COLLATERAL BENEFITS OF DIABETES SELF-MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATED WITH SELF-ADMINISTERED OUTPATIENT PARENTERAL ANTIMICROBIAL THERAPY

Self-administered outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (S-OPAT) is a self-care treatment modality in which patients requiring extended courses of intravenous antibiotics are trained to safely self-administer treatment via an indwelling catheter in their home. Many patients seen in the S-OPAT program have a diagnosis of diabetes and present with infections associated with poor glycemic control, including skin and soft-tissue infections and osteomyelitis. Given the degree of patient activation required to successfully complete the S-OPAT process, we hypothesized that participation in this self-care program may benefit patients in self-management of other chronic health conditions, such as diabetes. The study team included Anisha Ganguly (MPH candidate), Larry Brown (biostatistician), David Watkins, Dr. Kristin Alvarez, Dr. Deepak Agrawal, and Dr. Kavita Bhavan, founder and director of the Parkland S-OPAT clinic. We conducted a before-after retrospective analysis of diabetic patients receiving S-OPAT. HgbA1c, diabetes medication refill rates, and changes to diabetes medication regimen were compared in 6-month intervals prior to and following initiation of S-OPAT. A total number of 348 diabetic patients were identified, and 206 diabetic patients were included in the analysis. The mean HgbA1c decreased by 1.82 from the time period 6 months prior to and 6 months after initiation of S-OPAT (p \u3c 0.001). Subgroup analysis showed an additional significant reduction in HgbA1c among insulin users (p = 0.002). There were no differences in refill rates of diabetes medications or changes in medication regimen pre- and post-initiation of S-OPAT (p \u3e 0.05). Initiation of S-OPAT was associated with a significant reduction in HgbA1c among diabetic patients with similar findings among insulin users, a group requiring a higher level of self-care. The degree of patient engagement obtained through the S-OPAT model may have collateral benefits in improved self-management of other chronic diseases such as diabetes

Electron-electron interactions in the chemical bond: "1/3" effect in the bond length of hydrogen molecule

The prominent "1/3" effect observed in the Hall effect plateaus of two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) systems has been postulated to indicating 1/3 fractional charge quasiparticle excitations arising from electron-electron interactions. Tunneling shot-noise experiments on 2DEF exhibiting fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) shows evidence for tunnelling of particles with eand e/3 charges for a constant band mass. A "1/3" effect in the hydrogen molecule is seen in as much as its internuclear distance,dH-H= D- + D+, with ¦D+/D-¦ = 1/3. This is examined in terms of electron-electron interactions involving electron-and hole quasiparticles, (e-)and(h+), equivalent to those observed in FQHE shot -noise experiments. The(e/m) ratio of the (e-) and (h+) quasiparticles is kept at 1: -3. Instead of a 2DEG, these particles are treated as being in flat Bohr orbits. A treatment in the language of charge-flux tube composites for the hydrogen atom as well as the hydrogen molecule is attempted. Such treatment gives important insights into changes in chemical potential and bond energy on crossing a phase boundary during the atom-bond transition as well as on models for FQHE itself

Equality of Voice: Towards Fair Representation in Crowdsourced Top-K Recommendations

To help their users to discover important items at a particular time, major websites like Twitter, Yelp, TripAdvisor or NYTimes provide Top-K recommendations (e.g., 10 Trending Topics, Top 5 Hotels in Paris or 10 Most Viewed News Stories), which rely on crowdsourced popularity signals to select the items. However, different sections of a crowd may have different preferences, and there is a large silent majority who do not explicitly express their opinion. Also, the crowd often consists of actors like bots, spammers, or people running orchestrated campaigns. Recommendation algorithms today largely do not consider such nuances, hence are vulnerable to strategic manipulation by small but hyper-active user groups. To fairly aggregate the preferences of all users while recommending top-K items, we borrow ideas from prior research on social choice theory, and identify a voting mechanism called Single Transferable Vote (STV) as having many of the fairness properties we desire in top-K item (s)elections. We develop an innovative mechanism to attribute preferences of silent majority which also make STV completely operational. We show the generalizability of our approach by implementing it on two different real-world datasets. Through extensive experimentation and comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, we show that our proposed approach provides maximum user satisfaction, and cuts down drastically on items disliked by most but hyper-actively promoted by a few users.Comment: In the proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* '19). Please cite the conference versio

Analytical Modeling of Metal Gate Granularity based Threshold Voltage Variability in NWFET

Estimation of threshold voltage V T variability for NWFETs has been compu- tationally expensive due to lack of analytical models. Variability estimation of NWFET is essential to design the next generation logic circuits. Compared to any other process induced variabilities, Metal Gate Granularity (MGG) is of paramount importance due to its large impact on V T variability. Here, an analytical model is proposed to estimate V T variability caused by MGG. We extend our earlier FinFET based MGG model to a cylindrical NWFET by sat- isfying three additional requirements. First, the gate dielectric layer is replaced by Silicon of electro-statically equivalent thickness using long cylinder approxi- mation; Second, metal grains in NWFETs satisfy periodic boundary condition in azimuthal direction; Third, electrostatics is analytically solved in cylindri- cal polar coordinates with gate boundary condition defined by MGG. We show that quantum effects only shift the mean of the V T distribution without sig- nificant impact on the variability estimated by our electrostatics-based model. The V T distribution estimated by our model matches TCAD simulations. The model quantitatively captures grain size dependence with {\sigma}(V T ) with excellent accuracy (6%error) compared to stochastic 3D TCAD simulations, which is a significant improvement over the state-of- the-art model with fails to produce even a qualitative agreement. The proposed model is 63 times faster compared to commercial TCAD simulations

Soliton Lattice and Single Soliton Solutions of the Associated Lam\'e and Lam\'e Potentials

We obtain the exact nontopological soliton lattice solutions of the Associated Lam\'e equation in different parameter regimes and compute the corresponding energy for each of these solutions. We show that in specific limits these solutions give rise to nontopological (pulse-like) single solitons, as well as to different types of topological (kink-like) single soliton solutions of the Associated Lam\'e equation. Following Manton, we also compute, as an illustration, the asymptotic interaction energy between these soliton solutions in one particular case. Finally, in specific limits, we deduce the soliton lattices, as well as the topological single soliton solutions of the Lam\'e equation, and also the sine-Gordon soliton solution.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to J. Math. Phy

Experiments with flowing gases in an open photoacoustic cell

A simple gas-microphone photoacoustic cell is described in which there is no sizable loss of signal on opening the cell to the atmosphere or even under conditions of gas flow. Results obtained under different rates of flow of gases and chopping frequencies are reported. Except for carbon black, the photoacoustic signal is found to be independent of flow-rate for all the solid substances studied

Infrared spectroscopic studies of the oxide-​hydroxides of nickel, cobalt, and manganese

Metal oxide-​hydroxides of the general formula MO(OH) (M = Ni3+, Co3+ and Mn3+) are actually bronzes of the corresponding quadrivalent metal oxides and should be represented as HxMO2 (x = 1)​. IR spectroscopic studies show that these compds. do not exhibit any OH stretch. The protons seem to be delocalized between slabs of MO2