Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Intervention in Chronic Stroke: a Randomized, Controlled Pilot Study

Objectives Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) involves training in mindful meditation and has been shown to improve functioning across a range of different disorders. However, little research has focused on the use of MBSR in stroke patients, and previous MBSR studies typically have not included an active control condition to account for non-specific factors that could contribute to the observed benefits. Methods We conducted a pilot study of MBSR in chronic stroke patients, comparing MBSR to an active control condition. Half of participants were randomly assigned to a standard 8-week MBSR class, and the other half of participants were assigned to an 8-week Brain Health class matched for schedule, instructor, and format. Participants were assessed pre- and post-intervention by blinded examiners on a neuropsychological battery that included primary outcome measures of psychological and cognitive functioning. Participants were also given an anonymous questionnaire following the post-intervention testing session to measure class satisfaction. Results Both the MBSR and Brain Health classes were rated favorably by participants. Recruitment and retention rates were high, and methods for participant randomization and examiner blinding were successful. Class implementation in terms of execution was also successful, as rated by outside experts. Conclusions This study established the feasibility of conducting MBSR and Brain Health classes in a chronic stroke population. Trial Registration https://ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT #: 02600637

Approaches to measure class importance in Knowledge Graphs

The amount, size, complexity, and importance of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have increased during the last decade. Many different communities have chosen to publish their datasets using Linked Data principles, which favors the integration of this information with many other sources published using the same principles and technologies. Such a scenario requires to develop techniques of Linked Data Summarization. The concept of a class is one of the core elements used to define the ontologies which sustain most of the existing KGs. Moreover, classes are an excellent tool to refer to an abstract idea which groups many individuals (or instances) in the context of a given KG, which is handy to use when producing summaries of its content. Rankings of class importance are a powerful summarization tool that can be used both to obtain a superficial view of the content of a given KG and to prioritize many different actions over the data (data quality checking, visualization, relevance for search engines…). In this paper, we analyze existing techniques to measure class importance and propose a novel approach called ClassRank. We compare the class usage in SPARQL logs of different KGs with the importance ranking produced by the approaches evaluated. Then, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the evaluated techniques. Our experimentation suggests that ClassRank outperforms state-of-the-art approaches measuring class importance.

Amenability of groupoids and asymptotic invariance of convolution powers

The original definition of amenability given by von Neumann in the highly non-constructive terms of means was later recast by Day using approximately invariant probability measures. Moreover, as it was conjectured by Furstenberg and proved by Kaimanovich–Vershik and Rosenblatt, the amenability of a locally compact group is actually equivalent to the existence of a single probability measure on the group with the property that the sequence of its convolution powers is asymptotically invariant. In the present article we extend this characterization of amenability to measured groupoids. It implies, in particular, that the amenability of a measure class preserving group action is equivalent to the existence of a random environment on the group parameterized by the action space, and such that the tail of the random walk in almost every environment is trivial.

Topological flows for hyperbolic groups

Weshow that for every non-elementary hyperbolic group the Bowen–Margulis current associated with a strongly hyperbolic metric forms a unique group-invariant Radon measure class of maximal Hausdorff dimension on the boundary square. Applications include a characterization of roughly similar hyperbolic metrics via mean distortion.

Some spherical functions on hyperbolic groups

We investigate properties of some spherical functions defined on hyperbolic groups using boundary representations on the Gromov boundary endowed with the Patterson–Sullivan measure class. We prove sharp decay estimates for spherical functions as well as spectral inequalities associated with boundary representations. This point of view on the boundary allows us to view the so-called property RD (also called Haagerup’s inequality) as a particular case of a more general behavior of spherical functions on hyperbolic groups. We also prove that the family of boundary representations studied in this paper, which can be regarded as a one parameter deformation of the boundary unitary representation, are slow growth representations acting on a Hilbert space admitting a proper 1-cocycle.

A New Metric for Class Cohesion for Object Oriented Software

Various class cohesion metrics exist in literature both at design level and source code level to assess the quality of Object Oriented (OO) software. However, the idea of cohesive interactions (or relationships) between instance variables (i.e., attributes) and methods of a class for measuring cohesion varies from one metric to another. Some authors have used instance variable usage by methods of the class to measure class cohesion while some focus on similarity of methods based on sharing of instance variables. However, researchers believe that such metrics still do not properly capture cohesiveness of classes. Therefore, measures based on different perspective on the idea of cohesive interactions should be developed. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a source code level class cohesion metric based on instance variable usage by methods. We first formalize three types of cohesive interactions and then categorize these cohesive interactions by providing them ranking and weights in order to compute our proposed measure. To determine the usefulness of the proposed measure, theoretical validation using a property based axiomatic framework has been done. For empirical validation, we have used Pearson correlation analysis and logistic regression in an experimental study conducted on 28 Java classes to determine the relationship between the proposed measure and maintenance-effort of classes. The results indicate that the proposed cohesion measure is strongly correlated with maintenance-effort and can serve as a good predictor of the same.

Statistical behaviour of the leaves of Riccati foliations

We introduce the geodesic flow on the leaves of a holomorphic foliation with leaves of dimension one and hyperbolic, corresponding to the unique complete metric of curvature −1 compatible with its conformal structure. We do these for the foliations associated to Riccati equations, which are the projectivization of the solutions of linear ordinary differential equations over a finite Riemann surface of hyperbolic type S, and may be described by a representation ρ:π1(S)→GL(n,ℂ). We give conditions under which the foliated geodesic flow has a generic repeller–attractor statistical dynamics. That is, there are measures μ− and μ+ such that for almost any initial condition with respect to the Lebesgue measure class the statistical average of the foliated geodesic flow converges for negative time to μ− and for positive time to μ+ (i.e. μ+ is the unique Sinaï, Ruelle and Bowen (SRB)-measure and its basin has total Lebesgue measure). These measures are ergodic with respect to the foliated geodesic flow. These measures are also invariant under a foliated horocycle flow and they project to a harmonic measure for the Riccati foliation, which plays the role of an attractor for the statistical behaviour of the leaves of the foliation.