To evaluate autonomic influence on arrhythmogenesis in an animal preparation of triggered activity, we gave increasing doses of cesium chloride (0.125 to 5.0 mmol/kg iv) to 24 dogs distributed equally among four protocols of autonomic intervention: control, total denervation, beta-blockade, and left stellate stimulation. All dogs underwent atrioventricular node ablation followed by ventricular ...

The most obvious function performed by social scientists in modern America has been a cognitive one: the advancement of knowledge about society. Another, more subtle function has been a moral one: the articulation and criticism of standards for conduct. The role of the public moralist had long been performed by the clergy and by men and women of letters, but in the twentieth century this role i...

We propose a pioneering approach that integrates optimization algorithms and technology computer-aided design to automatically optimize laterally-diffused metal-oxide-semiconductors (LDMOS) with field-oxide structure. define the ratio of square breakdown voltage divided by specific on-resistance as figure-of-merit (FOM) objective function our optimization. compare performance three different al...

a precautionary note on promising findings Mead et al recently meta-analysed data on the effectiveness of befriending interventions on reducing depressive symptoms. Befriending was defined as a non-professional intervention that provides clients with non-directive, emotionally focused support by one or more individuals; was not psychoeducational or mentoring in nature; and did not constitute fo...

ow safe is our food? Put another way, how much illness in the United States is caused by foodborne pathogens? It sounds like a simple question. Getting a reasonable answer, however, is far from simple. The basic problem lies in the fact that only a small fraction of foodborne disease cases get reported through offi cial (or unoffi cial) reporting systems. Calculating the " real " rate of foodbo...

STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE Within the genus Mesoplodon, there are four species of beaked whales that reside in the northwest Atlantic. These include T rue's beak ed wha le, Mesoplodon mirus; Gervais' b eaked w hale, M. europaeus; Blainville's beaked whale , M. densirostris ; and Sow erby's bea ked wh ale, M. bidens (Mead 1989). Th ese species are difficult to identify to the species ...

One of the fundamental difficulties in engineering design is the multiplicity of local solutions. This has triggered great efforts to develop global search algorithms. Globality, however, often has a prohibitively high numerical cost for real problems. A fixed cost local search, which sequentially becomes global is developed. Globalization is achieved by probabilistic restart. A spacial probabi...

JERE MEAD did something very unusual. He established a whole new field of research. Respiratory Mechanics was his invention. Sure, there had been sporadic forays into the field beforehand, but nothing systematic. He created, developed, nurtured, and maintained this field while stimulating thousands of scientists from around the world to join him on his remarkable voyage of discovery. The luckie...

The Nelder–Mead algorithm, a longstanding direct search method for unconstrained optimization published in 1965, is designed to minimize a scalar-valued function f of n real variables using only function values, without any derivative information. Each Nelder–Mead iteration is associated with a nondegenerate simplex defined by n+ 1 vertices and their function values; a typical iteration produce...