Abstraction versus case based:A comparative study of two approaches to support Parametric Design

We describe an experimental study testing the reuse of design knowledge as a method to support learning and use of parametric design in architecture.The use of parametric design systems and programming environments offer architects new opportunities, providing a powerful means to create geometries and allowing dynamic design exploration, but it can also impose substantial challenges.The proposition tested in this study is that the reuse of design knowledge can improve architects’ ability to use parametric modelling, and reduce the barriers to using programming in a design context.The paper explores and compares two approaches as a means of accessing and reusing existing design solutions: the reuse of abstract parametric ‘Design Patterns’ [1]; and secondly the reuse of parametric solutions from specific design cases (Case- Based Design).This paper outlines the principles and methods of ‘abstract’ versus ‘case-based’ approaches to reuse parametric solutions; and focuses on the results of their practical implementation through the statistical analysis of a comparative study involving 126 designers. In conclusion, it is proposed the outcomes from this study can be applied to inform the methodology for introducing parametric design in architecture and design disciplines.

Two-group randomised, parallel trial of cognitive and exposure therapies for problem gambling: a research protocol

BACKGROUND: Problem gambling is a serious public health concern at an international level where population prevalence rates average 2% or more and occurs more frequently in younger populations. The most empirically established treatments until now are combinations of cognitive and behavioural techniques labelled cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). However, there is a paucity of high quality evidence for the comparative efficacy of core CBT interventions in treating problem gamblers. This study aims to isolate and compare cognitive and behavioural (exposure-based) techniques to determine their relative efficacy.

METHODS: A sample of 130 treatment-seeking problem gamblers will be allocated to either cognitive or exposure therapy in a two-group randomised, parallel design. Repeated measures will be conducted at baseline, mid and end of treatment (12 sessions intervention period), and at 3, 6 and 12 months (maintenance effects). The primary outcome measure is improvement in problem gambling severity symptoms using the Victorian Gambling Screen (VGS) harm to self-subscale. VGS measures gambling severity on an extensive continuum, thereby enhancing sensitivity to change within and between individuals over time.

DISCUSSION: This article describes the research methods, treatments and outcome measures used to evaluate gambling behaviours, problems caused by gambling and mechanisms of change. This study will be the first randomised, parallel trial to compare cognitive and exposure therapies in this population.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study was approved by the Southern Adelaide Health Service/Flinders University Human Research Ethics Committee. Study findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations.

Urban codes : abstraction and case-based approaches to algorithmic design and implications for the design of contemporary cities

This paper reports on a comparative study that evaluates two approaches to support the learning and use of algorithmic design in architecture, and extrapolates from this to consider applications for the algorithmic design of cities. The study explored two methods to reduce the barriers of using programming and potentially improve design performance. The first is the reuse of abstract algorithmic ‘patterns’. The second approach is the reuse of algorithmic solutions from specific design cases (case-based design). Reflecting on this research we outline how our findings discussed in relation to alternate thinking on the use of pattern, might inform a hybrid approach to the algorithmic design of cities.

Capturing best practices in web development

This paper describes capturing design experiences by applying grounded theory to pattern mining. The presented approach aims at inducing expert development knowledge and its subsequent packaging into domain-specific design patterns, which could later be used by both experienced and novice developers in the field. The method was evaluated empirically in a domain of Web development.

Application of hermeneutics to studying an experience mining process

In this paper we investigate an approach to eliciting practitioners’ problem-solving experience across an application domain. The approach is based on a well-known ‘pattern mining’ process which commonly results in a collection of sharable and reusable ‘design patterns’. While pattern mining has been recognised to work effectively in numerous domains, its main problem is the degree of technical proficiency that few domain practitioners are prepared to master. In our approach to pattern mining, patterns are induced indirectly from designers’ experience, as determined by analysing their past projects, the problems encountered and solutions applied in problem rectification. Through the cycles of hermeneutic revisions, the pattern mining process has been refined and ultimately its deficiencies addressed. The hermeneutic method used in the study has been clearly shown in the paper and illustrated with examples drawn from the multimedia domain. The resulting approach to experience elicitation provided opportunities for active participation of multimedia practitioners in capturing and sharing their design experience.

