From Falx to Fingertips: An Exercise in Mind-Body Awareness Through Acupuncture

This is a subjective account of an acupuncture treatment that includes a brief scientific exploration of its mechanisms of action. Additionally, connections are made between acupuncture and osteopathic manual manipulation, yoga, and meditation

Catalysis of Stark-Tuned Interactions Between Ultracold Rydberg Atoms

We present the study of the catalysis effect in the resonant energy transfer between ultracold 85Rb Rydberg atoms. We have investigated the energy transfer process of 34p + 34p → 34s + 35s, and observed Stark-tuned Forster resonances. When additional Rydberg atoms of 34d state are included in the interaction, an increase in the population of 34s states atoms is observed. Although the 34d state atoms do not directly participate in the resonant energy transfer that produces 34s state atoms, they add an additional interaction channel 34p + 34d 34d + 34 p that is resonant for all electric fields. We have also investigated the time dependence of the resonant interactions of 34p → + 34p → 34s + 35s, compared the experimental results with the numerical simulations of simple models, and found them to be in good agreement

Pleural mesothelioma and venous thrombosis: the eosinophilia link

Peripheral blood eosinophilia and vascular occlusions are rare occurrences in patients with pleural mesothelioma whereas eosinophilia may associate with thrombosis. We describe a patient with mesothelioma who developed peripheral blood eosinophilia followed by deep vein thrombosis despite being on low molecular weight heparin prophylaxis. We discuss the genesis of peripheral blood eosinophilia and thrombosis in pleural mesothelioma

Performance Comparison of Collaborative Filtering Prediction Methods on Recommendation System

Recommendation systems were introduced as the computer-based intelligent techniques to deal with the problem of information overload. Collaborative filtering is a simple recommendation algorithm that executes the similarity (neighborhoods) between items and then computes the missing data predictions. A serious limitation of collaborative filtering is the sparisity problem, referring to the situation where insufficient rating history is available for inferring reliable similarities. This research compares four prediction methods: Weighted Sum, Mean-Centering, Boosted Weighted Sum and Boosted Double Means Centering predictions. Boosting double means centering taken into account information of both users and items in order to overcome the potential decrease of accuracy due to sparsity when predicting the missing value. It tries to capture the user and item biases from the whole effects so as to enable the better concentrating on user-item interaction. Furthermore, ensemble learning will improve the performance collaborative filtering method because an ensemble of collaborative filtering models based on a single collaborative filtering algorithm considered the problem of sparsity, recommender error rate and sample weight update. Rating history in Book-Crossing dataset with 91% sparsity level is used to evaluate the missing rating predictions and the performance comparison of rating predictions on two traditional collaborative filtering and two boosting collaborative filtering frameworks. Experimental results shows that the proposed boosted double mean centering framework improve the prediction accuracy than the two traditional collaborative filtering and the other boosting prediction algorithm

Hemoglobin E prevalence in malaria-endemic villages in Myanmar.

The population of Myanmar comprises 8 major indigenous races (Bamar, Kayin, Kachin, Shan, Rakhine, Mon, Chin, and Kayah). The Bamar reside in the 7 central divisions of the country, and the others reside in the 7 peripheral states that border neighboring countries, including China, Laos, and Thailand in the east and India and Bangladesh in the west. Both malaria and HbE are endemic in Myanmar, although the actual prevalence of the latter in the different indigenous races is not yet known. Hemoglobin electrophoresis was performed in 4 malaria-endemic villages, each having a different predominating indigenous race. The overall prevalence of HbE was 11.4% (52/456 villagers), ranging from 2-6% in the Kayin-predominant villages to 13.1-24.4% in the Bamar-predominant villages. Although the overall HbE prevalence in the villages studied was not significantly different from that of the general Myanmar population, this study strongly documented the influence of racial differences on the prevalence of HbE in Myanmar. To prevent and control severe thalassemia syndromes in Myanmar, extensive prevalence studies of the country?s indigenous races are suggested.</p

Prevalence of High-Risk Human Papillomavirus (HR-HPV) Infection among Women with Normal and Abnormal Cervical Cytology in Myanmar

This study aimed to determine the prevalence of normal and abnormal cervical cytology in women who attended the cervical cancer screening clinic of the Department of Medical Research in Lower Myanmar, and to determine the proportion of high-risk (HR) human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and HPV genotypes in women with normal and abnormal cervical cytology. A total of 1,771 women were screened from 2010 to 2011. Among them, 762 women (43.0%) had a normal smear, and 866 (48.9%) and 87 (4.9%) were diagnosed with inflammatory smears and atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASCUS), respectively. Diagnoses of low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (LSIL) and high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (HSIL) numbered 42 (2.3%) and 11 (0.6%) respectively. Three cases of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) (0.2%) were detected. Cervical swabs were collected from 96 women with abnormal cervical cytology and 20 with normal cytology. HR-HPV DNA testing was performed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with pU1M/pU2R primers. HR-HPV were identified in 35.5% (22/62) of inflammatory smears, 60% (6/10) of ASCUS, 86.7% (13/15) of LSIL, 50% (3/6) of HSIL, 100% (3/3) of SCC and 5% (1/20) of normal cytology. In PCR-positive cases, HPV genotyping was analyzed by the cleaved amplification polymorphism method. The most prevalent HPV genotypes were HPV-16 (60.4%) followed by HPV-31 (14.6%), HPV-18 (12.5%) and HPV-58 (12.5%). Women with abnormal cervical cytology were 10 times more likely to be HR-HPV positive than those with normal cytology (p＝0.0001). This study suggests that the implementation of a cervical cytology screening program and routine vaccination against HPV in preadolescent and adolescent groups are needed to reduce the burden of HPV-associated cervical cancer

A Modified Quantization Based Image Compression Technique using Walsh-Hadamard Transform

A new quantization table using the nearest maximum common prime factor is generated for image compression using Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT). Image compression is important for many applications that involve huge data storage and transmission such as multimedia, video conferencing and medical imaging. In the proposed system, RGB components of color image are converted to YCbCr color image. Then an image is divided into 8x8 pixel block for each block. WHT based image compression is used to lossy image compression. The prime based new quantization table is created to reduce the quantization error (QE) bit in the quantization step. After the image is quantized, Huffman coding is a technique for representing the quantized coefficients as compactly as possible. The reverse process takes place for image decompression. The image compression system using WHT, standard quantization table, Huffman coding is also created. The performances are compared between original system and proposed system using performance parameters such as Compression ratio, Bit Per Pixel, Mean Square Error, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio and Time.

An Alternative Electrode System for Monitoring Belousov-Zhabotinsky Chemical Oscillations

The capability of copper-platinum (Cu/Pt) electrode system as a BelousovZhabotinsky (BZ) chemical oscillation monitor was compared with that of the normally used SCE/Pt electrode system, by testing it on three BZ systems, which were obtained by varying the oscillator in the combination bromate, oscillator and malonic acid. The oscillators, used separately, were cerium(IV), manganese(II) and ferroin [iron (II)-1,10- phenanthroline complex].Cu/Pt electrode gave essentially identical values of oscillation characteristics (oscillation period, peak potential, induction period, peak width) except peak potentials. This indicated that the Cu/Pt electrode system would be more useful than the SCE/Pt electrode system (which had chloride leakage problem), in electrical applications of chemical oscillations, such as electrical switches, which would depend only on the on/off frequency