Hundreds Of Connections Research Articles

Health System Initiatives: Catalysts for Change

AbstractHealth systems hold the key to change for dementia care, representing the primary organizational structures through which meaningful change will occur. The Alzheimer’s Association, the world’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to Alzheimer’s care, is committed to leading this change. Starting in July 2019, the Alzheimer’s Association launched a Health Systems Initiative to facilitate and enhance dementia care in the clinical setting.In the three years since its launch, this initiative has made hundreds of connections to health systems across the United States, offering proven solutions for improving health outcomes to more effectively provide care for people living with dementia. Twenty‐two regional health systems directors help increase awareness of resources for clinical training, with a focus on soliciting feedback from providers to better support their work.The goals of the initiative are to improve health measures, as well as quality of life measures, and promote ways to make it easier for clinicians to provide high quality care. The Alzheimer’s Association Health Systems Initiative provides technical assistance for quality improvement, solutions to advance system and practice changes, and an organizational structure to help disseminate best practices.Toolkits such as the KAER Model designed by the Gerontological Society of America, quality improvement models such as the Cognition in Primary Program at the University of Washington, and primary care models specialized in dementia care such as the Integrated Memory Care Program at Emory University are helping meet the complex care needs of individuals and families living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

If You Build a Better Sucker Rod, Will Buyers Be Willing To Change?

When the pump breaks down and the oil stops flowing, it’s mostly likely due to a failed sucker rod. “The statistics are pretty strong. While you would think the rod pump or the progressing cavity pump is the component with the most problems, it is the rod string” that is most often to blame, said Lonnie Dunn, vice president for technology at Lifting Solutions. That’s a critical fact for Dunn who works for the biggest maker of what are known as continuous sucker rods. Rather than connecting individual rods into a string long enough to run from the surface to the pump, a single long rod is run into the well like coiled tubing. While he was talking up coiled sucker rods at the SPE Artificial Lift Conference and Exhibition, a competitor at the conference, ChampionX, was announcing a first: a protective anodic coating for its continuous sucker rods that prevents corrosion and reduces the drag when a rod rubs against the surrounding tubing (SPE 209751). Unlike competitors that have relied on coatings that provide a physical barrier, ChampionX’s defense relies on a powdered metal coating that short-circuits electrochemical reactions that can cause rapid corrosion. This is an emerging technology where the key components are long-proven. Continuous rod was patented nearly 50 years ago, and methods using anodic corrosion protection methods have been around even longer with uses ranging from protecting subsea risers to galvanized nails. Still both ideas are new in this slow-changing service sector, where there has been little change in the dimensions of the rods, and key design elements are usually based on API specifications. These companies are among a handful of innovators working to convince operators that a continuous rod is a better choice at a time when wells present more challenges, from wellbores that curve by design or by accident to reservoirs producing increasingly corrosive fluids. It has been a slow change because “sucker rods have been around a long time and the product and servicing practices are well established whereas continuous rod, especially on the servicing side, represents a significant change,” Dunn said. While there are advantages, from faster running times to reduced failures, when it comes to this long-established oilfield commodity, he suspects some customers assume “everything that can be done is done.” Continuous rods eliminate the time required to make the hundreds of connections needed to make up a rod string. The risk of connection failures is reduced by replacing multiple rods with a long rod requiring connections only at the pumping unit on the surface and the pump downhole. To back up the promise of more-durable rods, the companies in this sector are adding corrosion-resistant coatings. “The general consensus is that the wells are going to get more and more corrosive, and the industry will be going after oil and gas in harsher conditions,” said Alex Perri, product line director for ChampionX.

Using Pinterest to Find and Share Evidence-Based Practices

Pinterest is a social media platform that allows users to “pin” resources from the Internet and includes hundreds of connections to education sites. Pinterest is a popular and trusted resource for many teachers, making it a potential way to share evidence-based practices. This column describes how teachers can use Pinterest to share evidence-based practices that enhance instruction for students with disabilities and work toward eliminating the research-to-practice gap.

Efficient gradient‐based optimisation of pixel antenna with large‐scale connections

An efficient gradient-based optimisation method is proposed for designing pixel antennas with hundreds of connections, where the connections between adjacent square pixel patches are modelled by lossy materials with continuous density variables. The gradients of antenna objective functions with respect to these density variables are derived by the adjoint variable method, at the cost of less than two times of simulation. With a gradient-based optimisation solver, four antennas with 220 connections are optimised. The optimised antennas achieve different expected polarisation and/or radiation patterns. All the optimisations in this work converge in only 80 iterations which is considerably faster than the heuristic algorithms handling the same number of variables. Two of the optimised antennas are fabricated to validate the optimisations. The simulated and measured results verify the accuracy and effectiveness of this method.

