Delays to Care in Pediatric Lupus Patients: Data From the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance Legacy Registry.

OBJECTIVE: Prompt treatment for lupus is important to prevent morbidity. A potential barrier to early treatment of pediatric lupus is delayed presentation to a pediatric rheumatologist. To better understand factors contributing to delayed presentation among pediatric lupus patients, we examined differences in demographic and clinical characteristics of lupus patients within the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA) Legacy Registry with regard to time between symptom onset and presentation to a pediatric rheumatologist. METHODS: We analyzed data from 598 CARRA Legacy Registry participants for differences between those who presented early (withinonset), between 1-3 months (typical presentation), with moderate delays (3-12 months), and with severe delays (≥1 year). Factors associated with early presentation, moderate delay, and severe delay were determined by multinomial logistic regression. RESULTS: Forty-four percent of patients presented early, while 23% had moderate delays and 9% had severe delays. Family history of lupus, absence of discoid rash, and location in a state with a higher density of pediatric rheumatologists were associated with earlier presentation. Younger age, low household income ( CONCLUSION: Delays to care ≥1 year exist in a notable minority of pediatric lupus patients from the CARRA Legacy Registry. In this large and diverse sample of patients, access to care and family resources played an important role in predicting time to presentation to a pediatric rheumatologist

Computing Nash Equilibrium in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: A Simulation-Based Approach

This paper studies the problem of computing Nash equilibrium in wireless networks modeled by Weighted Timed Automata. Such formalism comes together with a logic that can be used to describe complex features such as timed energy constraints. Our contribution is a method for solving this problem using Statistical Model Checking. The method has been implemented in UPPAAL model checker and has been applied to the analysis of Aloha CSMA/CD and IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA protocols.Comment: In Proceedings IWIGP 2012, arXiv:1202.422

Cidofovir for the Treatment of Recurrent Respiratory Papillomatosis: A Review of the Literature

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90089/1/phco.2005.25.7.977.pd

When and where to transfer for Bayesian network parameter learning

This work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC-2013-AdG339182-BAYES-KNOWLEDGE) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 640891. YZ is supported by China Scholarship Council (CSC)/Queen Mary Joint PhD scholarships and National Natural Science Foundation of China (61273322, 71471174)

Imagining the highway:Anticipating infrastructural and environmental change in Belize

This article examines the social and political, as well physical, construction of infrastructure, by attending to the implications of a highway yet to be built. In southern Belize, where the development of rural road networks figures strongly in historical narratives of political and environmental change, the recent paving of a major domestic highway has had distinctive implications for livelihoods and land rights among the predominantly Maya population of rural Toledo district. At the time of research, a plan for a new paved highway to the Guatemalan border animated longstanding debates over territoriality, environment and development, even as the details remained elusive. Bringing political ecology into conversation with attention to the perception of sensory environments, and the affective power of anticipation, I argue for extending anthropological conversations about infrastructure to encompass the meanings and consequences of imagined infrastructures for the ways people encounter, experience and enact social and environmental change

Distributed Parametric and Statistical Model Checking

Statistical Model Checking (SMC) is a trade-off between testing and formal verification. The core idea of the approach is to conduct some simulations of the system and verify if they satisfy some given property. In this paper we show that SMC is easily parallelizable on a master/slaves architecture by introducing a series of algorithms that scale almost linearly with respect to the number of slave computers. Our approach has been implemented in the UPPAAL SMC toolset and applied on non-trivial case studies.Comment: In Proceedings PDMC 2011, arXiv:1111.006

Marking Stress ExPLICitly in Written English Fosters Rhythm in the Reader’s Inner Voice

Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in the last line of poems. In experiment 2, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in heteronyms embedded in prose. As predicted by linguistic theories, when the stylistic alterations mapped onto the rhythmic pulses of the poems, and the lexically stressed syllables of the heteronyms, silent readers rated these alterations as more helpful compared with the incongruous conditions. In experiment 2, readers’ inner voices were more tuned to the prosodic nuances of the first syllable than the second in the bisyllabic heteronyms. This prosodic tuning for the first syllable in a word was likely afforded by the strong tendency for stress to appear word-initially. In addition, the stylistically marked stress was viewed as more helpful in the early half of the sentence, when readers likely recruited more bottom-up processes. In both experiments, prior exposure to poetry was related to a refined prosodic awareness. In experiment 2, exposure to poetry predicted participants’ prosody sensitivity, after controlling for the other predictors of academic achievement. The authors’ ongoing studies are evaluating whether marking stress explicitly in written English might aid struggling readers and late speakers of English

Star Formation in Ram Pressure Stripped Tails

We investigate the impact of star formation and feedback on ram pressure stripping using high-resolution adaptive mesh simulations, building on a previous series of papers that systematically investigated stripping using a realistic model for the interstellar medium, but without star formation. We find that star formation does not significantly affect the rate at which stripping occurs, and only has a slight impact on the density and temperature distribution of the stripped gas, indicating that our previous (gas-only) results are unaffected. For our chosen (moderate) ram pressure strength, stripping acts to truncate star formation in the disk over a few hundred million years, and does not lead to a burst of star formation. Star formation in the bulge is slightly enhanced, but the resulting change in the bulge-to-disk ratio is insignificant. We find that stars do form in the tail, primarily from gas that is ablated from the disk and the cools and condenses in the turbulent wake. The star formation rate in the tail is low, and any contribution to the intracluster light is likely to be very small. We argue that star formation in the tail depends primarily on the pressure in the intracluster medium, rather than the ram pressure strength. Finally, we compare to observations of star formation in stripped tails, finding that many of the discrepancies between our simulation and observed wakes can be accounted for by different intracluster medium pressures.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures, accepted to MNRA