Recoverable FCFS Mutual Exclusion with Wait-Free Recovery

Traditional mutual exclusion locks are not resilient to failures: if there is a power outage, the memory is wiped out. Thus, when the system comes back on, the lock will have to be restored to the initial state, i.e., all processes are rolled back to the Remainder section and all variables are reset to their initial values. Recently, Golab and Ramaraju showed that we can improve this state of the art by exploiting the Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM). They designed algorithms that, by maintaining shared variables in NVRAM, allow processes to recover from crashes on their own without a need for a global reset, even though a crash can wipe out the local memory of a process. We present a Recoverable Mutual Exclusion algorithm using the commonly supported CAS primitive. The main features of our algorithm are that it satisfies FCFS, it ensures that each process recovers in a wait-free manner, and in the absence of failures, it guarantees a worst-case Remote Memory Reference (RMR) complexity of O(lg n) on both Cache Coherent (CC) and Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) machines, where n is the number of processes for which the algorithm is designed. This bound matches the Omega(lg n) RMR lower bound by Attiya, Hendler, and Woelfel for Mutual Exclusion algorithms that use comparison primitives

Protocol for a randomized controlled trial on community education and surveillance on antibiotics use among young children in Nepal

BACKGROUND: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top ten threats to global health. There exists limited empirical evidence on effective approaches to address this threat. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), one of the primary drivers of AMR is easy access to antibiotics without prescriptions, in particular from community pharmacies. Interventions to reduce non-prescribed use of antibiotics and surveillance systems to track such usage are critically needed. This protocol describes a study that aims to test the effect of an educational intervention targeted to parents of young children on non-prescribed antibiotics consumption in Nepal and to track such consumption using a phone-based application. METHODS: The study is a clustered randomized controlled trial, in which we randomly assign 40 urban wards of Kathmandu Valley to either treatment group or control group, and randomly select 24 households in each ward. Households in the treatment group will receive an education intervention consisting of an AMR pitch (an in-person interaction that lasts up to an hour) by community nurses, videos and text messages on AMR every two weeks, and a brochure. We will conduct a survey at baseline with the parents of children ages 6 months to 10 years and track consumption of antibiotics and health care use among these children for a period of 6 months using a phone-based application. CONCLUSION: While the study will primarily inform future policy and programmatic efforts to reduce AMR in Nepal, the study-both the education intervention and the surveillance system-can serve as a prototype for tackling AMR in other similar settings

Validation of EpiTRAQ, a transition readiness assessment tool for adolescents and young adults with epilepsy

ObjectiveTo design and validate a transition readiness assessment tool for adolescents and young adults with epilepsy and without intellectual disability.MethodsWe adapted a general transition readiness assessment tool (TRAQ) to add epilepsy‐relevant items based on concepts in current epilepsy quality measures. The adapted tool, EpiTRAQ, maintained the original structure and scoring system. Concurrent with clinical implementation in pediatric and adult epilepsy clinics at an academic medical center, we assessed the validity and reliability of this adapted tool for patients 16‐26 years of age. This process included initial validation with 302 patients who completed EpiTRAQ between October 2017 and May 2018; repeat validation with 381 patients who completed EpiTRAQ between June 2018 and September 2019; and retest reliability among 153 patients with more than one completed EpiTRAQ.ResultsMean scores were comparable between initial and repeat validation populations (absolute value differences between 0.05 and 0.1); internal consistency ranged from good to high. For both the initial and repeat validation, mean scores and internal consistency demonstrated high comparability to the original TRAQ validation results. Upon retest, few patients rated themselves with a lower score, while the majority rated themselves with higher scores.SignificanceEpiTRAQ is a valid and reliable tool for assessing transition readiness in adolescents and young adults with epilepsy and without intellectual disability.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162789/2/epi412427_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162789/1/epi412427.pd

Assessment of the antibacterial activity of lemongrass-extracted essential oil

Lemongrass is one of the medicinal plants having significant applications to cure various diseases. This study aims at extracting essential oils from lemongrass plants and examining their antibacterial activity. The sample of lemongrass for this study was collected from Kailali District, Nepal. The leaves of lemongrass were collected, washed, cut into small pieces, and dried in the sun. Then pieces of lemongrass were steam distilled for about 4 hours using the Clevenger apparatus, and oil was extracted. The extracted essential oil was further utilized to study its antibacterial activity in human pathogens, namely Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus: gram-positive bacteria), by Agar diffusion and broth dilution methods. It was found that the zone of inhibition for S. aureus in concentrations of 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25% was about 25 mm, 11 mm, 9 mm, and 0 mm, respectively. In addition, it is clear from this study that the gram-positive bacteria were sensitive to essential oils. The lowest and highest zones of inhibition were shown against S. aureus at 25% and 100% concentrations, respectively. The zone of inhibition at 100% concentration is 25 mm and at 25% concentration is 0 mm, so lemongrass oil is effective against drug-resistant organisms only at high concentrations

Plaquette Ordering in SU(4) Antiferromagnets

We use fermion mean field theory to study possible plaquette ordering in the antiferromagnetic SU(4) Heisenberg model. We find the ground state for both the square and triangular lattices to be the disconnected plaquette state. Our mean field theory gives a first order transition for plaquette ordering for the triangular lattice. Our results suggest a large number of low lying states.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

The impact of hypsarrhythmia on infantile spasms treatment response: Observational cohort study from the National Infantile Spasms Consortium

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141801/1/epi13937_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141801/2/epi13937.pd