models with robust priors had excellent worst-case performance. Solutions followed from the form of the heuristic that was used to derive the prior. These new algorithms can serve applications in data analysis and machine learning, as well as help in understanding how people transition from novice to expert performance

Exploring Consumers’ Attitudes of Smart TV Related Privacy Risks

A number of privacy risks are inherent in the Smart TV ecosystem. It is likely that many consumers are unaware of these privacy risks. Alternatively, they might be aware but consider the privacy risks acceptable. In order to explore this, we carried out an online survey with 200 participants to determine whether consumers were aware of Smart TV related privacy risks. The responses revealed a meagre level of awareness. We also explored consumers’ attitudes towards specific Smart TV related privacy risks. We isolated a number of factors that influenced rankings and used these to develop awareness-raising messages. We tested these messages in an online survey with 155 participants. The main finding was that participants were generally unwilling to disconnect their Smart TVs from the Internet because they valued the Smart TV’s Internet functionality more than their privacy. We subsequently evaluated the awareness-raising messages in a second survey with 169 participants, framing the question differently. We asked participants to choose between five different Smart TV Internet connection options, two of which retained functionality but entailed expending time and/or effort to preserve privacy

Seroepidemiological Investigation of Toxocariasis in the Isparta Region of Turkey

Background: Toxocariasis is a common disease around the world. Our objective was to determine Toxocara seroprevalence in humans in the city of Isparta, Southwest Turkey, in respect of some determinants such as age, socio-economic level, residence in city center or rural area etc.Methods: Five hundred and thirty four individual participants from Isparta center and 85 from Asagi Gokdere village were included in the study. T. cati specific antibodies were ana­lyzed using excretory-secretory (ES)-enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) method.Results: T. cati antibodies were detected as positive in 73 (13.6%) of 534 samples which were collected from subjects living in the city center and 24 (28.2%) of 85 samples from Asagi Gokdere village. Toxocara seropositivity was detected among 15.6% of whole study group. The seroprevalence of toxocariasis was significantly higher among subjects from vil­lage than in subjects from city center (P=0.001). While gender, high school education, source of the water which is used, family income and geophagia/eating nail behaviors were the fea­tures which were detected as being associated with toxocariasis seropositivity (odds ratios= 0.5; 6.52; 3.61; 0.43; 0.13 respectively), owning dogs or cats and hand washing were de­tected as being not associated with toxocariasis seropositivity (P > 0.05). Furthermore, Toxo­cara seropositivity was significantly higher among subjects in 0-10 than >40 year-old group (P=0.02).Conclusion: It can be suggested that untreated lost pet population, environmental contamination, and way of life have influence on the epidemiology of toxocariasis

Solving Tree Problems with Category Theory

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long pursued models, theories, and techniques to imbue machines with human-like general intelligence. Yet even the currently predominant data-driven approaches in AI seem to be lacking humans' unique ability to solve wide ranges of problems. This situation begs the question of the existence of principles that underlie general problem-solving capabilities. We approach this question through the mathematical formulation of analogies across different problems and solutions. We focus in particular on problems that could be represented as tree-like structures. Most importantly, we adopt a category-theoretic approach in formalising tree problems as categories, and in proving the existence of equivalences across apparently unrelated problem domains. We prove the existence of a functor between the category of tree problems and the category of solutions. We also provide a weaker version of the functor by quantifying equivalences of problem categories using a metric on tree problems.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 201

Effect of catalyst pretreatment on chirality-selective growth of single-walled carbon nanotubes

We show that catalyst pre-treatment conditions can have a profound effect on the chiral distribution in single-walled carbon nanotubes chemical vapor deposition. Using a SiO2-supported Cobalt model catalyst and pre-treatment in NH3, we obtain a comparably narrowed chiral distribution with a downshifted tube diameter range, independent of the hydrocarbon source. Our findings demonstrate that the state of the catalyst at the point of nanotube nucleation is of fundamental importance for chiral control, thus identifying the pre-treatment atmosphere as a key parameter for control of diameter and chirality distributions.B.C.B acknowledges a Research Fellowship at Hughes Hall, Cambridge. J.R. thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for support.This is the original submitted version, prior to peer-review. The final version's available from ACS at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp4085348

Ear, nose and throat injuries at Bugando Medical Centre in northwestern Tanzania: a five-year prospective review of 456 cases.

Injuries to the ear, nose and throat (ENT) regions are not uncommon in clinical practice and constitute a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in our setting. There is dearth of literature on this subject in our environment. This study was conducted to describe the causes, injury pattern and outcome of these injuries in our setting and proffer possible preventive measures. This was a descriptive prospective study of patients with ear, nose and throat injuries managed at Bugando Medical Centre between May 2007 and April 2012. Ethical approval to conduct the study was sought from relevant authorities. Statistical data analysis was performed using SPSS computer software version 17.0. A total of 456 patients were studied. The median age of patients at presentation was 18 years (range 1 to 72 years). The male to female ratio was 2:1. The commonest cause of injury was foreign bodies (61.8%) followed by road traffic accidents (22.4%). The ear was the most common body region injured accounting for 59.0% of cases. The majority of patients (324, 71.1%) were treated as an outpatient and only 132(28.9%) patients required admission to the ENT wards after definitive treatment. Foreign body removal and surgical wound debridement were the most common treatment modalities performed in 61.9% and 16.2% of cases respectively. Complication rate was 14.9%. Suppurative otitis media (30.9%) was the commonest complication in the ear while traumatic epistaxis (26.5%) and hoarseness of voice (11.8%) in the aero-digestive tract were commonest in the nose and throat. The overall median length of hospital stay for in-patients was 8 days (range 1 to 22 days). Patients who developed complications and those who had associated injuries stayed longer in the hospital (P < 0.001).Mortality rate related to isolated ENT injuries was 1.3% (6 deaths). The majority of patients (96.9%) were treated successfully and only 3.1% of cases were discharged with permanent disabilities. Injuries to the ENT regions are not uncommon in our environment and foreign bodies constitute a significant cause of injury. Majority of these injuries can be prevented through public enlightenment campaigns

Tractable Pathfinding for the Stochastic On-Time Arrival Problem

We present a new and more efficient technique for computing the route that maximizes the probability of on-time arrival in stochastic networks, also known as the path-based stochastic on-time arrival (SOTA) problem. Our primary contribution is a pathfinding algorithm that uses the solution to the policy-based SOTA problem---which is of pseudo-polynomial-time complexity in the time budget of the journey---as a search heuristic for the optimal path. In particular, we show that this heuristic can be exceptionally efficient in practice, effectively making it possible to solve the path-based SOTA problem as quickly as the policy-based SOTA problem. Our secondary contribution is the extension of policy-based preprocessing to path-based preprocessing for the SOTA problem. In the process, we also introduce Arc-Potentials, a more efficient generalization of Stochastic Arc-Flags that can be used for both policy- and path-based SOTA. After developing the pathfinding and preprocessing algorithms, we evaluate their performance on two different real-world networks. To the best of our knowledge, these techniques provide the most efficient computation strategy for the path-based SOTA problem for general probability distributions, both with and without preprocessing.Comment: Submission accepted by the International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms 2016 and published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series on June 1, 2016. Includes typographical corrections and modifications to pre-processing made after the initial submission to SODA'15 (July 7, 2014

Super-resolving phase measurements with a multi-photon entangled state

Using a linear optical elements and post-selection, we construct an entangled polarization state of three photons in the same spatial mode. This state is analogous to a ``photon-number path entangled state'' and can be used for super-resolving interferometry. Measuring a birefringent phase shift, we demonstrate two- and three-fold improvements in phase resolution.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure