Introduction: Drug dependence is a chronic medical illness that often requires multiple treatment episodes and the use of health services. However, patterns related to substance use and abuse treatment are not well known. Two critical factors that have not been explored in relation to the number of prior substance use treatment episodes (PSUTEs) are multiple age groups and waiting periods. Hence, the first aim of this study was to examine if the frequency of prior substance use treatment episodes varies by different age categories. The second aim was to assess the extent to which the waiting period prior to receipt of substance use treatment services influences the likelihood of experiencing multiple treatment episodes. Methods: Data used for this research was the 2018 Treatment Episodes Data Set— Admissions (TEDS-A) (N= 1,935,541), which comprised of admissions to alcohol or drug treatment facilities across the United States. Descriptive statistics of participants was conducted. Bivariate and Zero-Inflated Poisson regression (ZIPR) analyses were performed to evaluate the number of PSUTEs associated with age and days waiting to enter a treatment facility while adjusting for other potential confounders. Andersen's healthcare utilization model was used to categorize covariates into predisposing, enabling, needs, and environmental factors. P-value ≤ 0.01 was considered the criteria for rejection of all null hypotheses. Results: Among participants, the average frequency of PSUTE was 1.60. About 34.2% were 25-32 years old, while 19.2% had a waiting period of between 1 to 7 days. Bivariate analysis showed that the number of PSUTEs (0 to ≥ 5) was significantly associated with all age groups and waiting periods, respectively. The results for age showed that 1.4% (12-17 years old), 8.4% (18-24 years old), 14.7% (25-34 years old), 16.7% (35-49 years old), and 18.1% (≥ 50 years old) reported ≥ 5 PUSTEs. For individuals with a waiting period of ≥ 31 days, the number of PSUTEs included 36.5% (no PUSTE), 20.2% (1 PUSTE), 12.3% (2 PUSTEs), 6.8% (3 PUSTEs), 4.2% (4 PUSTEs), and 20.0% (≥ 5 PUSTEs). ZIPR analysis demonstrated that the predicted log count of PSUTE increased significantly for every increase in age category. While for every increase in the number of days waiting to enter treatment, the predicted log count of PSUTEs significantly decreased. All potential confounders including, gender, race, living arrangement, type of treatment or service setting at admission, primary substance used, presence of co-occurring mental & substance use disorder, health insurance, and census region, were significantly associated with the frequency of previous substance use treatment episodes (P-value ≤0.01). Conclusion: This study demonstrated that multiple age categories and wait periods are significant predictors of the number of previous substance use treatment episodes. Notably, younger participants showed fewer prior episodes than older participants. These factors should be considered in order to develop effective strategies to improve treatment use and access to substance use treatment facilities. Therefore, more research is needed to explore these factors as well as other unknown predictors influencing multiple substance use treatment episodes.

Mitochondrial diseases are caused by gene mutations in either mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) or nuclear DNA (nDNA) and they are among one of the most common forms of inherited disorders. It is estimated that 1 out of every 5000 individuals will develop a mitochondrial disease in their lifetime. Due to the crucial and widespread functionality of mitochondria in human cells, prolonged diseases of the mitochondria affect cells of the brain, heart, liver, muscles and kidneys and can lead to multi-organ failure in some patients. Inherited or acquired mitochondrial diseases can present at any stage of life, affecting both children and adults. Since its discovery, the mitochondrial genome has been analyzed and sequenced with increasing ease and this process has helped recognize various mitochondrial disorders as the root of genetic diseases. This paper will explore the unique properties of the mitochondrion and its genome, examine the relationship between mtDNA and some common myopathies such as Leigh syndrome (LS) or maternally inherited Leigh syndrome (MILS), mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes (MELAS) in order to explore commonalities and differences in their inheritance patterns and their effect on mitochondrial function. Although studies have shown that these conditions generally affect the process of oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria, because of the wide variety of presentations of this disease, further research is needed to understand the different etiologies, as well as to explore novel therapies to treat them.

No description available.

