On Fluctuations of Conserved Charges : Lattice Results Versus Hadron Resonance Gas

We compare recent lattice results on fluctuations and correlations of strangeness, baryon number and electric charge obtained with p4 improved staggered action with the prediction of hadron resonance gas model. We show that hadron resonance gas can describe these fluctuations reasonably well if the hadron properties are as calculated on the lattice.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, uses jpconf.cls, to appear in the proceedings of 26th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamic

The applicability of causal dissipative hydrodynamics to relativistic heavy ion collisions

We utilize nonequilibrium covariant transport theory to determine the region of validity of causal Israel-Stewart dissipative hydrodynamics (IS) and Navier-Stokes theory (NS) for relativistic heavy ion physics applications. A massless ideal gas with 2->2 interactions is considered in a 0+1D Bjorken scenario, appropriate for the early longitudinal expansion stage of the collision. In the scale invariant case of a constant shear viscosity to entropy density ratio eta/s ~ const, we find that Israel-Stewart theory is 10% accurate in calculating dissipative effects if initially the expansion timescale exceeds half the transport mean free path tau0/lambda0 > ~2. The same accuracy with Navier-Stokes requires three times larger tau0/lambda0 > ~6. For dynamics driven by a constant cross section, on the other hand, about 50% larger tau0/lambda0 > ~3 (IS) and ~9 (NS) are needed. For typical applications at RHIC energies s_{NN}**(1/2) ~ 100-200 GeV, these limits imply that even the Israel-Stewart approach becomes marginal when eta/s > ~0.15. In addition, we find that the 'naive' approximation to Israel-Stewart theory, which neglects products of gradients and dissipative quantities, has an even smaller range of applicability than Navier-Stokes. We also obtain analytic Israel-Stewart and Navier-Stokes solutions in 0+1D, and present further tests for numerical dissipative hydrodynamics codes in 1+1, 2+1, and 3+1D based on generalized conservation laws.Comment: 30 pages, 26 EPS figures, revtex stylefil

Perceived Stress During COVID-19 Pandemic: The Malaysian Nurses Experience

Research shows that nurses are one of the most vulnerable categories of professionals to develop stress and other problems due to the nature of their job. Thus the objective of this study is to describe the perceived stress experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic among Malaysian nurses. A cross-sectional study was conducted through an online form involving 319 randomly selected nurses from a teaching hospital on the east coast of Pahang, Malaysia, between January to December 2022. The perceived stress was measured using the Malay version 10-item Perceived Stress Scale, PSS-10 questionnaire. Descriptive and linear regression analysis was applied to measure the mean score of perceived stress and the association between perceived stress scores and other factors in this population. The study found that the total mean score of PSS-10 among the respondents was 19.1 ± 5.8. The three items with the highest mean scores were under the subscales “lack of self-efficiency” of the questionnaire (item-4, item-7, and item 5), while the item with the lowest mean scores belonged to subscales “perceived helplessness” (item-10). However, further analysis performed shows no significant association between perceived stress towards COVID-19 with sociodemographic and work-related factors among respondents. This study concluded that lack of self-efficiency was perceived as the main stress experienced by Malaysian nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, it is pivotal that the nurse’s manager and higher authority of the organization focus on improving the efficiency of these nurses through targeted programs focusing on problem-solving, emotional and on-the -job management plan, along with accessibility to resources, a positive work environment and support

A matter of words: NLP for quality evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles

Automatic quality evaluation of Web information is a task with many fields of applications and of great relevance, especially in critical domains like the medical one. We move from the intuition that the quality of content of medical Web documents is affected by features related with the specific domain. First, the usage of a specific vocabulary (Domain Informativeness); then, the adoption of specific codes (like those used in the infoboxes of Wikipedia articles) and the type of document (e.g., historical and technical ones). In this paper, we propose to leverage specific domain features to improve the results of the evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles. In particular, we evaluate the articles adopting an "actionable" model, whose features are related to the content of the articles, so that the model can also directly suggest strategies for improving a given article quality. We rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and dictionaries-based techniques in order to extract the bio-medical concepts in a text. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by classifying the medical articles of the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, which have been previously manually labeled by the Wiki Project team. The results of our experiments confirm that, by considering domain-oriented features, it is possible to obtain sensible improvements with respect to existing solutions, mainly for those articles that other approaches have less correctly classified. Other than being interesting by their own, the results call for further research in the area of domain specific features suitable for Web data quality assessment