Arterial compliance, blood pressure, plasma leptin, and plasma lipids in women are improved with weight reduction equally with a meat-based diet and a plant-based diet

Obesity, strongly associated with the risk for coronary heart disease (CHD), is becoming increasingly prevalent. This study was designed to establish first whether systemic arterial compliance (SAC), an index of arterial function, is improved with weight loss and second, whether cardiovascular risk factors that improve with weight loss are reduced equally with lean meat or with an equivalent amount of plant protein in the diet. Thirty-six women, mostly overweight or obess, aged 40 ± 9 years, were allocated nonrandomly to a 16-week parallel-design trial of two equienergetic diets designed to lead to weight loss, with one arm of the study emphasizing red meat and the other soybeans as the major protein source. Body weight, waist and hip circumference, and plasma lipids, glucose, insulin, and leptin levels were measured, and SAC was calculated from ultrasound measurement of aortic flow velocity and aortic root driving pressure. Subjects lost weight (9% of body weight in 16 weeks) and showed decreased plasma total and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (12% and 14%, P < .0001, respectively), triacylglycerol (17%, P < .05), and leptin (24%, P < .01) concentrations. However, lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] levels did not change significantly. Mean arterial pressure (MAP) decreased 7% and SAC increased 28% (P < .001 for both). However, only the decrease in arterial pressure correlated significantly with the reduction in the waist to hip ratio (WHR), and the improvement in SAC correlated inversely with the blood pressure reduction (P < .001 for both). Further, weight loss and the metabolic benefits of weight loss occurred equally with the meat-based and plant-based diets. We conclude that moderate weight loss in women leads to a substantial reduction in the cardiovascular risk, including SAC.

Reducing parental anxiety using a family based intervention for youth mental health : a randomized controlled trial

This paper presents findings on parent anxiety and attachment relationship style from the Deakin Family Options (DFO) pilot study, a randomized controlled pilot study comparing a family-based treatment (BEST Plus), versus a youth only treatment (CBT) versus a group who received both of these treatments (COMBINED). Eligible participants were families with a young person (aged 12 - 25 years) with a high prevalence mental health problem. Youth from participating families scored in the clinical or subclinical range for depression, anxiety and/or substance misuse symptoms on standardized measures during the initial assessment. The collected sample was drawn from regional and urban centers in Victoria, Australia and allocated to treatment condition using a simple randomization procedure (parallel design). It was hypothesized that families receiving the BEST Plus would experience greater reductions in youth and parent mental health symptoms, and improved parent-child relationships, compared with those in the CBT condition. This paper describes and discusses changes in parent anxiety and parent attachment, according to whether the parent participated in a treatment (BEST Plus) or did not (NONBEST Plus). Participants were blind to the study hypotheses. In total 71 parent participants returned pre data and were allocated to a treatment group. In this paper, data from parent participants who completed pre and post measures (n = 48) and pre, post, and 6-month follow-up measures (n = 28) on anxiety and attachment were analyzed by group (BEST Plus versus NONBEST Plus). The results of this study suggest that parent anxiety decreased significantly more following parent involvement in a group treatment, than for parents that did not receive treatment. Unexpectedly, avoidant attachment increased in the no treatment group, but remained relatively stable following the BEST Plus group. There were no significant findings in relation to compulsive traits and anxious attachment. These findings are discussed in light of the study limitations.

Sucrose and lollypops to reduce immunisation pain in toddlers and young children: two pilot randomised controlled trials

Aims To evaluate the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary efficacy of sweet taste in reducing pain in toddlers and pre-school children during immunisation and to use the results to inform a sample size estimation for future full-scale trials. Background Sweet solutions reduce procedural pain in newborn infants and in infants beyond the newborn period. It is unclear if sweet taste continues to reduce procedural pain in children older than one year of age. Design Two parallel design pilot randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Methods Children attending an Immunisation Drop-in Clinic at a children's hospital in Australia participated in one of two pilot RCTs: 1) a double-blinded RCT of 33% sucrose compared to water in toddlers receiving their 12- or 18-month immunisation or 2) a non-blinded RCT of lollypop compared to standard care (active distraction using bubble and pin wheel blowing) in pre-school children aged 3-5 years. Primary outcomes included cry incidence and duration and pain score using the FLACC. Results Interventions, standard care and all aspects of the study were acceptable to children, parents and immunisation nurses. More toddlers in the sucrose group received their 12-month immunisation and more injections (n=35) compared to toddlers randomised to water (n=26). There were no significant differences in crying time or pain scores between intervention and control groups in either pilot RCT. Conclusion The study interventions are acceptable to children and parents. Full-scale trials would be feasible to conduct. Implications for clinical practice Toddlers receiving their 12-month immunisation should be the focus of future full-scale RCTs.