This thesis characterizes the feedback between the instructor and student teams engaged in a Virtual Bioreactor (VBioR) Laboratory Project. The project allows senior-level chemical, biological, and environmental engineering students to apply their developing knowledge and skills in an industrially situated process optimization project. Feedback is an important tool for instructors to use to scaffold student learning, especially in the context of an ill-structured project. An ethnographic approach is taken for data collection; audio recordings and field notes are taken throughout the duration of the project. The characterization of feedback uses an episodes framework for discourse analysis to consider similarities and differences. Using this framework, thematic codes have been developed through a semi-emergent process to describe the content of Design Memo Meetings (DMMs) between an instructor and student teams. Student work products, post-DMM surveys, and post-project interviews are also considered as data sources for this research. The results of this research show that instructor feedback in this project is adaptable, conforming to the status of the student team at the beginning of the DMM. This adaptability is highlighted by differences in DMM themes that are supported by differences in the Design Strategy Memos that student teams bring to the meeting. Student perceptions of the DMM feedback are also presented. / Graduation date: 2013

Pattern discovery is an important area of data mining referring to a class of techniques designed for the extraction of interesting patterns from the data. A pattern is some kind of a local structure that captures correlations and dependencies present in the elements of the data. In general, pattern discovery is about finding all patterns of `interest' in the data and a popular measure of interestingness for a pattern is its frequency of occurrence in the data. Thus the problem of frequent pattern discovery is to find all patterns in the data whose frequency of occurrence exceeds some user defined threshold. However, frequency of a pattern is not the only measure for finding patterns of interest and there also exist other measures and techniques for finding interesting patterns. This thesis is concerned with efficient discovery of inherent patterns from long sequence (or temporally ordered) data. Mining of such sequentially ordered data is called temporal data mining and the temporal patterns that are discovered from large sequential data are called episodes. More specifically, this thesis explores efficient methods for finding small and relevant subsets of episodes from sequence data that best characterize the data. The thesis also discusses methods for comparing datasets, based on comparing the sets of patterns representing the datasets. The data in a frequent episode discovery framework is abstractly viewed as a single long sequence of events. Here, the event is a tuple, (Ei; ti), where Ei is referred to as an event-type (taking values from a finite alphabet set) and ti is the time of occurrence. The events are ordered in the non-decreasing order of the time of occurrence. The pattern of interest in such a sequence is called an episode, which is a collection of event-types with a partial order defined over it. In this thesis, the focus is on a special type of episode called serial episode, where there is a total order defined among the collection of event-types representing the episode. The occurrence of an episode is essentially a subset of events from the data whose event-types match the set of eventtypes associated with the episode and the order in which they occur conforms to the underlying partial order of the episode. The frequency of an episode is some measure of how often it occurs in the event stream. Many different notions of frequency have been defined in literature. Given a frequency definition, the goal of frequent episode discovery is to unearth all episodes which have a frequency greater than a user-defined threshold. The size of an episode is the number of event-types in the episode. An episode β is called a subepisode of another episode β, if the collection of event-types of β is a subset of the corresponding collection of α and the event-types of β satisfy the same partial order relationships present among the corresponding event-types of α. The set of all episodes can be arranged in a partial order lattice, where each level i contains episodes of size i and the partial order is the subepisode relationship. In general, there are two approaches for mining frequent episodes, based on the way one traverses this lattice. The first approach is to traverse this lattice in a breadth-first manner, and is called the Apriori approach. The other approach is the Pattern growth approach, where the lattice is traversed in a depth-first manner. There exist different frequency notions for episodes, and many Apriori based algorithms have been proposed for mining frequent episodes under the different frequencies. However there do not exist Pattern-growth based methods for many of the frequency notions. The first part of the thesis proposes new Pattern-growth methods for discovering frequent serial episodes under two frequency notions called the non-overlapped frequency and the total frequency. Special cases, where certain additional conditions, called the span and gap constraints, are imposed on the occurrences of the episodes are also considered. The proposed methods, in general, consist of two steps: the candidate generation step and the counting step. The candidate generation step involves finding potential frequent episodes. This is done by following the general Pattern growth approach for finding the candidates, which is the depth-first traversal of the lattice of all episodes. The second step, which is the counting step, involves counting the frequencies of the episodes. The thesis presents efficient methods for counting the occurrences of serial episodes using occurrence windows of subepisodes for both the non-overlapped and total frequency. The relative advantages of Pattern-growth approaches over Apriori approaches are also discussed. Through detailed simulation results, the effectiveness of this approach on a host of synthetic and real data sets is shown. It is shown that the proposed methods are highly scalable and efficient in runtime as compared to the existing Apriori approaches. One of the main issues in frequent pattern mining is the huge number of frequent patterns, returned by the discovery methods, irrespective of the approach taken to solve the problems. The second part of this thesis, addresses this issue and discusses methods of selecting a small subset of relevant episodes from event sequences. There have been a few approaches, discussed in the literature, for finding a small subset of patterns. One set of methods are information theory based methods, where patterns that provide maximum information are searched for. Another approach is the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle based summarization schemes. Here the data is encoded using a subset of patterns (which forms the model for the data) and its occurrences. The subset of patterns that has the maximum efficiency in encoding the data is the best representative model for the data. The MDL