A comparative study was performed on the initial and final bacillary indexes of 213 multibacillary leprosy patients who received 12 doses (Group 1: 128 patients) or 24 doses (Group 2: 85 patients) of multidrug therapy (MDT/WHO) to measure the effectiveness of the two regimens. All patients were evaluated at treatment baseline, 12 months, and 24 months. The reduction in bacillary levels and mean...

In order to evaluate the graduates attending second-round examination objectively, this study established graduate second-round examination evaluate system based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. Evaluation indexes in the system included knowledge structure, scientific research ability and comprehensive quality of graduates attending second-round exa...

Network criticality is a graph-theoretic metric that quantifies network robustness, and that was originally designed to capture the effect of environmental changes in core networks. This paper investigates the application of network criticality in designing robust power allocation and flow assignment algorithms for wireless networks. Achieving robust behavior in wireless networks is a challengi...

Adopting mixed-criticality architectures enable safe sharing of computational resources between tasks of different criticalities consequently leading to reduced Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) requirements. A majority of the research in mixed-criticality systems focuses on scheduling tasks whose Worst Case Execution Times (WCETs) are certified to varying levels of assurances. If any given task ov...

The development of mixed-criticality systems that integrate applications of different criticality levels (safety, security, real-time and non real-time) can provide multiple benefits such as product cost-size-weight reduction, reliability increase and scalability. However, the integration of applications of different levels of criticality leads to several challenges with respect to safety certi...

The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) started working on criticality-safety related subjects in the seventies. In the mid-nineties, several activities related to criticality-safety were grouped together into the Working Party on Nuclear Criticality Safety. This working party has since been operating and reporting to the Nuclear Science Committee. Four expert groups co-ordinate various activities...

The dynamics of microelectrode local field potentials from cortical slice cultures shows critical behavior. A desirable feature of criticality is that information transmission is optimal in this state. We explore a biologically plausible neural net model that can dynamically converge on criticality and that can return to criticality if perturbed away from it. Our model assumes the presence of a...

This paper demonstrates the advantage of combining a ranked output from a fulltext index and another from an index generated using generic summary texts. Our main ndings are as follows: (1) The combination of a fulltext-based run and a summary-based run can signi cantly outperform either alone, especially when the fulltext evidence is emphasized. (2) The primary role of the summary index in the...

Many experiments have suggested that the brain operates close to a critical state, based on signatures of criticality such as power-law distributed neuronal avalanches. In neural network models, criticality is a dynamical state that maximizes information processing capacities, e.g. sensitivity to input, dynamical range and storage capacity, which makes it a favorable candidate state for brain f...

The capability of hardware is constantly developing in capacity, speed and efficiency. This development has sparked industrial and academic interest in how best to utilise the increased capability. It is now possible to integrate many systems that in the past might have existed as different nodes, into the one consolidated architecture. This desire to centralise functionality leads to the poten...