Recoiling from war again

What have we learned in the aftermaths of wars across the Middle East as a prolegomena for a new generation of research frameworks on mental health burdens in the region? Four questions are addressed: what are the moral implications of different forms of intervention? Are there transformations in the discursive structures over the past three decades in response to experiences of war? What are the implications for mental health and social resilience in neighboring countries to those in war? What mix of methods to research these are most helpful? The 2014 ‘Beyond Trauma’ workshop held at Kings College, London, organized by Orkideh Behrouzan, provides a beginning benchmark for new comparative work across the region from the Levant to Afghanistan and Acheh. I discuss the workshop’s case studies, together with other research, to highlight the range of methods utilized and objects examined, and to draw attention to the resonances this research has with the work of many other scholars. A new network and new conversation should grow and connect with other networks of researchers, bringing together patient life histories, genres of expression, and new discursive formations to address transformations in the lives of everyone touched by these wars

Illness perceptions and treatment beliefs in pulmonary rehabilitation for patients with COPD

In spite of the well-demonstrated benefits for patients, 20-40% of the patients with COPD who are referred to a pulmonary rehabilitation programme do not complete treatment. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the association of illness perceptions and treatment beliefs with treatment adherence and treatment outcomes, using the Common Sense Model (Leventhal et al., 1980) and the Necessity-Concerns Framework (Horne, 2003) as theoretical background. Our studies showed that attendance, but not drop-out during pulmonary rehabilitation was positively related to patients__ belief that their condition could be improved by treatment. Results also demonstrated that a positive evaluation of the outcomes of treatment led patients to adopt more optimistic illness perceptions, in particular the perceived controllability and variability of the symptoms and the consequences of the illness. With regard to specific ideas about exercise, results showed that concerns about the possible adverse consequences of training were negatively related to patients__ exercise test performance at baseline. For patients with mild-to-moderate COPD, these concerns also had a negative impact on response to training. We conclude that patients__ perceptions of illness and treatment are important for understanding adherence and treatment outcomes, and should be considered as possible treatment objective for the individual patient.Netherlands Asthma Foundation, Boehringer‐Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZenecaUBL - phd migration 201

Relating L-Resilience and Wait-Freedom via Hitting Sets

The condition of t-resilience stipulates that an n-process program is only obliged to make progress when at least n-t processes are correct. Put another way, the live sets, the collection of process sets such that progress is required if all the processes in one of these sets are correct, are all sets with at least n-t processes. We show that the ability of arbitrary collection of live sets L to solve distributed tasks is tightly related to the minimum hitting set of L, a minimum cardinality subset of processes that has a non-empty intersection with every live set. Thus, finding the computing power of L is NP-complete. For the special case of colorless tasks that allow participating processes to adopt input or output values of each other, we use a simple simulation to show that a task can be solved L-resiliently if and only if it can be solved (h-1)-resiliently, where h is the size of the minimum hitting set of L. For general tasks, we characterize L-resilient solvability of tasks with respect to a limited notion of weak solvability: in every execution where all processes in some set in L are correct, outputs must be produced for every process in some (possibly different) participating set in L. Given a task T, we construct another task T_L such that T is solvable weakly L-resiliently if and only if T_L is solvable weakly wait-free

Propositional Dynamic Logic with Converse and Repeat for Message-Passing Systems

The model checking problem for propositional dynamic logic (PDL) over message sequence charts (MSCs) and communicating finite state machines (CFMs) asks, given a channel bound $B$, a PDL formula $\varphi$ and a CFM $\mathcal{C}$, whether every existentially $B$-bounded MSC $M$ accepted by $\mathcal{C}$ satisfies $\varphi$. Recently, it was shown that this problem is PSPACE-complete. In the present work, we consider CRPDL over MSCs which is PDL equipped with the operators converse and repeat. The former enables one to walk back and forth within an MSC using a single path expression whereas the latter allows to express that a path expression can be repeated infinitely often. To solve the model checking problem for this logic, we define message sequence chart automata (MSCAs) which are multi-way alternating parity automata walking on MSCs. By exploiting a new concept called concatenation states, we are able to inductively construct, for every CRPDL formula $\varphi$, an MSCA precisely accepting the set of models of $\varphi$. As a result, we obtain that the model checking problem for CRPDL and CFMs is still in PSPACE

Benchmark of a cubieboard cluster

We built a cluster of ARM-based Cubieboards2 which has a SATA interface to connect a harddrive. This cluster was set up as a storage system using Ceph and as a compute cluster for high energy physics analyses. To study the performance in these applications, we ran two benchmarks on this cluster. We also checked the energy efficiency of the cluster using the preseted benchmarks. Performance and energy efficency of our cluster were compared with a network-attached storage (NAS), and with a desktop PC

Illness perceptions in women with breast cancer:A systematic literature review

Women with breast cancer respond to the illness and its medical management in their own personal way. Their coping behavior and self-management are determined by their views (cognitions) and feelings (emotions) about symptoms and illness: their illness perceptions. This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review of illness perceptions and breast cancer. In the 12 studies identified, published between 2012 and 2015, illness perceptions were found to be important concomitants of medical and behavioral outcomes: fear of recurrence, distress, quality of life, satisfaction with medical care, use of traditional healers, and risk perceptio

Strong Equivalence Relations for Iterated Models

The Iterated Immediate Snapshot model (IIS), due to its elegant geometrical representation, has become standard for applying topological reasoning to distributed computing. Its modular structure makes it easier to analyze than the more realistic (non-iterated) read-write Atomic-Snapshot memory model (AS). It is known that AS and IIS are equivalent with respect to \emph{wait-free task} computability: a distributed task is solvable in AS if and only if it solvable in IIS. We observe, however, that this equivalence is not sufficient in order to explore solvability of tasks in \emph{sub-models} of AS (i.e. proper subsets of its runs) or computability of \emph{long-lived} objects, and a stronger equivalence relation is needed. In this paper, we consider \emph{adversarial} sub-models of AS and IIS specified by the sets of processes that can be \emph{correct} in a model run. We show that AS and IIS are equivalent in a strong way: a (possibly long-lived) object is implementable in AS under a given adversary if and only if it is implementable in IIS under the same adversary. %This holds whether the object is one-shot or long-lived. Therefore, the computability of any object in shared memory under an adversarial AS scheduler can be equivalently investigated in IIS