principle takes into account both the encoding efficiency of the model as well as model complexity. A method, called Constrained Serial episode Coding(CSC), is proposed based on the MDL principle, which returns a highly relevant, non-redundant and small subset of serial episodes. This also includes an encoding scheme, where the model representation and the encoding of the data are efficient. An interesting feature of this algorithm for isolating a small set of relevant episodes is that it does not need a user-specified threshold on frequency. The effectiveness of this method is shown on two types of data. The first is data obtained from a detailed simulator for a reconfigurable coupled conveyor system. The conveyor system consists of different intersecting paths and packages flow through such a network. Mining of such data can allow one to unearth the main paths of package ows which can be useful in remote monitoring and visualization of the system. On this data, it is shown that the proposed method is able to return highly consistent sub paths, in the form of serial episodes, with great encoding efficiency as compared to other known related sequence summarization schemes, like SQS and GoKrimp. The second type of data consists of a collection of multi-class sequence datasets. It is shown that the selected episodes from the proposed method form good features in classi cation. The proposed method is compared with SQS and GoKrimp, and it is shown that the episodes selected by this method help in achieving better classification results as compared to other methods. The third and nal part of the thesis discusses methods for comparing sets of patterns representing different datasets. There are many instances when one is interested in comparing datasets. For example, in streaming data, one is interested in knowing whether the characteristics of the data are the same or have changed significantly. In other cases, one may simply like to compare two datasets and quantify the degree of similarity between them. Often, data are characterized by a set of patterns as described above. Comparing sets of patterns representing datasets gives information about the similarity/dissimilarity between the datasets. However not many measures exist for comparing sets of patterns. This thesis proposes a similarity measure for comparing sets of patterns which in turn aids in comparison of di erent datasets. First, a kernel for comparing two patterns, called the Pattern Kernel, is proposed. This kernel is proposed for three types of patterns: serial episodes, sequential patterns and itemsets. Using this kernel, a Pattern Set Kernel is proposed for comparing different sets of patterns. The effectiveness of this kernel is shown in classification and change detection. The thesis concludes with a summary of the main contributions and some suggestions for extending the work presented here.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-06-02T11:53:21Z No. of bitstreams: 1 robertoperobellideoliveira.pdf: 2358557 bytes, checksum: 51c90cb134b320721c3c108e9cc461d7 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-07-02T13:06:33Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 robertoperobellideoliveira.pdf: 2358557 bytes, checksum: 51c90cb134b320721c3c108e9cc461d7 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-02T13:06:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 robertoperobellideoliveira.pdf: 2358557 bytes, checksum: 51c90cb134b320721c3c108e9cc461d7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-08-22 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar como se realizam interacionalmente algumas instâncias sequenciais que estamos considerando como episódios de conflito. A análise é realizada com base no arcabouço teórico de uma linguística interacional, a partir das políticas de pesquisa empreendidas pela Análise da Conversa Etnometodológica e pela Sociolinguística Interacional. Trata-se de um estudo de caso realizado sobre gravações em áudio e transcritas de acordo com o modelo Jefferson de transcrição (LODER, 2008), na Vara de Família de uma cidade de interior no Sudeste brasileiro, em que uma assistente social se coloca como terceira parte, durante a fase de produção de parecer técnico, em um processo de regulamentação de visitas. Os litigantes, ficticiamente chamados Flávia e Amir, em conjunto com Sônia, codinome atribuído à representante da instituição, produzem ações confrontacionais que desencadeiam processos de prestações de contas (do inglês, accounts), as quais, ao invés de encerrar, acabam por investir mais no litígio, proporcionando a interpretação de que prestações de contas não só normalizam as expectativas dos participantes, mas também podem ser geradoras de mais fala de conflito, dependendo das ações em curso e do tópico abordado. O estudo pretende ser uma contribuição para as pesquisas em linguística aplicada das profissões, uma vez que procura descrever as diferentes anatomias do conflito, a partir das escolhas interacionais dos agentes. Além disso, esta tese poderá ser, também, uma contribuição para os praticantes da mediação endoprocessual, na medida em que descreve, a partir do entrecruzamento de tópicos e ações, os modos de agir dos participantes envolvidos, diante de determinados temas bastante comuns neste tipo de conduta processual. Sendo assim, esta tese “disseca” os vários corpos sequenciais que os episódios de conflito assumem, dada sua diversificação de contornos a partir das características tópicas e acionais envolvidas. / The present work aims to examine how some sequential instances that we are considering as conflict episodes happen interactionally. The analysis is implemented based on the theoretical framework of a interactional linguistics, from the policies of reserach undertaken by Conversation Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics. This is a case study which was produced based on audio recordings, which were transcribed according to the Jeffersonion model of transcription (LODER, 2008), done in the Family Court of a town in southeastern Brazil, in which a social worker is placed as third party, during the production of technical advice, in a process of regulatory visits. The litigants, fictitiously called Flávia and Amir, along with Sônia (nickname assigned to the representative of the institution) produce confrontational actions that trigger processes of accounts which, instead of closing, end up investing deeply in dispute, which means that accounts not only normalize participants‟ expectations, but can also generate more conflict talk, depending on the ongoing actions and the topic being discussed. The study intends to be a contribution to research in applied linguistics related to professions, as it seeks to describe the different anatomies of the conflict from the interactional choices of the agents. Furthermore, this project may also be a contribution to the practitioners of endoprocessual mediation, as it describes, from the intersection of topics and actions, the ways the participants involved do things in certain circunstances which are quite common in this type procedural conduct. Thus, this thesis “dissects” the various sequential bodies that conflict episodes assume, given their different contours according to the topical and actional features involved.

