Background. Around 25-45% of elective total joint arthroplasty (TJA) for primary hip and knee osteoarthritis (OA) are of questionable appropriateness. -- Objective. To examine how appropriateness of elective TJA for hip and knee OA is determined. -- Methods and results. Multi-methods studies guided by the Knowledge-To-Action (KTA) framework and the six Hawker appropriateness criteria for TJA. Study 1 was an interpretive descriptive study exploring barriers and facilitators to using the Hawker appropriateness criteria for adults with knee OA. Nine semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals and 14 with adults with a TKA revealed: a) 15 barriers (including difficulties in using criteria, lack of accessible conservative treatments, unreceptivity to practice change, clinical judgement limited to OA severity and age, patients receiving information after the decision is made); and b) one facilitator (providing research evidence to obtaining healthcare team buy-in). Study 2 was a systematic review identifying and appraising instruments to assess elective TJA appropriateness for adults with hip and knee OA. None of the 55 instruments met all the Hawker appropriateness criteria; the most included criteria were OA impact on quality of life and evidence of OA while the least included were trial of conservative treatments and elements of shared decision-making. There was limited evidence on psychometric properties. Study 3 was an environmental scan of online Canadian resources for adults with hip or knee OA considering TJA and healthcare professionals participating in the decision. The 73 patient resources were understandable for diverse health literacy levels, but only four were patient decisions aids. Thirteen healthcare professional resources typically recognized OA impact on quality of life, evidence of OA, trial of conservative treatments, and did not discuss elements of shared decision-making. -- Conclusion. When determining appropriateness of elective TJA for primary hip and knee OA, clinical practice and instruments typically focus on OA symptoms negatively impacting quality of life and radiographic evidence of OA, while trial of conservative treatments is less reported. The appropriateness decision-making process poorly acknowledges or supports patient preferences (e.g., shared decision-making). Appropriateness of elective TJA needs to be reconsidered and conceptualized in a way that supports early conservative treatments and patient-centred care.

Thesis advisor: Jeremy D. Wilkins / This dissertation draws upon the work of Thomas Aquinas and Bernard J. F. Lonergan in order to put forward an integrated theorem of the imago Trinitatis. The theorem of the imago Trinitatis, in Catholic theology, is a theorem about how human persons imitate and reflect the triune God. In Aquinas and Lonergan, the imago Trinitatis is identified with the intelligent emanations of word and love that occur within the human mind. But, according to Aquinas, the imago Trinitatis can be considered in two respects: first, as a likeness by analogy—that is, an analogical likeness—and, second, as a likeness by conformity between the human and the divine. The first two chapters explain each of these likenesses in Aquinas, and the next two chapters explain each of these likenesses in Lonergan. The final chapter of this dissertation proposes a complementary analogical likeness of the Trinity in humans: an analogical likeness based upon shared intentionality. It further explains how this likeness is related to the analogical likeness based upon intelligent emanation in Aquinas and Lonergan. In doing so, this dissertation defends an integrated conception of the analogical likeness of the Trinity in human beings, as it unites the analogical likeness based upon intelligible emanation occurring in the human mind and the analogical likeness based upon shared intentionality as interpersonal, coordinated activity. The imago Trinitatis, then, is at once personal and interpersonal, and the analogues for the Trinity in humans are both psychological and communal. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

This dissertation conducted an extensive examination of dockless e-scooter dynamics using high-resolution trip data from Austin, Texas. Four studies were conducted to capture the multifaceted nature of e-scooter operations and demand. The first study aimed to identify and quantify the influence of contributing factors affecting e-scooter demand by partitioning the data by time period for weekdays and weekends. Utilizing a joint panel linear regression (JPLR) model, significant associations were observed between e-scooter demand and variables such as sociodemographic attributes, transportation infrastructure, land use, meteorological attributes, and situational factors. The second study shifted focus to shared e-scooter origin-destination (OD) flows in the urban region. By employing a joint binary logit-fractional split model, e-scooter OD flows were analyzed, emphasizing variations across distinct time periods and the subsequent implications for e-scooter deployment and rebalancing strategies. The third study delved into e-scooter utilization efficiency, introducing a time-to-book (TtB) measure. Through a Mixed Grouped Ordered Logit (MGOL) model, the study highlighted variations between regular and peak weeks, offering operators a chance to enhance fleet utilization. The final study addressed the broader context of the e-scooter industry, investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing datasets spanning January 2019 through December 2021, a spatial approach illuminated changes in e-scooter demand patterns before, during, and after the pandemic, highlighting the effects of COVID-19-related factors and vaccine attributes on e-scooter trends. These collective insights from the four studies provide valuable contributions to understanding and enhancing e-scooter operations in urban landscapes

