Abstract

Restoration and redevelopment are difficult when traces of things that require preservation have been minimized. Such operations are even more complex whenever a portion of an ancient city is involved. This essay describes the redevelopment project of the historic center of Wuhu through the different themes raised during the drafting of the project: from the cultural opportunity of a wide reconstruction work, to the definition of the main design strategies, and the question of memory and identity. The results show that the field of intervention in this project is broader than that of most restoration projects, that is, an evolving city center, which is impossible to consider with traditional restoration parameters or with pure conservation. The only possibility of intervention is on the city structure, which allows the city to develop itself continuously within a well-defined system of rules.

Abstract

In our study, we aimed to evaluate the influence of training on compliance and persistence with bisphosphonate treatment given on a weekly vs. monthly basis in postmenopausal osteoporosis patients. A total of 979 patients with postmenopausal osteoporosis (mean age: 63.2 ± 7.2 years) were included in this national, multicenter, prospective non-interventional observational cohort registry study. Patients were randomized into training (n = 492, 50.3%, mean age: 63.4 ± 7.2 years) and control (n = 487, 49.7%, mean age: 63.0 ± 7.1 years) groups. Patients in each intervention group were given weekly (44.9% and 44.6% for training and control subjects, respectively) or monthly (55.1% and 55.4%, respectively) bisphosphonate regimens. After the initial visit, patients were followed up at three-month intervals throughout 12 months of treatment for evaluation of persistence, compliance and adverse events. On average, 79.4% of the patients were persistent with the treatment with a mean of 350.4 days of duration during the 12-month follow-up period. The mean compliance in the compliant and fully compliant group remained at an average of 86.6%. No significant difference was detected between the training and control groups in terms of compliance and persistence. Significantly longer persistence (360.0 ± 89.0 vs. 345.0 ± 108.0 days, p = 0.035), higher percentage of persistent patients (83.4% vs. 74.2%, p = 0.012) and higher compliance rates (88.8% vs. 83.3%, p = 0.002) were noted in monthly regimen patients in comparison to those given weekly regimen. Our findings revealed remarkably high rates for persistence and compliance with bisphosphonate treatment in postmenopausal osteoporosis, with no impact of training on compliance and persistence rates. Longer persistence and better compliance rates were achieved with the monthly bisphosphonate regimen when compared to the weekly regimen.

Abstract

Today, mobility and persistence are important aspects of distributed computing- . They have many fields of use such as load balancing, fault tolerance and dynamic reconfiguration of applications. In this context, Java provides many useful mechanisms for the mobility of code via dynamic class loading, and the mobility or persistence of data via object serialization. However, Java does not provide any mechanism for the mobility/persistence of computation (i.e., threads). We designed and implemented a new mechanism, called , that is used to build thread mobility or thread persistence. Therefore, a running Java thread can, at an arbitrary state of its execution, migrate to a remote machine where it resumes its execution, or be checkpointed on disk for possible subsequent recovery. With our services, migrating a thread is simply performed by the call of our primitive, and checkpointing/recovering a thread is performed by the call of our and primitives. Several projects have recently addressed the issue of Java thread serialization, e.g., Sumatra, Wasp, JavaGo, Brakes, JavaGoX, Merpati. Some of them have attempted to minimize the overhead incurred by the thread serialization mechanism on thread performance, but none of them has been able to completely avoid this overhead. We propose a generic Java thread serialization mechanism that does not impose any performance overhead on serialized threads. This is achieved thanks to the use of type inference and dynamic de-optimization techniques. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation details of our thread serialization prototype in Sun Microsystems' JDK. We report on experiments conducted with our prototype, present a comparative performance evaluation of the main thread serialization techniques, and confirm the elimination of the performance overhead with our thread serialization mechanism. Document type: Report

Abstract

The increase in dropout rates in higher education is a phenomenon that has generated a lot of interest because of the need to deal with its economic, personal, and social consequences, and because of its prevalence, estimated around 30% in Spain. There is a similar interest in violent behavior in university classrooms, which has also been seen to have increased in recent years. Given that, and the fact that research has shown personal variables to be more influential in dropout from higher education, the aim of this study is to explore whether those students who are the victims of bullying (both traditional and cyberbullying) are closer to dropping out from their degree courses. To that end, 1,653 first-year students doing various degree courses in the north of Spain were asked to complete a questionnaire. The results of a Bayesian analysis showed that students who were victims of bullying were more likely to consider dropping out than students who were not victims of bullying. In addition, variables related to social integration (support from friends and teachers) exhibited a moderating effect. These findings raise the urgent need to include intervention strategies in relation to bullying in university plans to prevent dropout.