Studies carried out by different scholars have shown that the social roles society assigns to women and men create differences in how the genders use language. However, there is little previous research in the domain of gender and topic shift or initiation. This essay aims to investigate possible gender differences in topic shift and initiation in multiparty conversation among second language learners of English in upper secondary school. The three group discussions were recorded in a classroom setting and the data collected was transcribed. The topical shifts in the transcripts were coded using the Topical Episode Analysis (TEA) and the episode shifts in each conversation were analyzed on the basis of gender distribution and type of shift. In addition, the findings of the three groups were compared and discussed. The main result of this study was that the boys initiated 100 percent more shifts than the girls. The boys took up more linguistic space and dominated the topical shifts in the conversation which indicates that gender differences in topic shift and initiation exists, a finding that is consistent with previous research within the field of gender and language. In conclusion, gender differences were found between how the girls and the boys participating in this study shifted and initiated topics. The boys initiated more shifts than the girls in the multiparty conversations.

La plus grande partie de l’Afrique orientale présente un climat aride à semi-aride, et une forte variabilité spatio-temporelle des pluies. Les sécheresses sont courantes dans cette région, et persistent souvent sur plusieurs années consécutives, précédées ou suivies par des inondations majeures. La plupart des modes de vie et des activités socio-économiques restent néanmoins dépendants des précipitations, avec des effets extrêmement dommageables en périodes d’extrêmes climatiques. Il a été montré qu’un seul événement extrême suffisait à inverser la croissance économique nationale plusieurs années d’affilée. Aucun développement durable ne peut donc être réalisé en Afrique de l’Est sans une prise en compte effective de l’information climatique dans les politiques, les plans et les programmes de développement. De nombreuses études antérieures sur la région ont été consacrées à la variabilité des pluies aux échelles saisonnière, annuelle et décadaire. Peu de recherches ont porté sur l’échelle intra-saisonnière, qui est déterminante pour la plupart des applications agricoles. Cette étude vise à combler cette lacune, en examinant la structure de la saison des pluies en termes de répartition des épisodes secs et pluvieux, et la façon dont cette répartition varie dans l’espace et le temps, à l’échelle interannuelle à travers l’Afrique est-équatoriale. Des modèles de prévision destinés à être utilisés dans des systèmes d’alerte précoce, en vue d’atténuer les risques liés au climat, sont en outre développés. Les objectifs spécifiques de l’étude incluent : un diagnostic des différents aspects de la répartition des épisodes secs et pluvieux, dans leur variation interannuelle ; une analyse des relations entre les aspects de cette répartition ainsi identifiés et les principaux champs climatiques d’échelle large qui gouvernent le climat global ; une évaluation de la prévisibilité des différents aspects des épisodes secs et pluvieux pour l’amélioration des systèmes d’alerte précoce de la région.Plusieurs bases de données couvrant une période de 40 ans (1961-2000) ont été utilisées. Elles comprennent des séries de précipitations journalières mesurées par pluviomètre dans les trois pays d’Afrique orientale (Kenya, Ouganda, Tanzanie) ; les températures de surface marine (SST) du Hadley Centre ; des données de réanalyses et des stations de radiosondages de Nairobi (Kenya) et de Bangui (République Centrafricaine). Des indices d’El Niño-Oscillation Australe (ENSO), du Dipôle de l’Océan Indien et de gradients de SST, constituant des prédicteurs SST prédéfinis, ont été également utilisés [...] / Most of Eastern Africa has arid and semi-arid climate with high space-time variability in rainfall. The droughts are very common in this region, and often persist for several years, preceded or followed by extreme floods. Most of the livelihoods and socio-economic activities however remain rain-dependent leading to severe negative impacts during the periods of occurrence of climate extremes. It has been noted that one extreme event was capable of reversing national economic growth made over a period of several years. Thus no sustainable development can be attained in eastern Africa without effective mainstreaming of climate information in the development policies, plans and programmes. Many past studies in the region have focused on rainfall variability at