Consulting (in Writing) to the Corporation: Principles and Pragmatics

Provenance information provides a useful basis to verify whether a particular application behavior has been adhered to. This is particularly useful to evaluate the basis for a particular outcome, as a result of a process, and to verify if the process involved in making the decision conforms to some pre-defined set of rules. This is significant in a healthcare scenario, where it is necessary to demonstrate that patient data has been processed in a particular way. Understanding how provenance information may be recorded, stored, and subsequently analyzed by a decision maker is therefore significant in a service oriented architecture, which involves the use of third party services over which the decision maker does not have control. The aggregation of data from multiple sources of patient information plays an important part in subsequent treatments that are proposed for a patient. A tool to navigate through and analyze such provenance information is proposed, based on the use of a portal framework that allows different views on provenance information to co-exist. The portal enables users to add custom portlets enabling application specific views that would facilitate particular decision making

Trust Assessment Using Provenance in Service Oriented Applications

Workflow forms a key part of many existing Service Oriented applications, involving the integration of services that may be made available at distributed sites. It is possible to distinguish between an "abstract" workflow description outlining which services must be involved in a workflow execution and a "physical" workflow description outlining the particular instances of services that were used in a particular enactment. Provenance information provides a useful way to capture the physical workflow description automatically especially if this information is captured in a standard format. Subsequent analysis on this provenance information may be used to evaluate whether the abstract workflow description has been adhered to, and to enable a user executing a workflow-based application to establish "trust" in the outcome

Recording Actor State in Scientific Workflows

The concept of “actor” provenance data – essentially data that a client or service actor may assert about itself regarding an interaction, is presented. Actor provenance data can be combined with assertions of interaction to enable better reasoning within a provenance system. The need for recording and maintaining actor provenance data is discussed, along with the description of an architecture that can enable such recording. The types of data that may be recorded are subjective, and dependent on the nature of the application and the eventual use that is likely to be made of this data. A registry system that allows monitoring tools to be related to user needs is described with reference to an application scenario

Evaluating provenance-based trust for scientific workflows

Provenance is the documentation concerning the origin of a result generated by a process, and provides explanations about who, how, what resources were used in a process, and the processing steps that occurred to produce the result. Such provenance information is important to improve a scientist’s ability to judge and place certain amount of trust on the generated data. We illustrate how provenance information associated with a workflow can be used to evaluate trust. This work is based on several use cases from a Bio-Diversity application. We also propose a simple architecture to illustrate our trust framework

Actor provenance capture with Ganglia

Provenance is generally defined as the documentation of a process that leads to some result, and has long been recognised as being fundamental to the development of problem solving mechanisms within Grid environments. The knowledge of how a particular result has been derived is just as important as the result itself within many e-Science experiments. We present the concept of "actor" provenance, which provides detailed information concerning the state of an actor at a particular time. We also demonstrate how actor provenance differs from "interaction" provenance between actors. We describe how actor provenance may be represented and recorded using monitoring tools such as ganglia. This is explained using a number of use cases in a Bio-Diversity application

Establishing workflow trust using provenance information

Workflow forms a key part of many existing Service Oriented applications, involving the integration of services that may be made available at distributed sites. It is possible to distinguish between an \abstract" workflow description outlining which services must be involved in a workflow execution and a \physical" workflow description outlining the instances of services that were used in a particular enactment. Provenance information provides a useful way to capture the physical workflow description automatically - especially if this information is captured in a standard format. Subsequent analysis on this provenance information may be used to evaluate whether the abstract workflow description has been adhered to, and to enable a user executing a work°ow-based application to establish \trust" in the outcome. An analysis tool that makes use of provenance information to assist in evaluating trust in the outcome of a workflow execution is presented. The analysis tool makes use of a rule-based engine, supporting a range of queries on the recorded information by one or more workflow enactors. The results of the analysis tool on a particular workflow scenario are presented, along with an experiment demonstrating how the analysis tool would scale as the granularity of the recorded provenance information was increased

e-TC: Development and pilot testing of a web-based intervention to reduce anxiety and depression in survivors of testicular cancer

e-TC is an online intervention designed to address common psychosocial concerns of testicular cancer survivors. It aims to reduce anxiety, depression and fear of cancer recurrence by providing evidence-based information and psychological intervention. This paper details the development and pilot testing of e-TC. During pilot testing, 25 men (with varying psychological profiles) who had completed treatment for testicular cancer, 6 months to 5 years ago (which had not recurred), used e-TC over a 10-week period and provided quantitative and qualitative feedback on the feasibility and acceptability of the programme. Six men also completed a qualitative interview to provide detailed feedback on their experiences using e-TC. Fourteen men (56%) completed at least 80% of the programme. Participants reported a high level of satisfaction with the programme. Men's limited time was a barrier to programme use and completion, and participants suggested that men with a more recent diagnosis and a higher level of distress may be more likely to engage with the programme. e-TC appears to be a feasible and acceptable online intervention for survivors of testicular cancer. Findings from this study are currently being used to refine e-TC and guide the design of a larger efficacy stud

Competency-Based Assessment Tool for Pediatric Esophagoscopy: International Modified Delphi Consensus.

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167424/1/lary29126.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167424/2/lary29126_am.pd

Rehabilitation and restoration: Orthopaedics and Disabled Soldiers in Germany and Britain in the First World War

This article offers a comparative analysis of the evolution of orthopaedics and rehabilitation within German and British military medicine during the Great War. In it, we reveal how the field of orthopaedics became integral to military medicine by tracing the evolution of the discipline and its practitioners in each nation during the war. In doing so, however, we document not only when and why both medical specialists and military officials realized that maintaining their respective national fighting forces depended upon the efficient rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, but also how these rehabilitative practices and goals reflected the particularities of the military context, civilian society and social structure of each nation. Thus, while our comparison reveals a number of similarities in the orthopaedic developments within each nation as a response to the Great War, we also reveal significant national differences in war-time medical goals, rehabilitation treatments and soldierly ‘medical experiences’. Moreover, as we demonstrate, a social and cultural re-conceptualization of the disabled body accompanied the medical advancements developed for him; however, this re-conceptualization was not the same in each nation. Thus, what our article reveals is that although the guns of August fell silent in 1918, the war’s medical experiences lingered long thereafter shaping the future of disability medicine in both nations

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7