Evaluating Patient Preferences of Maintenance Therapy for the Treatment of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Discrete Choice Experiment in the UK, USA and Germany.

Introduction: With increasing availability of different treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), we sought to understand patient preferences for COPD treatment in the UK, USA, and Germany using a discrete choice experiment (DCE). Methods: Qualitative research identified six attributes associated with COPD maintenance treatments: ease of inhaler use, exacerbation frequency, frequency of inhaler use, number of different inhalers used, side effect frequency, and out-of-pocket costs. A DCE using these attributes, with three levels each, was designed and tested through cognitive interviews and piloting. It comprised 18 choice sets, selected using a D-efficient experimental design. Demographics and disease history were collected and the final DCE survey was completed online by participants recruited from panels in the UK, USA and Germany. Responses were analyzed using mixed logit models, with results expressed as odds ratios (ORs). Results: Overall, 450 participants (150 per country) completed the DCE; most (UK and Germany, 97.3%; USA, 98.0%) were included in the final analysis. Based on relative attribute importance, avoidance of side effects was found to be most important (UK: OR 11.65; USA: OR 7.17; Germany: OR 11.45; all p<0.0001), followed by the likelihood of fewer exacerbations (UK: OR 2.22; USA: OR 1.63; Germany: OR 2.54; all p<0.0001) and increased ease of use (UK: OR 1.84; USA: OR 1.84; Germany: OR 1.60; all p<0.0001). Number of inhalers, out-of-pocket costs, and frequency of inhaler use were found to be less important. Preferences were relatively consistent across the three countries. All participants required a reduction in exacerbations to accept more frequent inhaler use or use of more inhalers. Conclusion: When selecting COPD treatment, individuals assigned the highest value to the avoidance of side effects, experiencing fewer exacerbations, and ease of inhaler use. Ensuring that patients' preferences are considered may encourage treatment compliance

Plasma Physics

Contains research objectives and reports on three research projects.United States Atomic Energy Commission (Contract AT(30-1)-1842

Investigating Sharing in Memory for Life Systems

Memory for Life (M4L) systems store and organize life events captured by people in digital form using their cameras, mobile phones and so on. This paper describes M4L systems and the challenges for sharing digital events. Based on the challenges, an investigation is carried out in order to find a suitable technology that allows sharing of digital events according to the social network of a user. For this purpose, Web-based online social networks and peer-to-peer networks are particularly studied. The requirements for a social P2P model for sharing human digital events (HDEs) are suggested as future work

Intentionality and Agency in Security

Weiser [13] said that the best software is that which just blends in and disap- pears. Security software has been at odds with this principle as it attempts to attract user attention whenever possible—it has been largely designed to be visible to the user and ask them to take action. For example, anti-virus software proudly notifies the user how many viruses it has stopped while websites dis- play padlocks and security seals. Users are disrupted in their work by security notifications, asked to read warnings and decide whether they want to heed or ignore them.ERC 30722

Memory Threads: Organizing Digital Memories to Organize Social P2P Networks

Human remember their memories based on some reference which helps in recalling those memories. These references are usually common for many people, objects, places and so on. We organize human digital memories in the form of memory threads, according to the references of the memories in order to present information about different places, persons, etc. We organize peers in our Entity-based social peer-to-peer network according to memory threads in the form of memory threads-based communities. In our approach, peers having human digital memories with similar reference keys are grouped together under certain criteria. The criteria for thread selects peers with similar digital memories and arrange them in a specific order that define a structure of thread, which allows tracing via memories and accessing peers at different locations in threads easily. This approach is more scalable because it brings the most similar peer together in a community of similar peer. The known location of peer and data allows fast data searching. Also, a community presents useful information about the entity in network

Tackling Systematic Errors in Quantum Logic Gates with Composite Rotations

We describe the use of composite rotations to combat systematic errors in single qubit quantum logic gates and discuss three families of composite rotations which can be used to correct off-resonance and pulse length errors. Although developed and described within the context of NMR quantum computing these sequences should be applicable to any implementation of quantum computation.Comment: 6 pages RevTex4 including 4 figures. Will submit to Phys. Rev.

Combined application of nitrogen and phosphorus to enhance nitrogen use efficiency and close the wheat yield gap on varying soils in semi‐arid conditions

A primary driver of the wheat yield gap in Australia and globally is the supply of nitrogen (N) and options to increase N use efficiency (NUE) are fundamental to closure of the yield gap. Co‐application of N with phosphorus (P) is suggested as an avenue to increase fertiliser NUE, and inputs of N and P fertiliser are key variable costs in low rainfall cereal crops. Within field variability in the response to nutrients due to soil and season offers a further opportunity to refine inputs for increased efficiency. The response of wheat to N fertiliser input (0, 10, 20, 40 and 80 kg N ha‐1) under four levels of P fertiliser (0, 5, 10 and 20 kg P ha−1) was measured on three key low rainfall cropping soils (dune, mid‐slope and swale) across a dune‐swale system in a low rainfall semi‐arid environment in South Australia, for three successive cropping seasons. Wheat on sandy soils produced significant and linear yield and protein responses across all three seasons, while wheat on a clay loam only produced a yield response in a high rainfall season. Responses to P fertiliser were measured on the sandy soils but more variable in nature and a consistent effect of increased P nutrition leading to increased NUE was not measured