The experience of female patients seeking elective rhinoplasty surgery: a narrative inquiry

The aim of this research is to understand what motivates patients to have an elective rhinoplasty, taking into consideration any societal, familial, cultural and intrapersonal influences. The research question explored how, if at all, surgery impacts women’s embodied sense of themselves and if there is a way of providing psychological support to this patient group. Four female patients were interviewed preoperatively and postoperatively using a narrative inquiry approach. The research offers a detailed qualitative contribution in a field that is predominantly quantitatively studied. The research explored the nuances of why female patients want to have rhinoplasty surgery. The narratives of the patients showed that the motivation to have surgery is based on external and internal factors. The external factors revealed the following: society’s acceptance of cosmetic surgery, the influence of the media, the experience of the consultation and how risk is understood. The internal factors were influenced by the patients’ experience of the death of significant family members, a need to separate from patriarchal and matriarchal family members, feelings of body shame, a fear of negative evaluation from others, and objectification of their body in preparation for surgery. Following surgery, a psychological shift was discussed by each patient; this indicates that cosmetic surgery does indeed have a psychological impact. The implication for practice is that clinicians need to have a better understanding of the motivation of this patient group to be able to offer the appropriate psychological support. Awareness also needs to be raised with surgeons, to help them better understand how the surgery they perform can have a psychological impact. This research showed that patients proceeding with cosmetic surgery could benefit from having specialised psychological support preoperatively and postoperatively. This would contribute to more realistic expectations for surgery and, hopefully, a better outcome for both patient and surgeon

Revisiting Visual Question Answering Baselines

Visual question answering (VQA) is an interesting learning setting for evaluating the abilities and shortcomings of current systems for image understanding. Many of the recently proposed VQA systems include attention or memory mechanisms designed to support "reasoning". For multiple-choice VQA, nearly all of these systems train a multi-class classifier on image and question features to predict an answer. This paper questions the value of these common practices and develops a simple alternative model based on binary classification. Instead of treating answers as competing choices, our model receives the answer as input and predicts whether or not an image-question-answer triplet is correct. We evaluate our model on the Visual7W Telling and the VQA Real Multiple Choice tasks, and find that even simple versions of our model perform competitively. Our best model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Visual7W Telling task and compares surprisingly well with the most complex systems proposed for the VQA Real Multiple Choice task. We explore variants of the model and study its transferability between both datasets. We also present an error analysis of our model that suggests a key problem of current VQA systems lies in the lack of visual grounding of concepts that occur in the questions and answers. Overall, our results suggest that the performance of current VQA systems is not significantly better than that of systems designed to exploit dataset biases.Comment: European Conference on Computer Visio

Phase Diagram of alpha-Helical and beta-Sheet Forming Peptides

The intrinsic property of proteins to form structural motifs such as alpha-helices and beta-sheets leads to a complex phase behavior in which proteins can assemble into various types of aggregates including crystals, liquidlike phases of unfolded or natively folded proteins, and amyloid fibrils. Here we use a coarse-grained protein model that enables us to perform Monte Carlo simulations for determining the phase diagram of natively folded alpha-helical and unfolded beta-sheet forming peptides. The simulations reveal the existence of various metastable peptide phases. The liquidlike phases are metastable with respect to the fibrillar phases, and there is a hierarchy of metastability

Bandit Models of Human Behavior: Reward Processing in Mental Disorders

Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a general parametric framework for multi-armed bandit problem, which extends the standard Thompson Sampling approach to incorporate reward processing biases associated with several neurological and psychiatric conditions, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addiction, and chronic pain. We demonstrate empirically that the proposed parametric approach can often outperform the baseline Thompson Sampling on a variety of datasets. Moreover, from the behavioral modeling perspective, our parametric framework can be viewed as a first step towards a unifying computational model capturing reward processing abnormalities across multiple mental conditions.Comment: Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI-1

Concurrent bandits and cognitive radio networks

We consider the problem of multiple users targeting the arms of a single multi-armed stochastic bandit. The motivation for this problem comes from cognitive radio networks, where selfish users need to coexist without any side communication between them, implicit cooperation or common control. Even the number of users may be unknown and can vary as users join or leave the network. We propose an algorithm that combines an $\epsilon$-greedy learning rule with a collision avoidance mechanism. We analyze its regret with respect to the system-wide optimum and show that sub-linear regret can be obtained in this setting. Experiments show dramatic improvement compared to other algorithms for this setting

Colloidal crystal growth at externally imposed nucleation clusters

We study the conditions under which and how an imposed cluster of fixed colloidal particles at prescribed positions triggers crystal nucleation from a metastable colloidal fluid. Dynamical density functional theory of freezing and Brownian dynamics simulations are applied to a two-dimensional colloidal system with dipolar interactions. The externally imposed nucleation clusters involve colloidal particles either on a rhombic lattice or along two linear arrays separated by a gap. Crystal growth occurs after the peaks of the nucleation cluster have first relaxed to a cutout of the stable bulk crystal.Comment: 4 pages, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

W49A North - Global or Local or No Collapse?

We attempt to fit observations with 5" resolution of the J=2-1 transition of CS in the directions of H II regions A, B, and G of W49A North as well as observations with 20" resolution of the J=2-1, 3-2, 5-4, and 7-6 transitions in the directions of H II regions A and G by using radiative transfer calculations. These calculations predict the intensity profiles resulting from several spherical clouds along the line of sight. We consider three models: global collapse of a very large (5 pc radius) cloud, localized collapse from smaller (1 pc) clouds around individual H II regions, and multiple, static clouds. For all three models we can find combinations of parameters that reproduce the CS profiles reasonably well provided that the component clouds have a core-envelope structure with a temperature gradient. Cores with high temperature and high molecular hydrogen density are needed to match the higher transitions (e.g. J=7-6) observed towards A and G. The lower temperature, low density gas needed to create the inverse P-Cygni profile seen in the CS J=2-1 line (with 5" beam) towards H II region G arises from different components in the 3 models. The infalling envelope of cloud G plus cloud B creates the absorption in global collapse, cloud B is responsible in local collapse, and a separate cloud, G', is needed in the case of many static clouds. The exact nature of the velocity field in the envelopes for the case of local collapse is not important as long as it is in the range of 1 to 5 km/s for a turbulent velocity of about 6 km/s. High resolution observations of the J=1-0 and 5-4 transitions of CS and C34S may distinguish between these three models. Modeling existing observations of HCO+ and C18O does not allow one to distinguish between the three models but does indicate the existence of a bipolar outflow.Comment: 42 pages, 27 figures, accepted for publication in the ApJS August 2004, v153 issu