Cancer research: Keep up the good mood to increase your chances of survival

For those patients undergoing cancer treatment, many medical institutions also insist or recommend that they get counselling, and also ask family members to ensure that the mood remains light. This was seen as giving the patient more hope, a better chance of undergoing the various emotional and pyschological problems that afflict a person who is undergoing the trauma of cancer treatment. Now, it appears that there is actually scientific reasoning behind such a counselling and hope-for-better reasoning, since a study found that people who have good mental health and feel optimistic are actually better off in terms of their chances of surviving cancer than those patients who feel depressed (link to article):

People with cancer who are depressed are more likely to die than are patients with good mental health, psychologists reported Monday in the science journal Cancer. The study reported that death rates from cancer "were up to 25 per cent higher in patients experiencing depressive symptoms and up to 39 per cent higher in patients diagnosed with major or minor depression."
But Satin warned, "I want people to be cautious about this. We have not shown that depression itself causes mortality -- but we have a suggestion that this is possible." Satin cautioned against trying to match a specific patient's likelihood of death with the startling finding that death rates can be up to 39 per cent higher with depression that is serious enough to be diagnosed.

Even while scientists and researches try to find a link between cancer outcomes and mental health, it would anyhow be positive for people to try and ensure that cancer patients get all the help they need to have a more positive outlook to life.

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Introduction to Database Concurrency

DATABASE CONCURRENCY: - Database concurrency is the particular situation when a single database is being accessed by multiple programs. Databases, by design in most cases are shared resources, but in this case, they are shared across multiple applications.
Database concurrency controls ensure that transactions occur in an ordered fashion. The main job of these controls is to protect transactions issued by different users/applications from the effects of each other. They must preserve the four characteristics of database transactions: atomicity, isolation, consistency and durability. Concurrency control is one of the main issues in the study of real time database systems. In addition to satisfying consistency requirements as in traditional database systems, a real time transaction processing system must also satisfy timing constraints.

Conflicts between transactions can be detected in two ways.
Pessimistic method detects conflicts before making access to the data object. When a transaction requests access to some data item, the concurrency control manager will examine this request and will determine whether to grant the request or not.
Optimistic schemes are designed to get rid of the locking overhead. They are optimistic in the sense that they take into account the explicit assumption that conflicts among transactions are rare events. The task of concurrency control is deferred until the end of transaction when some checking for potential conflicts has to take place and will be resolved accordingly, taking into consideration the amount of progress that has been done and the nature of conflict with transactions.
When concurrency control detects a conflict among some concurrent transactions accessing the same object, a conflict resolution mechanism needs to be put on. Concurrency control manager decides which transaction (victim) to penalize (the lock holder or the requester) and chooses an appropriate action and suitable timing. Two possible actions are most used: Blocking (wait) and abort (restart). In pessimistic concurrency control either blocking or abort can be used to resolve the conflict. However, in optimistic concurrency control only aborting is appropriate since conflict has been detected after the transaction has accessed the data object and performed some computation.

OPTIMISTIC CONCURRENCY CONTROL : The basic idea of an optimistic concurrency control mechanism is that the execution of a transaction consists of three phases: read, validation and write phases. For all optimistic concurrency control (OCC) schemes a conflict is detected after the data object has been accessed. In the OCC, conflict detection and resolution are both done at the certification time when a transaction completes its execution; it requests the concurrency control manager to validate all its accessed data objects. If it has not yet been marked for abort, it enters the commit phase where it writes all its updates to the database.