BACKGROUND Distortion of iron homeostasis may contribute to the pathogenesis of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and tuberculosis (TB). We studied the association of the central iron-regulatory hormone hepcidin with the severity of HIV and the association between hepcidin and other markers of iron homeostasis with development of TB. METHODS Three groups of patients were selected f...

This is a feasibility study of a new measurement technique for spent nuclear fuel. The technique combines gamma emission tomography with neutron activation analysis. The idea is to measure high-energy characteristic gamma from short-lived fission products and thereby verify the fissile material content in spent nuclear fuel assemblies. Simulations using MCNP were done to estimate the expected d...

In this paper a nonlinear state observer based on a distributed parameter model is proposed for a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). The estimation technique is implemented using a model-based nonlinear observer with a nonlinear disturbance observer in parallel. To implement the model, a nite element discretisation is performed to take advantage of the boundary conditions of the proble...

We combine adaptivity and memoization to obtain an incremental computation technique that dramatically improves performance over adaptivity and memoization alone. The key contribution is adaptive memoization, which enables result re-use by matching any subset of the function arguments to a previous function call and updating the result to satisfy the unmatched arguments via adaptivity. We study...

Spoken recordings that have been transcribed for human reading (e.g. as captions for audiovisual material, or to provide alternative modes of access to recordings) are widely available in many languages. Such recordings and transcriptions have proven to be a valuable source of ASR data in well-resourced languages, but have not been exploited to a significant extent in under-resourced languages ...

There is considerable interest in community interventions for health promotion, where the community is the experimental unit. Because such interventions are expensive, the number of experimental units (communities) is usually small. Because of the small number of communities involved, investigators often match treatment and control communities on demographic variables before randomization to mi...

In the past it has not been possible to measure optically the membrane potential of cells and collections of cells that are either naturally photosensitive or that can be activated by photolyzable caged transmitter molecules. This paper reports on a unique application of nonlinear optics that can monitor the potential of cellular membranes with a near-infrared source. Among many other singular ...

The treatment of glenoid bone loss in the setting of recurrent shoulder instability remains a challenge. This is because of the nonanatomic nature and resultant incongruous joint resulting from most bony augmentation procedures. We present a novel technique for the management of glenoid bone deficiency by using a fresh osteochondral distal tibial allograft. We have found that the distal tibia h...

the mediterranean flour moth, ephestia kuehniella zeller, is one of the major pests in stored products worldwide. several problems assossiated with the use of conventional insecticides have strongly demonstrated the need for applying alternative safe compounds such as insect growth regulators (igrs). in the present study, growth regulating activity and hematological effects of pyriproxifen and ...

Although blocking or pairing before randomization is a basic principle of experimental design, the principle is almost invariably applied to at most one or two blocking variables. Here, we discuss the use of optimal multivariate matching prior to randomization to improve covariate balance for many variables at the same time, presenting an algorithm and a case-study of its performance. The metho...