Approaches are discussed for a direct solar-pumped semiconductor laser. Efficiencies of 35% should be achievable, an order of magnitude better than the efficiency achieved by other solar-pumped lasers. The output wavelength of a semiconductor laser will be well matched to the optimum conversion efficiency of a solar cell of the same material. Solar pumped semiconductor lasers are thus an excell...

Estimate model parameter and the structure simultaneously is a crucial and challenging problem in system identification. For solving the problem, a hybrid algorithm by integrating two-order oscillating particle swarm optimization with successive quadratic programming is proposed in this paper. The two-order oscillating particle swarm optimization is showed to converge rapidly to a near optimum ...

The prevalence of psychiatric disorder in 100 patients attending their general practitioner was found to be 33% based on the criteria of the DSM-3 diagnostic system. Using the DSM-3 diagnosis as a yardstick, the performance of the hospital anxiety depression scale was compared with that of the general health questionnaire. Relative operating coefficient analysis showed good discrimination betwe...

OBJECTIVES To assess the value of percentage free prostate-specific antigen (%fPSA) in the detection of prostate cancer among Nigerian men with an intermediate total PSA level (4-10 ng/mL), and to show if the optimum threshold for biopsy is different from Caucasian values when the widely used (six-core, digitally directed) prostate biopsy protocol in Nigerians is applied. PATIENTS AND METHODS...

In this work, we present a novel portable, flexible and easy-to-use experimental setup for investigating salinity-based information transmission in microfluidic channels. At the receiver, different salinity-levels are detected by customized electronic circuit, which measures electrical conductivity via electrodes channel. We provide detailed description of setup, including chip fabrication. Mor...

We consider a univariate semimartingale model for (the logarithm of) an asset price, containing jumps having possibly infinite activity (IA). The nonparametric threshold estimator ˆ IV n of the integrated variance IV := ∫ T 0 σ sds proposed in [6] is constructed using observations on a discrete time grid, and precisely it sums up the squared increments of the process when they are under a thres...

OBJECTIVE  To compare the predictive accuracy and clinical utility of five risk scoring systems in the assessment of patients with upper gastrointestinal bleeding. DESIGN  International multicentre prospective study. SETTING  Six large hospitals in Europe, North America, Asia, and Oceania. PARTICIPANTS  3012 consecutive patients presenting over 12 months with upper gastrointestinal bleedi...

In order to understand the limits and dynamics of methane (CH(4)) oxidation in landfill cover soils, we investigated CH(4) oxidation in daily, intermediate, and final cover soils from two California landfills as a function of temperature, soil moisture and CO(2) concentration. The results indicate a significant difference between the observed soil CH(4) oxidation at field sampled conditions com...

A Silicon tunnel FET with Si1-x Gex source is investigated and optimized for improved performance. In order to optimize the device performance, Germanium mole fraction and the length of the SiGe region is varied and the optimum values are obtained. Moreover, the source/channel hetero-junction is assumed graded. The grading distance is varied from zero (abrupt hetero-junction) to total channel l...

Multi-round group-broadcast scheme to efficiently deduce the desired function and reduce redundancy in collocated Gaussian networks is studied. We focus on a particular type-threshold function, which is a subclass of symmetric functions. We numerically provide the optimum multi-round group-broadcast scheme for given parameters. An existing solution to non-linear discrete optimization problems i...