introduction: insome cases, assist devices are required to ensure an adequate cardiac output after cardiac surgery. intra-aortic balloon pump (iabp) is the most commonly used cardiac assist device, which provides first-line support for patients with heart failure. the aim of this study was to determine factors affecting the mortality rate of patients receiving iabp. materials & methods:  in thi...

Knowledge on gene action and trait expression are important for effective breeding. The objective of this study was to determine the general combining ability (GCA), specific combining ability (SCA), maternal effects and heritability of drought tolerance, yield and yield components of candidate sweetpotato clones. Twelve genotypes selected for their high yield, dry matter content or drought tol...

We present a methodology to forecast mortality rates and estimate longevity and mortality risks. The methodology uses generalized dynamic factor models fitted to the differences in the log-mortality rates. We compare their prediction performance with that of models previously described in the literature, including the traditional static factor model fitted to log-mortality rates. We also constr...

We continue our presentation of VINE. In this paper, we begin with a description of relevant architectural properties of the serial and shared memory parallel computers on which VINE is intended to run, and describe their influences on the design of the code itself. We continue with a detailed description of a number of optimizations made to the layout of the particle data in memory and to our ...

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: C1 C6 G1 Keywords: Energy stocks C-vines D-vines Dependence structure Risk measures Portfolio optimization This article models the dependence risk and resource allocation characteristics of two 20-stock coal–uranium and oil–gas sector portfolios from the Australian market in the context of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. The modeling framework...

Several studies have shown that vineyards are spatially variable at within field scale. Characterizing this variability could be used to improve grape and wine production, by adapting management practices and harvesting to the vineyard variability. The goal of this work is to calibrate a spatial model by coupling high quality, high cost punctual vine measurements with low cost medium-high densi...

Distributed hash tables suffer from several security and privacy vulnerabilities, including the problem of Sybil attacks. Existing social network-based solutions to mitigate the Sybil attacks in DHT routing have a high state requirement and do not provide an adequate level of privacy. For instance, such techniques require a user to reveal their social network contacts. We design X-Vine, a prote...

among the therapeutic options for achalasia are pneumatic dilatation (pd), an appropriate long-term therapy, and botulinum toxin injection (bt) that is a relatively short-term therapy. this study aimed to compare therapeutic effect of repetitive pneumatic dilation with a combined method (botulinum toxin injection and pneumatic dilation) in a group of achalasia patients who are low responder to ...

With the rapid development of mobile networking and end-terminals, anytime and anywhere data access becomes readily available nowadays. Given the crowdsourced content capturing and sharing, the preferred length becomes shorter and shorter, even for such multimedia content as video. A representative is Twitter’s Vine service, which, available exclusively to mobile users, enables them to create u...