This is my last Chair’s Message; as you read this, my term as SIGMOD Chair, along with the terms of Marianne Winslett (Vice-Chair) and Joachim Hammer (Secretary/Treasurer), is coming to a close. In a few weeks, we will know the results of elections and who will lead our organization for the next four years. The candidate slate is strong, and I am convinced that the organization will be very wel...

BACKGROUND Diltiazem hydrochloride is a widely used calcium channel blocking agent. While a few cases of diltiazem-associated photosensitivity have been reported, no cases of photodistributed hyperpigmentation are known. OBSERVATION Four cases of photodistributed hyperpigmentation associated with the long-acting formulation of diltiazem hydrochloride (Cardizem CD) are presented. All patients ...

Ashy dermatosis is a typically asymptomatic disease of unknown origin that causes symmetrical gray spots to appear on the trunk and extremities. We report 2 cases of ashy dermatosis with unilateral distribution. To our knowledge, only 5 cases of ashy dermatosis with unilateral lesion have been reported so far. Case 1: an 11-year-old woman presented with asymptomatic slate-gray pigmented plaques...

"Save paper, save trees" is a hot agenda in today's world. This paper presents an ingenuous approach to achieve the motto, by proposing a software-only design, through modeling a paper notepad digitally. It describes the financial and social significance of this model underlining its implementation. The paper also briefs about the underlying hardware selected for the design implementation. The ...

The crosscutting project described here based on the revolutionary concept of Probabilistic design [17] and of Ethnomathematics [13] aims to improve literacy in developing countries and regions, with an emphasis on India as the first test focussing on grades 1-5. Driving the I-Slate design are the pioneering principles trading off probability for energy, while educational pedagogy and practice ...

A number of techniques have been proposed to reduce the risk of data loss in hard-drives, from redundant disks (e.g., RAID systems) to error coding within individual drives. Disk scrubbing is a background process that reads disks during idle periods to detect irremediable read errors in infrequently accessed sectors. Timely detection of such latent sector errors (LSEs) is important to reduce da...

In this work we introduce a set of response strategies that capture the effect of cultural norms on the behavior of conversational agents in language and culture training systems. Response strategies cover behavior such as deception, vagueness, and distraction. Starting from a vocabulary of strategies derived from the literature on compliance and cooperation, we compare this explicit list to ev...