Association between obstructive apnea syndrome during sleep and damages to anterior labyrinth: Our experience

The obstructive sleep apnea syndrome is a chronic condition characterized by frequent episodes of collapse of the upper airways during sleep. It can be considered a multisystem disease. Among the districts involved, even the auditory system was seen to be concerned. It was enrolled a population of 20 patients after polysomnographic diagnosis of OSAS (Apnea Hypopnea Index > 10) and a control group of 28 healthy persons (Apnea Hypopnea Index < 5). Each patient has been subjected to Pure Tone Audiometry, Tympanometry, study of Acoustic Reflex, Otoacoustic Emissions and Auditory Brainstem Response. Moreover they were submitted to endoscopy of upper airway with Muller Maneuver and Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS). The values of ESS was 13.5 in OSAS group and 5.4 in control group. The tone audiometry is worse in all frequencies analyzed in OSAS patients, but within the normal range for both groups analyzed by 250 to 1000 Hertz. Otoacoustic emissions show a reduced reproducibility and a lower signal/ noise ratio in OSAS group (P <0.01)

The whip and the Bible: Punishment versus internalization

A variety of experimental and empirical research indicate that prosocial behavior is important for economic success. There are two sources of prosocial behavior: incentives and preferences. The latter, the willingness of individuals to “do their bit” for the group, we refer to as internalization, because we view it as something that a group can influence by appropriate investment. This implies that there is a trade-off between using incentives and internalization to encourage prosocial behavior. By examining this trade-off we shed light on the connection between social norms observed inside the laboratory and those observed outside in the field. For example, we show that a higher value of cooperation outside the laboratory may lower the use of incentives inside the laboratory even as it increases their usage outside. As an application we show that the model calibrated to experimental data makes reasonable out-of-sample quantitative forecasts

A logic for reasoning about knowledge of unawareness

In the most popular logics combining knowledge and awareness, it is not possible to express statements about knowledge of unawareness such as “Ann knows that Bill is aware of something Ann is not aware of” – without using a stronger statement such as “Ann knows that Bill is aware of p and Ann is not aware of p”, for some particular p. In Halpern and Rêgo (2006, 2009b) (revisited in Halpern and Rêgo (2009a, 2013)) Halpern and Rêgo introduced a logic in which such statements about knowledge of unawareness can be expressed. The logic extends the traditional framework with quantification over formulae, and is thus very expressive. As a consequence, it is not decidable. In this paper we introduce a decidable logic which can be used to reason about certain types of unawareness. Our logic extends the traditional framework with an operator expressing full awareness, i.e., the fact that an agent is aware of everything, and another operator expressing relative awareness, the fact that one agent is aware of everything another agent is aware of. The logic is less expressive than Halpern’s and Rêgo’s logic. It is, however, expressive enough to express all of the motivating examples in Halpern and Rêgo (2006, 2009b). In addition to proving that the logic is decidable and that its satisfiability problem is PSPACE-complete, we present an axiomatisation which we show is sound and complete

Application, validation and comparison in different geographical contexts of an integrated model for the design of ecological networks

The issue of the fragmentation of natural habitats is increasingly at the core of the scientific debate, yet it is not taken into account in planning tools, with particular reference to the dynamism and complexity of landscapes. As it has been recognised at a European level, in order to enable different species to remain in good functional status, a network of green infrastructures is required. The concept of “ecological island” is no longer sufficient to adequately protect the fauna and the ecosystem it lives in. As a consequence, ecological islands must turn into ecological networks. The Ecological connectivity refers to the way habitats are physically connected to each other and how easy it is for species to move in. Good ecological connectivity is fundamental to the effective conservation of biodiversity considering that most species and ecological functions provided by ecosystems (ecosystem services) require a much wider space than that available within the boundaries of a single protected area. The main objective of this paper is to critically compare the application of a model for the design of ecological networks to two very different environmental contexts. This model was first tested in a Mediterranean area (the Province of Reggio Calabria) in 2008; the goal was to integrate the traditional (physiographic and functional) approaches into the design of ecological networks by taking into account biological and orographic elements as well as the anthropic structure of the territory. In 2011, within the ECONNECT European project, the model was applied to the pilot region of South-Western Alps (including the French region of Provence-Alpes - Côte d’Azur and the Italian regions Piedmont and Liguria), which is one of the richest transnational districts in Europe in terms of biodiversity. In such a region, the issue of multidisciplinary ecological connectivity was tackled in order to provide a series of proposals aiming at the development of the ecological potential of the area. The two applications allowed to further investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the implemented model by integrating its validation with information on faunal presence, which obviated one of the major limitations occurred in the first application

Branching Structures in Elastic Shape Optimization

Fine scale elastic structures are widespread in nature, for instances in plants or bones, whenever stiffness and low weight are required. These patterns frequently refine towards a Dirichlet boundary to ensure an effective load transfer. The paper discusses the optimization of such supporting structures in a specific class of domain patterns in 2D, which composes of periodic and branching period transitions on subdomain facets. These investigations can be considered as a case study to display examples of optimal branching domain patterns. In explicit, a rectangular domain is decomposed into rectangular subdomains, which share facets with neighbouring subdomains or with facets which split on one side into equally sized facets of two different subdomains. On each subdomain one considers an elastic material phase with stiff elasticity coefficients and an approximate void phase with orders of magnitude softer material. For given load on the outer domain boundary, which is distributed on a prescribed fine scale pattern representing the contact area of the shape, the interior elastic phase is optimized with respect to the compliance cost. The elastic stress is supposed to be continuous on the domain and a stress based finite volume discretization is used for the optimization. If in one direction equally sized subdomains with equal adjacent subdomain topology line up, these subdomains are consider as equal copies including the enforced boundary conditions for the stress and form a locally periodic substructure. An alternating descent algorithm is employed for a discrete characteristic function describing the stiff elastic subset on the subdomains and the solution of the elastic state equation. Numerical experiments are shown for compression and shear load on the boundary of a quadratic domain.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Optimal Placement of Micro-services Chains in a Fog Infrastructure

