1,721,054 research outputs found
Antalgic treatment of pain associated with bone metastases
No full textPain from metastases of primitive cancer is the first sympthom of disease in 15-20% of patients and remains the most common cause of cancer-related pain, 30-70% of patients have metastases at diagnosis, and 80% of them at the moment of death. Functional impairment of skeleton, neurologic symptoms, pathological fractures and pain are the most important indications for palliative treatment which should result in tumor regression, relief in cancer-related symptoms and maintainance of functional integrity. Bone metastases are treated with the systemic therapies including radiotherapy, hormonal manipulation, biphosphonates, calcitonin. surgical treatment, and chemotherapy. Conventional use of opioids or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs does not always produce satifactory analgesic result in treated patients because of incidental and intermittent nature of pain and unacceptable side effects. Alternative strategies (peripheric and central nerve blocks, neurolysis) are frequently required. A proper use of different modalities of treatment enhances the probability of achieving relief of pain and maintaining an acceptable quality of life. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Design and Implementation of a Scalable and QoS-aware Stream Processing Framework: The Quasit Prototype
No full textToday's stream processing scenarios are characterized by large volumes of data, e.g., generated by cyber-physical systems in a smart city, on which continuous analysis tasks need to be performed, often with very different optimal trade-offs between achieved QoS and associated resource consumption. Here we present the novel Quasit model and framework offering runtime support to stream processing applications. Differently from existing literature, Quasit originally allows advanced QoS-based configuration, which can be used to finely tune the framework to fit highly different real-world situations. The paper describes the architecture and development of the Quasit prototype by offering interesting insights and lessons learned about the most important design/implementation choices made, such as the actor-based threading model, or the QoS enabled inter-process communication based on OMG DDS. The reported experimental results, measured over simple real test beds, show that our Quasit framework implementation can provide a good level of horizontal scalability with limited overhead and good exploitation of dynamically available processing resources
The QUASIT Model and Framework for Scalable Data Stream Processing with Quality of Service
No full textMany academic and industrial research activities have recently recognized the relevance of expressive models and effective frameworks for highly scalable data processing, such as MapReduce. This paper presents the novel Quasit programming model and runtime framework for stream processing in datacenters, with its original capabilities of i) allowing developers to choose among a large set of quality policies to associate with their processing tasks in a fine-grained way, and ii) effectively managing processing execution depending on the associated quality indications. The paper describes the Quasit programming model, via the primary design/implementation choices made in the Quasit runtime framework (available for download from the project Web site) to achieve maximum scalability, flexibility, and reusability. The first experiences with our prototype and the reported experimental results show the feasibility of our approach and its good performance in terms of both limited overhead and horizontal scalability
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Scalable Stream Processing with Quality of Service for Smart City Crowdsensing Applications
No full textCrowdsensing is emerging as a powerful paradigm capable of leveraging the collective, though imprecise, monitoring capabilities of common people carrying smartphones or other personal devices, which can effectively become real-time mobile sensors, collecting information about the physical places they live in. This unprecedented amount of information, considered collectively, offers new valuable opportunities to understand more thoroughly the environment in which we live and, more importantly, gives the chance to use this deeper knowledge to act and improve, in a virtuous loop, the environment itself. However, managing this process is a hard technical challenge, spanning several socio-technical issues: here, we focus on the related quality, reliability, and scalability trade-offs by proposing an architecture for crowdsensing platforms that dynamically self-configure and self-adapt depending on application-specific quality requirements. In the context of this general architecture, the paper will specifically focus on the Quasit distributed stream processing middleware, and show how Quasit can be used to process and analyze crowdsensing-generated data flows with differentiated quality requirements in a highly scalable and reliable way
Effective epidemic dissemination of multimedia metadata in Peer-to-Peer overlay networks: The Metis architecture and prototype
No full textThere is a clear and widely recognized trend toward a growing and unprecedentedly large amount of user-generated content, which users are willing to share in an easy, cheap, and immediate way. This poses novel hard technical challenges for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content distribution. We claim that a crucial technical factor to spread even more P2P distribution of multimedia content, is the availability of effective solutions to make rich metadata promptly accessible to users. However, state-of-the-art research and industrial practices are still too weakly addressing the problem and, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing solutions offers an adequate support for metadata distribution in P2P networks. This paper presents the design and implementation of a prototype (called Metis and available for download) for metadata dissemination in P2P overlay networks. Metis proposes several original contributions: it is fully decentralized; it exploits a set of dynamically selectable/configurable epidemic dissemination protocols; it can be easily integrated on top of existing P2P overlays, such as Tribler. The reported experimental results show the feasibility of our approach, which achieves good dissemination coverage and promptness with very limited overhead
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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