The importance of geriatrics to family medicine: a position paper by the Group on Geriatric Education of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine

The role of geriatrics and geriatricians in family medicine remains unsettled. Despite a rapidly aging population, a tremendous shortage now exists of faculty with interest and expertise in geriatrics. Relatively few family practice residents choose to enter geriatric fellowship programs, and federal funding for such programs has been reduced. Despite accreditation requirements, residency programs are not always able to provide the range of geriatric experiences needed to properly prepare graduates to provide care for the broad range of older patients. Medical students' exposure to geriatrics remains limited. The Group on Geriatric Education of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine believes that family medicine faculty must recognize and be committed to the notion that geriatrics is integral to family medicine. Both undergraduate and residency training programs should emphasize experience with geriatric patients in multiple settings. In particular, the nursing home should not be the main focus of geriatric training. The small number of certified geriatric faculty will be able to provide leadership, but a broad range of faculty must become involved in teaching geriatrics. Faculty development activities and continuing education programs to foster the necessary expertise will be essential to the accomplishment of this task.     

Robust ℋ︁∞ PID control for multivariable networked control systems with disturbance/noise attenuation

In this paper, we study the design problem of PID controllers for networked control systems (NCSs) with polyhedral uncertainties. The load disturbance and measurement noise are both taken into account in the modeling to better reflect the practical scenario. By using a novel technique, the design problem of PID controllers is converted into a design problem of output feedback controllers. Our goal of this paper is two‐fold: (1) To design the robust PID tracking controllers for practical models; (2) To develop the robust ??_∞ PID control such that load and reference disturbances can be attenuated with a prescribed level. Sufficient conditions are derived by employing advanced techniques for achieving delay dependence. The proposed controller can be readily designed based on iterative suboptimal algorithms. Finally, four examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can predicate-argument structures be used for contextual opinion retrieval from blogs?

We present the results of our investigation on the use of predicate-argument structures for contextual opinion retrieval. The use of predicate-argument structure for opinion retrieval is a novel approach that exploits the grammatical derivation of sentences to show contextual and subjective relevance. We do not use frequency of certain keywords as it is usually done in keyword-based opinion retrieval approaches. Rather, our novel solution is based on frequency of contextually relevant and subjective sentences. We use a linear relevance model that leverages semantic similarities among predicate-argument structures of sentences. Thus, this paper presents the evaluation results of the linear relevance model. The model does a linear combination of a popular relevance model, our proposed transformed terms similarity model, and the absolute value of a sentence subjectivity scoring scheme. The predicate-argument structures are derived from the grammatical derivations of natural language query topics and the well formed sentences from blog documents. The derived predicate-argument structures are then semantically compared to compute an opinion relevance score. Our scoring technique uses the highest frequency of semantically related predicate-argument structures enriched with the total subjectivity score from sentences. Evaluation and experimental results show that predicate-argument structures can indeed be used for contextual opinion retrieval as it improves performance of opinion retrieval task by 15% over the popular TREC baselines.     

An efficient recommender system algorithm using trust data

The Journal of Supercomputing - Smart services are a concept that provides services to the citizens in an efficient manner. The online shopping and recommender system can play an important role for...     

Parallel query execution over encrypted data in database-as-a-service (DaaS)

The Journal of Supercomputing - The main challenge in database-as-a-service is the security and privacy of data because service providers are not usually considered as trustworthy. So, the data...     

Magnetron sputtered Dy_2O_3 with chromium and copper contents for antireflective thin films with enhanced absorption

Dy_2O_3 is a rare earth oxide having a number of advanced applications in various fields including protective or antireflective coatings, Main objective of this novel research work is to check the effect of Cr and Cu addition on different properties of Dy_2O_3 and achievement of antireflective thin films with enhanced abso rption. Thin films of these materials we re deposited using DC magnetron with reactive cosputtering. XRD studies reveals the crystalline nature of thin films having Dy_2O_3(222) reflection in all samples with Cr_2O_3(116) and CuO(111) reflections in Cr and Cu containing compositions. Field emission scanning electron microscopy demonstrates the homogeneous deposition of thin films with uniform shape, size and distribution of grains. Refractive index, extinction coefficient and absorption coefficient significantly increase while optical reflectance decreases with Cr and Cu mediation corroborating an improved antireflective mechanism. The imaginary part of dielectric constant is found to increase slightly with low tangent loss for Cr containing composition co nsidered favorable for energy storage applications.     

The experimental analysis of a dead-end H2/O2 PEM fuel cell stack with cascade type design

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) with a dead-ended anode and cathode can reach high hydrogen and oxygen utilization by a relatively simple system. Nevertheless, the accumulation of the water in the anode and cathode channels can lead to a local fuel starvation deteriorating the performance and the durability of PEMFCs. In this study, a novel design for a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel-cell stack was presented which could achieve higher fuel utilization without using hydrogen and oxygen recirculation devices such as hydrogen pumps or ejectors that consume parasitic power and require additional control schemes. The basic concept of the innovatively proposed design was to divide the cells of a stack into several stages by conducting the outlet gas of each stage to a separator and reentering it into the next stage; thereby, a multistage anode and cathode system was prepared. In this relatively ingenious design, a higher gaseous flow rate was maintained at the cell outlet, even under dead-end conditions resulted in a reduced purge-gas emission by avoiding the accumulation of liquid water in the cells. The results revealed that proposed design had the same polarization curve as the open-end mode, leading to an enhanced PEMFC performance.