BACKGROUND Arterial cannulation for continuous blood-pressure measurement and frequent arterial-blood sampling commonly are required in critically ill patients. OBJECTIVES To compare ultrasound (US)-guided versus traditional palpation placement of arterial lines for time to placement, number of attempts, sites used, and complications. METHODS This was a prospective, randomized interventiona...

Room acoustic parameters are key information for dereverberation or speech recognition. Usually, when one needs to assess the level of reverberation, only the reverberation time RT60 or a direct to reverberant sounds index Dτ is estimated. Yet, methods which blindly estimate the reverberation time from reverberant recorded speech do not always differentiate the RT60 from the Dτ to evaluate the ...

In this paper, we present a blindly adaptive beamforming algorithm which is based on the second order interference estimation to maximize the received SINR. Using the desired signature code and the orthogonal to it code, a new code lter is introduced to decompose the receiving signals into two part : desired information and interference. The above method motivates us to develop the QR-decomposi...

The hypothesis that water "treated" with intention can affect ice crystals formed from that water was pilot tested under double-blind conditions. A group of approximately 2,000 people in Tokyo focused positive intentions toward water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. That group was unaware of similar water samples set aside in a different location as con...

We describe a practical e-voting protocol which guarantees e-voting protocol requirements: eligibility, privacy, accuracy, fairness, receipt-freeness, uncoercibility, robustness and verifiability. Unlike existing blind signature based protocols, in which the authority blindly signs ballot or part of ballot, the authority in our protocol blindly signs voter’s pseudo identity. Hereafter, voter be...

When phone segmentations are known a priori, normalizing the duration of each phone has been shown to be effective in overcoming weaknesses in duration modeling of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). While we have observed potential relative reductions in word error rate (WER) of up to 34.6% with oracle segmentation information, it has been difficult to achieve significant improvement in WER with segm...

Quasi-interpretations are a technique to guarantee complexity bounds on first-order functional programs: with termination orderings they give in particular a sufficient condition for a program to be executable in polynomial time ([14]), called here the P-criterion. We study properties of the programs satisfying the P-criterion, in order to better understand its intensional expressive power. Giv...