A web- and mobile phone-based intervention to prevent obesity in 4-year-olds (MINISTOP): a population-based randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Childhood obesity is an increasing health problem globally. Overweight and obesity may be established as early as 2-5 years of age, highlighting the need for evidence-based effective prevention and treatment programs early in life. In adults, mobile phone based interventions for weight management (mHealth) have demonstrated positive effects on body mass, however, their use in child populations has yet to be examined. The aim of this paper is to report the study design and methodology of the MINSTOP (Mobile-based Intervention Intended to Stop Obesity in Preschoolers) trial.

METHODS/DESIGN: A two-arm, parallel design randomized controlled trial in 300 healthy Swedish 4-year-olds is conducted. After baseline measures, parents are allocated to either an intervention- or control group. The 6- month mHealth intervention consists of a web-based application (the MINSTOP app) to help parents promote healthy eating and physical activity in children. MINISTOP is based on the Social Cognitive Theory and involves the delivery of a comprehensive, personalized program of information and text messages based on existing guidelines for a healthy diet and active lifestyle in pre-school children. Parents also register physical activity and intakes of candy, soft drinks, vegetables as well as fruits of their child and receive feedback through the application. Primary outcomes include body fatness and energy intake, while secondary outcomes are time spent in sedentary, moderate, and vigorous physical activity, physical fitness and intakes of fruits and vegetables, snacks, soft drinks and candy. Food and energy intake (Tool for Energy balance in Children, TECH), body fatness (pediatric option for BodPod), physical activity (Actigraph wGT3x-BT) and physical fitness (the PREFIT battery of five fitness tests) are measured at baseline, after the intervention (six months after baseline) and at follow-up (12 months after baseline).

DISCUSSION: This novel study will evaluate the effectiveness of a mHealth program for mitigating gain in body fatness among 4-year-old children. If the intervention proves effective it has great potential to be implemented in child-health care to counteract childhood overweight and obesity.

Subsuming methods: finding new optimisation opportunities in object-oriented software

The majority of existing application profiling techniques ag- gregate and report performance costs by method or call- ing context. Modern large-scale object-oriented applications consist of thousands of methods with complex calling pat- terns. Consequently, when profiled, their performance costs tend to be thinly distributed across many thousands of loca- tions with few easily identifiable optimisation opportunities. However experienced performance engineers know that there are repeated patterns of method calls in the execution of an application that are induced by the libraries, design patterns and coding idioms used in the software. Automati- cally identifying and aggregating costs over these patterns of method calls allows us to identify opportunities to improve performance based on optimising these patterns. We have developed an analysis technique that is able to identify the entry point methods, which we call subsuming methods, of such patterns. Our ofiine analysis runs over previously collected runtime performance data structured in a calling context tree, such as produced by a large number of existing commercial and open source profilers. We have evaluated our approach on the DaCapo bench- mark suite, showing that our analysis significantly reduces the size and complexity of the runtime performance data set, facilitating its comprehension and interpretation. We also demonstrate, with a collection of case studies, that our analysis identifies new optimisation opportunities that can lead to significant performance improvements (from 20% to over 50% improvement in our case studies).