Fog computing emerged as a novel approach to deliver micro-services that support innovative applications. This paradigm is consistent with the modern approach to application development, that leverages the composition of small micro-services that can be combined to create value-added applications. These applications typically require the access from distributed data sources, such as sensors located in multiple geographic locations or mobile users. In such scenarios, the traditional cloud approach is not suitable because latency constraints may not be compatible with having time-critical computations occurring on a far away data-center; furthermore, the amount of data to exchange may cause high costs imposed by the cloud pricing model. A layer of fog nodes close to application consumers can host pre-processing and data aggregation tasks that can reduce the response time of latency-sensitive elaboration as well as the traffic to the cloud data-centers. However, the problem of smartly placing micro-services over fog nodes that can fulfill Service Level Agreements is far more complex than in the more controlled scenario of cloud computing, due to the heterogeneity of fog infrastructures in terms of performance of both the computing nodes and inter-node connectivity. In this paper, we tackle such problem proposing a mathematical model for the performance of complex applications deployed on a fog infrastructure. We adapt the proposed model to be used in a genetic algorithm to achieve optimized deployment decisions about the placement of micro-services chains. Our experiments prove the viability of our proposal with respect to meeting the SLA requirements in a wide set of operating conditions

Tightness for a stochastic Allen--Cahn equation

We study an Allen-Cahn equation perturbed by a multiplicative stochastic noise which is white in time and correlated in space. Formally this equation approximates a stochastically forced mean curvature flow. We derive uniform energy bounds and prove tightness of of solutions in the sharp interface limit, and show convergence to phase-indicator functions.Comment: 27 pages, final Version to appear in "Stochastic Partial Differential Equations: Analysis and Computations". In Version 4, Proposition 6.3 is new. It replaces and simplifies the old propositions 6.4-6.

A Gamma-convergence argument for the blow-up of a non-local semilinear parabolic equation with Neumann boundary conditions

In this paper we study a simple non-local semilinear parabolic equation with Neumann boundary condition. We give local existence result and prove global existence for small initial data. A natural non increasing in time energy is associated to this equation. We prove that the solution blows up at finite time $T$ if and only if its energy is negative at some time before $T$. The proof of this result is based on a Gamma-convergence technique

No phenotypic differences for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) between women with and without type 1 diabetes mellitus.

CONTEXT: Women with type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM1) have a higher prevalence of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) than the general population. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to clarify, in DM1 women with PCOS (PCOS-DM1), the influence of insulin therapy and glycemic control and evaluate the hormonal and phenotypic differences with age-matched and body mass index (BMI)-matched women with PCOS without diabetes. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS: We evaluated 103 DM1 women with and without PCOS treated with intensive insulin therapy; 38 age-matched and BMI-matched women with PCOS without diabetes were compared in a cross-sectional study. OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS: Clinical, anthropometric, and metabolic parameters were evaluated. Hormonal evaluation and ovary ultrasound were performed during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle. RESULTS: Applying the diagnostic criteria of the Androgen Excess Society, 38 (36.89%) women with DM1 showed PCOS. The 38 PCOS-DM1 women showed no differences in treatment and glycemic control compared with DM1 women without PCOS. The only difference was a higher visceral adiposity index in PCOS-DM1 (1.21±0.70 vs 0.90±0.32; P=.002). PCOS-DM1 showed no phenotypic differences with age-matched and BMI-matched PCOS without diabetes. The hormonal pattern was similar except that higher levels of Δ4androstenedione were found in PCOS-DM1 (12.89±3.49 vs 2.79±1.75 nmol/L; P=.010). CONCLUSIONS: The women with PCOS-DM1 do not exhibit particular phenotypic characteristics compared with nondiabetic women with PCOS. However, this pathological disorder must not be underestimated because it could be an additional cardiovascular risk factor in women with DM1

Frontal brain asymmetries as effective parameters to assess the quality of audiovisual stimuli perception in adult and young cochlear implant users

How is music perceived by cochlear implant (CI) users? This question arises as "the next step" given the impressive performance obtained by these patients in language perception. Furthermore, how can music perception be evaluated beyond self-report rating, in order to obtain measurable data? To address this question, estimation of the frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha activity imbalance, acquired through a 19-channel EEG cap, appears to be a suitable instrument to measure the approach/withdrawal (AW index) reaction to external stimuli. Specifically, a greater value of AW indicates an increased propensity to stimulus approach, and vice versa a lower one a tendency to withdraw from the stimulus. Additionally, due to prelingually and postlingually deafened pathology acquisition, children and adults, respectively, would probably differ in music perception. The aim of the present study was to investigate children and adult CI users, in unilateral (UCI) and bilateral (BCI) implantation conditions, during three experimental situations of music exposure (normal, distorted and mute). Additionally, a study of functional connectivity patterns within cerebral networks was performed to investigate functioning patterns in different experimental populations. As a general result, congruency among patterns between BCI patients and control (CTRL) subjects was seen, characterised by lowest values for the distorted condition (vs. normal and mute conditions) in the AW index and in the connectivity analysis. Additionally, the normal and distorted conditions were significantly different in CI and CTRL adults, and in CTRL children, but not in CI children. These results suggest a higher capacity of discrimination and approach motivation towards normal music in CTRL and BCI subjects, but not for UCI patients. Therefore, for perception of music CTRL and BCI participants appear more similar than UCI subjects, as estimated by measurable and not self-reported parameters