1,801 research outputs found
Supporting novel home network management interfaces with Openflow and NOX
The Homework project has examined redesign of existing home network infrastructures to better support the needs and requirements of actual home users. Integrating results from several ethnographic studies, we have designed and built a home networking platform providing detailed per-flow measurement and management capabilities supporting several novel management interfaces. This demo specifically shows these new visualization and control interfaces, and describes the broader benefits of taking an integrated view of the networking infrastructure, realised through our router's augmented measurement and control APIs.
Aspects of this work have been published: the Homework Database in Internet Management (IM) 2011 and implications of the ethnographic results are to appear at the SIGCOMM W-MUST workshop 2011. Separate, more detailed expositions of the interface elements and system performance and implications are currently under submission at other venues. A partial code release is already available and we anticipate fuller public beta release by Q4 2011
Continuous sedation until death: The everyday moral reasoning of physicians, nurses and family caregivers in the UK, The Netherlands and Belgium
Copyright © 2014 Raus et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 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.Background - Continuous sedation is increasingly used as a way to relieve symptoms at the end of life. Current research indicates that some physicians, nurses, and relatives involved in this practice experience emotional and/or moral distress. This study aims to provide insight into what may influence how professional and/or family carers cope with such distress.
Methods - This study is an international qualitative interview study involving interviews with physicians, nurses, and relatives of deceased patients in the UK, The Netherlands and Belgium (the UNBIASED study) about a case of continuous sedation at the end of life they were recently involved in. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed by staying close to the data using open coding. Next, codes were combined into larger themes and categories of codes resulting in a four point scheme that captured all of the data. Finally, our findings were compared with others and explored in relation to theories in ethics and sociology.
Results - The participantsâ responses can be captured as different dimensions of âclosenessâ, i.e. the degree to which one feels connected or âcloseâ to a certain decision or event. We distinguished four types of âclosenessâ, namely emotional, physical, decisional, and causal. Using these four dimensions of âclosenessâ it became possible to describe how physicians, nurses, and relatives experience their involvement in cases of continuous sedation until death. More specifically, it shined a light on the everyday moral reasoning employed by care providers and relatives in the context of continuous sedation, and how this affected the emotional impact of being involved in sedation, as well as the perception of their own moral responsibility.
Conclusion - Findings from this study demonstrate that various factors are reported to influence the degree of closeness to continuous sedation (and thus the extent to which carers feel morally responsible), and that some of these factors help care providers and relatives to distinguish continuous sedation from euthanasia.The Economic and Social Research
Council (UK), the Research Foundation Flanders
(BE), the Flemish Cancer Association (BE), the Research Council of Ghent
University (BE), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NL) and
the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (NL)
ECCO: Edge-cloud chaining and orchestration framework for road context assessment
© 2020 IEEE. For road safety, detecting and reacting efficiently to road hazards is crucial and yet challenging due to practical restrictions such as limited data availability, which relies on network support. Moreover, from a system perspective we lack a computational model capable of providing to vehicles reliable and real-time assessment of the road context. As autonomous vehicles become widespread, the safety issues are further aggravated by the gap between cloud, roadside infrastructure and road users in terms of communication latency, software-hardware compatibility and data interoperability. To tackle this, we present ECCO: an orchestration framework that enables edge-cloud collaborative computing for road context assessment. ECCO can create on-demand task execution pipelines spanning multiple, potentially resource-constrained edge-nodes with the smart IoT infrastructure support. Our prototype lays the groundwork to support new services, which can use more efficiently the road infrastructure and deliver safety-critical applications for road users
Mental impact of Covid-19 among Spanish healthcare workers. A large longitudinal survey.
Aims
Longitudinal data on the mental health impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic in healthcare workers is limited. We estimated prevalence, incidence and persistence of probable mental disorders in a cohort of Spanish healthcare workers (Covid-19 waves 1 and 2) -and identified associated risk factors.
Methods
8996 healthcare workers evaluated on 5 Mayâ7 September 2020 (baseline) were invited to a second web-based survey (OctoberâDecember 2020). Major depressive disorder (PHQ-8 â„ 10), generalised anxiety disorder (GAD-7 â„ 10), panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder (PCL-5 â„ 7), and alcohol use disorder (CAGE-AID â„ 2) were assessed. Distal (pre-pandemic) and proximal (pandemic) risk factors were included. We estimated the incidence of probable mental disorders (among those without disorders at baseline) and persistence (among those with disorders at baseline). Logistic regression of individual-level [odds ratios (OR)] and population-level (population attributable risk proportions) associations were estimated, adjusting by all distal risk factors, health care centre and time of baseline interview.