“Don’t Knock the Rock”: Making Popular Music Collections a Part of Your Archives

Documenting and chronicling regional music scenes can be a difficult venture for an archival repository. Unlike records that originate from an individual or within an organization, those of music scenes are often ephemeral, scattered, and hidden from scholarly communities. Collectors and creators of these materials sometimes underestimate their enduring historical value. Or conversely, they may be unaware of the role that archival repositories play in their community and therefore be reluctant to donate their materials. Repositories themselves may be unprepared for the challenges associated with collecting these materials, including unique donor relations strategies and content in diverse media formats. The panelists in this session represent a diverse range of experience with musical materials and will explore the successes, failures, trials, and tribulations of their attempts to document popular and local music scenes in their respective archival repositories. In discussing their own attempts at documenting scenes in Champaign, Illinois; Dayton and Cleveland, Ohio; and Louisville, Kentucky, panelists will address the common concerns that arise in preservation efforts of this nature, including donor relations, community outreach, accessibility, documentation strategies, and making the case for collecting these materials to administration, peers, and library friends groups

Usefulness of Post-coronary Dilation to Prevent Recurrent Myocardial Infarction in Patients Treated With Percutaneous Coronary Intervention for Acute Coronary Syndrome (from the BASE ACS Trial)

Stent underexpansion is associated with worse outcome after stent implantation. Whether post-dilation (PD) improves outcome in patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) remains unclear. We performed post hoc analysis of outcome in patients from the BASE ACS (A prospective randomized comparison of titanium-nitride-oxide-coated bioactive stents with everolimus-eluting stents in acute coronary syndrome) trial who underwent PD versus those who did not. The BASE ACS trial randomized 827 patients (1:1) with ACS to receive either titanium-nitride-oxide coated bioactive stents or everolimus-eluting stents. The primary end point was major adverse cardiac events (MACE): a composite of cardiac death, nonfatal myocardial infarction (MI), or ischemia-driven target lesion revascularization. Follow-up was planned at 12 months and yearly thereafter for up to 7 years. Of 827 patients enrolled in the BASE ACS trial, 357 (43.2%) underwent PD. Median follow-up duration was 5 years. Patients who, underwent PD had less frequent nonfatal MI events at long-term follow-up, compared with those who did not (4.5% vs 8.5%, respectively, p = 0.02). The rates of MACE (15.7% vs 15.1%, respectively, p = 0.81), and the other endpoints, were not significantly different (p >0.5 for all). The results were consistent in propensity score matched analysis (270 pairs). In patients treated with bioactive stents, those who underwent PD had a trend for a fewer nonfatal MI events (p = 0.076). Comparably, in patients treated with everofimus-eluting stents, MACE and all the individual end points were comparable (p >0.5 for all). In conclusion, patients treated with early percutaneous coronary intervention for ACS who underwent PD had less frequent nonfatal MI events at long-term follow-up, compared with those who did not; MACE rates were not significantly different. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Fuzzy XPath : using fuzzy logic and IR features to approximately query XML documents

XML has become a key technology for interoperability, providing a common data model to applications. However, diverse data modeling choices may lead to heterogeneous XML structure and content. In this paper, information retrieval and database-related techniques have been jointly applied to effectively tolerate XML data diversity in the evaluation of flexible queries. Approximate structure and content matching is supported via a straightforward extension to standard XPath syntax. Also, we outline a query execution technique representing a first step toward efficiently addressing structural pattern queries together with predicate support over XML elements content

Flexible extension of XPath to improve XML querying

This work presents a flexible XML selection language, FleXPath which allows the formulation of flexible constraints on both structure and content of XML documents. Some experimental results, obtained with a preliminary prototype, are described in order to show that the idea promises good results