PriMa: a comprehensive approach to privacy protection in social network sites

With social networks (SNs) allowing their users to host large amounts of personal data on their platforms, privacy protection mechanisms are becoming increasingly important. The current privacy protection mechanisms offered by SNs mostly enforce access control policies based on users’ privacy settings. The task of setting privacy preferences may be tedious and confusing for the average user, who has hundreds of connections (e.g., acquaintances, colleagues, friends, etc.) and maintains an extensive profile on his main SN. Hence, users often end up with policies that do not sufficiently protect their personal information, thus facilitating potential privacy breaches and information misuse. In this paper, we propose PriMa (Privacy Manager), a privacy protection mechanism that supports semiautomated generation of access rules for users’ profile information, filling the gap between the privacy management needs of SN users and the existing SNs’ privacy protection mechanisms. PriMa access rules are generated using a multicriteria algorithm, so as to account for an extensive set of criteria to be considered when dealing with access control in SN sites. The resulting rules are simple yet powerful specifications, indicating the adequate level of protection for each user, and are dynamically adapted to the ever-changing requirements of the users’ preferences and SN configuration. We have implemented PriMa on a Drupal platform and as a third-party Facebook application. We have evaluated the performance of the PriMa application with respect to access rule generation.

Review of Networks of the brain.

Networks of the Brain, by Olaf Sporns. The MIT Press, 2010, 375 pages (ISBN 978-0-262-01469-4, CA $40.00 Hardcover) Reviewed by MARK DALEY and JODY C. CULHAM DOI: 10.1037/00025503 The history of psychology and neuroscience is filled with a tension between theories emphasising localization of brain functions versus holistic processing. A third way has been emerging - viewing brain and mind in terms of dynamic, interacting networks. In his recent book Networks of the Brain, Olaf Sporns provides a much-welcomed synthesis of the network perspective. This perspective is not entirely new. First, as indicated by the well-selected quotes from eminent historical figures - Golgi, Cajal, Broca, James, and Hebb included - that Sporns employs to introduce each chapter, network ideas have been considered for some time. Second, the core tools used to analyse networks, primarily graph theory (which dates back to 1 8th century mathematician Leonhard Euler), are well-established. Graph theory has revealed common principles that define small-world networks - in which clusters of sparse connections allow short paths between any two nodes - in applications as diverse as social circles, epidemiology and transportation routes. What is new - and exciting - is the application of network analytic approaches to neuroscience: over the past decade, graph theory has been applied to the wiring diagrams or connectomes within brains. Specific neuroscience applications span a range of scales: thousands of connections between hundreds of neurons in the simple roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans; hundreds of connections between dozens of functional areas of the human brain; and potentially even the trillions of connections between billions of neurons in the human brain. Sporns provides a comprehensive, tour-de-force overview of the cutting edge of the application of network science to neuroscience. This is a book that everyone with an interest in brain function should read. It provides a grand overview of a field that will undoubtedly hold a central position in the future of neuroscience - if it has not already taken that position now. The scope of the book is enormous, yet relatively self-contained. Sporns masterfully reviews and explains core concepts from many neuroscientific, psychological, mathematical, physical, and engineering disciplines in a way which is at once accessible to nonspecialists and, in most cases, does not sacrifice correctness or rigour to achieve that goal. The use of clear, natural language explanations in place of mathematical in order to appeal to a broader authence is commendable. Despite the inherent difficulty of such an undertaking, it is exactly the authence members who might be put off by too many equations who are most likely to benefit immediately from considering the approaches reviewed by Sporns. Chapter 1 provides an appetizer of sorts, briefly and clearly outlining a compelling argument for why one might wish to read the rest of the book. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the necessary background in network theory and neuroscience methods, respectively, to make sense of the rest of the book. The exposition of this material is clear, well written, and given in a wonderfully informal style - as though being guided through a new field over drinks by a very patient and knowledgeable colleague. Chapters 4-7 outline the application of network theoretic approaches to connections within anatomical circuits in the brain. Sporns is at the top of his game here and writes as one who has masterful knowledge of both the current state of the field and where it is likely to go. Particularly impressive is Sporns' very careful treatment of evolution in Chapter 7; he provides a network-theoretic framework for thinking about structural evolution in the brain by calling on a deep, broad range of supporting literature and making the full argument in terms of modern evolutionary theory. …

A variable weighted least-connection algorithm for multimedia transmission

Under high loads, a multimedia cluster server can serve many hundreds of connections concurrently, where a load balancer distributes the incoming connection request to each node according to a preset algorithm. Among existing scheduling algorithms, round-Robin and least-connection do not take into account the difference of service capability of each node and improved algorithms such as weighted round-Robin and weighted least-connection. They also do not consider the fact that the ratio of number of TCP connections and the fixed weight does not reflect die real load of node. In this paper we introduce our attempts in improving the scheduling algorithms and propose a variable weighted least-connection algorithm, which assigns variable weight, instead of fixed weight, to each node according to its real time resource. A validating trial has been performed and the results show that the proposed algorithm has effective load balancing in one central control node scenario.

Physical performance limits for shared buffer ATM switches

Performance studies, linking ATM switch capabilities to physical limitations imposed by integrated circuit technology, have been scarce. This paper explores trends in circuit capabilities, and makes projections toward the 0.25-/spl mu/m technologies that will be available to all switch designers in the year 2000. The limits imposed by circuit technology are applied to shared buffer ATM switches. We determine requirements and physical limits for buffer capacity, buffer throughput, chip I/O throughput, and power dissipation. As a result, we are able to project chip counts, aggregate switch throughputs, and switch dimensions. As well, performance capabilities of single-chip shared buffer switches are estimated. A single-chip shared buffer switch implemented in 0.25-/spl mu/m technology will be capable of an aggregate throughput of 1.3 Tb/s, will accomplish almost arbitrarily low cell loss rates for bursty traffic, and may be integrated together with translation tables supporting hundreds of connections per port.