Results
4809 healthcare workers participated at four months follow-up (cooperation rate = 65.7%; mean = 120 days S.D. = 22 days from baseline assessment). Follow-up prevalence of any disorder was 41.5%, (v. 45.4% at baseline, p < 0.001); incidence, 19.7% (S.E. = 1.6) and persistence, 67.7% (S.E. = 2.3). Proximal factors showing significant bivariate-adjusted associations with incidence included: work-related factors [prioritising Covid-19 patients (OR = 1.62)], stress factors [personal health-related stress (OR = 1.61)], interpersonal stress (OR = 1.53) and financial factors [significant income loss (OR = 1.37)]. Risk factors associated with persistence were largely similar.
Conclusions
Our study indicates that the prevalence of probable mental disorders among Spanish healthcare workers during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic was similarly high to that after the first wave. This was in good part due to the persistence of mental disorders detected at the baseline, but with a relevant incidence of about 1 in 5 of HCWs without mental disorders during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Health-related factors, work-related factors and interpersonal stress are important risks of persistence of mental disorders and of incidence of mental disorders. Adequately addressing these factors might have prevented a considerable amount of mental health impact of the pandemic among this vulnerable population. Addressing health-related stress, work-related factors and interpersonal stress might reduce the prevalence of these disorders substantially. Study registration number: NCT04556565post-print338 K
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Data analytics service composition and deployment on edge devices
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Data analytics on edge devices has gained rapid growth in research, industry, and different aspects of our daily life. This topic still faces many challenges such as limited computation resource on edge devices. In this paper, we further identify two main challenges: the composition and deployment of data analytics services on edge devices. We present the Zoo system to address these two challenge: on one hand, it provides simple and concise domain-specific language to enable easy and and type-safe composition of different data analytics services; on the other, it utilises multiple deployment backends, including Docker container, JavaScript, and MirageOS, to accommodate the heterogeneous edge deployment environment. We show the expressiveness of Zoo with a use case, and thoroughly compare the performance of different deployment backends in evaluation
New and updated stellar parameters for 90 transit hosts. The effect of the surface gravity
Context. Precise stellar parameters are crucial in exoplanet research for
correctly determining of the planetary parameters. For stars hosting a
transiting planet, determining of the planetary mass and radius depends on the
stellar mass and radius, which in turn depend on the atmospheric stellar
parameters. Different methods can provide different results, which leads to
different planet characteristics.}%Spectroscopic surface gravities have shown
to be poorly constrained, but the photometry of the transiting planet can
provide an independent measurement of the surface gravity.
Aims. In this paper, we use a uniform method to spectroscopically derive
stellar atmospheric parameters, chemical abundances, stellar masses, and
stellar radii for a sample of 90 transit hosts. Surface gravities are also
derived photometrically using the stellar density as derived from the light
curve. We study the effect of using these different surface gravities on the
determination of the chemical abundances and the stellar mass and radius.
Methods. A spectroscopic analysis based on Kurucz models in LTE was performed
through the MOOG code to derive the atmospheric parameters and the chemical
abundances. The photometric surface gravity was determined through isochrone
fitting and the use of the stellar density, directly determined from the light
curve. Stellar masses and radii are determined through calibration formulae.
Results. Spectroscopic and photometric surface gravities differ, but this has
very little effect on the precise determination of the stellar mass in our
spectroscopic analysis. The stellar radius, and hence the planetary radius, is
most affected by the surface gravity discrepancies. For the chemical
abundances, the difference is, as expected, only noticable for the abundances
derived from analyzing of lines of ionized species.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, accepted to A&
A new analysis of the WASP-3 system: no evidence for an additional companion
In this work we investigate the problem concerning the presence of additional
bodies gravitationally bounded with the WASP-3 system. We present eight new
transits of this planet and analyse all the photometric and radial velocity
data published so far. We did not observe significant periodicities in the
Fourier spectrum of the observed minus calculated (O-C) transit timing and
radial velocity diagrams (the highest peak having false-alarm probabilities of
56 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively) or long-term trends. Combining all
the available information, we conclude that the radial velocity and transit
timing techniques exclude, at 99 per cent confidence limit, any perturber more
massive than M \gtrsim 100 M_Earth with periods up to 10 times the period of
the inner planet. We also investigate the possible presence of an exomoon on
this system and determined that considering the scatter of the O-C transit
timing residuals a coplanar exomoon would likely produce detectable transits.
This hypothesis is however apparently ruled out by observations conducted by
other researchers. In case the orbit of the moon is not coplanar the accuracy
of our transit timing and transit duration measurements prevents any
significant statement. Interestingly, on the basis of our reanalysis of SOPHIE
data we noted that WASP-3 passed from a less active (log R'_hk=-4.95) to a more
active (log R'_hk=-4.8) state during the 3 yr monitoring period spanned by the
observations. Despite no clear spot crossing has been reported for this system,
this analysis claims for a more intensive monitoring of the activity level of
this star in order to understand its impact on photometric and radial velocity
measurements.Comment: MNRAS accepted (14/08/2012
Four-month incidence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among healthcare workers after the first wave of the Spain COVID-19 pandemic.
post-print499 K
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