OBJECTIVE To examine the effects of the length and timing of nighttime naps on performance and physiological functions, an experimental study was carried out under simulated night shift schedules. METHODS Six students were recruited for this study that was composed of 5 experiments. Each experiment involved 3 consecutive days with one night shift (22:00-8:00) followed by daytime sleep and nig...

Nuisance attribute projection (NAP) was an effective method to reduce session variability in SVM-based speaker verification systems. As the expanded feature space of nonlinear kernels is usually high or infinite dimensional, it is difficult to find nuisance directions via conventional eigenvalue analysis and to do projection directly in the feature space. In this paper, two different approaches...

Nuisance attribute projection (NAP) has become a common method for compensation of channel effects, session variation, speaker variation, and general mismatch in speaker recognition. NAP uses an orthogonal projection to remove a nuisance subspace from a larger expansion space that contains the speaker information. Training the NAP subspace is based on optimizing pairwise distances to reduce int...

Purification of monocyte-derived NAP-1/IL-8 by preparative reversed-phase (RP)-HPLC led to the detection of a second peak with polymorphonuclear leukocyte (PMNL)-activating (degranulation, chemotaxis) properties. The monokine responsible for this biological activity, which we tentatively termed NAP-3, could be purified to homogeneity by three different RP-HPLC steps. Tricine-SDS-PAGE analysis g...

OBJECTIVE To assess which bowel preparation agent is most effective. METHODS A search of randomized trials between January 1990 and July 2005 was obtained, using MEDLINE and PubMed databases, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. Meta-analysis was performed using the Forest plot review. RESULTS Sodium phosphate (NaP) was more effective in bowel cleansing than polyethylene ...

OBJECTIVES A measure to increase the electroencephalogram (EEG) outcome includes a short period of nap sleep during a routine standard EEG with the aim of increasing its sensitivity to interictal abnormalities or provoking seizures. As part of an ongoing auditing of our EEG data, we aimed to investigate the contribution of nap sleep during routine outpatient department based EEGs requested for ...

3-Nitroacetophenone (3-NAP) is an organic compound used as an intermediate for the synthesis of pharmaceutical agents. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of biofield energy treatment on the physical, thermal and spectral properties of 3-NAP. The study was performed in two groups i.e. control and treated. The control group remained as untreated, and the treated group received Mr. T...

Using recombinantly expressed proteins and synthetic peptides, we examined the structural/functional features of the platelet chemokines, neutrophil-activating peptide-2 (NAP-2) and platelet factor 4 (PF4); that were important in their activation of neutrophils. Previous studies with the chemokine interleukin-8 (IL-8) had shown that the N-terminal region preceding the first cysteine residue was...

LPS and mitogen-stimulated mononuclear cells secrete a cytokine, which is able to activate the PMNL-arachidonate-5-lipoxygenase. This cytokine has been proven to be identical with the recently characterized novel neutrophil-activating peptide NAP/IL-8. NAP/IL-8 is able to activate human PMNL for release of LTB4, omega-oxidized LTB4, and 5-HETE in the presence of exogenous AA. Half-maximal conce...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To assess the impact of a daytime sleep medical procedure--the PAP-NAP--on adherence to positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy among insomnia patients with sleep disordered breathing (SDB) METHODS: The PAP-NAP is based on Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes and combines psychological and physiological treatments into one procedure, which increases contact time between SD...