seasonal, annual and decadal scales. Very little work has been done at intraseasonal timescale that is paramount to most agricultural applications. This study aims at filling this research gap, by investigating the structure of rainfall season in terms of the distribution of wet and dry spells and how this distribution varies in space and time at interannual time scale over Equatorial Eastern Africa. Prediction models for use in the early warning systems aimed at climate risk reduction were finally developed. The specific objectives of the study include, delineate and diagnose the some aspects of the distribution of the wet and dry spells at interannual timescale; investigate the linkages between the aspects of the distribution of wet and dry spells identified and dominant large scale climate fields that drive the global climate; and assess the predictability of the various aspects of wet and dry spells for the improvement of the use in the early warning systems of the region.Several datasets spanning a period of 40 years (1961 – 2000) were used. The data included gauged daily rainfall amount for the three Eastern Africa countries namely Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania; Hadley Centre Sea Surface Temperature (SST); re-analysis data and radiosonde observations from Nairobi (Kenya) and Bangui (Central Africa Republic) upper air stations. The indices of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Indian Ocean Dipole and SST gradients which constituted the predefined predictors were also used [...]

Franz Liszt composed his Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust between 1856 and 1861. The composer intended to portray two emotionally contrasting scenes from Lenau's Faust in a set for orchestra, the first being The Night Procession and the second The Dance in the Village Inn. Liszt created a duet version of the orchestral set, and also a solo piano version of The Dance in the Village Inn, known as the Mephisto Waltz No. 1. The set was not performed together due to the immense popularity of The Dance in the Village Inn but also due to an unfortunate publication history resulting in the pieces being published separately by Schuberth publishers, published years apart from each other. As a result The Night Procession is largely forgotten today and The Dance in the Village Inn is interpreted as a single work outside of its context in a set. In this dissertation the works are examined from within its context in a set. Background information includes information on Liszt's student Robert Freund (1852-1936), and a solo piano transcription of the orchestral alternative ending to The Dance in the Village Inn. A comparison between Liszt's orchestral, solo and duet versions of the Mephisto Waltz No. 1 and the Liszt-Busoni Mephisto Waltz No. 1 is also made.

[pt] A presente dissertação tem como objetivo produzir um ensaio que problematize as representações da história escravista e colonial brasileira e as violências fixadas pelo racismo em manifestações artísticas contemporâneas. Para ler tais questões analiso o livro Memórias da Plantação: episódios de racismo cotidiano (2019), da artista multidisciplinar portuguesa Grada Kilomba e o filme de ficção Vazante (2017), dirigido pela cineasta brasileira Daniela Thomas, em diálogo com o evento de sua recepção e repercussão crítica na mídia brasileira. A partir destas duas obras que partem de diferentes perspectivas, abordagens e temporalidades, a pesquisa procura refletir sobre como as cicatrizes da violência escravista e colonial são performadas na contemporaneidade e como as noções de lugar de escuta/lugar de fala, letramento racial e fragilidade branca têm sido ativadas no vocabulário contemporâneo para se pensar racialidade e privilégio branco. / [en] This dissertation aims to produce an essay that problematizes the representations of the colonialism and slavery times of brazilian history and the violence fixed by racism in contemporary artistic works. To read such questions, I analyze the book Plantation memories: episodes of everyday racism (2019[2008]), by the portuguese multidisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba and the fiction feature film Vazante (2017), directed by the brazilian filmmaker Daniela Thomas, in dialogue with the event of its reception and critical repercussion in the brazilian media. From these two works that start from different perspectives, approaches and temporalities, the research seeks to reflect on how the scars of colonial and slave violence are performed in contemporary times and how the notions of place of listening / place of speech, racial literacy and white fragility have been activated and transformed in contemporary vocabulary to think about raciality and white privilege.