Demonstrative Suffering: The Gestural (Re)embodiment of Symptoms

Despite the long-standing interest in emotion and bodily conduct, there remains relatively little research concerned with how gestures are used with talk and within interaction to reveal emotional and personal experience. In this article, the author considers the medical consultation and, in particular, the ways in which patients attempt to reveal their experience of illness to the doctor. The paper examines how gesture and other forms of bodily conduct are used to transform symptoms into suffering; to display, enact, and (re)embody medical problems and difficulties. The analysis is based on videorecordings of primary health care consultations and focuses on the social and interactional organization of demonstrative suffering.     

Analysis of a master-slave architecture for distributed evolutionary computations.

This paper introduces a new mathematical model of the master-slave architecture for distributed evolutionary computations (EC). This model is validated using a concrete implementation based on the Distributed BEAGLE C++ framework. Results show that contrary to (current) popular belief, master-slave architectures are able to scale well over local area networks of workstations using off-the-shelf networking equipment. The main properties of the master-slave are also compared with those of the more mainstream island-model.     

The complexity of some reachability problems for a system on a finite group

We consider a system defined as the product of a finite set of periodic systems on cyclic groups. It is of interest to determine if certain subgroups and unions of subgroups of the state set are reachable from a specified initial state, and in particular to determine the computational complexity of verifying such reachability. These questions are motivated by certain problems that arise in the modelling and control of discrete event systems and certain forms of periodic scheduling. Our main result is that deciding whether or not the union of a certain set of subgroups is reachable or not is NP-complete.     

A new technique for on-line and off-line high speed computation

A novel technique for both online and offline computation is presented. With this technique, a reconstruction analysis in elementary particle physics, otherwise prohibitively long, has been accomplished. It will be used online in an upcoming Fermilab experiment to reconstruct more than 100000 events per second and to trigger on the basis of that information. The technique delivers 40 gigaoperations per second, has a bandwidth on the order of gigabytes per second, and has a modest cost. An overview of the program, details of the system, and performance measurements are presented     

Scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline: A web-based reciprocal peer review system

This paper describes how SWoRD (scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline), a web-based reciprocal peer review system, supports writing practice, particularly for large content courses in which writing is considered critical but not feasibly included. To help students gain content knowledge as well as writing and reviewing skills, SWoRD supports the whole cycle of writing, reviews, back-reviews, and rewriting by scaffolding the journal publication process as its authentic practice model. In addition, SWoRD includes algorithms that compute individual reviewer’s review accuracy, which is in turn used to support the various drawbacks of reciprocal peer reviews (e.g., variation in motivation or ability of reviewers). Finally, this paper describes an empirical evaluation showing that the SWoRD approach is effective in improving writing quality in content classes.