AT THIS POINT IN TIME

This Time of Dying

A must-read for those who think fl u pandemic preparedness is much ado about nothing, this fi rst novel by Reina James brings home the severity and plausibility of a fl u disaster. And without data, statistics, or comment, it makes a compelling case for progress on the matter of infl uenza, to ease suffering, prevent spread, and possibly eliminate the scourge. A series of journal entries beginn...

Qualitative point-of-care human chorionic gonadotropin testing: can we defuse this ticking time bomb?

Qualitative point-of-care (POC) human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) testing is routinely performed on urine samples obtained in the Emergency Department (ED) or before surgery to rule out pregnancy and prevent fetal injury or death. Because potentially harmful treatments are allowed to proceed on the basis of a negative hCG test result, falsenegative results can have disastrous consequences. We ...

this issue at a glance

in the retrospective investigation titled “risk factors evaluation of threshold retinopathy of prematurity” at a tertiary ophthalmic center in tehran, iran, the authors have studied 859 premature neonates during one year (2008-2009). 791 eyes have had retinopathy of prematurity (rop) and 7.4% of them presented threshold retinopathy (trop). the investigators aim has been to present and compare t...

Singularity of Super-Brownian Local Time at a Point Catalyst

Improving Point-Based POMDP Policies at Run-Time

Point-based algorithms have been widely used for computing approximate solutions for POMDPs. While they work well in many cases, they can perform very poorly if the current belief state at run time has not been well sampled. In this paper we proposed several heuristic functions for estimating when offline approximate policies are likely to perform poorly at the current belief point. We show tha...