Poor mood and elevated anxiety are linked to increased incidence of disease. This study examined the effects of sound meditation, specifically Tibetan singing bowl meditation, on mood, anxiety, pain, and spiritual well-being. Sixty-two women and men (mean age 49.7 years) participated. As compared with pre-meditation, following the sound meditation participants reported significantly less tension, anger, fatigue, and depressed mood (all Ps <.001). Additionally, participants who were previously naïve to this type of meditation experienced a significantly greater reduction in tension compared with participants experienced in this meditation (P < .001). Feeling of spiritual well-being significantly increased across all participants (P < .001). Tibetan singing bowl meditation may be a feasible low-cost low technology intervention for reducing feelings of tension, anxiety, and depression, and increasing spiritual well-being. This meditation type may be especially useful in decreasing tension in individuals who have not previously practiced this form of meditation.
Multithreading can significantly increase the performance of large agent-based simulations on multicore systems, but agent-based software packages do not commonly offer adequate support for multithreading. This report describes alterations and additions made to the MASON agent-based simulation package that allow the application programmer to make use of multiple threads easily and without radical change to conventional agent-based programming style. The report confirms performance gains with the results of test runs.
Self-organization has proven to be a universal functioning property inherent to the open systems, including biological entities and living organisms. The flux of energy or matter through the system enables its transition to a new ordered state, which results from a cooperative behavior of the system's constituents. The system functions far from thermodynamic equilibrium and its transitions between the states are treated within nonlinear models. An analysis of such behavior yields valuable information about the emergent properties of the particular system that is often impossible to obtain by other methods. This review summarizes some of the most interesting, recently reported phenomena related to dynamic self-organization and coherency at various complexity levels in living matter, demonstrating the widespread applications of these concepts in many modern fields of biological and healthcare research. The processes and interactions controlling self-organized behaviors are discussed in regards to molecular reactions, including mechanisms of protein folding, bioenergetics, and charge transfer. Phenomena in cells and tissues, as well as the examples of whole organs and organism levels are also reviewed. In addition, we analyze existing applications of self-organization and coherency processes in medicine. Special attention is given to determination of feedback mechanisms, control parameters, and order parameters needed to completely define the self-organized behavior and coherent dynamics of a particular system.
The IDES project at Sandia National Laboratories is developing a large scale portable parallel simulator for use in stockpile stewardship. IDES will use the Breathing-Time-Buckets synchronization protocol; to support IDES development, this paper studies a performance model and describes performance experiments on expected work load and architectural parameters. A new parallel algorithm for terminating the window quickly is also described and analyzed.
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