Internet-based psychoeducation for bipolar disorder: a qualitative analysis of feasibility, acceptability and impact

<p>Background: In a recent exploratory randomised trial we found that a novel, internet-based psychoeducation programme for bipolar disorder (Beating Bipolar) was relatively easy to deliver and had a modest effect on psychological quality of life. We sought to explore the experiences of participants with respect to feasibility, acceptability and impact of Beating Bipolar.</p> <p>Methods: Participants were invited to take part in a semi-structured interview. Thematic analysis techniques were employed; to explore and describe participants’ experiences, the data were analysed for emerging themes which were identified and coded.</p> <p>Results: The programme was feasible to deliver and acceptable to participants where they felt comfortable using a computer. It was found to impact upon insight into illness, health behaviour, personal routines and positive attitudes towards medication. Many participants regarded the programme as likely to be most beneficial for those recently diagnosed.</p> <p>Conclusions: An online psychoeducation package for bipolar disorder, such as Beating Bipolar, is feasible and acceptable to patients, has a positive impact on self-management behaviours and may be particularly suited to early intervention. Alternative (non-internet) formats should also be made available to patients.</p&gt

Predicting Remaining Useful Life with Similarity-Based Priors

Prognostics is the area of research that is concerned with predicting the remaining useful life of machines and machine parts. The remaining useful life is the time during which a machine or part can be used, before it must be replaced or repaired. To create accurate predictions, predictive techniques must take external data into account on the operating conditions of the part and events that occurred during its lifetime. However, such data is often not available. Similarity-based techniques can help in such cases. They are based on the hypothesis that if a curve developed similarly to other curves up to a point, it will probably continue to do so. This paper presents a novel technique for similarity-based remaining useful life prediction. In particular, it combines Bayesian updating with priors that are based on similarity estimation. The paper shows that this technique outperforms other techniques on long-term predictions by a large margin, although other techniques still perform better on short-term predictions.</p

A fault detection method for railway point systems

Failures of railway point systems (RPSs) often lead to service delays or hazardous situations. A condition monitoring system can be used by railway infrastructure operators to detect the early signs of the deteriorated condition of RPSs and thereby prevent failures. This paper presents a methodology for early detection of the changes in the measurement of the current drawn by the motor of the point operating equipment (POE) of an RPS, which can be used to warn about a possible failure in the system. The proposed methodology uses the one-class support vector machine classification method with the similarity measure of edit distance with real penalties. The technique has been developed taking into account specific features of the data of infield RPSs and therefore is able to detect the changes in the measurements of the current of the POE with greater accuracy compared with the commonly used threshold-based technique. The data from infield RPSs, which relate to incipient failures of RPSs, were used after the deficiencies in the data labelling were removed using expert knowledge. In addition, possible improvements in the proposed methodology were identified in order for it to be used as an automatic online condition monitoring system

Smoking‐induced genetic and epigenetic alterations in infertile men

Male fertility rates have shown a progressive decrease in both developing and industrialised countries in the past 50 years. Clinical and epidemiological studies have demonstrated controversial results about the harmful effects of cigarette smoking on seminal parameters. Some studies could not establish a negative effect by tobacco smoking on sperm quality and function, whereas others have found a significant reduction in sperm quality and function. This study reviews the components in cigarette smoke and discusses the effects of smoking on male fertility by focusing extensively on smoking‐induced genetic and epigenetic alterations in infertile men. Chromosomal aneuploidies, sperm DNA fragmentation and gene mutations are discussed in the first section, while changes in DNA methylation, chromatin remodelling and noncoding RNAs are discussed in the second section as part of epigenetic alterations

Characterization of Context Switch Effects on L2 Cache

Multitasking is common in most systems. In order to use the processor resources efficiently, a multitasking system schedules processes to run for certain intervals by switching (saving and restoring) their contexts. However, since processes bring their own data to the cache when they are running, context switching causes each process to suffer from more cache misses. The behavior of L2 cache misses due to context switches activities under different cache configurations, working-set sizes, and process priorities has not been sufficiently investigated. Analysis of this behavior will give insights about the reasons and ways to mitigate these misses. The first contribution of this paper is the characterization of how context switch misses at the L2 cache is affected by process priorities. The paper also characterizes the context switch effect with various cache configurations, including the size and associativity of the cache. Finally, it defines two types of misses that occur due to context switches. Replacement context switch misses occur when a process ’ working set is replaced by an interfering process. Reorder context switch misses occur due to reordering of lines by an interfering process, i.e. moving lines from more recently used to less recently used position. Through the characterization, we found that the number of context switch misses signifi-cantly increases with lower priorities. On average, on a Linux operating system, a process with the lowest priority suffers 15.4 × more L2 cache misses due to the context switch ef-fect compared to when time-sharing is not used, while the process with a relatively higher priority suffers only 1.2 × more misses. In addition, we observed that the impact of con-text switch is affected more by the priority of the process itself, rather than the priority of the interfering process. We also observed that reorder context switch misses increase with higher associativity. Finally, the context switch effect is strongest when a process ’ working set size is close to the cache size