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Exploring Female Genital Cutting Among Survivors of Torture | Though the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) has been framed as a form of gender-based torture, few studies have examined the prevalence and impact of the practice among documented survivors of torture. This article presents a secondary analysis of data from 514 African-born women at an interdisciplinary clinic for survivors of torture. Results indicate few demographic differences between those who experienced FGC and those who had not, though a larger proportion of the FGC group were West African and identified as Muslim. Many with FGC were in the process of applying for asylum, reported sexual and psychological torture, and cited gender as a basis for their persecution. The FGC group evidenced unique correlates related to immigration status and psychological and sexual torture experiences that the non-FGC group did not. Findings indicate that female survivors of torture with FGC represent a distinct group with specific mental health needs. |
Mining time-changing data streams | Most statistical and machine-learning algorithms assume that the data is a random sample drawn from a stationary distribution. Unfortunately, most of the large databases available for mining today violate this assumption. They were gathered over months or years, and the underlying processes generating them changed during this time, sometimes radically. Although a number of algorithms have been proposed for learning time-changing concepts, they generally do not scale well to very large databases. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm for mining decision trees from continuously-changing data streams, based on the ultra-fast VFDT decision tree learner. This algorithm, called CVFDT, stays current while making the most of old data by growing an alternative subtree whenever an old one becomes questionable, and replacing the old with the new when the new becomes more accurate. CVFDT learns a model which is similar in accuracy to the one that would be learned by reapplying VFDT to a moving window of examples every time a new example arrives, but with O(1) complexity per example, as opposed to O(w), where w is the size of the window. Experiments on a set of large time-changing data streams demonstrate the utility of this approach. |
Multiobjective Signal Processing Optimization: The way to balance conflicting metrics in 5G systems | The evolution of cellular networks is driven by the dream of ubiquitous wireless connectivity: any data service is instantly accessible everywhere. With each generation of cellular networks, we have moved closer to this wireless dream; first by delivering wireless access to voice communications, then by providing wireless data services, and recently by delivering a Wi-Fi-like experience with wide-area coverage and user mobility management. The support for high data rates has been the main objective in recent years [1], as seen from the academic focus on sum-rate optimization and the efforts from standardization bodies to meet the peak rate requirements specified in IMT-Advanced. In contrast, a variety of metrics/objectives are put forward in the technological preparations for fifth-generation (5G) networks: higher peak rates, improved coverage with uniform user experience, higher reliability and lower latency, better energy efficiency (EE), lower-cost user devices and services, better scalability with number of devices, etc. These multiple objectives are coupled, often in a conflicting manner such that improvements in one objective lead to degradation in the other objectives. Hence, the design of future networks calls for new optimization tools that properly handle the existence of multiple objectives and tradeoffs between them. |
Population pharmacokinetic analyses of the effect of carboplatin pretreatment on olaparib in recurrent or refractory women’s cancers | Combining olaparib with carboplatin was recently shown to be active in both BRCA and non-BRCA mutant cancers in a recent phase I/Ib combination trial. The optimal drug sequence recommended was carboplatin 1-day before olaparib. However, carboplatin pre-treatment induced a ~50% faster olaparib clearance. To further explore this drug interaction, a population pharmacokinetic (PK) model was designed that included a lag time parameter, a second absorption compartment from tablet formulation, a single distribution/elimination compartment, and covariance among the clearance and volume parameters. Clearance (6.8 L/h) and volume (33 L) estimates were comparable with literature. The only significant covariate was the presence of carboplatin on olaparib clearance, consistent with published noncompartmental PK and in vitro data. Simulations predicted lower steady-state peak/trough olaparib exposure through 24–36 h post carboplatin pre-treatment, but this effect was lost by day 2 and thus no dose adjustment is recommended. |
Heterogeneous lithium niobate photonics on silicon substrates. | A platform for the realization of tightly-confined lithium niobate photonic devices and circuits on silicon substrates is reported based on wafer bonding and selective oxidation of refractory metals. The heterogeneous photonic platform is employed to demonstrate high-performance lithium niobate microring optical resonators and Mach-Zehnder optical modulators. A quality factor of ~7.2 × 10⁴ is measured in the microresonators, and a half-wave voltage-length product of 4 V.cm and an extinction ratio of 20 dB is measured in the modulators. |
Uncovering Clusters in Crowded Parallel Coordinates Visualizations | The one-to-one strategy of mapping each single data item into a graphical marker adopted in many visualization techniques has limited usefulness when the number of records and/or the dimensionality of the data set are very high. In this situation, the strong overlapping of graphical markers severely hampers the user's ability to identify patterns in the data from its visual representation. We tackle this problem here with a strategy that computes frequency or density information from the data set, and uses such information in parallel coordinates visualizations to filter out the information to be presented to the user, thus reducing visual clutter and allowing the analyst to observe relevant patterns in the data. The algorithms to construct such visualizations, and the interaction mechanisms supported, inspired by traditional image processing techniques such as grayscale manipulation and thresholding are also presented. We also illustrate how such algorithms can assist users to effectively identify clusters in very noisy large data sets |
Risk stratification of patients after myocardial revascularization by stress Tc-99m tetrofosmin myocardial perfusion tomography. | BACKGROUND
The aim of this study was to assess the incremental prognostic value of stress technetium 99m tetrofosmin imaging after myocardial revascularization.
METHODS AND RESULTS
We studied 381 patients (aged 60 +/- 10 years, 270 men), 4.5 +/- 3.2 years after myocardial revascularization (coronary artery bypass grafting in 201 patients and percutaneous coronary intervention in 180 patients), who underwent exercise or dobutamine stress tetrofosmin single photon emission computed tomography. Events during a mean follow-up period of 3.5 +/- 1.4 years were cardiac death in 22 patients, nonfatal myocardial infarction in 11 patients (33 hard cardiac events), and late revascularization in 50 patients. There was no incidence of hard cardiac events in the 100 patients with normal perfusion. Hard cardiac events occurred in 19% of patients with reversible perfusion abnormalities and in 4% of patients without them (P <.01). The incidence of hard cardiac events was similar in patients with and without angina before stress testing (17/197 [8.6%] vs 16/184 [8.7%]). In a multivariate analysis model, predictors of cardiac death were stress rate pressure product and abnormal perfusion. Reversible perfusion abnormalities were independently associated with the composite endpoints of cardiac death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, and late revascularization. In an incremental multivariate analysis model, an abnormal scan was additive to clinical data in the prediction of hard cardiac events (model chi(2) = 17 vs 11, P <.01).
CONCLUSION
Stress Tc-99m tetrofosmin myocardial perfusion imaging provides independent prognostic information for the prediction of cardiac events after myocardial revascularization. Symptoms are not predictive of outcome, and therefore asymptomatic patients should not be deferred from stress testing. A normal study identifies a very low-risk population in whom no further intervention is required. |
Architectural support for trust models in decentralized applications | Decentralized applications are composed of distributed entities that directly interact with each other and make local autonomous decisions in the absence of a centralized coordinating authority. Such decentralized applications, where entities can join and leave the system at any time, are particularly susceptible to the attacks of malicious entities. Each entity therefore requires protective measures to safeguard itself against these entities. Trust management solutions serve to provide effective protective measures against such malicious attacks. Trust relationships help an entity model and evaluate its confidence in other entities towards securing itself. Trust management is, thus, both an essential and intrinsic ingredient of decentralized applications. However, research in trust management has not focused on how trust models can be composed into a decentralized architecture. The PACE architectural style, described previously [21], provides structured and detailed guidance on the assimilation of trust models into a decentralized entity's architecture. In this paper, we describe our experiments with incorporating four different reputation-based trust models into a decentralized application using the PACE architectural style. Our observations lead us to conclude that PACE not only provides an effective and easy way to integrate trust management into decentralized applications, but also facilitates reuse while supporting different types of trust models. Additionally, PACE serves as a suitable platform to aid the evaluation and comparison of trust models in a fixed setting towards providing a way to choose an appropriate model for the setting. |
Classification of ventilator modes: update and proposal for implementation. | Ventilator manufacturers and the respiratory care academic community have not yet adopted a standardized system for classifying and describing ventilation modes. As a result, there is enough confusion that potential sales, education, and patient care are all put at risk. This proposal summarizes a ventilator-mode classification scheme and complete lexicon that has been extensively published over the last 15 years. Specifically, the classification system has 3 components: (1) a description of the breathing pattern and control variables within breaths, (2) a description of control type used within and between breaths, (3) a detailed description of adjunctive operational algorithms. This 3-level specification provides scalability of detail to make the mode description appropriate for the particular need. At the bedside we need only refer to a mode briefly using the first component. To distinguish between similar modes and brand names we would need to use at least the first and second components. For a complete and unique mode specification (as in an operator's manual) we would use all 3 components. The classification system proposed in this article uses the equation of motion for the respiratory system as the underlying theoretical framework. All terms relevant to describing ventilation modes are defined in an extensive glossary. |
Are mindfulness-based interventions effective for substance use disorders? A systematic review of the evidence. | Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are increasingly suggested as therapeutic approaches for effecting substance use and misuse (SUM). The aim of this article is to review current evidence on the therapeutic efficacy of MBIs for SUM. A literature search was undertaken using four electronic databases and references of retrieved articles. The search included articles written in English published up to December 2011. Quality of included trials was assessed. In total, 24 studies were included, three of which were based on secondary analyses of previously investigated samples. Current evidence suggests that MBIs can reduce the consumption of several substances including alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, marijuana, cigarettes, and opiates to a significantly greater extent than waitlist controls, non-specific educational support groups, and some specific control groups. Some preliminary evidence also suggests that MBIs are associated with a reduction in craving as well as increased mindfulness. The limited generalizability of the reviewed findings is noted (i.e., small sample size, lack of methodological details, and the lack of consistently replicated findings). More rigorous and larger randomized controlled studies are warranted. |
Interpersonal emotion regulation as a mechanism of social support in depression. | Although social support is widely considered to be protective against depression, the mechanisms through which it acts on depressive psychopathology are not well known. This integrative review argues that emotion regulation serves as such a mechanism. First, the literature on the effects of social support on depression is reviewed, with an emphasis on open empirical questions regarding mechanisms linking support and depression. Then, the literature on emotion regulation is reviewed, highlighting its importance as a mechanism in the psychopathology of depression. Finally, potential interpersonal influences on depressive emotion regulation and dysregulation are suggested, drawing from theory and research on psychotherapy and on close relationships. The review suggests that emotion regulation is responsive to interpersonal influences, and that this responsiveness may account for the effects of social support on depression. Implications of an interpersonal perspective for basic and clinical research on depression, close relationships, and emotion regulation are discussed. |
Shearer's Manual of Human Dissection | of growth and development as the chief features which distinguish infants and children from adults. This section includes somewhat diverse subdivisions on disturbances of growth, constitutional signs and symptoms such as fever and edema, symptoms referable to particular systems such as the urinary tract, and symptoms related to sexual development and to intellectual retardation. Within each subdivision of this section an attempt is made to list the conditions in which the designated symptom is encountered and to present some information concerning the mechanism of its development. These explanations are necessarily brief and were not intended to be complete; they vary considerably in effectiveness. The final section on health supervision gives consideration to the prenatal period, infancy, the preschool period, the school years, and adolescence. An appendix includes in tabular form familiar percentiles for weight, height, and other selected measurements in different age groups. The book is attractively composed and in regard to both style and typography is easy to read. Incorporated into the text are numerous up-to-date references which directly accompany the subjects to which they refer. This arrangement, devised by the authors to encourage more intensive study, is an effective innovation. The index, although extensive, could be more serviceable if more complete. For example, the common terms croup, salicylates, hysteria, intoxication, and poisoning are not listed alphabetically; similarly, calcification in the skin is listed but not pulmonary or intracranial calcification. This book does not pretend to impart new knowledge of pediatrics but rather a new approach to existing knowledge. It will not replace nor was it intended to be a substitute for more comprehensive texts including Gross's Sutrgery of infancy and childhood to which frequent reference is made. Its chief value would seem to be as a guide to further reading and to a better understanding of those aspects of pediatrics with which this book is concerned. EDWARD C. CURNEN |
Models For The Semantic Classification Of Noun Phrases | This paper presents an approach for detecting semantic relations in noun phrases. A learning algorithm, called semantic scattering, is used to automatically label complex nominals, genitives and adjectival noun phrases with the corresponding semantic relation. 1 Problem description This paper is about the automatic labeling of semantic relations in noun phrases (NPs). The semantic relations are the underlying relations between two concepts expressed by words or phrases. We distinguish here between semantic relations and semantic roles. Semantic roles are always between verbs (or nouns derived from verbs) and other constituents (run quickly, went to the store, computer maker), whereas semantic relations can occur between any constituents, for example in complex nominals (malaria mosquito (CAUSE)), genitives (girl’s mouth (PART-WHOLE)), prepositional phrases attached to nouns (man at the store (LOCATIVE)), or discourse level (The bus was late. As a result, I missed my appointment (CAUSE)). Thus, in a sense, semantic relations are more general than semantic roles and many semantic role types will appear on our list of semantic relations. The following NP level constructions are considered here (cf. the classifications provided by (Quirk et al.1985) and (Semmelmeyer and Bolander 1992)): (1) Compound Nominals consisting of two consecutive nouns (eg night club a TEMPORAL relation indicating that club functions at night), (2) Adjective Noun constructions where the adjectival modifier is derived from a noun (eg musical clock a MAKE/PRODUCE relation), (3) Genitives (eg the door of the car a PART-WHOLE relation), and (4) Adjective phrases (cf. (Semmelmeyer and Bolander 1992)) in which the modifier noun is expressed by a prepositional phrase which functions as an adjective (eg toy in the box a LOCATION relation). Example: “Saturday’s snowfall topped a one-day record in Hartford, Connecticut, with the total of 12.5 inches, the weather service said. The storm claimed its fatality Thursday, when a car which was driven by a college student skidded on an interstate overpass in the mountains of Virginia and hit a concrete barrier, police said”. (www.cnn.com “Record-setting Northeast snowstorm winding down”, Sunday, December 7, 2003). There are several semantic relations at the noun phrase level: (1) Saturday’s snowfall is a genitive encoding a TEMPORAL relation, (2) one-day record is a TOPIC noun compound indicating that record is about one-day snowing an ellipsis here, (3) record in Hartford is an adjective phrase in a LOCATION relation, (4) total of 12.5 inches is an of-genitive that expresses MEASURE, (5) weather service is a noun compound in a TOPIC relation, (6) car which was driven by a college student encodes a THEME semantic role in an adjectival clause, (7) college student is a compound nominal in a PART-WHOLE/MEMBER-OF relation, (8) interstate overpass is a LOCATION noun compound, (9) mountains of Virginia is an of-genitive showing a PART-WHOLE/PLACE-AREA and LOCATION relation, (10) concrete barrier is a noun compound encoding PART-WHOLE/STUFF-OF. 1.1 List of Semantic Relations After many iterations over a period of time we identified a set of semantic relations that cover a large majority of text semantics. Table 1 lists these relations, their definitions, examples, and some references. Most of the time, the semantic relations are encoded by lexico-syntactic patterns that are highly ambiguous. One pattern can express a number of semantic relations, its disambiguation being provided by the context or world knowledge. Often semantic relations are not disjoint or mutually exclusive, two or more appearing in the same lexical construct. This is called semantic blend (Quirk et al.1985). For example, the expression “Texas city” contains both a LOCATION as well as a PART-WHOLE relation. Other researchers have identified other sets of semantic relations (Levi 1979), (Vanderwende 1994), (Sowa 1994), (Baker, Fillmore, and Lowe 1998), (Rosario and Hearst 2001), (Kingsbury, et al. 2002), (Blaheta and Charniak 2000), (Gildea and Jurafsky 2002), (Gildea and Palmer 2002). Our list contains the most frequently used semantic relations we have observed on a large corpus. Besides the work on semantic roles, considerable interest has been shown in the automatic interpretation of complex nominals, and especially of compound nominals. The focus here is to determine the semantic relations that hold between different concepts within the same phrase, and to analyze the meaning of these compounds. Several approaches have been proposed for empirical noun-compound interpretation, such as syntactic analysis based on statistical techniques (Lauer and Dras 1994), (Pustejovsky et al. 1993). Another popular approach focuses on the interpretation of the underlying semantics. Many researchers that followed this approach relied mostly on hand-coded rules (Finin 1980), (Vanderwende 1994). More recently, (Rosario and Hearst 2001), (Rosario, Hearst, and Fillmore 2002), (Lapata 2002) have proposed automatic methods that analyze and detect noun compounds relations from text. (Rosario and Hearst 2001) focused on the medical domain making use of a lexical ontology and standard machine learning techniques. |
