The 2008 U.K. national chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) audit examined the use of supported discharge programmes (SDPs) in clinical practice against British Thoracic Society guidelines. 98% of acute U.K. trusts participated. SDPs were available in 142 of 239 (59%) units. 1630 of 8971 (18%) patients with COPD were treated within SDPs. Median (IQR) stay in hospital for patients within...

independence of observations is a fundamental assumption in designing an x chart for individual observations. but unfortunately, the assumption of existence of independent data is not even approximately satisfied. in fact, there is one kind of autocorrelation in the data. this paper demonstrates, through simulating an ar(1) process, that the autocorrelation in the data has deep effect on x char...

Semidefinite programs (SDPs) – some of the most useful and pervasive optimization problems of the last few decades – often behave pathologically: the optimal values of the primal and dual problems may differ and may not be attained. Such SDPs are theoretically interesting and often impossible to solve. Yet, the pathological SDPs in the literature look strikingly similar, and our recent paper [1...

In this paper, we examine the robustness of a relax-and-round k-means clustering procedure, a method for clustering subgaussian mixtures using semidefinite programming first introduced in [MVW16]. We are interested in the robustness of the algorithm when there is an adversarial corruption of N points each through distance at most R0. We show that under such corruption this specific algorithm we...

The Galileo system introduces an extremely wideband civil E5 signal for high precision navigation. The structure of the receiver for the E5 signal is complicated due to the signal complexity and the large bandwidth. It is possible to process the whole E5 signal or process separately E5a and E5b parts combining obtained results afterwards (we call here such method as piece-wise processing). The ...

Objective analysis of intelligibility by a speech recognizer and prosodic features was performed for close-talking recordings before. This study examined whether this is also possible for reverberated speech. In order to ensure that only the room acoustics are different, artificial reverberation was used. 82 patients after partial laryngectomy read a standardized text, 5 experienced raters asse...