Enhancing the Quality of Life of Nursing Home Residents with Late Stage Alzheimer\u27s Disease and Related Disorders

Educational Objectives 1. Discuss the growing need for special programming and activities to improve the quality of life of nursing home residents with dementing illnesses. 2. Discuss program and activity options that have a positive impact on quality of life as measured by the resident\u27s mood, behavioral symptoms, cognitive skills, physical condition and medication use. 3. Review the responses of a resident to our unit’s therapeutic interventions

The invention of an international order: lessons from 1814

In 1814, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte. Drawing on a new book, Glenda Sluga explains how this coalition planted the seeds for today’s international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its centre

Heterogeneous computing architecture for fast detection of SNP-SNP interactions

The extent of data in a typical genome-wide association study (GWAS) poses considerable computational challenges to software tools for gene-gene interaction discovery. Exhaustive evaluation of all interactions among hundreds of thousands to millions of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) may require weeks or even months of computation. Massively parallel hardware within a modern Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) and Many Integrated Core (MIC) coprocessors can shorten the run time considerably. While the utility of GPU-based implementations in bioinformatics has been well studied, MIC architecture has been introduced only recently and may provide a number of comparative advantages that have yet to be explored and tested. We have developed a heterogeneous, GPU and Intel MIC-accelerated software module for SNP-SNP interaction discovery to replace the previously single-threaded computational core in the interactive web-based data exploration program SNPsyn. We report on differences between these two modern massively parallel architectures and their software environments. Their utility resulted in an order of magnitude shorter execution times when compared to the single-threaded CPU implementation. GPU implementation on a single Nvidia Tesla K20 runs twice as fast as that for the MIC architecture-based Xeon Phi P5110 coprocessor, but also requires considerably more programming effort. General purpose GPUs are a mature platform with large amounts of computing power capable of tackling inherently parallel problems, but can prove demanding for the programmer. On the other hand the new MIC architecture, albeit lacking in performance reduces the programming effort and makes it up with a more general architecture suitable for a wider range of problems

QSPR Models for Prediction of Aqueous Solubility: Exploring the Potency of Randić-type Indices

The development of QSPR models to predict aqueous solubility (logS) is presented. A structurally diverse set of over 1600 compounds with experimentally determined solubility values (AqSolDB database) is used for building the data-driven models based on multiple linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural network (ANN) methods to predict aqueous solubility. Molecular structures are encoded by numerous structural descriptors, including the connectivity index developed by Randić in 1975, and many later derived variations. To evaluate the potency of Randić-like descriptors in the structure-property relationship, we developed models based on two sets of descriptors, first using only Randić-like descriptors calculated with Dragon, and second using 17 commonly applied descriptors available in the AqSolDB database. All models were validated with external prediction sets, with the RMSE ranging from 0.8 to 1.1. Interestingly, the RMSE of predicted LogS values of models based only on the Randić-like descriptors were in average just 0.1 larger than the models with 17 descriptors preselected as suitable for modelling logS. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Gender, Peace and the New International Politics of Humanitarianism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

This chapter examines the changing ideas of peace and their connections with the longer history of humanitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century, using gender as an analytical focus. In particular, it explores the international and internationalist contexts of the emerging peace movement and international humanitarianism and their changing character; the gender dimensions of peace-thinking and policies, especially in the context of the League of Nations and the United Nations; and the ways in which feminism was a significant influence on the development of these two international bodies, even as women were sidelined in their operations. In the first half of the twentieth century, these international, intergovernmental organizations had as their central rationale the taming of warfare. The chapter analyzes the extent to which, in each case, they contributed to the institutionalization of new gendered international norms of pacifist and humanitarian activism

'Global Austria' and the League of Nations: Reframing Empire and Internationalism

In 1945, when Karl Polanyi was in London typing up his lecture notes on Nationalism and Internationalism, the Geneva-based League of Nations, perhaps the most extraordinary institution that had yet appeared in human history, was all but dead, without funeral and without fanfare, and a new international organization, and the foundations for the United Nations Organizaton were being laid on the other side of the world. Polanyi had already lived through through the great transformations of twentieth century international politics. His birth in 1886 in Vienna to a Jewish bourgeois family—his father was a railway entrepreneur, whose real name Pollacsek spoke to the diverse Habsburg origins—coincided with the international turn of the 1880s and 1890s. As we will see, in the Austrian empire as well as Europe’s other empires, bourgeois and aristocratic contemporaries were likely to identify with a ‘new internationalism’—the characteristics of which were a faith in international law, arbitration, and governance, as the means of a permanent peace

The International History of (International) Sovereignty

Historians have all but dispensed with a conventional chronology that marks the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) as the origin of a modern state-centric territorial sovereignty. Instead, they are accumulating evidence that, since at least the early nineteenth century, sovereignty stretches back to the imperial practice of intervention into polities elsewhere on humanitarian grounds. Imperial sovereignty was less uniform than imperial officials and cartographers asserted; instead, as Lauren Benton has argued, it was (and is) usually “more myth than reality, more a story that polities [told] about their own power than a definite quality that they possess[ed]”. Then there is the increasing number of historical examples of nonnormative, quasi-invisible forms of extra-territoriality that shaped the global imperial political architecture of the late nineteenth century: from the remaining principalities of the Holy Roman empire, and the conceptually distinctive practices of the Habsburgs as they separated cultural sovereignty from political sovereignty within their imperial territory, to the European claims to commercial and municipal authority in the treaty ports that dotted China’s seaboard and river system, carving out the spoils of war

Hour of Judgment: On judgment, decision making, and problem solving under accountability

Accurate judgment, adaptive decision making, and ability to find insightful solutions to challenging problems are some of the key qualities organizations aspire to instill in their members. In the service of this goal, designers of management systems draw on a variety of approaches, ranging from formal contracts to subtle “nudges.” At the core of many of these approaches is the idea of accountability, the use of external scrutiny to bring about desired beh

Empresas y bien común Caracterización de las empresas de Economía de Comunión y empresas B en la Argentina

El trabajo describe las características de dos tipos de empresas que presentan un concepto innovador en relación con los fines y modos de gestión: las empresas de Economía de Comunión y las empresas B. Se trata de firmas con espíritu de lucro, pero que incorporan los beneficios sociales y ecológicos –los bienes comunes– como objetivo esencial de su actividad. Llamadas "empresas civiles" por Bruni y Zamagni, constituyen un emergente que crece de manera notable en distintas partes del mundo y representan una comprensión de la empresa mucho más integral y sostenible que el paradigma convencional de la maximización del beneficio. La investigación expone asimismo los resultados de una encuesta y de entrevistas realizadas entre estas empresas en la Argentina