Integrating Geometric Context for Text Alignment of Handwritten Chinese Documents | The alignment of text line images with text transcript is a crucial step of handwritten document annotation. Handwritten text alignment is prone to errors due to the difficulty of character segmentation and the variability of character shape, size and position. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the geometric context of character strings to improve the alignment accuracy for offline handwritten Chinese documents. We use four statistical models to evaluate the geometric features of single characters and between-character relationships. By combining the geometric models with a character recognizer, we have achieved a large improvement of alignment accuracy in our experiments on unconstrained handwritten Chinese text lines. |
Sleep in adolescents: the perfect storm. | A reduction in sleep amount from late childhood through the second decade has long been known; however, the weight of current evidence holds that sleep need does not decline across this span. This article will describe how the loss of sleep through adolescence is not driven by lower need for sleep but arises from a convergence of biologic, psychological, and socio-cultural influences. |
Universal, Unsupervised, Uncovered Sentiment Analysis | We present a novel unsupervised approach for multilingual sentiment analysis driven by compositional syntax-based rules. On the one hand, we exploit some of the main advantages of unsupervised algorithms: (1) the interpretability of their output , in contrast with most supervised models , which behave as a black box and (2) their robustness across different corpora and domains. On the other hand, by introducing the concept of compositional operations and exploiting syntactic information in the form of universal dependencies , we tackle one of their main drawbacks: their rigidity on data that are differently structured depending on the language. Experiments show an improvement both over existing unsupervised methods, and over state-of-the-art supervised models when evaluating outside their corpus of origin. The system is freely available 1 . |
A Taxonomy of Customer Relationship Management Analyses for Data Warehousing | Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that supports an organization’s decision-making process to retain long-term and profitable relationships with its customers. Effective CRM analyses require a detailed data warehouse model that can support various CRM analyses and deep understanding on CRM-related business questions. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of CRM analysis categories. Our CRM taxonomy includes CRM strategies, CRM category analyses, CRM business questions, their potential uses, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for those analysis types. Our CRM taxonomy can be used in selecting and evaluating a data schema for CRM analyses, CRM vendors, CRM strategies, and KPIs. |
Narrative exposure therapy for PTSD increases top-down processing of aversive stimuli - evidence from a randomized controlled treatment trial | Little is known about the neurobiological foundations of psychotherapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Prior studies have shown that PTSD is associated with altered processing of threatening and aversive stimuli. It remains unclear whether this functional abnormality can be changed by psychotherapy. This is the first randomized controlled treatment trial that examines whether narrative exposure therapy (NET) causes changes in affective stimulus processing in patients with chronic PTSD. 34 refugees with PTSD were randomly assigned to a NET group or to a waitlist control (WLC) group. At pre-test and at four-months follow-up, the diagnostics included the assessment of clinical variables and measurements of neuromagnetic oscillatory brain activity (steady-state visual evoked fields, ssVEF) resulting from exposure to aversive pictures compared to neutral pictures. PTSD as well as depressive symptom severity scores declined in the NET group, whereas symptoms persisted in the WLC group. Only in the NET group, parietal and occipital activity towards threatening pictures increased significantly after therapy. Our results indicate that NET causes an increase of activity associated with cortical top-down regulation of attention towards aversive pictures. The increase of attention allocation to potential threat cues might allow treated patients to re-appraise the actual danger of the current situation and, thereby, reducing PTSD symptoms. Number: NCT00563888 Name: "Change of Neural Network Indicators Through Narrative Treatment of PTSD in Torture Victims" ULR: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00563888 |
Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation for Multiple Classes | In this paper, we present an efficient multi-class heterogeneous domain adaptation method, where data from source and target domains are represented by heterogeneous features of different dimensions. Specifically, we propose to reconstruct a sparse feature transformation matrix to map the weight vector of classifiers learned from the source domain to the target domain. We cast this learning task as a compressed sensing problem, where each binary classifier induced from multiple classes can be deemed as a measurement sensor. Based on the compressive sensing theory, the estimation error of the transformation matrix decreases with the increasing number of classifiers. Therefore, to guarantee reconstruction performance, we construct sufficiently many binary classifiers based on the error correcting output coding. Extensive experiments are conducted on both a toy dataset and three real-world datasets to verify the superiority of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art HDA methods in terms of prediction accuracy. |
Efficient Learning of Harmonic Priors for Pitch Detection in Polyphonic Music | Automatic music transcription (AMT) aims to infer a latent symbolic representation of a piece of music (piano-roll), given a corresponding observed audio recording. Transcribing polyphonic music (when multiple notes are played simultaneously) is a challenging problem, due to highly structured overlapping between harmonics. We study whether the introduction of physically inspired Gaussian process (GP) priors into audio content analysis models improves the extraction of patterns required for AMT. Audio signals are described as a linear combination of sources. Each source is decomposed into the product of an amplitude-envelope, and a quasi-periodic component process. We introduce the Matérn spectral mixture (MSM) kernel for describing frequency content of singles notes. We consider two different regression approaches. In the sigmoid model every pitch-activation is independently non-linear transformed. In the softmax model several activation GPs are jointly non-linearly transformed. This introduce crosscorrelation between activations. We use variational Bayes for approximate inference. We empirically evaluate how these models work in practice transcribing polyphonic music. We demonstrate that rather than encourage dependency between activations, what is relevant for improving pitch detection is to learnt priors that fit the frequency content of the sound events to detect. Python code complementing this paper is available at https://github.com/PabloAlvarado/MSMK. |
Degeneration in the cochlea after noise damage: primary versus secondary events. | PURPOSE
To determine if noise damage in the organ of Corti is different in the low- and high-frequency regions of the cochlea.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Chinchillas were exposed for 2 to 432 days to a 0.5 (low-frequency) or 4 kHz (high-frequency) octave band of noise at 47 to 95 dB sound pressure level. Auditory thresholds were determined before, during, and after the noise exposure. The cochleas were examined microscopically as plastic-embedded flat preparations. Missing cells were counted, and the sequence of degeneration was determined as a function of recovery time (0-30 days).
RESULTS
With high-frequency noise, primary damage began as small focal losses of outer hair cells in the 4-8 kHz region. With continued exposure, damage progressed to involve loss of an entire segment of the organ of Corti, along with adjacent myelinated nerve fibers. Much of the latter loss is secondary to the intermixing of cochlear fluids through the damaged reticular lamina. With low-frequency noise, primary damage appeared as outer hair cell loss scattered over a broad area in the apex. With continued exposure, additional apical outer hair cells degenerated, while supporting cells, inner hair cells, and nerve fibers remained intact. Continued exposure to low-frequency noise also resulted in focal lesions in the basal cochlea that were indistinguishable from those resulting from exposure to high-frequency noise.
CONCLUSIONS
The patterns of cochlear damage and their relation to functional measures of hearing in noise-exposed chinchillas are similar to those seen in noise-exposed humans. Thus, the chinchilla is an excellent model for studying noise effects, with the long-term goal of identifying ways to limit noise-induced hearing loss in humans. |
Daily aerobic exercise improves reactive hyperemia in patients with essential hypertension. | The effects of long-term aerobic exercise on endothelial function in patients with essential hypertension remain unclear. To determine whether endothelial function relating to forearm hemodynamics in these patients differs from normotensive subjects and whether endothelial function can be modified by continued physical exercise, we randomized patients with essential hypertension into a group that engaged in 30 minutes of brisk walking 5 to 7 times weekly for 12 weeks (n=20) or a group that underwent no activity modifications (control group, n=7). Forearm blood flow was measured using strain-gauge plethysmography during reactive hyperemia to test for endothelium-dependent vasodilation and after sublingual nitroglycerin administration to test endothelium-independent vasodilation. Forearm blood flow in hypertensive patients during reactive hyperemia was significantly less than that in normotensive subjects (n=17). Increases in forearm blood flow after nitroglycerin were similar between hypertensive and normotensive subjects. Exercise lowered mean blood pressure from 115.7+/-5.3 to 110.2+/-5.1 mm Hg (P<0.01) and forearm vascular resistance from 25.6+/-3.2 to 23. 2+/-2.8 mm Hg/mL per minute per 100 mL tissue (P<0.01); no change occurred in controls. Basal forearm blood flow, body weight, and heart rate did not differ with exercise. After 12 weeks of exercise, maximal forearm blood flow response during reactive hyperemia increased significantly, from 38.4+/-4.6 to 47.1+/-4.9 mL/min per 100 mL tissue (P<0.05); this increase was not seen in controls. Changes in forearm blood flow after sublingual nitroglycerin administration were similar before and after 12 weeks of exercise. Intra-arterial infusion of the nitric oxide synthase inhibitor NG-monomethyl-L-arginine abolished the enhancement of reactive hyperemia induced by 12 weeks of exercise. These findings suggest that through increased release of nitric oxide, continued physical exercise alleviates impairment of reactive hyperemia in patients with essential hypertension. |
Interventions in Small Food Stores to Change the Food Environment, Improve Diet, and Reduce Risk of Chronic Disease | INTRODUCTION
Many small-store intervention trials have been conducted in the United States and other countries to improve the food environment and dietary behaviors associated with chronic disease risk. However, no systematic reviews of the methods and outcomes of these trials have been published. The objective of this study was to identify small-store interventions and to determine their impact on food availability, dietary behaviors, and psychosocial factors that influence chronic disease risk.
METHODS
From May 2009 through September 2010, we used PubMed, web-based searches, and listservs to identify small-store interventions that met the following criteria: 1) a focus on small food stores, 2) a completed impact evaluation, and 3) English-written documentation (peer-reviewed articles or other trial documents). We initially identified 28 trials; 16 met inclusion criteria and were used for analysis. We conducted interviews with project staff to obtain additional information. Reviewers extracted and reported data in a table format to ensure comparability between data.
RESULTS
Reviewed trials were implemented in rural and urban settings in 6 countries and primarily targeted low-income racial/ethnic minority populations. Common intervention strategies included increasing the availability of healthier foods (particularly produce), point-of-purchase promotions (shelf labels, posters), and community engagement. Less common strategies included business training and nutrition education. We found significant effects for increased availability of healthy foods, improved sales of healthy foods, and improved consumer knowledge and dietary behaviors.
CONCLUSION
Trial impact appeared to be linked to the increased provision of both healthy foods (supply) and health communications designed to increase consumption (demand). |
Operation of a multiagent system for microgrid control | This paper presents the operation of a multiagent system (MAS) for the control of a Microgrid. The approach presented utilizes the advantages of using the MAS technology for controlling a Microgrid and a classical distributed algorithm based on the symmetrical assignment problem for the optimal energy exchange between the production units of the Microgrid and the local loads, as well the main grid. |
The COMPOSE API for the internet of things | The COMPOSE project aims to provide an open Marketplace for the Internet of Things as well as the necessary platform to support it. A necessary component of COMPOSE is an API that allows things, COMPOSE users and the platform to communicate. The COMPOSE API allows for things to push data to the platform, the platform to initiate asynchronous actions on the things, and COMPOSE users to retrieve and process data from the things. In this paper we present the design and implementation of the COMPOSE API, as well as a detailed description of the main key requirements that the API must satisfy. The API documentation and the source code for the platform are available online. |
Age‐dependence of cultured pearl grade and colour in the black‐lipped pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera | Pinctada margaritifera is an economically important marine bivalve species for cultured pearl production in French Polynesian aquaculture. In order to evaluate the influence of donor oyster age on pearl quality traits, experiments were conducted over 6 years using both grafts and surgreffe operations. At harvest, 6 pearl quality traits were recorded and compared: surface defects, luster, grade, darkness level, and visual color. Analyzing the quality traits of pearls harvested in the initial graft process and those of pearls obtained from surgreffe experiments allowed a comparison of the influence of pearl sac cells originating from the initial mantle graft, which aged together with their recipient oysters. The results demonstrated a significant decrease between these successive grafts in luster, grade (A-B-C,) darkness level, and green color – traits that are of major importance in the pearl market. The duplicated graft experiment allowed the comparison of donor oyster families at 2 and 5 years old, where a mantle graft was inserted into recipient oysters aged 2.5 years old. The results showed the same tendencies to a lesser extent, with 1) an improved pearl grade, predominantly through a most important rate of 0 surface defect category, and 2) a green / grey ratio in favor of the younger donor. A comparison between the graft-surgreffe and the duplicated graft experiments also highlighted: 1) the indirect role played by the younger recipient oysters, which must be optimized for optimal pearl quality realization, and 2) the complex interplay between donor and recipient oysters. |
Electromagnetic Analysis of a Synchronous Reluctance Motor With Single-Tooth Windings | This paper explores some of the key electromagnetic design aspects of a synchronous reluctance motor that is equipped with single-tooth windings (i.e., fractional slot concentrated windings). The analyzed machine, a 6-slot 4-pole motor, utilizes a segmented stator core structure for ease of coil winding, pre-assembly, and facilitation of high slot fill factors (~60%). The impact on the motors torque producing capability and its power factor of these inter-segment air gaps between the stator segments is investigated through 2-D finite element analysis (FEA) studies where it is shown that they have a low impact. From previous studies, torque ripple is a known issue with this particular slot–pole combination of synchronous reluctance motor, and the use of two different commercially available semi-magnetic slot wedges is investigated as a method to improve torque quality. An analytical analysis of continuous rotor skewing is also investigated as an attempt to reduce the torque ripple. Finally, it is shown that through a combination of 2-D and 3-D FEA studies in conjunction with experimentally derived results on a prototype machine that axial fringing effects cannot be ignored when predicting the q-axis reactance in such machines. A comparison of measured orthogonal axis flux linkages/reactances with 3-D FEA studies is presented for the first time. |
Combination of an ACE inhibitor and indapamide improves blood pressure control, but attenuates the beneficial effects of ACE inhibition on plasma adiponectin in patients with essential hypertension. | BACKGROUND
Antihypertensive agents differentially influence the plasma adiponectin concentration and the effects of fixed-dose combination regimens remain unclear. The influence of a combination of an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI) and a thiazide-type diuretic or an ACEI alone on plasma adiponectin concentrations in patients with essential hypertension was evaluated in the present study.
METHODS AND RESULTS
After a 2-week placebo run-in phase, 30 patients with essential hypertension were randomized to receive preterax (2 mg perindopril/0.625 mg indapamide) or cilazapril (2.5 mg) once daily for 12 weeks. Plasma adiponectin and insulin concentrations were measured before and after treatment. Insulin resistance was measured by homeostasis assessment index (HOMA-IR). Treatment with preterax (P=0.003) and cilazapril (P=0.031) significantly reduced systolic blood pressure (BP), but only preterax reduced diastolic BP (P=0.024). Cilazapril treatment significantly increased the plasma adiponectin concentration (P=0.025) and reduced plasma triglycerides (P=0.041), whereas preterax treatment increased the plasma insulin concentration (P=0.041) and tended to increase HOMA-IR.
CONCLUSIONS
The combination of an ACEI and indapamide improved BP control, but attenuated the beneficial effects of ACE inhibition on plasma adiponectin in patients with essential hypertension. Such a combination may be best reserved for improved BP control rather than for metabolic protection in clinical hypertension. |
Particulate air pollution as a predictor of mortality in a prospective study of U.S. adults. | Time-series, cross-sectional, and prospective cohort studies have observed associations between mortality and particulate air pollution but have been limited by ecologic design or small number of subjects or study areas. The present study evaluates effects of particulate air pollution on mortality using data from a large cohort drawn from many study areas. We linked ambient air pollution data from 151 U.S. metropolitan areas in 1980 with individual risk factor on 552,138 adults who resided in these areas when enrolled in a prospective study in 1982. Deaths were ascertained through December, 1989. Exposure to sulfate and fine particulate air pollution, which is primarily from fossil fuel combustion, was estimated from national data bases. The relationships of air pollution to all-cause, lung cancer, and cardiopulmonary mortality was examined using multivariate analysis which controlled for smoking, education, and other risk factors. Although small compared with cigarette smoking, an association between mortality and particulate air pollution was observed. Adjusted relative risk ratios (and 95% confidence intervals) of all-cause mortality for the most polluted areas compared with the least polluted equaled 1.15 (1.09 to 1.22) and 1.17 (1.09 to 1.26) when using sulfate and fine particulate measures respectively. Particulate air pollution was associated with cardiopulmonary and lung cancer mortality but not with mortality due to other causes. Increased mortality is associated with sulfate and fine particulate air pollution at levels commonly found in U.S. cities. The increase in risk is not attributable to tobacco smoking, although other unmeasured correlates of pollution cannot be excluded with certainty. |
Ordinal Regression with Multiple Output CNN for Age Estimation | To address the non-stationary property of aging patterns, age estimation can be cast as an ordinal regression problem. However, the processes of extracting features and learning a regression model are often separated and optimized independently in previous work. In this paper, we propose an End-to-End learning approach to address ordinal regression problems using deep Convolutional Neural Network, which could simultaneously conduct feature learning and regression modeling. In particular, an ordinal regression problem is transformed into a series of binary classification sub-problems. And we propose a multiple output CNN learning algorithm to collectively solve these classification sub-problems, so that the correlation between these tasks could be explored. In addition, we publish an Asian Face Age Dataset (AFAD) containing more than 160K facial images with precise age ground-truths, which is the largest public age dataset to date. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address ordinal regression problems by using CNN, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both the MORPH and AFAD datasets. |
The state-of-the-art of silicon-on-sapphire CMOS RF switches | Silicon-on-Sapphire (SOS) CMOS FETs have many properties which are desirable for RF switch applications. By being manufactured on an insulating sapphire substrate, the bulk parasitic capacitances typical of CMOS FETs are eliminated. The SOS FET has a very low Ron-Coff product, allowing for low insertion loss and high isolation in high frequency applications. Despite the low breakdown voltage intrinsic to Si, SOS FETs can be stacked in series to withstand high voltages when biased in subthreshold. This work studies the tradeoffs of SOS RF switch design and compares SOS against other technologies such as GaAs and Si-based SOI. Also presented is a high power SP6T switch with insertion loss of 0.6 dB at 2 GHz and isolation of 40 dB at 2 GHz. The presented switch has the highest linearity reported to date of any SP6T switch with a P1dB of 20 W and OIP3 of <+70 dBm. |
Pattern recognition computation using action potential timing for stimulus representation | A computational model is described in which the sizes of variables are represented by the explicit times at which action potentials occur, rather than by the more usual 'firing rate' of neurons. The comparison of patterns over sets of analogue variables is done by a network using different delays for different information paths. This mode of computation explains how one scheme of neuroarchitecture can be used for very different sensory modalities and seemingly different computations. The oscillations and anatomy of the mammalian olfactory systems have a simple interpretation in terms of this representation, and relate to processing in the auditory system. Single-electrode recording would not detect such neural computing. Recognition 'units' in this style respond more like radial basis function units than elementary sigmoid units. |
Microstructural Evolution of SiC_p/ZA27 Composite during Semi-solid Isothermal Treatment | The microstructural evolution of SiC p/ZA27 composite modified by Zr element was investigated during isothermal heat treatment at semi solid temperature,and compared with that of ZA27 alloy.The results indicated that the ideal microstructure for thixo forming of SiC p/ZA27 composite could be obtained through isothermal heat treatment for 30～40 min at 460℃.The speed of structural evolution of the composite was rapider than that of ZA27 alloy,and the structure coarsening phenomenon of the composite wasn't obvious when treated over 40 min. |
Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media | History of mental illness is a major factor behind suicide risk and ideation. However research efforts toward characterizing and forecasting this risk is limited due to the paucity of information regarding suicide ideation, exacerbated by the stigma of mental illness. This paper fills gaps in the literature by developing a statistical methodology to infer which individuals could undergo transitions from mental health discourse to suicidal ideation. We utilize semi-anonymous support communities on Reddit as unobtrusive data sources to infer the likelihood of these shifts. We develop language and interactional measures for this purpose, as well as a propensity score matching based statistical approach. Our approach allows us to derive distinct markers of shifts to suicidal ideation. These markers can be modeled in a prediction framework to identify individuals likely to engage in suicidal ideation in the future. We discuss societal and ethical implications of this research. |
Rapid three-dimensional echocardiography : clinically feasible alternative for precise and accurate measurement of left ventricular volumes. | BACKGROUND
Clinical applicability of conventional ultrasonographic systems using mechanical adapters for 3D echocardiographic imaging has been limited by long acquisition and processing times. We developed a rapid (6-s) acquisition technique that collects apical tomograms using a continuously internally rotating transthoracic transducer. This study was performed to examine the clinical feasibility of rapid-acquisition 3D echocardiography to estimate left ventricular end-diastolic and end-systolic volumes using electron-beam computed tomography as the reference standard. Methods and Results-We collected a series of 6 to 11 apical echocardiographic tomograms, depending on heart rate, in 11 patients. There was good correlation, low variability, and low bias between rapid 3D echocardiography and electron-beam computed tomography for measuring left ventricular end-diastolic volume (r=0.96; standard error of the estimate, 21.34 mL; bias, -4.93 mL) and left ventricular end-systolic volume (r=0.96; standard error of the estimate, 14.78 mL; bias, -6.97 mL).
CONCLUSIONS
The rapid-acquisition 3D echocardiography extends the use of a multiplane, internally rotating handheld transducer so that it becomes a precise and clinically feasible tool for assessing left ventricular volumes and function. A rapid-image acquisition time of 6 s would allow repeated image collection during the course of a clinical echocardiographic examination. Additional work must address rapid and automated data processing. |
Generic Pattern Trees for Exhaustive Exceptional Model Mining | Exceptional model mining has been proposed as a variant of subgroup discovery especially focusing on complex target concepts. Currently, efficient mining algorithms are limited to heuristic (non exhaustive) methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for fast exhaustive exceptional model mining: We introduce the concept of valuation bases as an intermediate condensed data representation, and present the general GP-growth algorithm based on FP-growth. Furthermore, we discuss the scope of the proposed approach by drawing an analogy to data stream mining and provide examples for several different model classes. Runtime experiments show improvements of more than an order of magnitude in comparison to a naive exhaustive depth-first search. |
Individual variation in coping with stress: a multidimensional approach of ultimate and proximate mechanisms. | Ecological studies on feral populations of mice, fish and birds elucidate the functional significance of phenotypes that differ individually in their behavioral and neuroendocrine response to environmental challenge. Within a species, the capacity to cope with environmental challenges largely determines individual survival in the natural habitat. Recent studies indicate that individual variation within a species may buffer the species for strong fluctuations in the natural habitat. A conceptual framework will be presented that is based on the view that individual variation in aggressive behavior can be considered more generally as a variation in actively coping with environmental challenges. Highly aggressive individuals adopt a proactive coping style whereas low levels of aggression indicate a more passive or reactive style of coping. Coping styles have now been identified in a range of species and can be considered as trait characteristics that are stable over time and across situations. The dimension of coping style seems to be independent of an emotionality dimension. Hence, in the analysis of the proximate mechanisms of stress and adaptation, one has to consider the possibility that the mechanisms which determine the type of stress response might be independent from those underlying the magnitude of the response. The two coping styles differ in a number of important neurobiological and neuroendocrine systems. For example, proactive males differ significantly from reactive males in the homeostatic control of serotonergic activity resulting in completely opposite dose response relationships of various serotonergic drugs. The results so far show that proactive coping is characterized by a strong inhibitory control of the 5-HT neuron via its somatodendritic 5-HT(1A) autoreceptor. It is hypothesized that the regulation of serotonin release is causally related to coping style rather than emotionality. Understanding the functional individual variation as it occurs in nature and the underlying neurobiology and neuroendocrinology is fundamental in understanding individual vulnerability to stress related disease. |
Mechanisms of head injuries in elite football. | OBJECTIVES
The aim of this study was to describe, using video analysis, the mechanisms of head injuries and of incidents with a high risk of head injury in elite football.
METHODS
Videotapes and injury information were collected prospectively for 313 of the 409 matches played in the Norwegian (2000 season) and Icelandic (1999 and 2000 season) professional leagues. Video recordings of incidents where a player appeared to be hit in the head and the match was consequently interrupted by the referee were analysed and cross referenced with reports of acute time loss injuries from the team medical staff.
RESULTS
The video analysis revealed 192 incidents (18.8 per 1000 player hours). Of the 297 acute injuries reported, 17 (6%) were head injuries, which corresponds to an incidence of 1.7 per 1000 player hours (concussion incidence 0.5 per 1000 player hours). The most common playing action was a heading duel with 112 cases (58%). The body part that hit the injured player's head was the elbow/arm/hand in 79 cases (41%), the head in 62 cases (32%), and the foot in 25 cases (13%). In 67 of the elbow/arm/hand impacts, the upper arm of the player causing the incident was at or above shoulder level, and the arm use was considered to be active in 61 incidents (77%) and intentional in 16 incidents (20%).
CONCLUSIONS
This study suggests that video analysis provides detailed information about the mechanisms for head injuries in football. The most frequent injury mechanism was elbow to head contact, followed by head to head contact in heading duels. In the majority of the elbow to head incidents, the elbow was used actively at or above shoulder level, and stricter rule enforcement or even changes in the laws of the game concerning elbow use should perhaps be considered, in order to reduce the risk of head injury. |
A Hybrid Hierarchical Model for Multi-Document Summarization | Scoring sentences in documents given abstract summaries created by humans is important in extractive multi-document summarization. In this paper, we formulate extractive summarization as a two step learning problem building a generative model for pattern discovery and a regression model for inference. We calculate scores for sentences in document clusters based on their latent characteristics using a hierarchical topic model. Then, using these scores, we train a regression model based on the lexical and structural characteristics of the sentences, and use the model to score sentences of new documents to form a summary. Our system advances current state-of-the-art improving ROUGE scores by ∼7%. Generated summaries are less redundant and more coherent based upon manual quality evaluations. |
A phase II study of sunitinib as a second-line treatment in advanced biliary tract carcinoma: a multicentre, multinational study. | BACKGROUND
Biliary tract carcinoma (BTC) is rare in the West, but not uncommon in Asia and is a highly fatal malignancy. VEGF expression is related with poor outcome in patients with BTC. Therefore, we conducted a phase II study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of sunitinib as second-line treatment.
METHODS
This was a prospective, single-arm, multicentre, multinational study. Patients with unresectable, metastatic BTC who progressed after first-line chemotherapy were eligible. Sunitinib was administered at 37.5mg once daily continuously with 4-week cycle. The primary end point was the time to progression (TTP).
RESULTS
Between May 2009 and October 2010, a total of 56 patients were enrolled from three countries. The median age was 55 years (range 38-75) and male to female ratio was 37:19. Median TTP was 1.7 months (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.0-2.4). The objective response rate was 8.9% (5 partial response) and disease control rate was 50.0%. (23 stable disease) Grade 3-4 toxicities were observed in 46.4% of the patients with neutropenia and thrombocytopenia being the most frequent (21.4%).
CONCLUSIONS
This phase II study suggests that sunitinib monotherapy demonstrated marginal efficacy in metastatic BTC patients although toxicity should be concerned in Asian population. |
Apixaban for reduction in stroke and other ThromboemboLic events in atrial fibrillation (ARISTOTLE) trial: design and rationale. | Atrial fibrillation (AF) is associated with increased risk of stroke that can be attenuated with vitamin K antagonists (VKAs). Vitamin K antagonist use is limited, in part, by the high incidence of complications when patients' international normalized ratios (INRs) deviate from the target range. The primary objective of ARISTOTLE is to determine if the factor Xa inhibitor, apixaban, is noninferior to warfarin at reducing the combined endpoint of stroke (ischemic or hemorrhagic) and systemic embolism in patients with AF and at least 1 additional risk factor for stroke. We have randomized 18,206 patients from over 1,000 centers in 40 countries. Patients were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to receive apixaban or warfarin using a double-blind, double-dummy design. International normalized ratios are monitored and warfarin (or placebo) is adjusted aiming for a target INR range of 2 to 3 using a blinded, encrypted point-of-care device. Minimum treatment is 12 months, and maximum expected exposure is 4 years. Time to accrual of at least 448 primary efficacy events will determine treatment duration. The key secondary objectives are to determine if apixaban is superior to warfarin for the combined endpoint of stroke (ischemic or hemorrhagic) and systemic embolism, and for all-cause death. These will be tested after the primary objective using a closed test procedure. The noninferiority boundary is 1.38; apixaban will be declared noninferior if the 95% CI excludes the possibility that the primary outcome rate with apixaban is >1.38 times higher than with warfarin. ARISTOTLE will determine whether apixaban is noninferior or superior to warfarin in preventing stroke and systemic embolism; whether apixaban has particular benefits in the warfarin-naïve population; whether it reduces the combined rate of stroke, systemic embolism, and death; and whether it impacts bleeding. |
Indoor tracking of multiple persons with a 77 GHz MIMO FMCW radar | In this paper, we tackle the task of multi-target tracking of humans in an indoor setting using a low power 77 GHz MIMO CMOS radar. A drawback of such a highresolution and low-power device is the higher sensitivity to noise, which makes the analysis of signals more challenging. Therefore, a pipeline is proposed to address both pre-processing of the radar signal and multi-target tracking. In the pre-processing phase, we focus on handling the low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and eliminating so-called ghost targets. The tracking method we propose is based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo Data Association (MCMCDA), thus taking a combinatorial approach towards the task of tracking. The pipeline is tested on a number of real-world scenarios and shows promising results, overcoming the significant amount of noise associated with embedded radar devices. |
Analog front-end for EMG acquisition system | This paper presents a 4-channel analog front-end (AFE) for Electromyogram (EMG) acquisition systems. Each input channel consists of a chopper-stabilized instrumentation amplifier (IA) and a low-pass filer (LPF). A 15-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with a buffer amplifier is shared with four input channels through multiplexer. An incremental ADC with a 1.5-bit second-order feed-forward topology is employed to achieve 15-bit resolution. The prototype AFE is fabricated in a 0.18 μm CMOS process with an active die area of 1.5 mm2. It achieves 3.2 μVrms input referred noise with a gain of 40 dB and a cutoff frequency of 500 Hz for LPF while consuming 3.713 mW from a 1.8V supply. |
The Semantic Concept of Truth in Pre-Han Chinese Philosophy | In this paper I argue, contrary to Chad Hansen’s view (Hansen 1985), that pre-Han 漢 Chinese philosophy has the semantic concept of truth. Hansen argues that, first, pre-Han Chinese thinkers do not have motivations to introduce the concept of truth in their philosophy due to their peculiar theory of language; second, the concept does not fit well with philosophical texts at that time, and in particular, the Mozi 墨子 text about the three standards of doctrine. However, I argue that Chinese thinkers indeed have reasons to introduce the concept of truth. Hansen’s reading of the three standards of doctrine takes the standards as standards of correct word use, thus attributing to the authors of the Mozi an understanding of yan 言 (“speech” or “doctrine”) as something without complete propositional content. However, I argue, a reading that sees the three standards as standards for something with complete propositional content explains better the passages in which the authors apply the standards to various issues. Finally I argue that the term ran 然 is sometimes used as a truth predicate in classical Chinese texts, because it has several important features identical to that of the truth predicate “is true” in English. |
Fast image denoising based on modify CNN and noise estimation | Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been applied in many areas successfully because of their ability to learn, ease of implementation and fast real-time operation. In this research, there are proposed two algorithms. The first is cellular neural network (CNN) with noise level estimation. While the second is modify cellular neural network with noise level estimation. The proposed CNN modification is by adding the Rossler chaos to the CNN fed. Noise level algorithm were used to image noise removal approach in order to get a good image denoising processing with high quality image visual and statistical measures. The results of the proposed system show that the combination of chaos CNN with noise level estimation gives acceptable PSNR and RMSE with a best quality visual vision and small computational time. |
Comparison of early phase adaptations for traditional strength and endurance, and low velocity resistance training programs in college-aged women. | The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a six-week (16-17 training sessions) low velocity resistance training program (LV) on various performance measures as compared to a traditional strength (TS) and a traditional muscular endurance (TE) resistance training program. Thirty-four healthy adult females (21.1 +/- 2.7 y) were randomly divided into 4 groups: control (C), TS, TE, and LV. Workouts consisted of 3 exercises: leg press (LP), back squat (SQ), and knee extension (KE). Each subject was pre- and posttested for 1 repetition maximum (1RM), muscular endurance, maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max), muscular power, and body composition. After the pretesting, TS, TE, and LV groups attended a minimum of 16 out of 17 training sessions in which the LP, SQ, and KE were performed to fatigue for each of 3 sets. For each training session, TS trained at 6-10 RM and TE trained at 20-30 RM both with 1-2 second concentric/1-2 second eccentric; and LV trained at 6-10 RM, with 10 second concentric/4 s eccentric. Statistical significance was determined at an alpha level of 0.05. LV increased relative LP and KE 1 RM, but the percent increase was smaller than TS, and not different from C in the SQ. For muscular endurance, LV improved similarly to TE for LP and less than TS and TE for KE. Body composition improved for all groups including C (significant main effect). In conclusion, muscular strength improved with LV training however, TS showed a larger improvement. Muscular endurance improved with LV training, but not above what TE or TS demonstrated. For all other variables, there were no significant improvements for LV beyond what C demonstrated. |
Ring Resonator Bandpass Filter With Switchable Bandwidth Using Stepped-Impedance Stubs | This paper presents a novel ring resonator bandpass filter (BPF) with switchable passband bandwidth. Simple techniques for analyzing resonant frequencies and transmission zeros are shown, and the methods of designing the lengths of open, stepped-impedance stubs attached to the ring are introduced to obtain the tunability of the bandwidth. Interdigital-coupled feed lines are used for harmonic suppression by adding transmission zeros outside of the passband, resulting in wide upper and lower stopbands. After the lengths of the open stubs and the design of the feed lines are decided, the means of producing the bandwidth tunability are analyzed. By changing the characteristic impedances of the open stubs, mid-upper or mid-lower passband bandwidths can be separately varied. Simultaneous increases or decreases of each width of the stepped open stubs change the number of resonances, resulting in wide or narrow passband bandwidths. The measured results of the BPF using PIN diodes show that the tunable passband ratio is 1.22:1.13:1 with a maximum insertion loss of 1.35 dB. |
Jointless structure and under-actuation mechanism for compact hand exoskeleton | It is important for a wearable robot to be compact and sufficiently light for use as an assistive device. Since human fingers are arranged in a row in dense space, the concept of traditional wearable robots using a rigid frame and a pin joint result in size and complexity problems. A structure without a conventional pin joint, called a jointless structure, has the potential to be used as a wearable robotic hand because the human skeleton and joint can replace the robot's conventional structure. Another way to reduce the weight of the system is to use under-actuation. Under-actuation enables adaptive grasping with less number of actuators for robotic hands. Differential mechanisms are widely used for multi-finger under-actuation; however, they require additional working space. We propose a design with a jointless structure and a novel under-actuation mechanism to reduce the size and weight of a hand exoskeleton. Using these concepts, we developed a prototype that weighs only 80 grams. To evaluate the prototype, fingertip force and blocked force are measured. Fingertip force is the force that can be applied by the finger of the hand exoskeleton on the object surface. The fingertip force is about 18 N when actuated by a tension force of 35 N from the motor. 18 N is sufficient for simple pinch motion in daily activities. Another factor related to performance of the under-actuation mechanism is blocked force, which is a force required to stop one finger while the other finger keeps on moving. It is measured to be 0.5 N, which is sufficiently small. With these experiments, the feasibility of the new hand exoskeleton has been shown. |
Accuracy-based Curriculum Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning | In this paper, we investigate a new form of automated curriculum learning based on adaptive selection of accuracy requirements, called accuracybased curriculum learning. Using a reinforcement learning agent based on the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm and addressing the Reacher environment, we first show that an agent trained with various accuracy requirements sampled randomly learns more efficiently than when asked to be very accurate at all times. Then we show that adaptive selection of accuracy requirements, based on a local measure of competence progress, automatically generates a curriculum where difficulty progressively increases, resulting in a better learning efficiency than sampling randomly. |
Miniature robots for space and military missions | ABSTUCT Miniature robots enable low-cost planetary surface exploration missions, and new military missions in urban terrain where small robots provide critical assistance to human operations. These space and military missions have many similar technological challenges. Robots can be deployed in environments where it may not be safe or affordable to send humans, or where robots can reduce the risk to humans. Small size is needed in urban terrain to make the robot easy to carry and deploy by military personnel. Technology to sense and perceive the environment, and to autonomously plan and execute navigation maneuvers and other remote tasks, is an important requirement for both planetary and surface robots and for urban terrain robotic assistants. Motivated by common technological needs and by a shared vision about the great technological potential, a strong, collaborative relationship exists between the NASNJPL and DARPA technology development in miniaturized robotics. This paper describes the technologies under development, the applications where these technologies are relevant to both space and military missions, and the status of the most recent technology demonstrations in terrestrial scenarios. |
Posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in close relatives of intensive care unit patients: Prevalence data resemble that of earthquake survivors in Chile. | INTRODUCTION
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in relatives of intensive care unit (ICU) patients has not been fully described. We studied potential relationships between PTSD and specific patients' conditions and relatives' psychologic characteristics.
METHODS
This is a prospective study of family caregivers of ICU patients. Patients' clinical and physiologic variables were recorded. At admission (time I), family caregivers' sociodemographic and psychologic variables were assessed, using specific questionnaires. Reassessment occurred at 2 to 4 days (time II) and 60 days (time III).
RESULTS
Of 105 enrolled caregivers, 83 completed follow-up. They were mainly female adults and first-degree relatives. Caregiver's baseline anxiety and depression symptoms were observed in 30.4% and 17.4%, respectively. Higher levels associated positively with PTSD symptoms (PS). At time III, 22.89% of caregivers met criteria for PTSD, similar to Chilean general population after the 2010's massive earthquake. Patient's mean age was 59.90 ± 17.4 years; Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II score, 17.84 ± 7.13; 50% were on mechanical ventilation (MV); and average ICU stay, 9.40 ± 9.82 days. Patient's age correlated directly with PS (P = .017 when patient was on MV and length of stay >3 days). Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II greater than 7 correlated with PS (P = .043).
CONCLUSIONS
Close relatives of patients admitted to the ICU experience a high prevalence of PTSD during and after hospitalization. Individual patient factors such as severity, age, and being on MV increase the occurrence of PTSD, as well as sex and baseline anxiety levels of caregivers. Preventative measures could be devised for this particular high-risk population. |
Intensive therapy with cyclophosphamide, carmustine, etoposide +/- cisplatin, and autologous bone marrow transplantation for Hodgkin's disease in first relapse after combination chemotherapy. | The optimal timing in which to use intensive chemotherapy and autologous bone marrow transplantation (BMT) in Hodgkin's disease (HD) is uncertain. In 1985, we initiated a program in which this modality was used as the initial salvage therapy in patients relapsing after combination chemotherapy. Fifty-eight patients with HD in first relapse after primary chemotherapy received conditioning with high-dose cyclophosphamide, carmustine, etoposide (VP16-213) +/- cisplatin (CBV +/- P) followed by autologous BMT. All but six of these patients were given a median of two cycles of conventional chemotherapy +/- involved field radiation therapy before CBV +/- P and autologous BMT. These measures were not used as a means for patients selection; all patients receiving such therapy ultimately were transplanted. The probability of nonrelapse mortality, progression of HD, and progression-free survival post-BMT were calculated, and prognostic factors for progression-free survival were evaluated using the Cox proportional hazards method. Treatment-related deaths occurred in only three patients. Thirteen patients have relapsed at a median 0.7 years (range 0.1 to 3.5) post-BMT. At a median follow-up of 2.3 years (range 0.4 to 7.2), the actuarial progression-free survival is 64% (95% confidence interval, 46% to 78%). In the statistical analysis, three similarly weighted but independent prognostic factors were identified: "B" symptoms at relapse, extranodal disease at relapse, and initial remission duration of less than 1 year. Patients with no risk factors had a 3-year progression-free survival of 100%, compared with 81% in patients with one factor, 40% in those with two factors, and 0% in patients with all three factors. CBV +/- P and autologous BMT is highly effective salvage therapy for HD patients in a first relapse, particularly in the subset of patients with less than two adverse factors. Therapy must be improved in the future for patients with > or = 2 adverse factors. |
Generating Synthetic Time Series to Augment Sparse Datasets | In machine learning, data augmentation is the process of creating synthetic examples in order to augment a dataset used to learn a model. One motivation for data augmentation is to reduce the variance of a classifier, thereby reducing error. In this paper, we propose new data augmentation techniques specifically designed for time series classification, where the space in which they are embedded is induced by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). The main idea of our approach is to average a set of time series and use the average time series as a new synthetic example. The proposed methods rely on an extension of DTW Barycentric Averaging (DBA), the averaging technique that is specifically developed for DTW. In this paper, we extend DBA to be able to calculate a weighted average of time series under DTW. In this case, instead of each time series contributing equally to the final average, some can contribute more than others. This extension allows us to generate an infinite number of new examples from any set of given time series. To this end, we propose three methods that choose the weights associated to the time series of the dataset. We carry out experiments on the 85 datasets of the UCR archive and demonstrate that our method is particularly useful when the number of available examples is limited (e.g. 2 to 6 examples per class) using a 1-NN DTW classifier. Furthermore, we show that augmenting full datasets is beneficial in most cases, as we observed an increase of accuracy on 56 datasets, no effect on 7 and a slight decrease on only 22. |
Dynamic Time-Dependent Route Planning in Road Networks with User Preferences | There has been tremendous progress in algorithmic methods for computing driving directions on road networks. Most of that work focuses on time-independent route planning, where it is assumed that the cost on each arc is constant per query. In practice, the current traffic situation significantly influences the travel time on large parts of the road network, and it changes over the day. One can distinguish between traffic congestion that can be predicted using historical traffic data, and congestion due to unpredictable events, e. g., accidents. In this work, we study the dynamic and time-dependent route planning problem, which takes both prediction (based on historical data) and live traffic into account. To this end, we propose a practical algorithm that, while robust to user preferences, is able to integrate global changes of the time-dependent metric (e. g., due to traffic updates or user restrictions) faster than previous approaches, while allowing subsequent queries that enable interactive applications. |
Multitemporal Satellite Data for Monitoring Urbanization in Nanjing from 2001 to 2016 | .................................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. iii List of Abbreviations .............................................................................................................. vi List of Figures ........................................................................................................................ vii List of Tables ......................................................................................................................... viii |
Overweight/obesity among adults in North-Western Ethiopia: a community-based cross sectional study | Background
Nowadays adulthood overweight/obesity is an emerging public health problem in developing countries. There is no information on magnitude and contributing factors of adulthood overweight/obesity in Ethiopia, particularly in North West region of the country. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess magnitude and contributing factors of adulthood overweight/obesity in North West region of Ethiopia.
Methods
A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted from September1, 2015 to November 30, 2015 in northwest region of Ethiopia particularly Bahir-Dar city and its rural districts. A total of 1484 adult participants were recruited in the study. Stratified multistage followed by systematic random sampling technique was employed to select participants. Overweight/obesity was determined using center for diseases control cutoff points. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was fitted to identify factors associated with overweight/obesity. Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR) with the corresponding 95% Confidence Interval (CI) was calculated to show the strength of association.
Results
A total of 1405 adults were participated in the study with a response rate of 94.7%. This study indicated that 11.3 (95% CI: 9.6, 13.1) adults were overweight and obese of which about 9.3% and 2% of adults were overweight and obese, respectively. The higher odds of being Overweight/Obese were noted among urban residents, females and older age. However performing mild to moderate physical activity [AOR = 0.608, 95% CI: 0.37, 0.99] and consumption of fruit and vegetable [AOR = 0.51, 95% CI: 0.34, 0.77] were found to be protective against overweight/obesity.
Conclusion
Though, it was a problem of developed countries adulthood overweight /obesity is emerged as a public health problem among adults in Ethiopia particularly in the study area, northwest region. Hence, preventive interventions focusing on urban residents, females through encouraging Physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption is essential to prevent emergence of adulthood overweight/obesity. |
An Internet-Wide View of Internet-Wide Scanning | While it is widely known that port scanning is widespread, neither the scanning landscape nor the defensive reactions of network operators have been measured at Internet scale. In this work, we analyze data from a large network telescope to study scanning activity from the past year, uncovering large horizontal scan operations and identifying broad patterns in scanning behavior. We present an analysis of who is scanning, what services are being targeted, and the impact of new scanners on the overall landscape. We also analyze the scanning behavior triggered by recent vulnerabilities in Linksys routers, OpenSSL, and NTP. We empirically analyze the defensive behaviors that organizations employ against scanning, shedding light on who detects scanning behavior, which networks blacklist scanning, and how scan recipients respond to scans conducted by researchers. We conclude with recommendations for institutions performing scans and with implications of recent changes in scanning behavior for researchers and network operators. |
The Global Financial Markets: An Ultra-Large-Scale Systems Perspective | ...................................................................................................................................................4 |
Non-contrast-enhanced computerized tomography and analgesic-related kidney disease: report of the national analgesic nephropathy study. | Previous studies suggested that the non-contrast-enhanced computerized tomography (CT) scan is a highly reliable tool for the diagnosis of analgesic-associated renal disease. However, this issue has not been addressed in the US population. A total of 221 incident patients with ESRD from different regions of the United States underwent a helical CT scan and detailed questioning about drug history. Specific renal anatomic criteria were developed to determine whether a constellation of CT findings (small indented calcified kidneys [SICK]) is linked to analgesic ingestion. For approximating use before the onset of renal disease, only analgesic ingestion at least 9 yr before starting dialysis was considered relevant. Fifteen patients met the criteria for SICK. This represented 7% of the enrolled patients and approximately 1% of the total ESRD population. There was a significant increase in the estimated risk among patients with a history of heavy aspirin ingestion (odds ratio [OR] 7.4 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.2 to 43] for > or =1 kg lifetime; OR 8.8 [95% CI 1.2 to 66] for > or =0.3 kg/yr). Total analgesic ingestion of > or =0.3 kg/yr also was significantly associated with SICK (OR 8.2; 95% CI 1.5 to 45). These findings were accounted for largely by combination products that contained aspirin and phenacetin (used by three patients with SICK), which are no longer available. In addition, the CT finding of SICK was present only in a minority of heavy analgesic users, yielding a sensitivity of 5 to 26%. Findings of SICK are infrequent in the US ESRD population and do not occur among a sufficient proportion of heavy analgesic users to render the non-contrast-enhanced CT scan a sensitive tool to detect analgesic-associated kidney injury. |
Is the Hénon attractor chaotic? | By performing a systematic study of the Hénon map, we find low-period sinks for parameter values extremely close to the classical ones. This raises the question whether or not the well-known Hénon attractor-the attractor of the Hénon map existing for the classical parameter values-is a strange attractor, or simply a stable periodic orbit. Using results from our study, we conclude that even if the latter were true, it would be practically impossible to establish this by computing trajectories of the map. |
Demand forecast sharing in a dual-channel supply chain | We assess the benefits of sharing demand forecast information in a manufacturer–retailer supply chain, consisting of a traditional retail channel and a direct channel. The demand is a linear function of price with a Gaussian primary demand (i.e., zero-price market potential). Both the manufacturer and the retailer set their price based on their forecast of the primary demand. In this setting, we investigate the value of sharing demand forecasts. We analyze the make-toorder scenario, in which prices are set before and production takes place after the primary demand is known, and the make-to-stock scenario, in which production takes place and prices are set before the primary demand is known. We also compare the supply chain performance with and without the direct channel under some assumptions (production cost is zero, and each demand function has the same slope of price). We find that the direct channel has a negative impact on the retailer s performance, and, under some conditions, the manufacturer and the whole supply chain are better off. Our research extends and complements prior research that has investigated only the inventory and replenishment-related benefits of information sharing. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
Energy Efficient Telemonitoring of Physiological Signals via Compressed Sensing: A Fast Algorithm and Power Consumption Evaluation | Wireless telemonitoring of physiological signals is an important topic in eHealth. In order to reduce on-chip energy consumption and extend sensor life, recorded signals are usually compressed before transmission. In this paper, we adopt compressed sensing (CS) as a low-power compression framework, and propose a fast block sparse Bayesian learning (BSBL) algorithm to reconstruct original signals. Experiments on real-world fetal ECG signals and epilepsy EEG signals showed that the proposed algorithm eywords: ow-power data compression ompressed sensing (CS) lock sparse Bayesian learning (BSBL) lectrocardiography (ECG) lectroencephalography (EEG) has good balance between speed and data reconstruction fidelity when compared to state-of-the-art CS algorithms. Further, we implemented the CS-based compression procedure and a low-power compression procedure based on a wavelet transform in field programmable gate array (FPGA), showing that the CS-based compression can largely save energy and other on-chip computing resources. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ield programmable gate array (FPGA) |
Probabilistic Under Frequency Load Shedding Considering RoCoF Relays of Distributed Generators | The activation of under frequency load shedding (UFLS) is the last automated action against the severe frequency drops in order to rebalance the system. In this paper, the setting parameters of a multistage load shedding plan are obtained and optimized using a discretized model of dynamic system frequency response. The uncertainties of system parameters including inertia time constant, load damping, and generation deficiency are taken into account. The proposed UFLS model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming optimization problem to minimize the expected amount of load shedding. The activation of rate-of-change-of-frequency relays as the anti-islanding protection of distributed generators is considered. The Monte Carlo simulation method is utilized for modeling the uncertainties of system parameters. The results of probabilistic UFLS are then utilized to design four different UFLS strategies. The proposed dynamic UFLS plans are simulated over the IEEE 39-bus and the large-scale practical Iranian national grid. |
Saliva-Based Biosensors: Noninvasive Monitoring Tool for Clinical Diagnostics | Saliva is increasingly recognised as an attractive diagnostic fluid. The presence of various disease signalling salivary biomarkers that accurately reflect normal and disease states in humans and the sampling benefits compared to blood sampling are some of the reasons for this recognition. This explains the burgeoning research field in assay developments and technological advancements for the detection of various salivary biomarkers to improve clinical diagnosis, management, and treatment. This paper reviews the significance of salivary biomarkers for clinical diagnosis and therapeutic applications, with focus on the technologies and biosensing platforms that have been reported for screening these biomarkers. |
Approximating the Girth | This paper considers the problem of computing a minimum weight cycle in weighted undirected graphs. Given a weighted undirected graph <i>G</i>(<i>V,E,w</i>), let <i>C</i> be a minimum weight cycle of <i>G</i>, let <i>w</i>(<i>C</i>) be the weight of <i>C</i> and let <i>w</i><sub><i>max</i></sub> (<i>C</i>) be the weight of the maximal edge of <i>C</i>. We obtain three new approximation algorithms for the minimum weight cycle problem:
1. For integral weights from the range [1, <i>M</i>] an algorithm that reports a cycle of weight at most 4/3<i>w</i>(<i>C</i>) in <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>2</sup> log <i>n</i>(log <i>n</i> + log <i>M</i>)) time.
2. For integral weights from the range [1, <i>M</i>] an algorithm that reports a cycle of weight at most <i>w</i>(<i>C</i>) + <i>w</i><sub><i>max</i></sub> (<i>C</i>) in <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>2</sup> log <i>n</i>(log <i>n</i> + log <i>M</i>)) time.
3. For non-negative real edge weights an algorithm that for any ε > 0 reports a cycle of weight at most (4/3 + ε)<i>w</i>(<i>C</i>) in <i>O</i>(1/ε <i>n</i><sup>2</sup> log <i>n</i>(log log <i>n</i>)) time.
In a recent breakthrough Vassilevska Williams and Williams [WW10] showed that a subcubic algorithm that computes the exact minimum weight cycle in undirected graphs with integral weights from the range [1, <i>M</i>] implies a subcubic algorithm for computing all-pairs shortest paths in directed graphs with integral weights from the range [− <i>M, M</i>]. This implies that in order to get a subcubic algorithm for computing a minimum weight cycle we have to relax the problem and to consider an approximated solution.
Lingas and Lundell [LL09] were the first to consider approximation in the context of minimum weight cycle in weighted graphs. They presented a 2-approximation algorithm for integral weights with <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>2</sup> log <i>n</i>(log <i>n</i> + log <i>M</i>)) running time. They also posed as an open problem the question whether it is possible to obtain a subcubic algorithm with a <i>c</i>-approximation, where <i>c</i> < 2. The current paper answers this question in the affirmative, by presenting an algorithm with 4/3-approximation and the same running time.
Surprisingly, the approximation factor of 4/3 is not accidental. We show using the new result of Vassilevska Williams and Williams [WW10] that a subcubic combinatorial algorithm with (4/3 − ε)-approximation, where 0 < ε ≤ 1/3, implies a subcubic combinatorial algorithm for multiplying two boolean matrices. |
Safety and Effectiveness of Levosimendan in Patients with Predominant Right Heart Failure | Levosimendan is a new calcium sensitizer that enhances the contractile force of the myocardium and exhibits additional vasodilating properties. The present study describes the hemodynamic effects of levosimendan in patients with acute predominant right heart failure in need of inotropic therapy. 18 patients (15 male, age 60 ± 17 years) with acute heart failure, predominant right ventricular dysfunction, left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) ≤ 30%, cardiac index (CI) ≤ 2.5 l/min/m2, right atrial pressure (RAP) ≥ 10 mmHg, and pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP) ≥ 15 mmHg were investigated. Following a loading dose, levosimendan was administered intravenously for 24 h. After 24 h, CI and left ventricular stroke work index increased from 1.7 ± 0.4 to 2.3 ± 0.6 l/min/m2 (p < 0.001) and 14 ± 6 to 17.3 ± 8 g-m/m2/beat (p < 0.05), respectively. PCWP and systemic vascular resistance decreased from 25 ± 7 to 21 ± 5 mmHg (p < 0.01) and 1,724 ± 680 to 1,096 ± 312 dyne * s * cm–5 (p < 0.0001), respectively. RAP was reduced from 15 ± 5 to 10 ± 3 mmHg (p < 0.001), whereas decreases in mean pulmonary artery pressure and pulmonary vascular resistance were not significant. Right ventricular stroke work index (RVSWI) increased from 4.8 ± 1.8 to 7.6 ± 3.4 g-m/m2/beat (p < 0.01). Levosimendan therapy is feasible and improves hemodynamics in patients with acute predominant right heart failure. Augmentation in RVSWI indicates an increase in right ventricular contractility rather than reduction in afterload as a possible pathophysiological mechanism. Levosimendan ist ein Calciumsensitizer mit positiv inotroper und vasodilatierender Wirkung, dessen Anwendung sich bei der akuten Herzinsuffizienz als sehr effektiv erwiesen hat. In der vorliegenden Untersuchung wurden speziell die Wirkung und Sicherheit dieser neuen Substanz bei Patienten mit überwiegendem Rechtsherzversagen untersucht. In einer Serie von 18 Patienten mit hochgradig eingeschränkter überwiegend rechtsventrikulärer Pumpfunktion, deutlich reduziertem Herzindex (CI), erhöhtem Wedge-Druck (PCWP) und klinischen Zeichen eines manifesten Rechtsherzversagens wurde Levosimendan als 24-h-Infusion mit und ohne vorausgehenden Bolus verabreicht. Dabei bestätigten sich die bereits bekannten positiven Effekte auf die Hämodynamik (Zunahme des CI von 1,7 ± 0,4 auf 2,3 ± 0,6 l/min/m2; p < 0,001; Abnahme des PCWP von 25 ± 7 auf 21 ± 5 mmHg; p < 0,01; Abnahme des systemischen Gefäßwiderstands von 1 724 ± 680 auf 1 096 ± 312 dyn * s * cm–5; p < 0,0001). Auffällig waren die Abnahme des rechtsatrialen Drucks von 15 ± 5 auf 10 ± 3 mmHg (p < 0,001) und die signifikante Steigerung des rechtsventrikulären Schlagarbeitsindex von 4,8 ± 1,8 auf 7,6 ± 3,4 g-m/m2/Schlag (p < 0,01) bei weitgehend unverändertem Lungengefäßwiderstand. Der Herzfrequenzanstieg während der Behandlung war nicht signifikant, und es traten keine Tachykardien und/oder relevanten Arrhythmien auf. Patienten mit vasopressorpflichtiger Hypotonie bereits zu Beginn oder während der Behandlung wiesen die höchste 30-Tage-Mortalität auf. In dieser Fallserie erwies sich die Anwendung von Levosimendan bei Patienten mit überwiegender Rechtsherzdekompensation als sicher und effektiv. Die deutliche Zunahme der rechtsventrikulären Schlagarbeit spricht eher für die Kontraktilitätssteigerung des Ventrikels und weniger für die Nachlastsenkung als dem zugrundeliegenden Wirkmechanismus von Levosimendan am rechten Ventrikel. |
A Look at Agenda-setting : past , present and future | Ten US presidential elections ago in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the agenda of issues that a small group of undecided voters regarded as the most important ones of the day was compared with the news coverage of public issues in the news media these voters used to follow the campaign (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). Since that election, the principal finding in Chapel Hill*/those aspects of public affairs that are prominent in the news become prominent among the public*/has been replicated in hundreds of studies worldwide. These replications include both election and non-election settings for a broad range of public issues and other aspects of political communication and extend beyond the United States to Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. Recently, as the news media have expanded to include online newspapers available on the Web, agenda-setting effects have been documented for these new media. All in all, this research has grown far beyond its original domain*/the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda*/and now encompasses five distinct stages of theoretical attention. Until very recently, the ideas and findings that detail these five stages of agenda-setting theory have been scattered in a wide variety of research journals, book chapters and books published in many different countries. As a result, knowledge of agenda setting has been very unevenly distributed. Scholars designing new studies often had incomplete knowledge of previous research, and graduate students entering the field of mass communication had difficulty learning in detail what we know about the agenda-setting role of the mass media. This situation was my incentive to write Setting the Agenda: the mass media and public opinion, which was published in England in late 2004 and in the United States early in 2005. My primary goal was to gather the principal ideas and empirical findings about agenda setting in one place. John Pavlik has described this integrated presentation as the Gray’s Anatomy of agenda setting (McCombs, 2004, p. xii). Shortly after the US publication of Setting the Agenda , I received an invitation from Journalism Studies to prepare an overview of agenda setting. The timing was wonderfully fortuitous because a book-length presentation of what we have learned in the years since Chapel Hill could be coupled with a detailed discussion in a major journal of current trends and future likely directions in agenda-setting research. Journals are the best venue for advancing the stepby-step accretion of knowledge because they typically reach larger audiences than books, generate more widespread discussion and offer more space for the focused presentation of a particular aspect of a research area. Books can then periodically distill this knowledge. Given the availability of a detailed overview in Setting the Agenda , the presentation here of the five stages of agenda-setting theory emphasizes current and near-future research questions in these areas. Moving beyond these specific Journalism Studies, Volume 6, Number 4, 2005, pp. 543 557 |
Comparison of two self-rating instruments for medication adherence assessment in hypertension revealed insufficient psychometric properties. | OBJECTIVE
In cases of insufficiently controlled blood pressure, it is important for practitioners to distinguish between "nonadherence" and "nonresponse" to antihypertensive drug treatment. A reliable and valid adherence measurement based on the patient's self-report may be helpful in daily practice.
STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING
In a primary care sample with 353 hypertensive patients, we applied two self-rating instruments to assess medication adherence (the "Hill-Bone Compliance to High Blood Pressure Therapy Scale" and Morisky's "Self-Reported Measure of Medication Adherence") and compared their psychometric properties.
RESULTS
Both scales showed low acceptability and insufficiency to moderate internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha=0.25 and 0.73, respectively). Their convergent validity as indexed by kappa=0.39 could be judged as "fair" at best. Testing the power to predict blood pressure >140/90mmHg, both scales showed an accuracy of 57% and 62%, respectively. The positive likelihood, that is, the increase in likelihood of high blood pressure in cases of nonadherence was 1.00 and 1.32, respectively.
CONCLUSION
The use of both scales cannot be recommended. They showed considerable floor effects, and their ability to identify medication adherence was inconsistent for nearly every third patient. The power of both scales to predict uncontrolled blood pressure was essentially a chance. The underlying conceptual framework of medication adherence therefore needs to be rethought. |
User-level sentiment analysis incorporating social networks | We show that information about social relationships can be used to improve user-level sentiment analysis. The main motivation behind our approach is that users that are somehow "connected" may be more likely to hold similar opinions; therefore, relationship information can complement what we can extract about a user's viewpoints from their utterances. Employing Twitter as a source for our experimental data, and working within a semi-supervised framework, we propose models that are induced either from the Twitter follower/followee network or from the network in Twitter formed by users referring to each other using "@" mentions. Our transductive learning results reveal that incorporating social-network information can indeed lead to statistically significant sentiment classification improvements over the performance of an approach based on Support Vector Machines having access only to textual features. |
Recent improvements of efficiency and power density of DC-DC converters for automotive applications | Automotive industry is considered to be one of the main contributors to environmental pollution and global warming. Therefore, many car manufacturers are in near future planning to introduce hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) and pure electric vehicles (EV) to make our cars more environmentally friendly. These new vehicles require highly efficient and small power converters. In recent years, considerable improvements were made in designing such converters. In this paper, an approach based on so called Snubber Assisted Zero Voltage and Zero Current Switching topology otherwise also know as SAZZ is presented. This topology has evolved to be one of the leaders in the field of highly efficient converters with high power densities. Evolution and main features of this topology are briefly discussed. Capabilities of the topology are demonstrated on two case study prototypes based on different design approaches. The prototypes are designed to be fully bi-directional for peak power output of 30 kW. Both designs reached efficiencies close to 99 % in wide load range. Power densities over 40 kW/litre are attainable in the same time. Combination of MOSFET technology and SAZZ topology is shown to be very beneficial to converters designed for EV applications. |
Purchasing’s Strategic Relevance | Recently Ramsay (2001) applied the resource based view of the firm (RBV) to argue that purchasing is a largely irrelevant activity from a strategic management point of view. In this paper it will be argued to the contrary on several grounds. First, it will be shown there is a much wider theoretical base underlying the field of strategic management, from which arguments can be drawn to substantiate that purchasing can indeed have strategic impact. Second, recent developments in the RBV will be discussed to illustrate that also within the RBV purchasing is a strategic activity. Furthermore there is much empirical evidence to demonstrate that purchasing and supply management activities contribute to sustainable competitive advantage. The paper then puts forward a systematic set of criteria, which may be of value to purchasing management researchers to assess whether studied phenomena have strategic impact. Finally some hints are given for future research directions. |
Innovation in Analogical Design: A Model-Based Approach | Analogical reasoning, it is commonly accepted, plays an important role in innovation and creativity. Since design often is innovative, and can be creative, the design task provides a good context for exploring the role of analogy in innovation and creativity. In the IDEAL project, we are exploring the processes of innovation and creativity in the context of conceptual (or preliminary, qualitative) design of physical devices. In particular, we are developing a model-based approach to innovation and creativity in analogical design: our core hypothesis is that innovative analogical design involves both reasoning from past experiences in designing devices (in the form of analogs or cases) and comprehension of how those devices work (in the form of device models or theories). In this paper, we focus on the issues of understanding feedback on the performance of a design, discovery of new design constraints, and reformulation of the design problem, and describe how the model-based approach addresses these issues. |
The Construction of Reality in the Child | class does not exist either, precisely since the relation between the two shadows compared is not a relation of simple comparison and common appurtenance to the same totality, but of substantial participation. The shadow perceived on the table is therefore no more an isolable object than is, on the sensorimotor plane, the watch which disappears under one cushion and which the child expects to see appear under another. But if there is thus an apparent return to the past it is for an opposite reason to that which obstructs objectification in sensorimotor intelligence; in the latter case the object is difficult to form in proportion as the child has difficulty in intercoordinating perceptual images, whereas on the plane of conceptual thought the object, already elaborated, again loses its identity to the extent that it is coordinated with other objects to construct a class or a relation. In conclusion, in the case of the object as in that of space, from the very beginnings of verbal reflection there is a return of the difficulties already overcome on the plane of action, and there is repetition, with temporal displacements, of the stages and process of adaptation defined by the transition from egocentrism to objectivity. And in both cases the phenomenon is due to the difficulties experienced by the child, after he has reached the social plane, in inserting his sensorimotor acquisitions in a framework of relationships of logical classes and deductive structures admitting of true generalisation, that is, taking into account the point of view of others and all possible points of view as well as his own. § 4. From Sensori-Motor Universe to Representation of the Child’s World II. Causality and Time The development of causality from the first months of life to the eleventh or twelfth year reveals the same graphic curve as that of space or object. The acquisition of causality seems to be completed with the formation of sensorimotor intelligence; in the measure that objectification and spatialisation of relations of cause and effect succeed the magico-phenomenalistic egocentrism of the primitive connections, a whole evolution resumes with the advent of speech and representative thought which seems to reproduce the preceding evolution before really extending it. But among the displacements to which this history of the concept of cause gives rise, distinction must again be made between the simple temporal displacements in extension due to the repetition of primitive processes on the occasion of new problems analogous to old ones, and the temporal displacements in comprehension due to the transition from one plane of activity to another; that is, from the plane of action to that of representation. It seems useless to us to emphasise the former. Nothing is more natural than the fact that belief in the efficacy of personal activity, a belief encouraged by chance comparisons through immediate or phenomenalistic experience, is again found throughout childhood in those moments of anxiety or of desire which characterise infantile magic. The second type of temporal displacements, however, raises questions which it is useful to mention here. During the first months of life the child does not dissociate the external world from his own activity. Perceptual images, not yet consolidated into objects or coordinated in a coherent space, seem to him to be governed by his desires and efforts, though these are not attributed to a self which is separate from the universe. Then gradually, as progress is made in the intelligence which elaborates objects and space by spinning a tight web of relations among these images, the child attributes an autonomous causality to things and persons and conceives of the existence of causal relations independent of himself, his own body becoming a source among other sources of effects integrated in this total system. What will happen when, through speech and representative thought, the subject succeeds not only in foreseeing the development of phenomena and in acting upon them but in evoking them apart from any action in order to try to explain them? It is here that the paradox of displacement in comprehension appears. By virtue of the "why" obsessing the child’s mind, as soon as his representation of the world can be detached without too much risk of error, one perceives that this universe, centred on the self, which seemed abolished because it was eliminated from practical action relating to the immediate environment, reappears on the plane of thought and impresses itself on the little child as the sole understandable conception of totality. Undoubtedly the child no longer behaves, as did the baby, as though he commanded everything and everybody. He knows that adults have their own will, that the rain, wind, clouds, stars, and all things are characterised by movements and effects he undergoes but cannot control. In short, on the practical plane, the objectification and spatialisation of causality remain acquired. But this does not at all prevent the child from representing the universe to himself as a large machine, organised exactly by whom he does not know, but organised with the help of adults and for the sake of the well-being of men and particularly of children. Just as in a house everything is arranged according to a plan, despite imperfections and partial failures, so also the raison d’être for everything in the physical universe is the function of a sort of order in the world, an order both material and moral, of which the child is the center. Adults are there "to take care of us," animals to do us service, the stars to warm us and give us light, plants to nourish us, rain to make the gardens grow, clouds to "make night," mountains to climb on, and lakes for boats, etc. Furthermore, to this more or less explicit and coherent artificialism there corresponds a latent animism which endows everything with the will to play its role and with just the force and awareness needed to act with regularity. Thus the causal egocentrism, which on the sensorimotor plane disappears gradually under the influence of spatialisation and objectification, reappears from the time of the beginnings of thought in almost as radical a form. Doubtless the child no longer attributes personal causality to others or to things, but while endowing objects with specific activities he centers all these activities on man and above all on himself. It seems clear that in this sense we may speak of temporal displacement from one plane to another and that the phenomenon is thus comparable to the phenomena which characterise the evolution of space and object. But it is in a still deeper sense that the primitive schemata of causality are again transposed in the child’s first