Self-management, self-efficacy, and secondary health conditions in people with spinal cord injury

This thesis is about self-management, confidence, and secondary health conditions of people who were recently confronted with spinal cord injury. Spinal cord injury is a relative rare condition that not only causes paralysis and sensibility defects it may also affect autonomic functions like control over bladder and bowel functioning. These changes make self-management important in preventing secondary health conditions, for instance pressure injuries, urinary tract infections, pain, but also anxiety and depressive mood, if possible. The execution of self-management by people with a spinal cord injury depends on knowledge, skills and confidence in their ability to manage their condition.The results of the seven presented studies show that confidence in their ability to manage their condition is an important factor for the occurrence of mental secondary health conditions. For the physical secondary health conditions more research necessary. Further it was found that the questionnaires, currently used to measure confidence, measure mostly personality traits and not the state aspects of confidence. While these state aspects are supposed to highly correlated with adjustment after spinal cord injury, there is a need for a sensitive state questionnaire in clinical practice. Confidence being an important aspect of adjusting after spinal cord injury, this should be emphasized during rehabilitation after spinal cord injury. This can be done by making confidence an important rehabilitation target. The whole rehabilitation team can work on this target in an interdisciplinary approach

Facial palsy: treatment, quality of life, and assessment

Part II of this thesis consists of comparative studies of reanimation procedures. Physical therapy seems to have a beneficial effect on the development of a spontaneous smile after smile reanimation. In addition, we found a similar effect of two surgical procedures for long-standing facial palsy.Part III describes the results of two studies on the treatment of synkinesis. We saw that mime therapists can be divided into two groups, but we do not know whether that will affect treatment. Furthermore, we saw that the long-term results of a procedure for synkinesis around the eye diminished over time but was still favorable.In part IV we have attempted to achieve a better estimate of facial palsy-related quality of life and thus increase our understanding of the impact of facial palsy on quality of life. We saw that facial function explained the largest component in quality of life, that movement of the corner of the mouth is the most important component thereof, and that the stated portion of quality of life becomes greater when patient reported severity of synkinesis is included.In part V we have studied aspects of different assessment methods of facial function in patients with facial paralysis. We found a considerable learning curve for these assessments, that 3D measurements are reliable, and have translated a questionnaire. We saw that beauty is more dependent on the person watching than the person being watched. Finally, we developed software that looks at the expression of a patient instead of just the smile

The reliability of the All-Up concept Special technical report no. 13

Implementation approaches for conducting Saturn V launch vehicle program without dummy stage

Handbook for Computerized Reliability Analysis Method /CRAM/

Method for analyzing reliability by use of computer

Faster Cut Sparsification of Weighted Graphs

A cut sparsifier is a reweighted subgraph that maintains the weights of the cuts of the original graph up to a multiplicative factor of $(1\pm\epsilon)$. This paper considers computing cut sparsifiers of weighted graphs of size $O(n\log (n)/\epsilon^2)$. Our algorithm computes such a sparsifier in time $O(m\cdot\min(\alpha(n)\log(m/n),\log (n)))$, both for graphs with polynomially bounded and unbounded integer weights, where $\alpha(\cdot)$ is the functional inverse of Ackermann's function. This improves upon the state of the art by Bencz\'ur and Karger (SICOMP 2015), which takes $O(m\log^2 (n))$ time. For unbounded weights, this directly gives the best known result for cut sparsification. Together with preprocessing by an algorithm of Fung et al. (SICOMP 2019), this also gives the best known result for polynomially-weighted graphs. Consequently, this implies the fastest approximate min-cut algorithm, both for graphs with polynomial and unbounded weights. In particular, we show that it is possible to adapt the state of the art algorithm of Fung et al. for unweighted graphs to weighted graphs, by letting the partial maximum spanning forest (MSF) packing take the place of the Nagamochi-Ibaraki (NI) forest packing. MSF packings have previously been used by Abraham at al. (FOCS 2016) in the dynamic setting, and are defined as follows: an $M$-partial MSF packing of $G$ is a set $\mathcal{F}=\{F_1, \dots, F_M\}$, where $F_i$ is a maximum spanning forest in $G\setminus \bigcup_{j=1}^{i-1}F_j$. Our method for computing (a sufficient estimation of) the MSF packing is the bottleneck in the running time of our sparsification algorithm.Comment: To be presented at the 49th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2022

An Improved Random Shift Algorithm for Spanners and Low Diameter Decompositions

Spanners have been shown to be a powerful tool in graph algorithms. Many spanner constructions use a certain type of clustering at their core, where each cluster has small diameter and there are relatively few spanner edges between clusters. In this paper, we provide a clustering algorithm that, given k ? 2, can be used to compute a spanner of stretch 2k-1 and expected size O(n^{1+1/k}) in k rounds in the CONGEST model. This improves upon the state of the art (by Elkin, and Neiman [TALG\u2719]) by making the bounds on both running time and stretch independent of the random choices of the algorithm, whereas they only hold with high probability in previous results. Spanners are used in certain synchronizers, thus our improvement directly carries over to such synchronizers. Furthermore, for keeping the total number of inter-cluster edges small in low diameter decompositions, our clustering algorithm provides the following guarantees. Given ? ? (0,1], we compute a low diameter decomposition with diameter bound O((log n)/?) such that each edge e ? E is an inter-cluster edge with probability at most ?? w(e) in O((log n)/?) rounds in the CONGEST model. Again, this improves upon the state of the art (by Miller, Peng, and Xu [SPAA\u2713]) by making the bounds on both running time and diameter independent of the random choices of the algorithm, whereas they only hold with high probability in previous results

The Laplacian Paradigm in Deterministic Congested Clique

In this paper, we bring the techniques of the Laplacian paradigm to the congested clique, while further restricting ourselves to deterministic algorithms. In particular, we show how to solve a Laplacian system up to precision $\epsilon$ in $n^{o(1)}\log(1/\epsilon)$ rounds. We show how to leverage this result within existing interior point methods for solving flow problems. We obtain an $m^{3/7+o(1)}U^{1/7}$ round algorithm for maximum flow on a weighted directed graph with maximum weight $U$, and we obtain an $\tilde{O}(m^{3/7}(n^{0.158}+n^{o(1)}\text{poly}\log W))$ round algorithm for unit capacity minimum cost flow on a directed graph with maximum cost $W$. Hereto, we give a novel routine for computing Eulerian orientations in $O(\log n \log^* n)$ rounds, which we believe may be of separate interest.Comment: To be presented at the 42nd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2023) as brief announcemen