Cognitive versus exposure therapy for problem gambling: randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Problem gambling-specific cognitive therapy (CT) and behavioural (exposure-based) therapy (ET) are two core cognitive-behavioural techniques to treating the disorder, but no studies have directly compared them using a randomised trial. AIMS: To evaluate differential efficacy of CT and ET for adult problem gamblers at a South Australian gambling therapy service. METHODS: Two-group randomised, parallel design. Primary outcome was rated by participants using the Victorian Gambling Screen (VGS) at baseline, treatment-end, 1, 3, and 6 month follow-up. FINDINGS: Of eighty-seven participants who were randomised and started intervention (CT = 44; ET = 43), 51 (59%) completed intervention (CT = 30; ET = 21). Both groups experienced comparable reductions (improvement) in VGS scores at 12 weeks (mean difference -0.18, 95% CI: -4.48-4.11) and 6 month follow-up (mean difference 1.47, 95% CI: -4.46-7.39). CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive and exposure therapies are both viable and effective treatments for problem gambling. Large-scale trials are needed to compare them individually and combined to enhance retention rates and reduce drop-out.

Robust parallel filtering design of a swarm tracking system

Swarming networks of mobile autonomous agents require inter-agent position information in order perform various tasks. The primary control input for the majority of current control strategies is inter-agent distance information. In this paper we provide a robust parallel filter based tracking scheme that allows a mobile agent to track other multiple mobile agents. The distance, angle, and relative position is given in a direct target tracking output. This allows the mobile agent to decide which information is best suited for the particular objective

Design of multiple sequence alignment algorithms on parallel, distributed memory supercomputers

The challenge of comparing two or more genomes that have undergone recombination and substantial amounts of segmental loss and gain has recently been addressed for small numbers of genomes. However, datasets of hundreds of genomes are now common and their sizes will only increase in the future. Multiple sequence alignment of hundreds of genomes remains an intractable problem due to quadratic increases in compute time and memory footprint. To date, most alignment algorithms are designed for commodity clusters without parallelism. Hence, we propose the design of a multiple sequence alignment algorithm on massively parallel, distributed memory supercomputers to enable research into comparative genomics on large data sets. Following the methodology of the sequential progressiveMauve algorithm, we design data structures including sequences and sorted k-mer lists on the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer (BG/P). Preliminary results show that we can reduce the memory footprint so that we can potentially align over 250 bacterial genomes on a single BG/P compute node. We verify our results on a dataset of E.coli, Shigella and S.pneumoniae genomes. Our implementation returns results matching those of the original algorithm but in 1/2 the time and with 1/4 the memory footprint for scaffold building. In this study, we have laid the basis for multiple sequence alignment of large-scale datasets on a massively parallel, distributed memory supercomputer, thus enabling comparison of hundreds instead of a few genome sequences within reasonable time.

Effects of exercise on the isoelectric patterns of erythropoietin

Objectives: Recombinant erythropoietin has a strong impact on aerobic power and is therefore one of the most potent doping agents in endurance sports. The anti-doping control of this synthetic hormone relies on the detection, in the urine, of its isoelectric pattern, which differs from that of the corresponding natural hormone, the latter being typically more acidic than the former. However, a small number of natural urinary patterns, referred to as atypical patterns, are less acidic than the dominant form. Based on anecdotal evidence, the occurrence of such patterns seems to be related to particular strenuous exercises. This study aimed to demonstrate this relation using a strenuous exercise protocol.

Design: Seven athletes took part in a training protocol including a series of supramaximal short-duration exercises. Urine and blood samples were collected throughout the protocols.

Settings: World Cycling Center, Aigle, Switzerland, and research laboratories.

Participants: Seven top-level athletes (cyclists) were involved in this study.

Main Outcome Measures: Erythropoietin (EPO) isoelectric patterns were obtained by submitting blood and urine samples to isoelectric focusing. Additional protein dosages were performed.

Results: Supramaximal short-duration exercises induced the transformation of typical urinary natural EPO patterns into atypical ones. None of the obtained atypical patterns fulfilled the 3 criteria mandatory for reporting an adverse analytical finding. Serum EPO patterns were not affected by the exercises that caused the transformation of urinary patterns.

Conclusion: An exercise-induced transient renal dysfunction is proposed as a hypothetic explanation for these observations that rely on parallel investigations of proteinuria in the same samples.

A parallel-group, randomised controlled trial of a multimedia, self-directed, coping skills training intervention for patients with cancer and their partners: design and rationale

Introduction: