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Reproductive biology of Alpinia blepharocalyx (Zingiberaceae): another example of flexistyly | The floral biology and breeding system of Alpinia blepharocalyx were studied in Yunnan province, southwest China. Our results indicate that populations of A. blepharocalyx have two floral morphs, which differ in flowering behaviour: the cataflexistylous morph in which the stigma is held erect above the dehiscent anther when anthesis begins in the morning and becomes curved under the anther at afternoon, and the anaflexistylous morph in which the receptive stigma is curved under the indehiscent anther first and moves into a reflexed superior position above the anther as it begins to shed pollen in the afternoon; the flowering period of both floral morphs is 12 hours; the stylar movements in the two floral morphs are synchronous, and they have similar traits to those found in other Alpinia species previously reported. Also, on average, cataflexistylous flowers are larger than anaflexistylous flowers, especially the labellum and corolla tube length; moreover, the P/O ratio of the two floral morphs is significantly different: the cataflexistylous morph has more pollen grains and fewer ovules than the anaflexistylous morph; the evolutionary significance of this comparison is discussed. Cataflexistylous flowers were observed to produce a lower concentration of nectar than that of anaflexistylous flowers before 11:00 a.m., but they then have higher nectar concentration; cataflexistylous flowers always have more nectar than anaflexistylous flowers. Flowers of A. blepharocalyx were visited by fewer insects at a lower frequency, including honey bees (Apis cerana cerana) and two species of carpenter bees (Xylocopa spp.). No significant differences were found in the fruit set among the hand-pollination treatments regardless of selfing (geitonogamy and autogamy) or crossing (intermorph and intramorph); but all hand-pollination treatments exhibited much higher fruit set than the controls; meanwhile, no fruit set occurred in the unpollinated bagged plants. Pollen tube growth was examined using fluorescence microscopy following self, intramorph, and intermorph hand pollinations at different times of the day; the pollen tubes of both floral morphs have the same growth rate and the capability to reach the ovary. Both the results of pollen tube growth and fruit sets under different pollination conditions show that A. blepharocalyx is self-compatible and dependent upon insects for pollination. The distinctive flexistyly mechanism of A. blepharocalyx is likely a floral mechanism that promotes effective intermorph pollen transfer. |
Is half strength of 0.05 % betamethasone valerate cream still effective in the treatment of phimosis in young children? | 0.05 % betamethasone valerate cream is generally used as an alternative to circumcision for the treatment of phimosis in boys. The aim of this study is to determine whether the half-strength formula (0.025 %) of betamethasone is as effective as 0.05 % betamethasone. All boys with phimosis seen at our institution between 2010 and 2012, whose parents complained that their children had problems of micturition, i.e., crying and ballooning, and sought for some instructions or treatments, were instructed to apply betamethasone valerate cream. Two strengths, 0.05 and 0.025 %, were randomly applied to each patient twice a day for 2 months. The patients whose parents were not willing to the conservative treatment underwent circumcision. Of the 47 patients, 23 boys with an average age of 16.65 ± 4.052 months (range 11–24 months) were given 0.025 % betamethasone cream, whereas the remaining 24 boys in control group with an average age of 18.42 ± 5.030 months (range 10–24 months) were instructed to apply with 0.05 % betamethasone valerate cream. Using unpaired t test, the age in both groups were comparable (p = 0.1932). There was a decrease in phimosis grade by the end of the therapeutic course in both groups. Further analysis using Mann–Whitney test revealed that the phimosis grade in the half-strength group (0.025 % strength) was significantly lower to the phimosis grade in the control (0.05 % betamethasone) group (p = 0.0003). There was no diversion from steroid application to circumcision or any side effects in the both groups. 0.025 % betamethasone valerate cream produced a clinical improvement. However, the half-strength formula was not effective as the conventional formula of 0.05 % betamethasone valerate cream. |
Radio resource allocation for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) relay network using matching game | In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem for a single-cell non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) relay network where an OFDM amplify-and-forward (AF) relay allocates the spectrum and power resources to the source-destination (SD) pairs. We aim to optimize the spectrum and power resource allocation to maximize the total sum-rate. This is a very complicated problem and the optimal approach requires an exhaustive search, leading to a NP hard problem. To solve this problem, we propose an efficient many-to-many two sided SD pair-subchannel matching algorithm in which the SD pairs and sub-channels are considered as two sets of rational and selfish players chasing their own interests. The algorithm converges to a pair-wise stable matching after a limited number of iterations with a low complexity compared with the optimal solution. Simulation results show that the sum-rate of the proposed algorithm approaches the performance of the optimal exhaustive search and significantly outperforms the conventional orthogonal multiple access scheme, in terms of the total sum-rate and number of accessed SD pairs. |
Insulin pump therapy in patients with type 2 diabetes safely improved glycemic control using a simple insulin dosing regimen. | BACKGROUND
This study assessed insulin dose and dosing patterns required to optimize glycemic control with an insulin pump in patients with type 2 diabetes.
METHODS
In this 16-week, open-label, multicenter, pilot study, 56 insulin pump-naive patients treated at baseline with two or more oral antidiabetes agents (OADs), basal insulin with or without OADs, or basal-bolus insulin with or without OADs discontinued all diabetes medications except metformin and initiated insulin pump therapy. Insulin doses were adjusted to optimize glycemic control with the simplest possible insulin regimen. Outcomes included total daily insulin dose, daily basal and bolus insulin doses, number of daily basal rates, hemoglobin A1C, fasting and postprandial glucose, patient-reported outcomes and rate of hypoglycemia.
RESULTS
After 16 weeks of pump therapy, the mean +/- SD total daily insulin dose was 95 +/- 59 U. The percentage of the total daily insulin dose used as basal and as bolus delivery was 55% and 45%, respectively. Eighty-eight percent of patients were treated with two or fewer daily basal rates. Mean A1C was lowered by 1.2 +/- 1.2% (P < 0.001), and there was no severe hypoglycemia. Mean change in body weight was +1.9 +/- 3.3 kg (P < 0.001). Overall treatment preference improved with pump therapy compared to baseline.
CONCLUSIONS
Insulin pump therapy using a simple dosing regimen significantly improved glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes. Patients experienced limited weight gain, there was no severe hypoglycemia, and overall treatment preference improved significantly. |
Real-time Human Pose and Shape Estimation for Virtual Try-On Using a Single Commodity Depth Camera | We present a system that allows the user to virtually try on new clothes. It uses a single commodity depth camera to capture the user in 3D. Both the pose and the shape of the user are estimated with a novel real-time template-based approach that performs tracking and shape adaptation jointly. The result is then used to drive realistic cloth simulation, in which the synthesized clothes are overlayed on the input image. The main challenge is to handle missing data and pose ambiguities due to the monocular setup, which captures less than 50 percent of the full body. Our solution is to incorporate automatic shape adaptation and novel constraints in pose tracking. The effectiveness of our system is demonstrated with a number of examples. |
Prophylactic vasopressin in patients receiving the angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor ramipril undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery. | OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of continuation versus discontinuation of the angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor ramipril and assess the efficacy of prophylactic vasopressin infusion on hemodynamic stability and vasoactive drug requirements in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery.
DESIGN
A prospective, randomized, double-blinded, single-center clinical study.
SETTING
Tertiary care hospital.
PARTICIPANTS
Forty-seven patients on the ACE inhibitor ramipril for 6 weeks before undergoing elective primary CABG surgery on cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB).
INTERVENTIONS
Patients were randomly divided into 3 groups: group A (n = 16), patients discontinued ramipril 24 hours before surgery; group B (n = 16), patients continued ramipril until the morning of surgery; and group C (n = 15), patients continued ramipril until the morning of surgery and received vasopressin infusion (0.03 U/min) from the onset of rewarming until the hemodynamics were stable without vasopressor agents. The anesthetic technique and conduct of CPB were standardized for all the groups. Hemodynamic parameters and vasoactive drug requirements were recorded for 3 days postoperatively.
MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS
Patients in group A maintained stable mean arterial pressure (MAP) and systemic vascular resistance (SVR). In group B, MAP and SVR decreased after the induction of anesthesia and remained so throughout surgery (p < 0.05). In group C, MAP and SVR decreased upon the induction of anesthesia (p < 0.05) but normalized after CPB.
CONCLUSIONS
Preoperative ACE inhibitor continuation predisposed to hypotension upon the induction of anesthesia and in the post-CPB period. Prophylactic low-dose vasopressin infusion prevented post-CPB hypotension. Low-dose vasopressin can be considered as potential therapy in these patients. |
Text summarization using enhanced MMR technique | Now a day when huge amount of documents and web contents are available, so reading of full content is somewhat difficult. Summarization is a way to give abstract form of large document so that the moral of the document can be communicated easily. Current research in automatic summarization is dominated by some effective, yet naive approaches: summarization through extraction, summarization through Abstraction and multi-document summarization. These techniques are used to building a summary of a document. Although there are a number of techniques implemented for the summarization of text for the single document or for the online web data or for any language. Here in this paper we are implemented an efficient technique for text summarization to reduce the computational cost and time and also the storage capacity. |
WaterCooler: exploring an organization through enterprise social media | As organizations scale up, their collective knowledge increases, and the potential for serendipitous collaboration between members grows dramatically. However, finding people with the right expertise or interests becomes much more difficult. Semi-structured social media, such as blogs, forums, and bookmarking, present a viable platform for collaboration-if enough people participate, and if shared content is easily findable. Within the trusted confines of an organization, users can trade anonymity for a rich identity that carries information about their role, location, and position in its hierarchy.
This paper describes WaterCooler, a tool that aggregates shared internal social media and cross-references it with an organization's directory. We deployed WaterCooler in a large global enterprise and present the results of a preliminary user study. Despite the lack of complete social networking affordances, we find that WaterCooler changed users' perceptions of their workplace, made them feel more connected to each other and the company, and redistributed users' attention outside their own business groups. |
Life Values and Adolescent Mental Health | Contents: Preface. Theoretical, Empirical, and Analytical Framework. What Children Admire: The Measure and Developmental Trends. Life Priorities: Measure Origins and Developmental Changes. The Environmental Origins of Life Goals: Neighborhood, School, and Peers. The Environmental Origins of Children's Values: Family Effects. Within-Child Correlates of Children's Patterns of Admiration and Life Priorities. The Consequences of Children's Attitudes and Life Priorities: Connections With Mental Disorder. Summarizing the Past, Anticipating the Future. Tying It Together. Appendix: Childs Priority Sort. |
Autonomous Dual Wheel Self Balancing Robot Based on Microcontroller | An autonomous dual wheel self balancing robot is developed that is capable of balancing its position around predetermined position. Initially the system was nonlinear and unstable. It is observed that the system becomes stable after redesigning the physical structure of the system using PID controller and analyzing its dynamic behavior using mathematical modeling. The position of self balancing robot is controlled by PID controller. Simulation results using PROTEOUS, MATLAB, and VM lab are observed and verified vital responses of different components. Balancing is claimed and shown the verification for this nonlinear and unstable system. Some fluctuations in forward or backward around its mean position is observed, afterwards it acquires its balanced position in reasonable settling time. The research is applicable in gardening, hospitals, shopping malls and defense systems etc. |
Robust Lane Detection and Tracking in Challenging Scenarios | A lane-detection system is an important component of many intelligent transportation systems. We present a robust lane-detection-and-tracking algorithm to deal with challenging scenarios such as a lane curvature, worn lane markings, lane changes, and emerging, ending, merging, and splitting lanes. We first present a comparative study to find a good real-time lane-marking classifier. Once detection is done, the lane markings are grouped into lane-boundary hypotheses. We group left and right lane boundaries separately to effectively handle merging and splitting lanes. A fast and robust algorithm, based on random-sample consensus and particle filtering, is proposed to generate a large number of hypotheses in real time. The generated hypotheses are evaluated and grouped based on a probabilistic framework. The suggested framework effectively combines a likelihood-based object-recognition algorithm with a Markov-style process (tracking) and can also be applied to general-part-based object-tracking problems. An experimental result on local streets and highways shows that the suggested algorithm is very reliable. |
Practical guidelines for evaluation of loose anagen hair syndrome. | OBJECTIVES
To better categorize the epidemiologic profile, clinical features, and disease associations of loose anagen hair syndrome (LAHS) compared with other forms of childhood alopecia.
DESIGN
Retrospective survey.
SETTING
Academic pediatric dermatology practice. Patients Three hundred seventy-four patients with alopecia referred from July 1, 1997, to June 31, 2007.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Epidemiologic data for all forms of alopecia were ascertained, such as sex, age at onset, age at the time of evaluation, and clinical diagnosis. Patients with LAHS were further studied by the recording of family history, disease associations, hair-pull test or biopsy results, hair color, laboratory test result abnormalities, initial treatment, and involvement of eyelashes, eyebrows, and nails.
RESULTS
Approximately 10% of all children with alopecia had LAHS. The mean age (95% confidence interval) at onset differed between patients with LAHS (2.8 [1.2-4.3] years) vs patients without LAHS (7.1 [6.6-7.7] years) (P < .001), with 3 years being the most common age at onset for patients with LAHS. All but 1 of 37 patients with LAHS were female. The most common symptom reported was thin, sparse hair. Family histories were significant for LAHS (n = 1) and for alopecia areata (n = 3). In 32 of 33 patients, trichograms showed typical loose anagen hairs. Two children had underlying genetic syndromes. No associated laboratory test result abnormalities were noted among patients who underwent testing.
CONCLUSIONS
Loose anagen hair syndrome is a common nonscarring alopecia in young girls with a history of sparse or fine hair. Before ordering extensive blood testing in young girls with diffusely thin hair, it is important to perform a hair-pull test, as a trichogram can be instrumental in the confirmation of a diagnosis of LAHS. |
Optimal boson energy for superconductivity in the Holstein model | We examine the superconducting solution in the Holstein model, where the conduction electrons couple to the dispersionless Boson fields, using the Migdal-Eliashberg theory and Dynamical Mean Field Theory. Although different in numerical values, both methods imply the existence of an optimal Boson energy for superconductivity at a given electron-Boson coupling. This non-monotonous behavior can be understood as an interplay between the polaron and superconducting physics, as the electron-Boson coupling is the origin of the superconductor, but at the same time traps the conduction electrons making the system more insulating. Our calculation provides a simple explanation on the recent experiment on sulfur hydride (H$_2$S), where an optimal pressure for the superconductivity was observed. The validities of both methods are discussed. |
Generalized Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition | With the prevalence of accessible depth sensors, dynamic human body skeletons have attracted much attention as a robust modality for action recognition. Previous methods model skeletons based on RNN or CNN, which has limited expressive power for irregular joints. In this paper, we represent skeletons naturally on graphs and propose a generalized graph convolutional neural networks (GGCN) for skeleton-based action recognition, aiming to capture space-time variation via spectral graph theory. In particular, we construct a generalized graph over consecutive frames, where each joint is not only connected to its neighboring joints in the same frame strongly or weakly, but also linked with relevant joints in the previous and subsequent frames. The generalized graphs are then fed into GGCN along with the coordinate matrix of the skeleton sequence for feature learning, where we deploy high-order and fast Chebyshev approximation of spectral graph convolution in the network. Experiments show that we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the widely used NTU RGB+D, UT-Kinect and SYSU 3D datasets. |
Methodology for the systematic reviews on occupational therapy for adults with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. | Systematic reviews of literature relevant to adults with Alzheimer's disease and their families are important to the practice of occupational therapy. We describe the seven questions that served as the focus for systematic reviews of the effectiveness of occupational therapy interventions for adults with Alzheimer's disease and their families. We include the background for the reviews; the process followed for each question, including search terms and search strategy; the databases searched; and the methods used to summarize and critically appraise the literature. The final number of articles included in each systematic review; a summary of the results; the strengths and limitations of the findings; and implications for practice, education, and research are presented for the six questions addressing interventions in the areas of occupation, perception, environment, activity demands, fall prevention, and caregiver strategies. |
Efficacy of multi-electrode duty-cycled radiofrequency ablation for pulmonary vein disconnection in patients with paroxysmal and persistent atrial fibrillation. | AIM
A novel multi-electrode pulmonary vein ablation catheter (PVAC) combining circular mapping and duty-cycled multi-electrode radiofrequency (RF) energy delivery has been developed to map and isolate the pulmonary veins (PVs). The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy of multi-electrode RF ablation using the PVAC device.
METHODS AND RESULTS
A total of 102 consecutive patients, age 57.9 +/- 9.6 years, with paroxysmal or persistent drug refractory atrial fibrillation (AF) were referred for ablation. All patients had documented AF episodes with an AF duration of 9.3 +/- 7.5 years (range 1.5-25). The mean total procedure time was 139.30 +/- 37.72 (median 135, range 115-172). The mean fluoroscopy time required for PVAC ablation was 17 +/- 12 min (median 16, range 12-33) and the total fluoroscopy time was 32.1 +/- 11.3 min (median 29, range 25-39). The mean multi-electrode RF ablation time required to achieve complete PV isolation was 31 +/- 6.7 min (range 16-51). In eight patients with persistent AF, additional ablations were performed to defragment septal and posterior part of the left atrium. In five patients additional RF ablations using conventional catheters were necessary. After multi-electrode duty-cycled RF ablation, 62 of 102 (60.8%) patients were in sustained sinus rhythm without anti-arrhythmic drugs. The mean follow-up duration was 12.2 +/- 3.9 months (range 6-15).
CONCLUSION
This novel multi-electrode ablation technique can be used for PV isolation and left atrium ablation with a relatively low medium-term success rate after the first ablation of approximately 61%. Larger studies with longer follow-up are required to evaluate the efficacy and whether multi-electrode RF ablation is associated with a different complication rate compared with standard PV isolation. |
Use of platelet-rich fibrin in regenerative dentistry: a systematic review | Research across many fields of medicine now points towards the clinical advantages of combining regenerative procedures with platelet-rich fibrin (PRF). This systematic review aimed to gather the extensive number of articles published to date on PRF in the dental field to better understand the clinical procedures where PRF may be utilized to enhance tissue/bone formation. Manuscripts were searched systematically until May 2016 and separated into the following categories: intrabony and furcation defect regeneration, extraction socket management, sinus lifting procedures, gingival recession treatment, and guided bone regeneration (GBR) including horizontal/vertical bone augmentation procedures. Only human randomized clinical trials were included for assessment. In total, 35 articles were selected and divided accordingly (kappa = 0.94). Overall, the use of PRF has been most investigated in periodontology for the treatment of periodontal intrabony defects and gingival recessions where the majority of studies have demonstrated favorable results in soft tissue management and repair. Little to no randomized clinical trials were found for extraction socket management although PRF has been shown to significantly decrease by tenfold dry sockets of third molars. Very little to no data was available directly investigating the effects of PRF on new bone formation in GBR, horizontal/vertical bone augmentation procedures, treatment of peri-implantitis, and sinus lifting procedures. Much investigation now supports the use of PRF for periodontal and soft tissue repair. Despite this, there remains a lack of well-conducted studies demonstrating convincingly the role of PRF during hard tissue bone regeneration. Future human randomized clinical studies evaluating the use of PRF on bone formation thus remain necessary. PRF was shown to improve soft tissue generation and limit dimensional changes post-extraction, with little available data to date supporting its use in GBR. |
Subpixel rendering without color distortions for diamond-shaped PenTile displays | A novel subpixel rendering algorithm for diamond-shaped PenTile displays, which improves the apparent display resolution and reduces color fringing artifacts, is proposed in this work. We develop two types of filters: main filters and nonnegative filters. First, the main filters are derived to minimize the error between an original input image and a perceived image. Second, the nonnegative filters are modified from the main filters. While the main filters are optimized for improving the resolution, the nonnegative filters suppress color distortions effectively. We analyze local characteristics of an image and estimate the amount of color distortions in each region. Based on the color distortion analysis, we render the image by applying adaptive combinations of the main filters and the nonnegative filters. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional algorithms, by not only improving the apparent resolution but also suppressing color distortions effectively. |
A Semantically Compositional Annotation Scheme for Time Normalization | We present a new annotation scheme for normalizing time expressions, such as three days ago, to computer-readable forms, such as 2016-03-07. The annotation scheme addresses several weaknesses of the existing TimeML standard, allowing the representation of time expressions that align to more than one calendar unit (e.g., the past three summers), that are defined relative to events (e.g., three weeks postoperative), and that are unions or intersections of smaller time expressions (e.g., Tuesdays and Thursdays). It achieves this by modeling time expression interpretation as the semantic composition of temporal operators like UNION, NEXT, and AFTER. We have applied the annotation scheme to 34 documents so far, producing 1104 annotations, and achieving inter-annotator agreement of 0.821. |
Compassionate Mind Training for People with High Shame and Self-Criticism : Overview and Pilot Study of a Group Therapy Approach | Compassionate mind training (CMT) was developed for people with high shame and self-criticism, whose problems tend to be chronic, and who find self-warmth and self-acceptance difficult and/or frightening. This paper offers a short overview of the role of shame and self-criticism in psychological difficulties, the importance of considering different types of affect system (activating versus soothing) and the theory and therapy process of CMT. The paper explores patient acceptability, understanding, abilities to utilize and practice compassion focused processes and the effectiveness of CMT from an uncontrolled trial. Six patients attending a cognitive–behavioural-based day centre for chronic difficulties completed 12 two-hour sessions in compassionate mind training. They were advised that this was part of a research programme to look at the process and effectiveness of CMT and to become active collaborators, advising the researchers on what was helpful and what was not. Results showed significant reductions in depression, anxiety, self-criticism, shame, inferiority and submissive behaviour. There was also a significant increase in the participants’ ability to be self-soothing and focus on feelings of warmth and reassurance for the self. Compassionate mind training may be a useful addition for some patients with chronic difficulties, especially those from traumatic backgrounds, who may lack a sense of inner warmth or abilities to be self-soothing. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
Attenuation-corrected thallium-201 single-photon emission tomography using a gadolinium-153 moving line source: clinical value and the impact of attenuation correction on the extent and severity of perfusion abnormalities | The aim of the study was to test the clinical value of attenuation-corrected (AC) thallium-201 single-photon emission tomography using a moving gadolinium-153 line source in a group of patients in whom coronary angiography was planned because of clinically suspected coronary artery disease (CAD). Furthermore, we wanted to test the impact of AC on assessment of the extent and severity of perfusion abnormalities. A total of 107 patients planned to undergo coronary angiography were included in the study. In each patient, AC and NC (non-corrected) 201Tl SPET was performed. AC and NC images were evaluated visually as well as by a 31-segment semiquantitative analysis and the findings were correlated with angiographic results. Patients were assigned to two groups: group A with angina and no previous cardiac infarction or intervention and group B with known CAD because of previous myocardial infarction or intervention. With visual analysis, NC revealed a sensitivity of 88.9% in group A and 74.3% in group B, compared to 94.4% in group A and 94.3% in group B with AC. Specificity for NC was calculated to be 68.7% for group A and 91.3% for group B. AC demonstrated significantly higher specificity of 83.9% and 100%, respectively. This effect was particularly demonstrated for males and bicycle workload. The extent and severity of perfusion abnormalities were significantly influenced by the use of AC, in that significantly fewer abnormal and less severely abnormal segments were demonstrated in the segmental analysis as compared to NC; this was especially true for the vascular territory of the left anterior descending artery nd the right coronary artery. It is concluded that AC with a moving line source is feasible in patients with all degrees of probability of CAD. AC has a significant impact on the assessment of the severity and extent of myocardial ischaemia, especially in the posterior and septal wall. |
Gender reassignment surgery: an overview | Gender reassignment (which includes psychotherapy, hormonal therapy and surgery) has been demonstrated as the most effective treatment for patients affected by gender dysphoria (or gender identity disorder), in which patients do not recognize their gender (sexual identity) as matching their genetic and sexual characteristics. Gender reassignment surgery is a series of complex surgical procedures (genital and nongenital) performed for the treatment of gender dysphoria. Genital procedures performed for gender dysphoria, such as vaginoplasty, clitorolabioplasty, penectomy and orchidectomy in male-to-female transsexuals, and penile and scrotal reconstruction in female-to-male transsexuals, are the core procedures in gender reassignment surgery. Nongenital procedures, such as breast enlargement, mastectomy, facial feminization surgery, voice surgery, and other masculinization and feminization procedures complete the surgical treatment available. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health currently publishes and reviews guidelines and standards of care for patients affected by gender dysphoria, such as eligibility criteria for surgery. This article presents an overview of the genital and nongenital procedures available for both male-to-female and female-to-male gender reassignment. |
Deep Expander Networks: Efficient Deep Networks from Graph Theory | Efficient CNN designs like ResNets and DenseNet were proposed to improve accuracy vs efficiency trade-offs. They essentially increased the connectivity, allowing efficient information flow across layers. Inspired by these techniques, we propose to model connections between filters of a CNN using graphs which are simultaneously sparse and well connected. Sparsity results in efficiency while well connectedness can preserve the expressive power of the CNNs. We use a well-studied class of graphs from theoretical computer science that satisfies these properties known as Expander graphs. Expander graphs are used to model connections between filters in CNNs to design networks called X-Nets. We present two guarantees on the connectivity of X-Nets: Each node influences every node in a layer in logarithmic steps, and the number of paths between two sets of nodes is proportional to the product of their sizes. We also propose efficient training and inference algorithms, making it possible to train deeper and wider X-Nets effectively. Expander based models give a 4% improvement in accuracy on MobileNet over grouped convolutions, a popular technique, which has the same sparsity but worse connectivity. X-Nets give better performance trade-offs than the original ResNet and DenseNet-BC architectures. We achieve model sizes comparable to state-of-the-art pruning techniques using our simple architecture design, without any pruning. We hope that this work motivates other approaches to utilize results from graph theory to develop efficient network architectures. |
Pegylated liposomal doxorubicin, 5-fluorouracil and cisplatin versus mitomycin-C, 5-fluorouracil and cisplatin for advanced gastric cancer: a randomized phase II trial | Clinical data suggested that a regimen incorporating doxorubicin to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and cisplatin may be more effective but probably quite toxic for advanced gastric cancer patients. With the aim to maintain efficacy while reducing toxicity, we compared the activity and safety of a combination of 5-FU, cisplatin and pegylated liposomal doxorubicin with a combination of 5-FU, cisplatin and mitomycin-C. Seventy-eight patients were randomised to receive 5-FU (400 mg/m2 bolus, 600 mg/m2 22 h continuous infusion day 1 and 2) and cisplatin (50 mg/m2 day 1) every 2 weeks, combined either with pegylated liposomal doxorubicin (20 mg/m2 day 1 every two weeks) (arm A) or mitomycin-C (7 mg/m2 every 6 weeks) (arm B). The overall response rate was 64.1% in arm A and 38.5% in arm B (P = 0.041). The median time to tumour progression and overall survival were 7.93 and 5.14 months (P = 0.04) and 12.1 and 8.3 months (P = 0.02) in arm A and B, respectively. Fourteen patients in arm A and 18 patients in arm B experienced a grade 3/4 toxic effect. A combination of pegylated liposomal doxorubicin, cisplatin and 5-FU can be safely administered in gastric cancer patients with a promising efficacy profile. |
Ion-Channeling Studies of Interfaces and Defect Properties in Silicon Carbide | Helium ion channeling has been used in a detailed study of 3C-SiC films on a Si/SiO2/Si (SIMOX) substrate. The strain-induced angular shift was determined to be 0.16?? 0.05?, indicating a kink between the SiC and Si layers along the axis. Single crystals of 6H-SiC have been irradiated with a variety of ions over a range of fluences. The relative disorder on Si sublattice shows a sigmoidal dependence on dose for all ions. In isochronal and isothermal annealing studies, two distinct recovery stages are identified with activation energies of 0.25? 0.1 eV and 1.5? 0.3 eV, respectively. Deuterium ion channeling is also applied to simultaneously study accumulated disorder on Si and C sublattices in 6H-SiC crystals irradiated at 100 and 300 K. |
Effects of low dose versus conventional dose thiazide diuretic on insulin action in essential hypertension. | OBJECTIVE
To see whether low dose thiazide diuretics given to patients with essential hypertension might avoid the adverse metabolic consequences seen with conventional doses.
DESIGN
Double blind randomised crossover study of two 12 week treatment periods with either low dose (1.25 mg) or conventional dose (5.0 mg) bendrofluazide given after a six week placebo run in period.
SETTING
Outpatient clinics serving the greater Belfast area.
SUBJECTS
16 white non-diabetic patients (9 male) under 65 with essential hypertension recruited from general practices within the greater Belfast area.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Systolic and diastolic blood pressure and peripheral and hepatic insulin action.
RESULTS
One man failed to complete the study. There were no differences between doses in their effects on systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Bendrofluazide 1.25 mg had substantially less effect on serum potassium concentration than the 5.0 mg dose. There were no intertreatment differences in fasting glucose, insulin, cholesterol, and triglyceride concentrations. Bendrofluazide 5.0 mg significantly increased postabsorptive endogenous glucose production compared with baseline (mean 10.9 (SD 1.2) v 10.0 (0.8) mumol/kg/min), whereas bendrofluazide 1.25 mg did not. Postabsorptive endogenous glucose production was significantly higher with bendrofluazide 5.0 mg compared with 1.25 mg (10.9 (1.2) v 9.9 (0.8) mumol/kg/min) but was suppressed to a similar extent after insulin (bendrofluazide 5.0 mg 2.8 (1.5) mumol/kg/min v bendrofluazide 1.25 mg 2.2 (1.5) mumol/kg/min). Exogenous glucose infusion rates required to maintain euglycaemia were not significantly different between doses and were similar to baseline.
CONCLUSIONS
Bendrofluazide 1.25 mg is as effective as conventional doses but has less adverse metabolic effect. In contrast with conventional doses, low dose bendrofluazide has no effect on hepatic insulin action. There is no difference between low and conventional doses of bendrofluazide in their effect on peripheral insulin sensitivity. |
Smart gas cylinder: Leakage alert and automatic booking | Now a days, world is very fast and automate due to change in technologies. Internet of things is one of the important technologies which operate hardware resources remotely. This project deals with automatic booking of gas Cylinder and also detects leakage of gas. In our home, we observe whenever the LPG cylinder is get empty, we need to give request to the gas cylinder provider for new cylinder. However, many times it happens that because of the rush or due to the shortage of the cylinder, there is a delay in providing the gas cylinder. The main reason behind this is the delay in informing to the gas provider or we inform the gas provider at the last moment when the gas is empty. This project also detects the leakage of gas from LPG cylinder using gas sensor which is very sensitive to detect presence of LPG (composed of mostly butane and propane). To avoid all such situations, we have proposed solution through this paper. |
Sentiment Classification using Distant Supervision | We introduce a novel approach for automatically classifying the sentiment of Twitter messages. These messages are classified as either positive or negative with respect to a query term. This is useful for consumers who want to research the sentiment of products before purchase, or companies that want to monitor the public sentiment of their brands. There is no previous research on classifying sentiment of messages on microblogging services like Twitter. We present the results of machine learning algorithms for classifying the sentiment of Twitter messages using distant supervision. Our training data consists of Twitter messages with emoticons, which are used as noisy labels. This type of training data is abundantly available and can be obtained through automated means. We show that machine learning algorithms (Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy, and SVM) have accuracy above 80% when trained with emoticon data. This paper also describes the preprocessing steps needed in order to achieve high accuracy. The main contribution of this paper is the idea of using tweets with emoticons for distant supervised learning. |
Effect of increased warfarin use on warfarin-related cerebral hemorrhage: a longitudinal population-based study. | BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Warfarin use has rapidly increased with the aging of the population. We investigated the temporal trends in the incidence and outcome of warfarin-related intracerebral hemorrhages (ICHs) in a defined population.
METHODS
We identified all subjects with first-ever primary ICH during 1993 to 2008 among the population of Northern Ostrobothnia, Finland. The number of warfarin users was obtained from the national register of prescribed medicines kept by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. We calculated the annual incidence of warfarin-related ICHs, 28-day case fatality, and deaths from the primary bleed.
RESULTS
The proportion of warfarin users among the population increased 3.6-fold from 0.68% in 1993 to 2.28% in 2008. Of a total of 982 patients with ICH, 182 (18.5%) had warfarin-related ICH. One-year survival rate after onset of stroke was 35.2% among warfarin users and 67.9% among nonusers. The annual incidence (P=0.062) and 28-day case fatality of warfarin-related ICHs (P=0.002) decreased during the observation period. Warfarin users were older (mean difference 6.6; 95% CI, 5.0 to 8.1; P<0.001) than nonusers. Admission international normalized ratio values above the therapeutic range (2.0 to 3.0) decreased through the observation period, suggesting improved control of anticoagulant therapy over time.
CONCLUSIONS
The annual incidence and case fatality of warfarin-related ICHs decreased, although the proportion of warfarin users almost quadrupled in our population. |
miRDeep2 accurately identifies known and hundreds of novel microRNA genes in seven animal clades | microRNAs (miRNAs) are a large class of small non-coding RNAs which post-transcriptionally regulate the expression of a large fraction of all animal genes and are important in a wide range of biological processes. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing allow miRNA detection at unprecedented sensitivity, but the computational task of accurately identifying the miRNAs in the background of sequenced RNAs remains challenging. For this purpose, we have designed miRDeep2, a substantially improved algorithm which identifies canonical and non-canonical miRNAs such as those derived from transposable elements and informs on high-confidence candidates that are detected in multiple independent samples. Analyzing data from seven animal species representing the major animal clades, miRDeep2 identified miRNAs with an accuracy of 98.6-99.9% and reported hundreds of novel miRNAs. To test the accuracy of miRDeep2, we knocked down the miRNA biogenesis pathway in a human cell line and sequenced small RNAs before and after. The vast majority of the >100 novel miRNAs expressed in this cell line were indeed specifically downregulated, validating most miRDeep2 predictions. Last, a new miRNA expression profiling routine, low time and memory usage and user-friendly interactive graphic output can make miRDeep2 useful to a wide range of researchers. |
StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-domain Image-to-Image Translation | Recent studies have shown remarkable success in image-to-image translation for two domains. However, existing approaches have limited scalability and robustness in handling more than two domains, since different models should be built independently for every pair of image domains. To address this limitation, we propose StarGAN, a novel and scalable approach that can perform image-to-image translations for multiple domains using only a single model. Such a unified model architecture of StarGAN allows simultaneous training of multiple datasets with different domains within a single network. This leads to StarGAN's superior quality of translated images compared to existing models as well as the novel capability of flexibly translating an input image to any desired target domain. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a facial attribute transfer and a facial expression synthesis tasks. |
MCS Selection for Throughput Improvement in Downlink LTE Systems | In this paper, we investigate resource block (RB) assignment and modulation-and-coding scheme (MCS) selection to maximize downlink throughput of long-term evolution (LTE) systems, where all RB's assigned to the same user in any given transmission time interval (TTI) must use the same MCS. We develop several effective MCS selection schemes by using the effective packet-level SINR based on exponential effective SINR mapping (EESM), arithmetic mean, geometric mean, and harmonic mean. From both analysis and simulation results, we show that the system throughput of all the proposed schemes are better than that of the scheme in [7]. Furthermore, the MCS selection scheme using harmonic mean based effective packet-level SINR almost reaches the optimal performance and significantly outperforms the other proposed schemes. |
1 Coherence and Structure in Text and Discourse | Textual coherence versus discourse structure Coherence is one of the most general and most widely discussed concepts in the study of text and discourse In spite or perhaps because of its central status the concept of coherence has many di erent and often incompatible de nitions and connotations For text linguistics or psycholinguistics with their focus on the representation and processing of information in written texts coherence is predominantly a matter of semantics and domain knowledge while various brands of speech act and dialogue analysis describe coherence in terms of inten tions and interactional structures I will argue in subsection that the focus on and restriction to rather extreme discourse genres such as exposition on the one hand or highly interactive dialogues on the other causes an overemphasis on genre speci c characteristics at the expense of general properties common to all kinds of discourse Theories of discourse coherence then should be built and tested for a su ciently diverse variety of discourse types especially discourse that combines monologue and dialogue features In sections and of this paper I will present a framework for such a theory and two corpus analytical studies that support the notion that coherence should be thought of as con sisting of three parallel components ideational semantic structure rhetorical structure and sequential or segment structure |
A Parallel-Strip Ring Power Divider With High Isolation and Arbitrary Power-Dividing Ratio | In this paper, a new power divider concept, which provides high flexibility of transmission line characteristic impedance and port impedance, is proposed. This power divider is implemented on a parallel-strip line, which is a balanced transmission line. By implementing the advantages and uniqueness of the parallel-strip line, the divider outperforms the conventional divider in terms of isolation bandwidths. A swap structure of the two lines of the parallel-strip line is employed in this design, which is critical for the isolation enhancements. A lumped-circuit model of the parallel-strip swap including all parasitic effects has been analyzed. An equal power divider with center frequency of 2 GHz was designed to demonstrate the idea. The experimental results show that the equal power divider has 96.5% -10-dB impedance bandwidth with more than 25-dB isolation and less than 0.7-dB insertion loss. In order to generalize the concept with an arbitrary power ratio, we also realize unequal power dividers with the same isolation characteristics. The impedance bandwidth of the proposed power divider will increase with the dividing ratio, which is opposite to the conventional Wilkinson power divider. Unequal dividers with dividing ratios of 1 : 2 and 1 : 12 are designed and measured. Additionally, a frequency independent 180 power divider has been realized with less than 2 phase errors. |
The effectiveness of aerobic training, cognitive behavioural therapy, and energy conservation management in treating MS-related fatigue: the design of the TREFAMS-ACE programme | BACKGROUND
TREFAMS is an acronym for TReating FAtigue in Multiple Sclerosis, while ACE refers to the rehabilitation treatment methods under study, that is, Aerobic training, Cognitive behavioural therapy, and Energy conservation management. The TREFAMS-ACE research programme consists of four studies and has two main objectives: (1) to assess the effectiveness of three different rehabilitation treatment strategies in reducing fatigue and improving societal participation in patients with MS; and (2) to study the neurobiological mechanisms of action that underlie treatment effects and MS-related fatigue in general.
METHODS/DESIGN
Ambulatory patients (n = 270) suffering from MS-related fatigue will be recruited to three single-blinded randomised clinical trials (RCTs). In each RCT, 90 patients will be randomly allocated to the trial-specific intervention or to a low-intensity intervention that is the same for all RCTs. This low-intensity intervention consists of three individual consultations with a specialised MS-nurse. The trial-specific interventions are Aerobic Training, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and Energy Conservation Management. These interventions consist of 12 individual therapist-supervised sessions with additional intervention-specific home exercises. The therapy period lasts 16 weeks. All RCTs have the same design and the same primary outcome measures: fatigue - measured with the Checklist Individual Strength, and participation - measured with the Impact on Participation and Autonomy questionnaire. Outcomes will be assessed 1 week prior to, and at 0, 8, 16, 26 and 52 weeks after randomisation. The assessors will be blinded to allocation. Pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines in serum, salivary cortisol, physical fitness, physical activity, coping, self-efficacy, illness cognitions and other determinants will be longitudinally measured in order to study the neurobiological mechanisms of action.
DISCUSSION
The TREFAMS-ACE programme is unique in its aim to assess the effectiveness of three rehabilitation treatments. The programme will provide important insights regarding the most effective treatment for MS-related fatigue and the mechanisms that underlie treatment response. A major strength of the programme is that the design involves three almost identical RCTs, enabling a close comparison of the treatment strategies and a strong overall meta-analysis. The results will also support clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of MS-related fatigue.
TRIAL REGISTRATIONS
Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN69520623, ISRCTN58583714, and ISRCTN82353628. |
Motion-based motion deblurring | Motion blur due to camera motion can significantly degrade the quality of an image. Since the path of the camera motion can be arbitrary, deblurring of motion blurred images is a hard problem. Previous methods to deal with this problem have included blind restoration of motion blurred images, optical correction using stabilized lenses, and special CMOS sensors that limit the exposure time in the presence of motion. In this paper, we exploit the fundamental trade off between spatial resolution and temporal resolution to construct a hybrid camera that can measure its own motion during image integration. The acquired motion information is used to compute a point spread function (PSF) that represents the path of the camera during integration. This PSF is then used to deblur the image. To verify the feasibility of hybrid imaging for motion deblurring, we have implemented a prototype hybrid camera. This prototype system was evaluated in different indoor and outdoor scenes using long exposures and complex camera motion paths. The results show that, with minimal resources, hybrid imaging outperforms previous approaches to the motion blur problem. We conclude with a brief discussion on how our ideas can be extended beyond the case of global camera motion to the case where individual objects in the scene move with different velocities. |
Spatial and Temporal Intricacies of Natural Resource Use: Studies in Water, Forests, and Hydrocarbons | This dissertation examines spatial and temporal impacts of natural resource use. The second chapter integrates hydrological and economic systems to examine the impact of drought on these two systems and explores the spatial impact of policies aimed to mitigate the drought impact. The systems dynamics model developed for this chapter simultaneously considers the physical hydrology in the Middle Rio Grande water basin in New Mexico, the engineered water management system, and a behavioral model of residential water demand for three cities: Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The simulation results showed that droughts that occur in later periods, when there are larger populations, have more substantial impacts. Later and longer drought increases per capita water consumption, reduces aquifer volume, and in general reduces river flow. However, increased public awareness can outweigh the stress on water resources due to population growth. Furthermore, increased awareness and decreased population in one city results in to decreased groundwater pumping costs in another city. The third chapter utilizes survey-based contingent evaluation data to investigate public |
Aspirin versus low-molecular-weight heparin for extended venous thromboembolism prophylaxis after total hip arthroplasty: a randomized trial. | BACKGROUND
The role of aspirin in thromboprophylaxis after total hip arthroplasty (THA) is controversial.
OBJECTIVE
To compare extended prophylaxis with aspirin and dalteparin for prevention of symptomatic venous thromboembolism (VTE) after THA.
DESIGN
Multicenter randomized, controlled trial with a noninferiority design based on a minimal clinically important difference of 2.0%. Randomization was electronically generated; patients were assigned to a treatment group through a Web-based program. Patients, physicians, study coordinators, health care team members, outcome adjudicators, and data analysts were blinded to interventions. (Current Controlled Trials: ISRCTN11902170).
SETTING
12 tertiary care orthopedic referral centers in Canada.
PATIENTS
778 patients who had elective unilateral THA between 2007 and 2010.
INTERVENTION
After an initial 10 days of dalteparin prophylaxis after elective THA, patients were randomly assigned to 28 days of dalteparin (n = 400) or aspirin (n = 386).
MEASUREMENTS
Symptomatic VTE confirmed by objective testing (primary efficacy outcome) and bleeding.
RESULTS
Five of 398 patients (1.3%) randomly assigned to dalteparin and 1 of 380 (0.3%) randomly assigned to aspirin had VTE (absolute difference, 1.0 percentage point [95% CI, -0.5 to 2.5 percentage points]). Aspirin was noninferior (P < 0.001) but not superior (P = 0.22) to dalteparin. Clinically significant bleeding occurred in 5 patients (1.3%) receiving dalteparin and 2 (0.5%) receiving aspirin. The absolute between-group difference in a composite of all VTE and clinically significant bleeding events was 1.7 percentage points (CI, -0.3 to 3.8 percentage points; P = 0.091) in favor of aspirin.
LIMITATION
The study was halted prematurely because of difficulty with patient recruitment.
CONCLUSION
Extended prophylaxis for 28 days with aspirin was noninferior to and as safe as dalteparin for the prevention of VTE after THA in patients who initially received dalteparin for 10 days. Given its low cost and greater convenience, aspirin may be considered a reasonable alternative for extended thromboprophylaxis after THA.
PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE
Canadian Institutes of Health Research. |
A distributed approach for access and visibility task under ergonomic constraints with a manikin in a virtual reality environment | This paper presents a new method, based on a multiagent system and on digital mock-up technology, to assess an efficient path planner for a manikin for access and visibility task under ergonomic constraints. In order to solve this problem, the human operator is integrated in the process optimization to contribute to a global perception of the environment. This operator cooperates, in real-time, with several automatic local elementary agents. The result of this work validates solutions brought by digital mock-up and that can be applied to simulate maintenance task. |
Infrastructure for Usable Machine Learning: The Stanford DAWN Project | Despite incredible recent advances in machine learning, building machine learning applications remains prohibitively time-consuming and expensive for all but the best-trained, best-funded engineering organizations. This expense comes not from a need for new and improved statistical models but instead from a lack of systems and tools for supporting end-to-end machine learning application development, from data preparation and labeling to productionization and monitoring. In this document, we outline opportunities for infrastructure supporting usable, end-to-end machine learning applications in the context of the nascent DAWN (Data Analytics for What’s Next) project at Stanford. |
A Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced Natural Language Corpora for Spoken Dialog Systems | Recent spoken dialog systems have been able to recognize freely spoken user input in restricted domains thanks to statistical methods in the automatic speech recognition. These methods require a high number of natural language utterances to train the speech recognition engine and to assess the quality of the system. Since human speech offers many variants associated with a single intent, a high number of user utterances have to be elicited. Developers are therefore turning to crowdsourcing to collect this data. This paper compares three different methods to elicit multiple utterances for given semantics via crowd sourcing, namely with pictures, with text and with semantic entities. Specifically, we compare the methods with regard to the number of valid data and linguistic variance, whereby a quantitative and qualitative approach is proposed. In our study, the method with text led to a high variance in the utterances and a relatively low rate of invalid data. |
Pharmacokinetic Interactions of Herbs with Cytochrome P450 and P-Glycoprotein | The concurrent use of drugs and herbal products is becoming increasingly prevalent over the last decade. Several herbal products have been known to modulate cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes and P-glycoprotein (P-gp) which are recognized as representative drug metabolizing enzymes and drug transporter, respectively. Thus, a summary of knowledge on the modulation of CYP and P-gp by commonly used herbs can provide robust fundamentals for optimizing CYP and/or P-gp substrate drug-based therapy. Herein, we review ten popular medicinal and/or dietary herbs as perpetrators of CYP- and P-gp-mediated pharmacokinetic herb-drug interactions. The main focus is placed on previous works on the ability of herbal extracts and their phytochemicals to modulate the expression and function of CYP and P-gp in several in vitro and in vivo animal and human systems. |
Efficient L1 Regularized Logistic Regression | L1 regularized logistic regression is now a workhorse of machine learning: it is widely used for many classification problems, particularly ones with many features. L1 regularized logistic regression requires solving a convex optimization problem. However, standard algorithms for solving convex optimization problems do not scale well enough to handle the large datasets encountered in many practical settings. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for L1 regularized logistic regression. Our algorithm iteratively approximates the objective function by a quadratic approximation at the current point, while maintaining the L1 constraint. In each iteration, it uses the efficient LARS (Least Angle Regression) algorithm to solve the resulting L1 constrained quadratic optimization problem. Our theoretical results show that our algorithm is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum. Our experiments show that our algorithm significantly outperforms standard algorithms for solving convex optimization problems. Moreover, our algorithm outperforms four previously published algorithms that were specifically designed to solve the L1 regularized logistic regression problem. |
Internet Censorship in Iran: A First Look | The Iranian government operates one of the largest and most sophisticated Internet censorship regimes in the world, but the mechanisms it employs have received little research attention, primarily due to lack of access to network connections within the country and personal risks to Iranian citizens who take part. In this paper, we examine the status of Internet censorship in Iran based on network measurements conducted from a major Iranian ISP during the lead up to the June 2013 presidential election. We measure the scope of the censorship by probing Alexa’s top 500 websites in 18 different categories. We investigate the technical mechanisms used for HTTP Host–based blocking, keyword filtering, DNS hijacking, and protocol-based throttling. Finally, we map the network topology of the censorship infrastructure and find evidence that it relies heavily on centralized equipment, a property that might be fruitfully exploited by next generation approaches to censorship circumvention. |
Recognition using visual phrases | In this paper we introduce visual phrases, complex visual composites like “a person riding a horse”. Visual phrases often display significantly reduced visual complexity compared to their component objects, because the appearance of those objects can change profoundly when they participate in relations. We introduce a dataset suitable for phrasal recognition that uses familiar PASCAL object categories, and demonstrate significant experimental gains resulting from exploiting visual phrases. We show that a visual phrase detector significantly outperforms a baseline which detects component objects and reasons about relations, even though visual phrase training sets tend to be smaller than those for objects. We argue that any multi-class detection system must decode detector outputs to produce final results; this is usually done with non-maximum suppression. We describe a novel decoding procedure that can account accurately for local context without solving difficult inference problems. We show this decoding procedure outperforms the state of the art. Finally, we show that decoding a combination of phrasal and object detectors produces real improvements in detector results. |
Capabilites and Reliability of LEDs and Laser Diodes | In general, high temperature testing is used to determine LED and laser diode lifetimes, even though laser diode failure mechanisms are more sensitive to increases in current density. As a measured parameter of degradation, the current density is of great significance when searching for failure modes in a laser diode. Raising the current density however, is not really indicative of lifetime since it is more likely a situation to be avoided than one that simulates normal lifetime degradation. The reliability of semiconductor sources is very dependent on the degradation modes. This report intends to summarize some of the degradation modes and capabilities of typical LEDs and laser diodes currently used in many communication and sensing systems. |
Treatment optimization and prediction of HCV clearance in patients with acute HCV infection. | BACKGROUND & AIMS
The lack of consensus on the optimal timing, regimen, and duration of treatment, in patients with acute HCV infection, stimulates the research on both favourable outcome predictors and individualized treatment regimens. This study aimed at investigating the impact of IL28B SNP rs12979860 alone or in combination with HLA class II alleles in both predicting spontaneous viral clearance and individualizing treatment strategies for patients with HCV persistence, after acute HCV exposure.
METHODS
178 patients with AHC, consecutively treated with interferon alone or in combination with ribavirin, starting within or after 48 weeks from the diagnosis of AHC, were tested for IL28B SNPs and HLA class II alleles.
RESULTS
Spontaneous viral clearance was achieved in 28% of 169 patients available for genetic testing. Factors associated with HCV elimination were jaundice (OR 2.75, 95% CI 1.31-5.77) and IL28B CC (OR 3.87, CI 1.71-8.51), but not HLA alleles. In CT/TT patients without jaundice, NPV for virus persistence was 98%. In patients with IL28B CT/TT, starting treatment 48 weeks after the onset was significantly associated with lower rates of response (28% vs. 100%, p=0.027). By contrast, no significant differences in the rate of SVR were observed for CC carriers who started treatment later (65% vs. 85%, p=1.0).
CONCLUSIONS
In patients with acute HCV hepatitis, lack of viral clearance may be predicted by absence of jaundice and IL28B CT/TT genotype; in patients with these characteristics, treatment needs to be started immediately. |
Low-Rank Modeling of Local $k$-Space Neighborhoods (LORAKS) for Constrained MRI | Recent theoretical results on low-rank matrix reconstruction have inspired significant interest in low-rank modeling of MRI images. Existing approaches have focused on higher-dimensional scenarios with data available from multiple channels, timepoints, or image contrasts. The present work demonstrates that single-channel, single-contrast, single-timepoint k-space data can also be mapped to low-rank matrices when the image has limited spatial support or slowly varying phase. Based on this, we develop a novel and flexible framework for constrained image reconstruction that uses low-rank matrix modeling of local k-space neighborhoods (LORAKS). A new regularization penalty and corresponding algorithm for promoting low-rank are also introduced. The potential of LORAKS is demonstrated with simulated and experimental data for a range of denoising and sparse-sampling applications. LORAKS is also compared against state-of-the-art methods like homodyne reconstruction, l1-norm minimization, and total variation minimization, and is demonstrated to have distinct features and advantages. In addition, while calibration-based support and phase constraints are commonly used in existing methods, the LORAKS framework enables calibrationless use of these constraints. |
The genome of Prunus mume | Prunus mume (mei), which was domesticated in China more than 3,000 years ago as ornamental plant and fruit, is one of the first genomes among Prunus subfamilies of Rosaceae been sequenced. Here, we assemble a 280M genome by combining 101-fold next-generation sequencing and optical mapping data. We further anchor 83.9% of scaffolds to eight chromosomes with genetic map constructed by restriction-site-associated DNA sequencing. Combining P. mume genome with available data, we succeed in reconstructing nine ancestral chromosomes of Rosaceae family, as well as depicting chromosome fusion, fission and duplication history in three major subfamilies. We sequence the transcriptome of various tissues and perform genome-wide analysis to reveal the characteristics of P. mume, including its regulation of early blooming in endodormancy, immune response against bacterial infection and biosynthesis of flower scent. The P. mume genome sequence adds to our understanding of Rosaceae evolution and provides important data for improvement of fruit trees. |
Stochastic WaveNet: A Generative Latent Variable Model for Sequential Data | How to model distribution of sequential data, including but not limited to speech and human motions, is an important ongoing research problem. It has been demonstrated that model capacity can be significantly enhanced by introducing stochastic latent variables in the hidden states of recurrent neural networks. Simultaneously, WaveNet, equipped with dilated convolutions, achieves astonishing empirical performance in natural speech generation task. In this paper, we combine the ideas from both stochastic latent variables and dilated convolutions, and propose a new architecture to model sequential data, termed as Stochastic WaveNet, where stochastic latent variables are injected into the WaveNet structure. We argue that Stochastic WaveNet enjoys powerful distribution modeling capacity and the advantage of parallel training from dilated convolutions. In order to efficiently infer the posterior distribution of the latent variables, a novel inference network structure is designed based on the characteristics of WaveNet architecture. State-of-the-art performances on benchmark datasets are obtained by Stochastic WaveNet on natural speech modeling and high quality human handwriting samples can be generated as well. |
A short history of sweat gland biology. | The axilla, especially its microflora and axillary sweat glands as well as their secretions, is the main target of cosmetic compositions such as deodorants or antiperspirants. There are three types of sweat glands present in the axillary skin, namely apocrine, eccrine and apoeccrine sweat glands. Here, we provide an overview of the morphological, structural and functional characteristics of the different gland types and present techniques that allow their clear distinction. Moreover, we describe different forms of perspiration as physical reactions to external and internal stimuli. |
An annotated catalog of fossil and subfossil Lepidoptera (Insecta: Holometabola) of the world | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Methods and conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 A catalog of lepidopteran fossils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Fossils securely placed in Lepidoptera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Lepidoptera incertae sedis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Putative lepidopteran fossils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Fossils excluded from Lepidoptera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Taxon index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Author index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 |
The PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway mediates insulin-like growth factor 1-induced E-cadherin down-regulation and cell proliferation in ovarian cancer cells. | Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) is produced by ovarian cancer cells and it has been suggested that it plays an important role in tumor progression. In this study, we report that IGF1 treatment down-regulated E-cadherin by up-regulating E-cadherin transcriptional repressors, Snail and Slug, in human ovarian cancer cells. The pharmacological inhibition of phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K) and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) suggests that PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling is required for IGF1-induced E-cadherin down-regulation. Moreover, IGF1 up-regulated Snail and Slug expression via the PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway. Finally, IGF1-induced cell proliferation was abolished by inhibiting PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling. This study demonstrates a novel mechanism in which IGF1 down-regulates E-cadherin expression through the activation of PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling and the up-regulation of Snail and Slug in human ovarian cancer cells. |
Exploring Strategies for Training Deep Neural Networks | Deep multi-layer neural networks have many levels of non-linearities allowing them to compactly represent highly non-linear and highly-varying functions. However, until recently it was not clear how to train such deep networks, since gradient-based optimization starting from random initialization often appears to get stuck in poor solutions. Hinton et al. recently proposed a greedy layer-wise unsupervised learning procedure relying on the training algorithm of restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM) to initialize the parameters of a deep belief network (DBN), a generative model with many layers of hidden causal variables. This was followed by the proposal of another greedy layer-wise procedure, relying on the usage of autoassociator networks. In the context of the above optimization problem, we study these algorithms empirically to better understand their success. Our experiments confirm the hypothesis that the greedy layer-wise unsupervised training strategy helps the optimization by initializing weights in a region near a good local minimum, but also implicitly acts as a sort of regularization that brings better generalization and encourages internal distributed representations that are high-level abstractions of the input. We also present a series of experiments aimed at evaluating the link between the performance of deep neural networks and practical aspects of their topology, for example, demonstrating cases where the addition of more depth helps. Finally, we empirically explore simple variants of these training algorithms, such as the use of different RBM input unit distributions, a simple way of combining gradient estimators to improve performance, as well as on-line versions of those algorithms. |
Commonsense computing (episode 5): algorithm efficiency and balloon testing | This paper investigates what students understand about algorithm efficiency before receiving any formal instruction on the topic. We gave students a challenging search problem and two solutions, then asked them to identify the more efficient solution and to justify their choice. Many students did not use the standard worst-case analysis of algorithms; rather they chose other metrics, including average-case, better for more cases, better in all cases, one algorithm being more correct, and better for real-world scenarios. Students were much more likely to choose the correct algorithm when they were asked to trace the algorithms on specific examples; this was true even if they traced the algorithms incorrectly. |
Computational modeling of deformation bands in granular media . I . Geological and mathematical framework | Failure of granular media under natural and laboratory loading conditions involves a variety of micromechanical processes producing several geometrically, kinematically, and texturally distinct types of structures. This paper provides a geological framework for failure processes as well as a mathematical model to analyze these processes. Of particular interest is the formation of tabular deformation bands in granular rocks, which could exhibit distinct localized deformation features including simple shearing, pure compaction/dilation, and various possible combinations thereof. The analysis is carried out using classical bifurcation theory combined with non-linear continuum mechanics and theoretical/computational plasticity. For granular media, yielding and plastic flow are known to be influenced by all three stress invariants, and thus we formulate a family of three-invariant plasticity models with a compression cap to capture the entire spectrum of yielding of geomaterials. We then utilize a return mapping algorithm in principal stress directions to integrate the stresses over discrete load increments, allowing the solution to find the critical bifurcation point for a given loading path. The formulation covers both the infinitesimal and finite deformation regimes, and comparisons are made of the localization criteria in the two regimes. In the accompanying paper, we demonstrate with numerical examples the role that the constitutive model and finite deformation effects play on the prediction of the onset of deformation bands in geomaterials. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
Pros and cons of apomorphine and L-dopa continuous infusion in advanced Parkinson's disease. | Motor fluctuations and dyskinesia are common in advanced Parkinson's disease and can be poorly managed by current oral medications. Risk factors include the amount of L-dopa administered, gender and patient age. Continuous duodenal L-dopa or subcutaneous apomorphine infusions are helpful strategies because they can control motor complications by providing continuous dopaminergic drug delivery. Apomorphine subcutaneous infusion provides a motor benefit similar to that of dopamine and is relatively easy to use in advanced PD. However, it commonly requires concomitant administration of oral L-dopa and its long-term use is limited by compliance. Continuous administration of L-dopa/carbidopa by infusion in the duodenum/jejunum is a more complex procedure requiring a gastrostomy for the placement of the infusion tube, but it allows replacement of all oral medications and the achievement of a satisfactory therapeutic response paralleled by a reduction of motor complication severity. It should be noted that although these procedures are effective, most evidence relates to small case series and, particularly in the case of apomorphine, despite its long-term availability, there is a complete lack of randomized blinded studies. In addition, unlike deep brain stimulation, it is unclear which patients are the best candidates for these procedures, making any indirect comparison very complex, given the clinical heterogeneity of reported patients. This has consequences in resource allocation and in estimating cost-benefit ratios for these complex therapies in advanced PD. |
Nature and timing of movement on Hines Creek strand of Denali fault system, Alaska | The Hines Creek strand of the Denali fault system in the central Alaska Range juxtaposes continental basement rocks on the north with younger Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks more characteristic of an oceanic environment on the south. A pluton that intrudes the Hines Creek strand has a 95-m.y. cooling age indicated by K-Ar dating and establishes a maximum age for strata that overlie the pluton unconformably. The Hines Creek fault may have been the locus of major strike-slip movement prior to 95 m.y. ago. Subsequently, strike-slip movement along the Denali system has taken place on the McKinley strand 32 km to the south. |
Viewing Angle Classification of Cryo-Electron Microscopy Images Using Eigenvectors | The cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) reconstruction problem is to find the three-dimensional structure of a macromolecule given noisy versions of its two-dimensional projection images at unknown random directions. We introduce a new algorithm for identifying noisy cryo-EM images of nearby viewing angles. This identification is an important first step in three-dimensional structure determination of macromolecules from cryo-EM, because once identified, these images can be rotationally aligned and averaged to produce "class averages" of better quality. The main advantage of our algorithm is its extreme robustness to noise. The algorithm is also very efficient in terms of running time and memory requirements, because it is based on the computation of the top few eigenvectors of a specially designed sparse Hermitian matrix. These advantages are demonstrated in numerous numerical experiments. |
A 4-GHz All Digital PLL With Low-Power TDC and Phase-Error Compensation | This paper presents a 4-GHz all-digital fractional-N PLL with a low-power TDC operating at low-rate retimed reference clocks, a compensator preventing big phase-error downfalls, and a loop settling monitor. Two retimed reference clocks, nCKR and pCKR, are employed in the TDC to estimate the fractional phase error between the low-rate reference and high-rate oscillator clocks. Applying the retimed reference clocks does not only reduce a dynamic power in its delay chain, but simplify a fractional phase-error correction. The phase-error compensator is introduced to avoid big phase-error downfalls caused by large output glitches originating from a high-speed accumulator. In addition, a loop-settling monitor is invented to allow the DCO operation mode to be shifted seamlessly and fast. By consuming 9.6 mW, the ADPLL achieves -97 dBc in-band phase noise, - 38 dBc/Hz integrated noise, and 740 ns settling time. |
Language control and lexical competition in bilinguals: an event-related FMRI study. | Language selection (or control) refers to the cognitive mechanism that controls which language to use at a given moment and context. It allows bilinguals to selectively communicate in one target language while minimizing the interferences from the nontarget language. Previous studies have suggested the participation in language control of different brain areas. However, the question remains whether the selection of one language among others relies on a language-specific neural module or general executive regions that also allow switching between different competing behavioral responses including the switching between various linguistic registers. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the neural correlates of language selection processes in German-French bilingual subjects during picture naming in different monolingual and bilingual selection contexts. We show that naming in the first language in the bilingual context (compared with monolingual contexts) increased activation in the left caudate and anterior cingulate cortex. Furthermore, the activation of these areas is even more extended when the subjects are using a second weaker language. These findings show that language control processes engaged in contexts during which both languages must remain active recruit the left caudate and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in a manner that can be distinguished from areas engaged in intralanguage task switching. |
Tolerability of red yeast rice (2,400 mg twice daily) versus pravastatin (20 mg twice daily) in patients with previous statin intolerance. | Currently, no consensus has been reached regarding the management of hyperlipidemia in patients who develop statin-associated myalgia (SAM). Many statin-intolerant patients use alternative lipid-lowering therapies, including red yeast rice. The present trial evaluated the tolerability of red yeast rice versus pravastatin in patients unable to tolerate other statins because of myalgia. The study was conducted in a community-based setting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A total of 43 adults with dyslipidemia and a history of statin discontinuation because of myalgia were randomly assigned to red yeast rice 2,400 mg twice daily or pravastatin 20 mg twice daily for 12 weeks. All subjects were concomitantly enrolled in a 12-week therapeutic lifestyle change program. The primary outcomes included the incidence of treatment discontinuation because of myalgia and a daily pain severity score. The secondary outcomes were muscle strength and plasma lipids. The incidence of withdrawal from medication owing to myalgia was 5% (1 of 21) in the red yeast rice group and 9% (2 of 22) in the pravastatin group (p = 0.99). The mean pain severity did not differ significantly between the 2 groups. No difference was found in muscle strength between the 2 groups at week 4 (p = 0.61), week 8 (p = 0.81), or week 12 (p = 0.82). The low-density lipoprotein cholesterol level decreased 30% in the red yeast rice group and 27% in the pravastatin group. In conclusion, red yeast rice was tolerated as well as pravastatin and achieved a comparable reduction of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol in a population previously intolerant to statins. |
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in early adolescents' friendship development: friendship selection, influence, and prospective friendship quality. | Friendships are essential for adolescent social development. However, they may be pursued for varying motives, which, in turn, may predict similarity in friendships via social selection or social influence processes, and likely help to explain friendship quality. We examined the effect of early adolescents' (N = 374, 12-14 years) intrinsic and extrinsic friendship motivation on friendship selection and social influence by utilizing social network modeling. In addition, longitudinal relations among motivation and friendship quality were estimated with structural equation modeling. Extrinsic motivation predicted activity in making friendship nominations during the sixth grade and lower friendship quality across time. Intrinsic motivation predicted inactivity in making friendship nominations during the sixth, popularity as a friend across the transition to middle school, and higher friendship quality across time. Social influence effects were observed for both motives, but were more pronounced for intrinsic motivation. |
Autonomous and autonomic systems: a paradigm for future space exploration missions | More and more, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will rely on concepts from autonomous systems not only in mission control centers on the ground, but also on spacecraft and on rovers and other space assets on extraterrestrial bodies. Autonomy facilitates not only reduced operations costs, but also adaptable goal-driven functionality of mission systems. Space missions lacking autonomy will be unable to achieve the full range of advanced mission objectives, given that human control under dynamic environmental conditions will not be feasible due, in part, to the unavoidably high signal propagation latency and constrained data rates of mission communications links. While autonomy supports cost-effective accomplishment of mission goals, autonomicity supports survivability of remote mission assets, especially when tending by humans is not feasible. In principle, the properties of autonomic systems may enable space missions of a higher order than any previously flown. Analysis of two NASA agent-based systems previously prototyped, and of a proposed future mission involving numerous cooperating spacecraft, illustrates how autonomous and autonomic system concepts may be brought to bear on future space missions |
MemNet: A Persistent Memory Network for Image Restoration | Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been attracting considerable attention in image restoration. However, as the depth grows, the longterm dependency problem is rarely realized for these very deep models, which results in the prior states/layers having little influence on the subsequent ones. Motivated by the fact that human thoughts have persistency, we propose a very deep persistent memory network (MemNet) that introduces a memory block, consisting of a recursive unit and a gate unit, to explicitly mine persistent memory through an adaptive learning process. The recursive unit learns multi-level representations of the current state under different receptive fields. The representations and the outputs from the previous memory blocks are concatenated and sent to the gate unit, which adaptively controls how much of the previous states should be reserved, and decides how much of the current state should be stored. We apply MemNet to three image restoration tasks, i.e., image denosing, super-resolution and JPEG deblocking. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the necessity of the MemNet and its unanimous superiority on all three tasks over the state of the arts. Code is available at https://github.com/tyshiwo/MemNet. |
Three-dimensional structure of magnetic field in the mixed-/spl mu/ levitation system using bulk superconductors | A permanent-magnet type mixed-/spl mu/ levitation system, which only needs an iron, permanent magnets and bulk superconductors, can realize an advantageous levitation system-for example, for transportation over a relatively long distance because of its simple structure and stable levitation without active control. A three-dimensional numerical analysis of electromagnetic force characteristics in the mixed-/spl mu/ levitation system is carried out and the results of the analysis are compared with experiments. From these results, the authors have confirmed that the three-dimensional structure of the magnetic field and the electromagnetic performance of superconductors strongly influence the characteristics of the electromagnetic force acting on the iron, which become unstable in some cases. |
Contextual Augmentation: Data Augmentation by Words with Paradigmatic Relations | We propose a novel data augmentation for labeled sentences called contextual augmentation. We assume an invariance that sentences are natural even if the words in the sentences are replaced with other words with paradigmatic relations. We stochastically replace words with other words that are predicted by a bi-directional language model at the word positions. Words predicted according to a context are numerous but appropriate for the augmentation of the original words. Furthermore, we retrofit a language model with a label-conditional architecture, which allows the model to augment sentences without breaking the label-compatibility. Through the experiments for six various different text classification tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed method improves classifiers based on the convolutional or recurrent neural networks. |
Credit Scoring Methods | Despite the proliferation of banking services, lending to industry and the public still constitutes the core of the income of commercial banks and other lending institutions in developed as well as post-transition countries. From the technical perspective, the lending process in general is a relatively straightforward series of actions involving two principal parties. These activities range from the initial loan application to the successful or unsuccessful repayment of the loan. Although retail lending belongs among the most profitable investments in lenders’ asset portfolios (at least in developed countries), increases in the amounts of loans also bring increases in the number of defaulted loans, i.e. loans that either are not repaid at all or cases in which the borrower has problems with paying debts. Thus, the primary problem of any lender is to differentiate between “good” and “bad” debtors prior to granting credit. Such differentiation is possible by using a credit-scoring method. The goal of this paper is to review credit-scoring methods and elaborate on their efficiency based on the examples from the applied research. Emphasis is placed on credit scoring related to retail loans. We survey the methods which are suitable for credit scoring in the retail segment. We focus on retail loans as sharp increase in the amounts of loans for this clientele has been recorded in the last few years and another increase can be expected. This dynamic is highly relevant for post-transition countries. In the last few years, banks in the Czech and Slovak Republics have allocated a significant part of their lending to retail clientele. In 2004 alone, Czech and Slovak banks recorded 33.8% and 36.7% increases in retail loans, respectively. Hilbers et al. (2005) review trends in bank lending to the private sector, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern European countries, and find that rapid growth of private sector credit continues to be a key challenge for most of these countries. In the Czech and Slovak Republics the financial liabilities of households formed 11 % and 9 % |
Fast Marching farthest point sampling for point clouds and implicit surfaces | In a recent paper [13], the Fast Marching farthest point sampling strategy (FastFPS) for planar domains and curved manifolds was introduced. The version of FastFPS for curved manifolds discussed in the paper [13] deals with surface domains in triangulated form only. Due to a restriction of the underlying Fast Marching method, the algorithm further requires the splitting of any obtuse into acute triangles to ensure the consistency of the Fast Marching approximation. In this paper, we overcome these restrictions by using Mémoli and Sapiro’s [11, 12] extension of the Fast Marching method to the handling of implicit surfaces and point clouds. We find that the extended FastFPS algorithm can be applied to surfaces in implicit or point cloud form without the loss of the original algorithm’s computational optimality and without the need for any preprocessing. |
Delayed eruption of a mandibular primary cuspid associated with compound odontoma. | Although odontomas are considered to be a common type of odontogenic tumor, they rarely occur solely in the primary dentition. This case report presents an eight and a half-year-old-child with a compound odontoma located in the mandible, which caused the impaction of both primary and permanent canines. |
Tax Evasion across Industries: Soft Credit Evidence from Greece | We begin with the new observation that banks lend to tax-evading individuals based on the bank's perception of true income. This insight leads to a novel approach to estimate tax evasion from privatesector adaptation to semiformality. We use household microdata from a large bank in Greece and replicate bank models of credit capacity, credit card limits, and mortgage payments to infer the bank’s estimate of individuals’ true income. We estimate a lower bound of 28 billion euros of unreported income for Greece. The foregone government revenues amount to 31 percent of the deficit for 2009. Primary taxevading occupations are doctors, engineers, private tutors, accountants, financial service agents, and lawyers. Testing the industry distribution against a number of redistribution and incentive theories, our evidence suggests that industries with low paper trail and industries supported by parliamentarians have more tax evasion. We conclude by commenting on the property right of informal income. *Corresponding Authors: Adair Morse; email: adair.morse@chicagobooth.edu. Margarita Tsoutsoura; email: tsoutsoura@chicagobooth.edu. We are grateful for helpful comments to Loukas Karabarbounis, Amit Seru, Annette VissingJorgensen, Luigi Zingales, and seminar participants at Chicago Booth, Berkeley Haas, INSEAD, Catholica Lisbon School of Business, London Business School, NOVA School of Business, UBC, NBER Public Economic meeting, Booth-Deutschebank Symposium and the Political Economy in the Chicago area conference. This research was funded in part by the Fama-Miller Center for Research in Finance, the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, and the Goult Faculty Research Endowment. Tsoutsoura gratefully acknowledges financial support from the PCL Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business |
Understanding the Influence of User Participation and Involvement on System Success – a Systematic Mapping Study | User participation and involvement in software development are considered to be essential for a successful software system. Three research areas, human aspects of software engineering, requirements engineering, and information systems, study these topics from various perspectives. We think it is important to analyze user participation and involvement in software engineering comprehensively to encourage further research in this area. We investigate the evidence on effects of user participation and involvement on system success and we explore which methods are available in literature. A systematic mapping study was conducted. The systematic search yielded 3,698 hits, from which we identified 289 unique papers. These papers were reviewed by the first author based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. The second author validated the selection of papers by reviewing the reasons for exclusion and inclusion and the corresponding papers on a sample base. 58 of the 289 papers were selected (22 statistical survey and meta-study papers and 36 methods papers). Based on the empirical evidence of the surveys and meta-studies, we developed a meta-analysis of structural equation models. This overview demonstrates that most papers showed positive correlations between aspects of development processes (including user participation) and human aspects (including user involvement) and system success. The analysis of the proposed solutions from the method papers revealed a wide variety of user participation and involvement practices for most activities within software development. |
Capillary blood sampling as an alternative to venipuncture in the assessment of serum 25 hydroxyvitamin D levels | This study compared 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] measurements in capillary and venous blood samples collected, respectively by fingerprick and venipuncture. Capillary blood for measuring 25(OH)D has potential advantages by reducing blood volume required (2mL versus 0.3mL for venipuncture and capillary sampling, respectively), facilitating blood collection for those populations in whom venipuncture is difficult (e.g. infants and children), improving patient convenience and reducing costs associated with phlebotomy. The results demonstrated a highly significant relationship between 25(OH)D levels in serum derived from venous and capillary blood samples (r(2)=0.901). Despite statistically higher 25(OH)D levels in fingerprick samples (108+/-9nmol/L) compared with venipuncture samples (90+/-7nmol/L), the correlation between venous and capillary samples provides support for this approach as a practical alternative to venipuncture for vitamin D determination. However, clinical application may require the incorporation of a correction factor for the assessment of insufficiency, and research studies should avoid using the two methods interchangeably. Studying vitamin D's role in health and disease requires collection techniques and measurement methods that are reliable, reproducible, easily accessible, inexpensive and minimally burdensome to the patient. The option to collect patient samples by fingerprick may facilitate the collection process. |
Capless LDO Regulator Achieving −76 dB PSR and 96.3 fs FOM | The performance of switching devices such as display driver ICs is degraded by large power supply noise at switching frequencies from a few hundreds of kilohertz to a few megahertz. In order to minimize the power supply noise, a low-dropout (LDO) regulator with higher power supply rejection (PSR) is essential. In this brief, a capless LDO regulator with a negative capacitance circuit and voltage damper is proposed for enhancing PSR and figure of merit (FOM), respectively, in switching devices. The proposed LDO regulator is fabricated in a $0.18~\boldsymbol {\mu }\text{m}$ CMOS. Measurement results show that the proposed LDO regulator achieves −76 dB PSR at 1 MHz and 96.3 fs FOM with a total on-chip capacitance of as small as 12.7 pF. |
Multiband Printed Monopole Slot Antenna for WWAN Operation in the Laptop Computer | A multiband printed monopole slot antenna promising for operating as an internal antenna in the thin-profile laptop computer for wireless wide area network (WWAN) operation is presented. The proposed antenna is formed by three monopole slots operated at their quarter-wavelength modes and arranged in a compact planar configuration. A step-shaped microstrip feedline is applied to excite the three monopole slots at their respective optimal feeding position, and two wide operating bands at about 900 and 1900 MHz are obtained for the antenna to cover all the five operating bands of GSM850/900/1800/1900/UMTS for WWAN operation. The antenna is easily printed on a small-size FR4 substrate and shows a length of 60 mm only and a height of 12 mm when mounted at the top edge of the system ground plane or supporting metal frame of the laptop display. Details of the proposed antenna are presented and studied. |
Scalable Person Re-identification: A Benchmark | This paper contributes a new high quality dataset for person re-identification, named "Market-1501". Generally, current datasets: 1) are limited in scale, 2) consist of hand-drawn bboxes, which are unavailable under realistic settings, 3) have only one ground truth and one query image for each identity (close environment). To tackle these problems, the proposed Market-1501 dataset is featured in three aspects. First, it contains over 32,000 annotated bboxes, plus a distractor set of over 500K images, making it the largest person re-id dataset to date. Second, images in Market-1501 dataset are produced using the Deformable Part Model (DPM) as pedestrian detector. Third, our dataset is collected in an open system, where each identity has multiple images under each camera. As a minor contribution, inspired by recent advances in large-scale image search, this paper proposes an unsupervised Bag-of-Words descriptor. We view person re-identification as a special task of image search. In experiment, we show that the proposed descriptor yields competitive accuracy on VIPeR, CUHK03, and Market-1501 datasets, and is scalable on the large-scale 500k dataset. |
Learning to Represent Words in Context with Multilingual Supervision | We present a neural network architecture based on bidirectional LSTMs to compute representations of words in the sentential contexts. These context-sensitive word representations are suitable for, e.g., distinguishing different word senses and other context-modulated variations in meaning. To learn the parameters of our model, we use cross-lingual supervision, hypothesizing that a good representation of a word in context will be one that is sufficient for selecting the correct translation into a second language. We evaluate the quality of our representations as features in three downstream tasks: prediction of semantic supersenses (which assign nouns and verbs into a few dozen semantic classes), low resource machine translation, and a lexical substitution task, and obtain state-of-the-art results on all of these. |
Efficacy of abdominal acupuncture for neck pain: A randomized controlled trial | OBJECTIVE
This study aims to provide evidence regarding the clinical efficacy of abdominal acupuncture for neck pain.
METHODS
This randomized, patient and assessor-blind, sham-controlled trial was conducted at a Chinese medicine center in Hong Kong between November 2014 and March 2016. A total of 154 eligible participants (age range, 18-65 years) with neck pain were randomly assigned to receive abdominal (n = 77) or non-penetrating sham abdominal (sham group; n = 77) acupuncture. Each participant was administered treatment over six sessions by Registered Chinese Medicine Practitioners, in accordance with a standardized protocol. The primary outcome was mean improvement in neck pain disability scores evaluated by the Northwick Park Neck Pain Questionnaire (NPQ). Secondary outcomes included intensity of neck pain and health-related quality-of-life measures. The outcomes were assessed at baseline and at 2 and 6 weeks from baseline. Patients in the abdominal acupuncture group received additional follow-up evaluation at 14 weeks from baseline. Outcomes were evaluated by intention-to-treat analysis.
RESULTS
All participants provided informed consent for treatment and follow-up evaluation. Patients who received abdominal acupuncture exhibited greater improvement in NPQ scores than those who received sham treatment at both 2 and 6 weeks from baseline (intergroup mean differences, -5.75; 95% confidence interval [CI], -9.48 to -2.03; P = 0.008 and -8.65; 95% CI, -12.13 to -5.16; P < 0.001, respectively). The improvement in NPQ scores in the abdominal acupuncture group was even more significant at 14 weeks from baseline. Patients in the abdominal acupuncture group also exhibited significantly greater improvements in intensity of neck pain and a few quality-of-life measures than those in the sham abdominal acupuncture group, without any serious adverse events.
CONCLUSION
These findings suggest that abdominal acupuncture is an effective alternative treatment for neck pain.
TRIAL REGISTRATION
Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR-TRC-14004932. |
Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation | Evolutionary theory relevant to the question of human cooperation is reviewed and compared to other theoretical perspectives. A compound explanation is distilled as a plausible account of human cooperation and selfishness. This account leans heavily on group selection on cultural variation but also includes lower-level forces driven by both micro-scale cooperation and purely selfish motives. It is proposed that innate aspects of human social psychology coevolved with group-selected cultural institutions to produce just the kinds of social and moral faculties originally proposed by Darwin. This is termed the “tribal social instincts” hypothesis. The account is systemic in the sense that human social systems are functionally differentiated, conflicted, and diverse. A successful explanation of human cooperation has to account for these complexities. For example, a tribal-scale cultural group selection process alone cannot account for human patterns of cooperation because, on one hand, much conflict exists within tribes and, on the other, people have proven able to organize cooperation on a much larger scale than tribes. Multilevel selection and gene-culture coevolution effects are included to account for some of these complexities and empirical tests of the resulting hypotheses are discussed. In particular, it is argued that strong support for the tribal social instincts hypothesis comes from the structure of modern social institutions. These institutions have conspicuous “work-arounds” that shed light on the underlying instincts. |
Amplitudes of stellar oscillations: The Implications for asteroseismology | There are no good predictions for the amplitudes expected from solar-like oscillations in other stars. In the absence of a definitive model for convection, which is thought to be the mechanism that excites these oscillations, the amplitudes for both velocity and luminosity measurements must be estimated by scaling from the Sun. In the case of luminosity measurements, even this is difficult because of disagreement over the solar amplitude. This last point has lead us to investigate whether the luminosity amplitude of oscillations ( L=L) can be derived from the velocity amplitude (vosc). Using linear theory and observational data, we show that p-mode oscillations in a large sample of pulsating stars satisfy ( L=L)bol / vosc=Teff . Using this relationship, together with the best estimate of vosc; = (23:4 1:4) cm s 1, we estimate the luminosity amplitude of solar oscillations at 550 nm to be ( L=L) = (4:7 0:3) ppm. Next we discuss how to scale the amplitude of solar-like (i.e., convectively-powered) oscillations from the Sun to other stars. The only predictions come from model calculations by Christensen-Dalsgaard & Frandsen (1983, Sol. Phys. 82, 469). However, their grid of stellar models is not dense enough to allow amplitude predictions for an arbitrary star. Nevertheless, although convective theory is complicated, we might expect that the general properties of convection – including oscillation amplitudes – should change smoothly through the colourmagnitude diagram. Indeed, we find that the velocity amplitudes predicted by the model calculations are well fitted by the relation vosc / L=M . These two relations allow us to predict both the velocity and luminosity amplitudes of solar-like oscillations in any given star. We compare these predictions with published observations and evaluate claims for detections that have appeared in the literature. We argue that there is not yet good evidence for solar-like oscillations in any star except the Sun. For solartype stars (e.g., Cen A and Hyi), observations have not yet reached sufficient sensitivity to detect the amplitudes we predict. For some F-type stars, namely Procyon and several Send offprint requests to: Tim Bedding (tbedding@eso.org) ? Present address: Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark (hans@obs.aau.dk) members of M67, detection sensitivities 30–40% below the predicted amplitudes have been achieved. We conclude that these stars must oscillate with amplitudes less than has generally been assumed. |
True upper bounds for Bermudan products via non-nested Monte | We present a generic non-nested Monte Carlo procedure for computing true upper bounds for Bermudan products, given an approximation of the Snell envelope. The pleonastic “true” stresses that, by construction, the estimator is biased above the Snell envelope. The key idea is a regression estimator for the Doob martingale part of the approximative Snell envelope, which preserves the martingale property. The so constructed martingale can be employed for computing tight dual upper bounds without nested simulation. In general, this martingale can also be used as a control variate for simulation of conditional expectations. In this context, we develop a variance reduced version of the nested primal-dual estimator (Andersen and Broadie, 2004). Numerical experiments indicate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. |
Energy Harvesting Chip and the Chip Based Power Supply Development for a Wireless Sensor Network | In this study, an energy harvesting chip was developed to scavenge energy from artificial light to charge a wireless sensor node. The chip core is a miniature transformer with a nano-ferrofluid magnetic core. The chip embedded transformer can convert harvested energy from its solar cell to variable voltage output for driving multiple loads. This chip system yields a simple, small, and more importantly, a battery-less power supply solution. The sensor node is equipped with multiple sensors that can be enabled by the energy harvesting power supply to collect information about the human body comfort degree. Compared with lab instruments, the nodes with temperature, humidity and photosensors driven by harvested energy had variation coefficient measurement precision of less than 6% deviation under low environmental light of 240 lux. The thermal comfort was affected by the air speed. A flow sensor equipped on the sensor node was used to detect airflow speed. Due to its high power consumption, this sensor node provided 15% less accuracy than the instruments, but it still can meet the requirement of analysis for predicted mean votes (PMV) measurement. The energy harvesting wireless sensor network (WSN) was deployed in a 24-hour convenience store to detect thermal comfort degree from the air conditioning control. During one year operation, the sensor network powered by the energy harvesting chip retained normal functions to collect the PMV index of the store. According to the one month statistics of communication status, the packet loss rate (PLR) is 2.3%, which is as good as the presented results of those WSNs powered by battery. Referring to the electric power records, almost 54% energy can be saved by the feedback control of an energy harvesting sensor network. These results illustrate that, scavenging energy not only creates a reliable power source for electronic devices, such as wireless sensor nodes, but can also be an energy source by building an energy efficient program. |
Load balancing for multicast traffic in SDN using real-time link cost modification | In this paper we propose an approach for applying traffic load balancing to multicast traffic through real-time link cost modification in a software defined network (SDN) controller. We present an SDN controller architecture supporting traffic monitoring, group management, and multicast traffic routing. An implemented prototype is described, and this prototype is used to implement shortest path multicast routing techniques which make use of the real-time state of traffic flows in the network. This prototype is evaluated through experimentation in Mininet emulated wide area networks. Evaluation is presented in terms of resulting network performance metrics focusing on the distribution of traffic flows. Our results demonstrate that real-time modification of links costs produces statistically significant improvements in traffic distribution metrics, with an average improvement of up to 52.8% in traffic concentration relative to shortest-path routing. This indicates that SDN enables the use of real-time modification of link cost functions as an effective technique for implementing traffic load balancing for multicast traffic. |
No easy compromise: sustainability and the dilemmas and dynamics of change | Sustainable HCI grapples with how to use technology design to make social change. This is made difficult by recurring dilemmas about how to truly make change, like how to increase the scale and duration of design impact. In this essay, we reflect on our own journey to better understand design for social change by taking inspiration from two groups that have long engaged in making change towards sustainability -- simple living and organic farm families. We describe 5 key dilemmas that both the families and HCI designers struggle with and reflect on how we can learn from families' practices to negotiate these dilemmas. We contribute a deepened understanding of the dilemmas of and opportunities for making change for sustainable HCI. |
V-Band Separation Shock Characteristics | The V-band systems have been widely used in the aerospace industry for securing spacecraft inside the launch vehicle payload fairing. Separation is initiated by firing pyro-devices to rapidly release the tension bands. A significant shock transient is expected as a result of the band separation. The shock environment is defined with the assumption that the shock events due to the band separation are associated with the rapid release of the strain energy from the preload tension of the restraining band. |
Computer tomography assessment of pedicle screw insertion in percutaneous posterior transpedicular stabilization | Percutaneous insertion of cannulated pedicle screws has been recently developed as a minimally invasive alternative to the open technique during instrumented fusion procedures. Given the reported rate of screw misplacement using open techniques (up to 40%), we considered it important to analyze possible side effects of this new technique. Placement of 60 pedicle screws in 15 consecutive patients undergoing lumbar or lumbosacral fusion, mainly for spondylolisthesis, were analyzed. Axial, coronal, and sagittal reformatted computer tomography images were examined by three observers. Individual and consensus interpretation was obtained for each screw position. Along with frank penetration, we also looked at cortical encroachment of the pedicular wall by the screw. Thirteen percent of the patients (2/15) had severe frank penetration from the screws, while 80% of them (12/15) had some perforation. On axial images the incidence of severe frank pedicle penetration was 3.3% while the overall rate of screw perforation was 23%. In coronal images the overall screw perforation rate rose to 30% while the rate of severe frank pedicle penetration remained unchanged. One patient (6.6%) suffered S1 root symptoms due to a frankly medially misplaced screw, requiring re-operation. This study has shown that percutaneous insertion of cannulated pedicle screws in the lumbar spine is an acceptable procedure. The overall rate of perforation in axial images is below the higher rates reported in the literature but does remain important. Frank penetration of the pedicle was nevertheless low. It remains a demanding technique and has to be performed with extreme care to detail. |
A programmable CMOS voltage controlled ring oscillator for radio-frequency diathermy on-chip circuit | In this work we present the design of a digitally controlled ring type oscillator in 0.5 μm CMOS technology for a low-cost and portable radio-frequency diathermy (RFD) device. The oscillator circuit is composed by a low frequency ring oscillator (LFRO), a voltage controlled ring oscillator (VCRO), and a logic control. The digital circuit generates an input signal for the LFO, which generates a voltage ramp that controls the oscillating output signal of the VCRO in the range of 500 KHz to 1 MHz. Simulation results show that the proposed circuit exhibits controllable output characteristics in the range of 500 KHz–1 MHz, with low power consumption and low phase noise, making it suitable for a portable RFD device. |
HanGuard: SDN-driven protection of smart home WiFi devices from malicious mobile apps | A new development of smart-home systems is to use mobile apps to control IoT devices across a Home Area Network (HAN). As verified in our study, those systems tend to rely on the Wi-Fi router to authenticate other devices. This treatment exposes them to the attack from malicious apps, particularly those running on authorized phones, which the router does not have information to control. Mitigating this threat cannot solely rely on IoT manufacturers, which may need to change the hardware on the devices to support encryption, increasing the cost of the device, or software developers who we need to trust to implement security correctly. In this work, we present a new technique to control the communication between the IoT devices and their apps in a unified, backward-compatible way. Our approach, called HanGuard, does not require any changes to the IoT devices themselves, the IoT apps or the OS of the participating phones. HanGuard uses an SDN-like approach to offer fine-grained protection: each phone runs a non-system userspace Monitor app to identify the party that attempts to access the protected IoT device and inform the router through a control plane of its access decision; the router enforces the decision on the data plane after verifying whether the phone should be allowed to talk to the device. We implemented our design over both Android and iOS (> 95% of mobile OS market share) and a popular router. Our study shows that HanGuard is both efficient and effective in practice. |
Detect-to-Retrieve: Efficient Regional Aggregation for Image Search | Retrieving object instances among cluttered scenes efficiently requires compact yet comprehensive regional image representations. Intuitively, object semantics can help build the index that focuses on the most relevant regions. However, due to the lack of bounding-box datasets for objects of interest among retrieval benchmarks, most recent work on regional representations has focused on either uniform or class-agnostic region selection. In this paper, we first fill the void by providing a new dataset of landmark bounding boxes, based on the Google Landmarks dataset, that includes 94k images with manually curated boxes from 15k unique landmarks. Then, we demonstrate how a trained landmark detector, using our new dataset, can be leveraged to index image regions and improve retrieval accuracy while being much more efficient than existing regional methods. In addition, we further introduce a novel regional aggregated selective match kernel (R-ASMK) to effectively combine information from detected regions into an improved holistic image representation. R-ASMK boosts image retrieval accuracy substantially at no additional memory cost, while even outperforming systems that index image regions independently. Our complete image retrieval system improves upon the previous state-of-the-art by significant margins on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets. Code and data will be released. |
Multi-layered Gesture Recognition with Kinect | This paper proposes a novel multi-layered gesture recognition method with Kinect. We explore the essential linguistic characters of gestures: the components concurrent character and the sequential organization character, in a multi-layered framework, which extracts features from both the segmented semantic units and the whole gesture sequence and then sequentially classifies the motion, location and shape components. In the first layer, an improved principle motion is applied to model the motion component. In the second layer, a particle-based descriptor and a weighted dynamic time warping are proposed for the location component classification. In the last layer, the spatial path warping is further proposed to classify the shape component represented by unclosed shape context. The proposed method can obtain relatively high performance for one-shot learning gesture recognition on the ChaLearn Gesture Dataset comprising more than 50, 000 gesture sequences recorded with Kinect. |
Repositioning for pressure ulcer prevention in adults. | BACKGROUND
A pressure ulcer (PU), also referred to as a 'pressure injury', 'pressure sore', or 'bedsore' is defined as an area of localised tissue damage that is caused by unrelieved pressure, friction or shearing forces on any part of the body. PUs commonly occur in patients who are elderly and less mobile, and carry significant human and economic impacts. Immobility and physical inactivity are considered to be major risk factors for PU development and the manual repositioning of patients in hospital or long-term care is a common pressure ulcer prevention strategy.
OBJECTIVES
The objectives of this review were to:1) assess the effects of repositioning on the prevention of PUs in adults, regardless of risk or in-patient setting;2) ascertain the most effective repositioning schedules for preventing PUs in adults; and3) ascertain the incremental resource consequences and costs associated with implementing different repositioning regimens compared with alternate schedules or standard practice.
SEARCH METHODS
We searched the following electronic databases to identify reports of the relevant randomised controlled trials: the Cochrane Wounds Group Specialised Register (searched 06 September 2013), the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (2013, Issue 8); Ovid MEDLINE (1948 to August, Week 4, 2013); Ovid EMBASE (1974 to 2013, Week 35); EBESCO CINAHL (1982 to 30 August 2013); and the reference sections of studies that were included in the review.
SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs), published or unpublished, that assessed the effects of any repositioning schedule or different patient positions and measured PU incidence in adults in any setting.
DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Two review authors independently performed study selection, risk of bias assessment and data extraction.
MAIN RESULTS
We included three RCTs and one economic study representing a total of 502 randomised participants from acute and long-term care settings. Two trials compared the 30º and 90º tilt positions using similar repositioning frequencies (there was a small difference in frequency of overnight repositioning in the 90º tilt groups between the trials). The third RCT compared alternative repositioning frequencies.All three studies reported the proportion of patients developing PU of any grade, stage or category. None of the trials reported on pain, or quality of life, and only one reported on cost. All three trials were at high risk of bias.The two trials of 30º tilt vs. 90º were pooled using a random effects model (I² = 69%) (252 participants). The risk ratio for developing a PU in the 30º tilt and the standard 90º position was very imprecise (pooled RR 0.62, 95% CI 0.10 to 3.97, P=0.62, very low quality evidence). This comparison is underpowered and at risk of a Type 2 error (only 21 events).In the third study, a cluster randomised trial, participants were randomised between 2-hourly and 3-hourly repositioning on standard hospital mattresses and 4 hourly and 6 hourly repositioning on viscoelastic foam mattresses. This study was also underpowered and at high risk of bias. The risk ratio for pressure ulcers (any category) with 2-hourly repositioning compared with 3-hourly repositioning on a standard mattress was imprecise (RR 0.90, 95% CI 0.69 to 1.16, very low quality evidence). The risk ratio for pressure ulcers (any category) was compatible with a large reduction and no difference between 4-hourly repositioning and 6-hourly repositioning on viscoelastic foam (RR 0.73, 95% CI 0.53 to 1.02, very low quality evidence).A cost-effectiveness analysis based on data derived from one of the included parallel RCTs compared 3-hourly repositioning using the 30º tilt overnight with standard care consisting of 6-hourly repositioning using the 90º lateral rotation overnight. In this evaluation the only included cost was nursing time. The intervention was reported to be cost saving compared with standard care (nurse time cost per patient €206.6 vs €253.1, incremental difference €-46.5; 95%CI: €-1.25 to €-74.60).
AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
Repositioning is an integral component of pressure ulcer prevention and treatment; it has a sound theoretical rationale, and is widely recommended and used in practice. The lack of robust evaluations of repositioning frequency and position for pressure ulcer prevention mean that great uncertainty remains but it does not mean these interventions are ineffective since all comparisons are grossly underpowered. Current evidence is small in volume and at risk of bias and there is currently no strong evidence of a reduction in pressure ulcers with the 30° tilt compared with the standard 90º position or good evidence of an effect of repositioning frequency. There is a clear need for high-quality, adequately-powered trials to assess the effects of position and optimal frequency of repositioning on pressure ulcer incidence.The limited data derived from one economic evaluation means it remains unclear whether repositioning every 3 hours using the 30º tilt is less costly in terms of nursing time and more effective than standard care involving repositioning every 6 hours using a 90º tilt. |
Calculations of risk: Towards an understanding of insurance as a moral and political technology | This paper is a contribution to the continuing examination of the linkages and interdependencies between politics and forms of calculation. It uses the case of life insurance in England to argue that the constitution of risk as the object of insurance is linked to a series of important transformations in the aims and means of the liberal government of the “social” domain. Insurance and its associated calculative techniques have been constituted as moral and political technologies and relied upon by a succession of governmental-administrative projects of social regulation culminating in, but not exhausted by, the construction of a state-sponsored “insurantial” apparatus. |
Reciprocal myocardial-endocardial interactions pattern the delay in atrioventricular junction conduction. | Efficient blood flow depends on two developmental processes that occur within the atrioventricular junction (AVJ) of the heart: conduction delay, which entrains sequential chamber contraction; and valve formation, which prevents retrograde fluid movement. Defects in either result in severe congenital heart disease; however, little is known about the interplay between these two crucial developmental processes. Here, we show that AVJ conduction delay is locally assigned by the morphogenetic events that initiate valve formation. Our data demonstrate that physical separation from endocardial-derived factors prevents AVJ myocardium from becoming fast conducting. Mechanistically, this physical separation is induced by myocardial-derived factors that support cardiac jelly deposition at the onset of valve formation. These data offer a novel paradigm for conduction patterning, whereby reciprocal myocardial-endocardial interactions coordinate the processes of valve formation with establishment of conduction delay. This, in turn, synchronizes the electrophysiological and structural events necessary for the optimization of blood flow through the developing heart. |
Semantic expansion using word embedding clustering and convolutional neural network for improving short text classification | Text classification can help users to effectively handle and exploit useful information hidden in large-scale documents. However, the sparsity of data and the semantic sensitivity to context often hinder the classification performance of short texts. In order to overcome the weakness, we propose a unified framework to expand short texts based on word embedding clustering and convolutional neural network (CNN). Empirically, the semantically related words are usually close to each other in embedding spaces. Thus, we first discover semantic cliques via fast clustering. Then, by using additive composition over word embeddings from context with variable window width, the representations of multi-scale semantic units1 in short texts are computed. In embedding spaces, the restricted nearest word embeddings (NWEs)2 of the semantic units are chosen to constitute expanded matrices, where the semantic cliques are used as supervision information. Finally, for a short text, the projected matrix 3 and expanded matrices are combined and fed into CNN in parallel. Experimental results on two open benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. |
A CMOS Wideband Current-Mode Digital Polar Power Amplifier With Built-In AM–PM Distortion Self-Compensation | This paper presents a fully integrated wideband current-mode digital polar power amplifier (DPA) in CMOS with built-in AM–PM distortion self-compensation. Feedforward capacitors are implemented in each differential cascode digital power cell. These feedforward capacitors operate together with a proposed DPA biasing scheme to minimize the DPA output device capacitance <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C_{d}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> variations over a wide output power range and a wide carrier frequency bandwidth, resulting in DPA AM–PM distortion reduction. A three-coil transformer-based DPA output passive network is implemented within a single transformer footprint (330 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m} \,\, \times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 330 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and provides parallel power combining and load impedance transformation with a low loss, an octave bandwidth, and a large impedance transformation ratio. Moreover, this proposed power amplifier (PA) output passive network shows a desensitized phase response to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C_{d}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> variations and further suppresses the DPA AM–PM distortion. Both proposed AM–PM distortion self-compensation techniques are effective for a large carrier frequency range and a wide modulation bandwidth, and are independent of the DPA AM control codes. This results in a superior inherent DPA phase linearity and reduces or even eliminates the need for phase pre-distortion, which dramatically simplifies the DPA pre-distortion computations. As a proof-of-concept, a 2–4.3 GHz wideband DPA is implemented in a standard 28-nm bulk CMOS process. Operating with a low supply voltage of 1.4 V for enhanced reliability, the DPA demonstrates ±0.5 dB PA output power bandwidth from 2 to 4.3 GHz with +24.9 dBm peak output power at 3.1 GHz. The measured peak PA drain efficiency is 42.7% at 2.5 GHz and is more than 27% from 2 to 4.3 GHz. The measured PA AM–PM distortion is within 6.8° at 2.8 GHz over the PA output power dynamic range of 25 dB, achieving the lowest AM–PM distortion among recently reported current-mode DPAs in the same frequency range. Without any phase pre-distortion, modulation measurements with a 20-MHz 802.11n standard compliant signal demonstrate 2.95% rms error vector magnitude, −33.5 dBc adjacent channel leakage ratio, 15.6% PA drain efficiency, and +14.6 dBm PA average output power at 2.8 GHz. |
Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science. | SummaryOngoing political controversies around the world exemplify a long-standing and widespread preoccupation with the acceptability of homosexuality. Nonheterosexual people have seen dramatic surges both in their rights and in positive public opinion in many Western countries. In contrast, in much of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Oceania, and parts of Asia, homosexual behavior remains illegal and severely punishable, with some countries retaining the death penalty for it. Political controversies about sexual orientation have often overlapped with scientific controversies. That is, participants on both sides of the sociopolitical debates have tended to believe that scientific findings-and scientific truths-about sexual orientation matter a great deal in making political decisions. The most contentious scientific issues have concerned the causes of sexual orientation-that is, why are some people heterosexual, others bisexual, and others homosexual? The actual relevance of these issues to social, political, and ethical decisions is often poorly justified, however. |
Matching Ontologies for Emergency Evacuation Plans | A logic circuit incorporating carry look-ahead in which efficiency can be achieved regarding the hardware for generating the sum signals and carry signals by a suitable choice of the adder gate, making use of the already present signal &upbar& a1x &upbar& bi which is used for generating the carry look-ahead signal. |
High performance MIMO antenna for 5G wearable devices | In this paper, a dual-band 2×2 MIMO antenna for wearable device applications is presented to support the 5G radio frequency allocations at 3.3–3.6 and 4.5–5 GHz in China. The single antenna unit is composed of a monopole mode and a folded loop mode with a single feed to cover these two bands. Two identical antennas positioned at top and bottom sides of a smart watch sized PCB (40×40mm2) are used to demonstrate the MIMO performance. The simulation results from xFDTD show that these MIMO antennas can achieve over 85 % efficiency, more than 17 dB isolation and 0.02 correlation coefficient at both bands. |
A Novel Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm | Artificial bee colony algorithm is a new population-based evolutionary method based on the intelligent behavior of honey bee swarm. It has shown more effective than other biological-inspired algorithms. However, there are still insufficiencies in ABC algorithm, which is good at exploration but poor at exploitation and its convergence speed is also an issue in some cases. For these insufficiencies, we propose a novel artificial bee colony algorithm (NABC) for numerical optimization problems in this paper to improve the exploitation capability by incorporating the current best solution into the search procedure. Experiments are conducted on a set of unimodal/multimodal benchmark functions. The experiments results of NABC have been compared with Gbest-guided artificial bee colony algorithm (G-ABC), improved artificial bee colony algorithm (I-ABC), Elitist artificial bee colony algorithm (E-ABC). The results show that NABC is superior to those algorithms in most of the tested functions. |
Efficient Mobile Robot Navigation using 3D Surfel Grid Maps | We present robust and efficient means for mobile robot navigation using a 3D representation of the environment. We build 3D surfel grid maps and propose Monte Carlo localization with probabilistic observation models for 2D and 3D sensors in such maps. In contrast to localization methods that utilize a 2D laser scanner in a static horizontal mounting, our method takes advantage of the 3D structure in the environment. This is useful, for instance, to localize in crowds of people: The robot can focus on the static parts of the environment above the person’s height. Finally, we extract navigation maps for 2D path planning from the 3D maps. Our approach avoids discretization effects and considers the complete height range of the robot to estimate traversability. In experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of our approach for pose tracking and global localization – even in a crowded environment. |