Mechanoresponsive Luminescent Molecular Assemblies: An Emerging Class of Materials

The possibility to change the molecular assembled structures of organic and organometallic materials through mechanical stimulation is emerging as a general and powerful concept for the design of functional materials. In particular, the photophysical properties such as photoluminescence color, quantum yield, and emission lifetime of organic and organometallic fluorophores can significantly depend on the molecular packing, enabling the development of molecular materials with mechanoresponsive luminescence characteristics. Indeed, an increasing number of studies have shown in recent years that mechanical force can be utilized to change the molecular arrangement, and thereby the optical response, of luminescent molecular assemblies of π-conjugated organic or organometallic molecules. Here, the development of such mechanoresponsive luminescent (MRL) molecular assemblies consisting of organic or organometallic molecules is reviewed and emerging trends in this research field are summarized. After a brief introduction of mechanoresponsive luminescence observed in molecular assemblies, the concept of “luminescent molecular domino” is introduced, before molecular materials that show turn-on/off of photoluminescence in response to mechanical stimulation are reviewed. Mechanically stimulated multicolor changes and water-soluble MRL materials are also highlighted and approaches that combine the concept of MRL molecular assemblies with other materials types are presented in the last part of this progress report

The ATLAS Tau Trigger Performance during LHC Run 1 and Prospects for Run 2

AbstractThe ATLAS tau trigger is designed to select the hadronic decays of tau leptons. Tau leptons play an important role in Standard Model (SM) physics, such as in Higgs boson decays. Tau leptons are also important in searches for beyond the SM (BSM) scenarios, such as supersymmetry, where they are often produced preferentially. During the 2010-2012 LHC run (Run 1), tau triggers were implemented and used successfully in ATLAS, contributing to several important results such as the evidence for H→ττ. For the 2015 LHC run (Run 2), the LHC will be upgraded. Due to the energy increase, the cross sections for SM processes are expected to get much larger. Additionally, the number of overlapping interactions per bunch crossing (pile-up) is expected to increase significantly. It will therefore be challenging to control trigger rates while keeping interesting physics events. This document summarizes the tau trigger performance in Run 1 and its prospects for Run 2

Effects of a self-management program on antiemetic-induced constipation during chemotherapy among breast cancer patients: a randomized controlled clinical trial.

Research on patient-reported outcomes indicates that constipation is a common adverse effect of chemotherapy, and the use of 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin; 5HT3) receptor antagonists aggravates this condition. As cancer patients take multiple drugs as a part of their clinical management, a non-pharmacological self-management (SM) of constipation would be recommended. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a SM program on antiemetic-induced constipation in cancer patients. Thirty patients with breast cancer, receiving 5HT3 receptor antagonists to prevent emesis during chemotherapy were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. The SM program consisted of abdominal massage, abdominal muscle stretching, and education on proper defecation position. The intervention group started the program before the first chemotherapy cycle, whereas patients in the wait-list control group received the program on the day before their second chemotherapy cycle. The primary outcome was constipation severity, assessed by the constipation assessment scale (CAS, sum of eight components). The secondary outcome included each CAS component (0-2 points) and mood states. A self-reported assessment of satisfaction with the program was performed. The program produced a statistically and clinically significant alleviation of constipation severity (mean difference in CAS, -3.00; P = 0.02), decrease in the likelihood of a small volume of stool (P = 0.03), and decrease in depression and dejection (P = 0.02). With regards to program satisfaction, 43.6 and 26.4 % patients rated the program as excellent and good, respectively. Our SM program is effective for mitigating the symptoms of antiemetic-induced constipation during chemotherapy

Shortest cover after edit

This paper investigates the (quasi-)periodicity of a string when the string is edited. A string $C$ is called a cover (as known as a quasi-period) of a string $T$ if each character of $T$ lies within some occurrence of $C$. By definition, a cover of $T$ must be a border of $T$; that is, it occurs both as a prefix and as a suffix of $T$. In this paper, we focus on the changes in the longest border and the shortest cover of a string when the string is edited only once. We propose a data structure of size $O(n)$ that computes the longest border and the shortest cover of the string in $O(\ell \log n)$ time after an edit operation (either insertion, deletion, or substitution of some string) is applied to the input string $T$ of length $n$, where $\ell$ is the length of the string being inserted or substituted. The data structure can be constructed in $O(n)$ time given string $T$

Finding Top-k Longest Palindromes in Substrings

Palindromes are strings that read the same forward and backward. Problems of computing palindromic structures in strings have been studied for many years with a motivation of their application to biology. The longest palindrome problem is one of the most important and classical problems regarding palindromic structures, that is, to compute the longest palindrome appearing in a string $T$ of length $n$. The problem can be solved in $O(n)$ time by the famous algorithm of Manacher [Journal of the ACM, 1975]. This paper generalizes the longest palindrome problem to the problem of finding top-$k$ longest palindromes in an arbitrary substring, including the input string $T$ itself. The internal top-$k$ longest palindrome query is, given a substring $T[i..j]$ of $T$ and a positive integer $k$ as a query, to compute the top-$k$ longest palindromes appearing in $T[i.. j]$. This paper proposes a linear-size data structure that can answer internal top-$k$ longest palindromes query in optimal $O(k)$ time. Also, given the input string $T$, our data structure can be constructed in $O(n\log n)$ time. For $k = 1$, the construction time is reduced to $O(n)$

Shortest Cover After Edit

This paper investigates the (quasi-)periodicity of a string when the string is edited. A string C is called a cover (as known as a quasi-period) of a string T if each character of T lies within some occurrence of C. By definition, a cover of T must be a border of T; that is, it occurs both as a prefix and as a suffix of T. In this paper, we focus on the changes in the longest border and the shortest cover of a string when the string is edited only once. We propose a data structure of size O(n) that computes the longest border and the shortest cover of the string in O( log n) time after an edit operation (either insertion, deletion, or substitution of some string) is applied to the input string T of length n, where is the length of the string being inserted or substituted. The data structure can be constructed in O(n) time given string T

A bridge between robustness and simplicity: practical control design for complex systems

Automatic control design has been one of the major subjects in real-world system design/operation and is becoming much more significant today in accordance with increasing size, changing structure, uncertainties and complexity of artificial industry systems. A major challenge in a new environment is to integrate computing, communication and control into appropriate levels of real-world systems operation and control. In practice, many control systems usually track different control objectives such as stability, disturbance attenuation and reference tracking with considering practical constraints, simultaneously. At the moment in the industry applications, it is desirable to meet all specified goals using the controllers with simple structures. Since, practically these controllers are commonly designed based on experiences, classical and trial-and-error approaches, they are incapable of obtaining good dynamical performance to capture all design objectives and specifications for a wide range of operating conditions and various disturbances. It is significant to note that because of using simple structure, pertaining to the low-order control synthesis for dynamical systems in the presence of strong constraints and tight objectives are few and restrictive. Under such conditions, the synthesis process may not approach to a strictly feasible solution. Therefore, the most of robust and optimal approaches suggest complex state-feedback or high-order dynamic controllers. Moreover in the most of proposed approaches, a single performance criterion has been used to evaluate the robustness of resulted control systems. This research addresses three systematical, fast and flexible algorithms to design of low order or static output controllers for dynamical systems. The developed strategies attempt to invoke the strict conditions and bridge the gap between the power of optimal/robust control theory and industrial control design. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies, they have been applied to several complex systems in the electric industry