reflective representations. If it is true that from the second year of life the child attributes causality to others and to objects instead of reserving a monopoly on them for his own activity, we have still to discover how he represents to himself the mechanism of these causal relations. We have just recalled that corresponding to the egocentric artificialism which makes the universe gravitate around man and child is an animism capable of explaining the activity of creatures and things in this sort of world. This example is precisely of a kind to help us understand the second kind of temporal displacement of which we now speak: if the child renounces considering his actions as the cause of every event, he nevertheless is unable to represent to himself the action of bodies except by means of schemata drawn from his own activity. An object animated by a "natural" movement like the wind which pushes clouds, or the moon which advances, thus seems endowed with purposefulness and finality, for the child is unable to conceive of an action without a conscious goal. Through lack of awareness, every process involving a relation of energies, such as the rising of the water level in a glass in which a pebble has been dropped, seems due to forces copied from the model of personal activity; the pebble "weighs" on the bottom of the water, it "forces" the water to rise, and if one held the pebble on a string midway of the column of the water the level would not change. In short, even though there is objectivity on the practical plane, causality may remain egocentric from the representative point of view to the extent that the first causal conceptions are drawn from the completely subjective consciousness of the activity of the self. With regard to spatialisation of the causal connection the same temporal displacement between representation and action is observable. Thus the child can acknowledge in practice the necessity for a spatial contact between cause and effect, but that does not make causality geometric or mechanical. For example, the parts of a bicycle all seem necessary to the child long before he thinks of establishing irreversible causal series among them. However, subsequent to these primitive stages of representation during which one sees reappear on the plane of thought forms of causality relative to those of the first sensorimotor stages and which seem surpassed by the causal structures of the final stages of sensorimotor intelligence, one witnesses a truly reflective objectification and spatialisation, whose progress is parallel to that which we have described on the plane of action. Thus it is that subsequent to the animism and dynamism we have just mentioned, we see a gradual "mechanism" taking form, correlative to the principles of conservation described in § 3 and to the elaboration of a relative space. Causality, like the other categories, therefore evolves on the plane of thought from an initial egocentrism to a combined objectivity and relativity, thus reproducing, in surpassing, its earlier sensorimotor evolution. With regard to time, concerning which we have tried to describe on the purely practical plane of the first two years of life the transformation from |
Analysis on Deep Metallogenic Trace and Simulation Experiment in Xiangshan Large-scale Volcanic Hydrothermal Type Uranium Deposit | Based on series experiments on field geologic analysis,and associated with deep metallogenic trace experiment model transformed from establishment of field deep metallogenic trace model,this paper come to the conclusion that distribution coefficients of U Th first domestic from the magmatic experiment,and then discuss the geochemical behaviors of U、Th、K during magmatic evolution stage. The experiment shows that close relationship between U and Na during the hydrothermal alteration stage; and relationship between U and K during metallogenic stage,which prove that U K are incompatible and regularity of variation between K and Na. The conclusion of uranium dissolving ability increased accompany with pressure increasing in basement metamorphic rocks and host rocks,is obtained from this experiment,which indicate a good deep metallogenic prospect. Furthermore,Pb、Sr、Nd、He isotopes show that the volcanic rocks and basement rocks are ore source beds; due to the combined functions of volcanic hydrothermal and mantle ichor,uranium undergo multi-migration and enrichment and finally concentrated to large rich deposit. |
Exploiting N-Best Hypotheses to Improve an SMT Approach to Grammatical Error Correction | Grammatical error correction (GEC) is the task of detecting and correcting grammatical errors in texts written by second language learners. The statistical machine translation (SMT) approach to GEC, in which sentences written by second language learners are translated to grammatically correct sentences, has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, the SMT approach is unable to utilize global context. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the accuracy of GEC, by exploiting the n-best hypotheses generated by an SMT approach. Specifically, we build a classifier to score the edits in the n-best hypotheses. The classifier can be used to select appropriate edits or re-rank the n-best hypotheses. We apply these methods to a state-of-the-art GEC system that uses the SMT approach. Our experiments show that our methods achieve statistically significant improvements in accuracy over the best published results on a benchmark test dataset on GEC. |
A Survey of Evolutionary Algorithms for Clustering | This paper presents a survey of evolutionary algorithms designed for clustering tasks. It tries to reflect the profile of this area by focusing more on those subjects that have been given more importance in the literature. In this context, most of the paper is devoted to partitional algorithms that look for hard clusterings of data, though overlapping (i.e., soft and fuzzy) approaches are also covered in the paper. The paper is original in what concerns two main aspects. First, it provides an up-to-date overview that is fully devoted to evolutionary algorithms for clustering, is not limited to any particular kind of evolutionary approach, and comprises advanced topics like multiobjective and ensemble-based evolutionary clustering. Second, it provides a taxonomy that highlights some very important aspects in the context of evolutionary data clustering, namely, fixed or variable number of clusters, cluster-oriented or nonoriented operators, context-sensitive or context-insensitive operators, guided or unguided operators, binary, integer, or real encodings, centroid-based, medoid-based, label-based, tree-based, or graph-based representations, among others. A number of references are provided that describe applications of evolutionary algorithms for clustering in different domains, such as image processing, computer security, and bioinformatics. The paper ends by addressing some important issues and open questions that can be subject of future research. |
Survey of SCADA security challenges and potential attack vectors | SCADA systems run silently in the background of our power generation plants, manufacturing facilities, and many other critical infrastructure resources. Even though these SCADA systems are critical in nature, the IT community often poorly understands them. As a result, security of SCADA systems has been neglected, even though companies have improved their security posture to meet regulatory demands. This paper will explore some of the weaknesses in SCADA based system security and the effectiveness of current security techniques. In addition, new methods and tools will be proposed to augment SCADA system security strategies. |
Augmented Reality for teaching spatial relations | This paper describes an approach for increasing the understanding and ease the learning of chemistry for students by visualizing and controlling virtual models of molecules in a intuitive way. With the Help of Augmented Reality, we developed a tool with the name Augmented Chemical Reactions. This program visualizes models of molecules rendered to a camera picture at the position of special markers hold in the hands of the users. The intuitive controlling of the position and orientation of the molecules is done by moving and rotating the markers in front of a camera, so the virtual objects behave as they would have been manipulated themselves. For a better understanding of the subject of chemistry, Augmented Chemical Reactions also shows the dynamic deformation of molecules when they come close to each other. Here the users can have a better view on certain behaviours between molecules. This program has the potential to increase the understanding and ease learning chemistry because of its intuitive controlling of the 3D structure of molecules. In the same way that Augmented Chemical Reactions can help students, it also has the potential to speed up the process of designing new molecules. Scientists can inspect the created molecules and see, if they meet the spatial requirements for specific reactions. This approach prevents time consuming reactions in the laboratory to create those molecules and test them for their desired attributes. |
Recent developments in the physics of light quarks | My talk was dedicated to the memory of Jan Stern. The brief account given below focuses on the progress achieved in the determination of the $\pi\pi$ S-wave scattering lengths, both experimentally and with light dynamical quarks on a lattice. In view of the excellent agreement, we can conclude that (a) the expansion in powers of the two lightest quark masses represents a very efficient tool for the analysis of the low energy structure of QCD and (b) the size of the energy gap of QCD is governed by the order parameter of lowest dimension, the quark condensate. |
Characteristics of falls producing hip fracture in patients on oral anticoagulants. | OBJECTIVE
To analyze the demographic and clinical characteristics of patients on chronic anticoagulant therapy (CAT) admitted because of a hip fracture secondary to a fall, and to compare with patients not receiving CAT.
METHODS
A prospective, observational study realized in six hospitals in the Barcelona area. Demographic and clinical characteristics of patients were collected. The index fall characteristics - cause, height, location, and time of occurrence - were evaluated.
RESULTS
Of the 1225 patients included, 99 (8%) patients were on CAT. When we compare with the rest logistic regression analysis showed that patients receiving CAT were more likely to be male (odds ratio 3.7), not institutionalized (odds ratio 3.5), to take more number of drugs (odds ratio 1.3), to have dementia (odds ratio 2.1) and stroke (odds ratio 1.7). Results revealed a higher prevalence of combined factors as the cause of the index fall in the group of patients on anticoagulants.
CONCLUSIONS
Characteristics of falls were very similar when comparing the group of patients receiving CAT with those who did not. A prior history of falls should lead physicians to take actions for preventing falls causing hip fracture, in all patients and particularly in these on CAT. |
Static Verification for Code Contracts | The Code Contracts project [3] at Microsoft Research enables programmers on the .NET platform to author specifications in existing languages such as C# and VisualBasic. To take advantage of these specifications, we provide tools for documentation generation, runtime contract checking, and static contract verification. This talk details the overall approach of the static contract checker and examines where and how we trade-off soundness in order to obtain a practical tool that works on a full-fledged object-oriented intermediate language such as the .NET Common Intermediate Language. |
Postanaesthesia pulmonary complications after use of muscle relaxants in Europe: Study protocol of the POPULAR study. | From the Department of Anesthesiology, Surgical Services and Intensive Care, Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden (MJF, LIE); Department of Anesthesiology, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany (HF, EB, MB); Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany (KU); Department of Anesthesiology, Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (MH); Department of Anesthesiology, University of Nancy, Nancy, France (CM); Department of Musculoskeletal Biology, Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease, Liverpool University, Liverpool, UK (JMH); and Research department, European Society of Anaesthesiology, Brussels, Belgium (BL, SD) |
A Multilevel Model for Measuring Fit Between a Firm's Competitive Strategies and Information Systems Capabilities | To compete in a highly dynamic marketplace, firms must frequently adapt and align their competitive strategies and information systems. The dominant literature on the strategic fit of a firm’s information systems focuses primarily on high-level measures of the strategic fit of a firm’s overall IS portfolio and the impact of fit on business performance. This paper addresses the need for a more fine-grained approach for assessing the specific areas of misfit between a firm’s competitive strategies and IS capabilities. We describe the design and evaluation of a multilevel strategic fit (MSF) measurement model that enables researchers and practitioners to measure the strategic fit of a firm’s information systems at both an overall and a detailed level. The steps in the model include identifying the relevant IS capabilities according to the type of system; measuring the current level of support for each capability using a capabilities instrument; identifying the ideal level of support for each capability using an adaptation of Conant et al.’s (1990) instrument to assess strategic archetype; and comparing the ideal and realized level of support for each capability. Evidence from a multiple case study analysis indicates that the fine-grained assessment of strategic fit can strengthen the validity, utility, and ease of corroboration of the strategic fit measurement outputs. The paper also demonstrates how an iterative design science research approach, with its emphasis on evaluating the utility of prototype artifacts, is well suited to developing field-tested and theoretically grounded measurement models and instruments that are accessible to practitioners. This focus on practical utility in turn provides researchers with results that can be more readily corroborated, thus improving the quality and usefulness of the research findings. |
Virtual AoA and AoD estimation for sparse millimeter wave MIMO channels | In this paper, we investigate an angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD) estimation algorithm for sparse millimeter wave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The analytical channel model whose use we advocate here is the beam space (or virtual) MIMO channel representation. By leveraging the beam space MIMO concept, we characterize probabilistic channel priors under an analog precoding and combining constraints. This investigation motivates Bayesian inference approaches to virtual AoA and AoD estimation. We divide the estimation task into downlink sounding for AoA estimation and uplink sounding for AoD estimation. A belief propagation (BP)-type algorithm is adopted, leading to computationally efficient approximate message passing (AMP) and approximate log-likelihood ratio testing (ALLRT) algorithms. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional AMP in terms of the AoA and AoD estimation accuracy for the sparse millimeter wave MIMO channel. |
Accident Detection System using Image Processing and MDR | In this research, we suggested a vision-based traffic accident detection system for automatically detecting, recording, and reporting traffic accidents at intersections. This model first extracts the vehicles from the video image of CCD camera, tracks the moving vehicles, and extracts features such as the variation rate of the velocity, position, area, and direction of moving vehicles. The model then makes decisions on the traffic accident based on the extracted features. And we suggested and designed the metadata registry for the system to improve the interoperability. In the field test, 4 traffic accidents were detected and recorded by the system. The video clips are invaluable for intersection safety analysis. |
Spatial evolution of the US urban system | We test implications of economic geography models for location, size and growth of cities with US Census data for 1900 – 1990. Our tests involve non-parametric estimations of stochastic kernels for the distributions of city sizes and growth rates, conditional on various measures of market potential and on features sizes of neighbors. We show that while these relationships change during the twentieth century, by 1990 they stabilize such that the size distribution of cities conditional on a range of spatial variables are all roughly independent of these conditioning variables. In contrast, similar results suggest that there is a spatial element to the city wage distribution. Our parametric estimations for growth rates against market potential, entry of neighbors, and own lagged population imply a negative effect of market potential on growth rates, unless own lagged population is also included, in which case market potential has a positive effect and own lagged population a negative one. Cities grow faster when they are small relative to their market potential. In total, our results support some theoretical predictions, but also provide a number of interesting puzzles. This paper was produced as part of the Centre’s Globalisation Programme Spatial Evolution of the US Urban System Yannis Ioannides and Henry G. Overman |
Evaluation of effective connectivity of motor areas during motor imagery and execution using conditional Granger causality | The effective connectivity networks among overlapped core regions recruited by motor execution (ME) and motor imagery (MI) were explored by means of conditional Granger causality and graph-theoretic method, based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Our results demonstrated more circuits of effective connectivity among the selected seed regions during right-hand performance than during left-hand performance, implying the influences of brain asymmetry of right-handedness on effective connectivity networks. The increased causal connections were found during ME than during MI, suggesting that the ME network may have some additional connections compared to MI networks to execute the overt physical movement. Furthermore, the In-Out degrees of information flow suggested left dorsal premotor cortex (PMd), inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and superior parietal lobule (SPL) as causal sources in ME/MI tasks, highlighting the dominant function of left PMd, IPL and SPL. These findings depicted the causal connectivity of motor related core regions in fronto-parietal circuit and might indicate the conversion of causal networks between ME and MI. |
Association between a chloride-liberal vs chloride-restrictive intravenous fluid administration strategy and kidney injury in critically ill adults. | CONTEXT
Administration of traditional chloride-liberal intravenous fluids may precipitate acute kidney injury (AKI).
OBJECTIVE
To assess the association of a chloride-restrictive (vs chloride-liberal) intravenous fluid strategy with AKI in critically ill patients.
DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS
Prospective, open-label, sequential period pilot study of 760 patients admitted consecutively to the intensive care unit (ICU) during the control period (February 18 to August 17, 2008) compared with 773 patients admitted consecutively during the intervention period (February 18 to August 17, 2009) at a university-affiliated hospital in Melbourne, Australia.