Enligt olika mätningar sjunker andelen barn och unga som läser skönlitteratur för sitt eget nöjes skull. Det har lett till en utbredd oro i samhället, eftersom en väl utvecklad läsförmåga anses vara en förutsättning för att fullt ut delta i det demokratiska samhället. Läsning antas även ha djupgående effekter på människors förmåga till tänkande, inlevelse och empati. En konsekvens av denna oro är att vuxenvärlden genom olika insatser försöker öka intresset för läsning hos barn och unga, medan målgruppens eget perspektiv på läsning lyser med sin frånvaro. När barn och unga faktiskt tillfrågas tycks dock kroppsliga och rumsliga aspekter spela en viktig roll för en positiv läsupplevelse. Bokcirkeln är en relativt vanlig läsfrämjande aktivitet på folkbiblioteken. Den brittiska metoden Shared Reading liknar bokcirkeln, med den stora skillnaden att all läsning sker tillsammans i gruppen genom högläsning. Intresset för Shared Reading är på uppgång i Sverige. Tidigare forskning visar att kroppsliga och rumsliga aspekter bidrar till deltagarnas positiva upplevelse av Shared Reading. Dock har ytterst få studier gjorts med barn och unga.

The parallelization of complex, irregular scientific applications with various computational requirements often results in severe load imbalance. Load balancing increases the efficient utilization of available resources in parallel and distributed applications, thereby reducing the overall processor completion times. Loops are a rich source of parallelism in data parallel applications. In recent years, several loop scheduling schemes that balance processor workloads have been proposed and have been successfully implemented in data parallel applications. If the workload on processors is balanced, then the overall efficiency of a computation increases, and that, in turn reduces the computation run-time. Therefore, loop scheduling routines are incorporated into applications to insure that the workload is balanced for all the available processors. Significant research effort has been made towards embedding the most competitive loop scheduling algorithms into specific scientific applications. The application developer has to rewrite the algorithm to be incor-porated into a different application, each time a new one is developed. Certain compilers take advantage of loops present in the application and perform automatic parallelization on them. However, the automatic parallelization doesn?t address all sources of algorithmic and systemic variances in heterogeneous environments. These limitations raise a compelling need for building an application programmable interface (API) for adaptive loop scheduling algorithms that can be incorporated into any scientific application. This thesis presents an API for various adaptive loop scheduling strategies for data parallel applications in a shared address space architecture, which allows for parallelization as well as adaptive load balancing of a scientific application. This API has been incorporated into a few scientific applications in order to evaluate the performance of each application using the adaptive loop scheduling routines on shared address space parallel machines against the automatic loop scheduling offered by present parallelizing compiler technology.

The sweep paradigm for volume rendering has previously been successfully applied with irregular grids. This thesis describes a parallel volume rendering algorithm called PARZSweep for regular grids that utilizes the sweep paradigm. The sweep paradigm is a concept where a plane sweeps the data volume parallel to the viewing direction. As the sweeping proceeds in the increasing order of z, the faces incident on the vertices are projected onto the viewing volume to constitute to the image. The sweeping ensures that all faces are projected in the correct order and the image thus obtained is very accurate in its details. PARZSweep is an extension of a serial algorithm for regular grids called RZSweep. The hypothesis of this research is that a parallel version of RZSweep can be designed and implemented which will utilize multiple processors to reduce rendering times. PARZSweep follows an approach called image-based task scheduling or tiling. This approach divides the image space into tiles and allocates each tile to a processor for individual rendering. The sub images are composite to form a complete final image. PARZSweep uses a shared memory architecture in order to take advantage of inherent cache coherency for faster communication between processor. Experiments were conducted comparing RZSweep and PARZSweep with respect to prerendering times, rendering times and image quality. RZSweep and PARZSweep have approximately the same prerendering costs, produce exactly the same images and PARZSweep substantially reduced rendering times. PARZSweep was evaluated for scalability with respect to the number of tiles and number of processors. Scalability results were disappointing due to uneven data distribution.

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