INTERVENTIONS
During the control period, patients received standard intravenous fluids. After a 6-month phase-out period (August 18, 2008, to February 17, 2009), any use of chloride-rich intravenous fluids (0.9% saline, 4% succinylated gelatin solution, or 4% albumin solution) was restricted to attending specialist approval only during the intervention period; patients instead received a lactated solution (Hartmann solution), a balanced solution (Plasma-Lyte 148), and chloride-poor 20% albumin.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
The primary outcomes included increase from baseline to peak creatinine level in the ICU and incidence of AKI according to the risk, injury, failure, loss, end-stage (RIFLE) classification. Secondary post hoc analysis outcomes included the need for renal replacement therapy (RRT), length of stay in ICU and hospital, and survival. RESULTS Chloride administration decreased by 144 504 mmol (from 694 to 496 mmol/patient) from the control period to the intervention period. Comparing the control period with the intervention period, the mean serum creatinine level increase while in the ICU was 22.6 μmol/L (95% CI, 17.5-27.7 μmol/L) vs 14.8 μmol/L (95% CI, 9.8-19.9 μmol/L) (P = .03), the incidence of injury and failure class of RIFLE-defined AKI was 14% (95% CI, 11%-16%; n = 105) vs 8.4% (95% CI, 6.4%-10%; n = 65) (P <.001), and the use of RRT was 10% (95% CI, 8.1%-12%; n = 78) vs 6.3% (95% CI, 4.6%-8.1%; n = 49) (P = .005). After adjustment for covariates, this association remained for incidence of injury and failure class of RIFLE-defined AKI (odds ratio, 0.52 [95% CI, 0.37-0.75]; P <.001) and use of RRT (odds ratio, 0.52 [95% CI, 0.33-0.81]; P = .004). There were no differences in hospital mortality, hospital or ICU length of stay, or need for RRT after hospital discharge. CONCLUSION The implementation of a chloride-restrictive strategy in a tertiary ICU was associated with a significant decrease in the incidence of AKI and use of RRT.
TRIAL REGISTRATION
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00885404. |
Humans: Still Vital After All These Years of Automation | OBJECTIVE
The authors discuss empirical studies of human-automation interaction and their implications for automation design.
BACKGROUND
Automation is prevalent in safety-critical systems and increasingly in everyday life. Many studies of human performance in automated systems have been conducted over the past 30 years.
METHODS
Developments in three areas are examined: levels and stages of automation, reliance on and compliance with automation, and adaptive automation.
RESULTS
Automation applied to information analysis or decision-making functions leads to differential system performance benefits and costs that must be considered in choosing appropriate levels and stages of automation. Human user dependence on automated alerts and advisories reflects two components of operator trust, reliance and compliance, which are in turn determined by the threshold designers use to balance automation misses and false alarms. Finally, adaptive automation can provide additional benefits in balancing workload and maintaining the user's situation awareness, although more research is required to identify when adaptation should be user controlled or system driven.
CONCLUSIONS
The past three decades of empirical research on humans and automation has provided a strong science base that can be used to guide the design of automated systems.
APPLICATION
This research can be applied to most current and future automated systems. |
Palliative pelvic radiotherapy for symptomatic incurable prostate cancer – A prospective multicenter study. | BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Radiotherapy is used to palliate pelvic symptoms of castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). However, magnitude and time course of effects and toxicities are poorly documented. Study aims were to evaluate changes in patient-reported target symptoms (TS), health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and toxicity following palliative pelvic radiotherapy (PPRT) of CRPC.
MATERIAL AND METHODS
47 patients with CRPC and a symptomatic pelvic mass prescribed PPRT with 30-39 Gy were prospectively included. Primary endpoint was patient-reported improvement or complete resolution of the TS twelve weeks after PPRT. HRQOL changes were explored. Toxicity was physician-evaluated.
RESULTS
Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) (45%), hematuria (26%) and pain (19%) were the most common TS. In the 40 evaluable patients, overall TS response twelve weeks after PPRT was 70%. TS responses were 8/18 for LUTS, 11/12 for hematuria, and 7/9 for pain. Global HRQOL improved transiently. The most common toxicity was grade 1 or 2 diarrhea (50%). There was no grade 4 toxicity.
CONCLUSIONS
In the majority of patients with CRPC and a symptomatic pelvic tumor, PPRT with 30-39 Gy contributes to relief of hematuria, pain and other pelvic symptoms, with acceptable toxicity. Future studies should investigate whether PPRT regimens can be simplified. |
Neural networks, nativism, and the plausibility of constructivism | Recent interest in PDP (parallel distributed processing) models is due in part to the widely held belief that they challenge many of the assumptions of classical cognitive science. In the domain of language acquisition, for example, there has been much interest in the claim that PDP models might undermine nativism. Related arguments based on PDP learning have also been given against Fodor's anti-constructivist position--a position that has contributed to the widespread dismissal of constructivism. A limitation of many of the claims regarding PDP learning, however, is that the principles underlying this learning have not been rigorously characterized. In this paper, I examine PDP models from within the framework of Valiant's PAC (probably approximately correct) model of learning, now the dominant model in machine learning, and which applies naturally to neural network learning. From this perspective, I evaluate the implications of PDP models for nativism and Fodor's influential anti-constructivist position. In particular, I demonstrate that, contrary to a number of claims, PDP models are nativist in a robust sense. I also demonstrate that PDP models actually serve as a good illustration of Fodor's anti-constructivist position. While these results may at first suggest that neural network models in general are incapable of the sort of concept acquisition that is required to refute Fodor's anti-constructivist position, I suggest that there is an alternative form of neural network learning that demonstrates the plausibility of constructivism. This alternative form of learning is a natural interpretation of the constructivist position in terms of neural network learning, as it employs learning algorithms that incorporate the addition of structure in addition to weight modification schemes. By demonstrating that there is a natural and plausible interpretation of constructivism in terms of neural network learning, the position that nativism is the only plausible model of acquisition can no longer be defended. Indeed, I briefly discuss a number of learning-theoretic reasons indicating that constructivist models so characterized uniquely possess a number of important learning characteristics. |
The Relationship Between Organisational Culture and the Deployment of Systems Development Methodologies | This paper analyses the relationship between organisational culture and the perceptions of use, support and impact of systems development methodologies (SDMs) interpreting organisational culture in terms of the competing values model. The results show that organisations with different culture differ in their perceptions concerning the support provided by SDMs and in their perceptions concerning the impact of SDMs on the quality of developed systems and the quality and productivity of the systems development process. The results depend, however, on the respondent groups (developers vs. managers). The findings also suggest that the deployment of SDMs is primarily associated with the hierarchical culture which is oriented toward security, order and routinisation. Also managers’ criticality towards the deployment of SDMs in organisation with high rational culture (focusing on productivity, efficiency and goal achievement) is noteworthy. |
3D Shape Induction from 2D Views of Multiple Objects | In this paper we investigate the problem of inducing a distribution over three-dimensional structures given two-dimensional views of multiple objects taken from unknown viewpoints. Our approach called "projective generative adversarial networks" (PrGANs) trains a deep generative model of 3D shapes whose projections match the distributions of the input 2D views. The addition of a projection module allows us to infer the underlying 3D shape distribution without using any 3D, viewpoint information, or annotation during the learning phase. We show that our approach produces 3D shapes of comparable quality to GANs trained on 3D data for a number of shape categories including chairs, airplanes, and cars. Experiments also show that the disentangled representation of 2D shapes into geometry and viewpoint leads to a good generative model of 2D shapes. The key advantage is that our model allows us to predict 3D, viewpoint, and generate novel views from an input image in a completely unsupervised manner. |
Corporate Social Responsibility : Strategic Implications * | In recent years, scholars and managers have devoted greater attention to the strategic implications of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Consistent with McWilliams and Siegel (2001), we define CSR as situations where the firm goes beyond compliance and engages in ‘actions that appear to further some social good, beyond the interests of the firm and that which is required by law’. However, this is just one interpretation of CSR. Numerous definitions of CSR have been proposed and often no clear definition is given, making theoretical development and measurement difficult. CSR activities have been posited to include incorporating social characteristics or features into products and manufacturing processes (e.g. aerosol products with no fluorocarbons or using environmentally-friendly technologies), adopting progressive human resource management practices (e.g. promoting employee empowerment), achieving higher levels of environmental performance through recycling and pollution abatement (e.g. adopting an aggresJournal of Management Studies 43:1 January 2006 0022-2380 |
Design of Smart Traffic Light Controller Using Embedded System | The occurrence of traffic congestion at the intersections in cities is one of major problem. The present traffic light controlling system could not sufficient to tackle the traffic congestion due to the lack of efficiency in the designing. The main design problems of present traffic light controller system are: A. Fixed Time Interval: Vehicles at the traffic lane wait until the green light on. Due to the fixed time interval of red & green light, suppose a road is always crowded with vehicles and go-ahead time is short. So, vehicles can’t pass through the road in the time allowed. But sub lane has few vehicles and go-ahead time is relatively long. The proposed system provides dynamic time interval for traffic lights according to length of vehicles present at each lane. B. No mechanism provided for the occurrence of an emergency vehicle: The emergency vehicle such as ambulance, fire brigade and police will be stuck especially at the traffic light junction. To solve these problems, we have proposed the system called as “Smart Traffic Light Controlling System”. The proposed system handles the occurrence of emergency vehicle. It makes all the signals red except one from the emergency vehicle passes. C. No Traffic information to user: The proposed system provides GSM phone interface to the user, with SMS facility to those who wish to obtain the latest traffic information on congested roads. The map of the traffic signal will be provided to the users on their request. The proposed system has been developed using the sensor assembly along with embedded technology. |
Anonymous Secure Framework in Connected Smart Home Environments | The smart home is an environment, where heterogeneous electronic devices and appliances are networked together to provide smart services in a ubiquitous manner to the individuals. As the homes become smarter, more complex, and technology dependent, the need for an adequate security mechanism with minimum individual’s intervention is growing. The recent serious security attacks have shown how the Internet-enabled smart homes can be turned into very dangerous spots for various ill intentions, and thus lead the privacy concerns for the individuals. For instance, an eavesdropper is able to derive the identity of a particular device/appliance via public channels that can be used to infer in the life pattern of an individual within the home area network. This paper proposes an anonymous secure framework (ASF) in connected smart home environments, using solely lightweight operations. The proposed framework in this paper provides efficient authentication and key agreement, and enables devices (identity and data) anonymity and unlinkability. One-time session key progression regularly renews the session key for the smart devices and dilutes the risk of using a compromised session key in the ASF. It is demonstrated that computation complexity of the proposed framework is low as compared with the existing schemes, while security has been significantly improved. |
Triggers for an episode of sudden onset low back pain: study protocol | BACKGROUND
Most research on risk factors for low back pain has focused on long term exposures rather than factors immediately preceding the onset of low back pain. The aim of this study is to quantify the transient increase in risk of a sudden episode of low back pain associated with acute exposure to a range of common physical and psychological factors.
METHODS/DESIGN
This study uses a case-crossover design. One thousand adults with a sudden onset of low back pain presenting to primary care clinicians will be recruited. Basic demographic and clinical information including exposure to putative triggers will be collected using a questionnaire. These triggers include exposure to hazardous manual tasks, physical activity, a slip/trip or fall, consumption of alcohol, sexual activity, being distracted, and being fatigued or tired. Exposures in the case window (0-2 hours from the time when participants first notice their back pain) will be compared to exposures in two control time-windows (one 24-26 hours and another 48-50 hours before the case window).
DISCUSSION
The completion of this study will provide the first-research based estimates of the increase in risk of a sudden episode of acute low back pain associated with transient exposure to a range of common factors thought to trigger low back pain. |
Renal cysts of inv/inv mice resemble early infantile nephronophthisis. | Cystic kidney disease has been linked to mutations in the Invs gene in mice with inversion of embryonic turning (inv/inv) and the INVS (NPHP2) gene in infants with nephronophthisis type 2 (NPHP2). The inv mouse model features multiorgan defects including renal cysts, altered left-right laterality, and hepatobiliary duct malformations transmitted in an autosomal recessive manner. Affected mice usually die of renal and liver failure by postnatal day 7. Although cardiopulmonary and liver anomalies have been carefully detailed, renal cysts have yet to be fully characterized in inv/inv. By use of three-dimensional visualization by two-photon microscopy, this study provides the first comprehensive analysis of in situ cyst formation and progression in inv/inv kidneys. At embryonic day 15, there is dilatation of Bowman's capsule followed temporally by corticomedullary cysts involving collecting ducts, proximal tubules, and thick ascending limbs. Collecting ducts of newborn inv/inv mice are uniformly and diffusely cystic from medulla to cortex, with normal diameters found only at their most proximal tips. Proximal tubules form fusiform cysts that alternate with segments of normal or narrowed caliber along torturous convolutions. Because defective cilia have been linked to situs inversus and cystogenesis, we examined inv/inv cilia by scanning and transmission electron microscopy. The former detected monocilia of expected length in cystic collecting ducts and proximal tubules; the latter demonstrated the usual 9 + 2 pattern in respiratory cilia. The inv mutant mouse has renal cysts resembling infantile NPHP2 and will provide broader insight into the role cilia play in renal cystogenesis. |
Kangaroo: A Tenant-Centric Software-Defined Cloud Infrastructure | Applications on cloud infrastructures acquire virtual machines (VMs) from providers when necessary. The current interface for acquiring VMs from most providers, however, is too limiting for the tenants, in terms of granularity in which VMs can be acquired (e.g., small, medium, large, etc.), while giving very limited control over their placement. The former leads to VM underutilization, and the latter has performance implications, both translating into higher costs for the tenants. In this work, we leverage nested virtualization and a networking overlay to tackle these problems. We present Kangaroo, an Open Stack-based virtual infrastructure provider, and IPOPsm, a virtual networking switch for communication between nested VMs over different infrastructure VMs. In addition, we design and implement Skippy, the realization of our proposed virtual infrastructure API for programming Kangaroo. Our benchmarks show that through careful mapping of nested VMs to infrastructure VMs, Kangaroo achieves up to an order of magnitude better performance, with only half the cost on Amazon EC2. Further, Kangaroo's unified Open Stack API allows us to migrate an entire application between Amazon EC2 and our local Open Nebula deployment within a few minutes, without any downtime or modification to the application code. |
Nonconvex Weighted $\ell _p$ Minimization Based Group Sparse Representation Framework for Image Denoising | Nonlocal image representation or group sparsity has attracted considerable interest in various low-level vision tasks and has led to several state-of-the-art image denoising techniques, such as BM3D, learned simultaneous sparse coding. In the past, convex optimization with sparsity-promoting convex regularization was usually regarded as a standard scheme for estimating sparse signals in noise. However, using convex regularization cannot still obtain the correct sparsity solution under some practical problems including image inverse problems. In this letter, we propose a nonconvex weighted <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _p$</tex-math></inline-formula> minimization based group sparse representation framework for image denoising. To make the proposed scheme tractable and robust, the generalized soft-thresholding algorithm is adopted to solve the nonconvex <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"> $\ell _p$</tex-math></inline-formula> minimization problem. In addition, to improve the accuracy of the nonlocal similar patch selection, an adaptive patch search scheme is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach not only outperforms many state-of-the-art denoising methods such as BM3D and weighted nuclear norm minimization, but also results in a competitive speed. |
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