Short Term Rehabilitative Outcome and its Predictors in Guillain Barré Syndrome

Clinical and electrophysiological data of 34 patientssuffering from Guillain Barré Syndrome (GBS) wereanalyzed. Functional disability and predictors of outcomewas determined using Hugh’s scale and MedicalResearch Council (MRC) scale at 0, 2 and at 4 weeks.Good outcome was defined as the ability to ambulatewithout assistance. 56% patients were males with meanage of 18.41 years (SD ±13.88). Preceding illness wasseen in 76.5%. Mean days to disease nadir was 4.6 days.Weakness (50%) was the predominant chief complaint.Mechanical ventilation was required in 41.2 % patientswith a mortality of 7.1%. Independent ambulation wasachieved by 61.8% and 17.6% with support at the end ofstudy period. Increasing age (p<0.01), days to nadir(p=0.00), duration of ventilation (p<0.001), severity ofmotor deficit at disease nadir (p<0.001) and high Hugh’sscore (p=0.00) affected outcome. Mechanicallyventilated patients had poorer outcome. Although therecovery from severe GBS was prolonged, most survivorsregained independent ambulation

Filtering DRA Array and Its Applications in MIMO for Sub-6 GHz Band

A dielectric resonator-based filtering array antenna along with multi input - multi output (MIMO) characteristics is represented in this paper. Two rectangular dielectric resonators, together with a filtering power splitter (PS) is used to get a high gain filtering response. The PS, which consists of a simple T-junction 3-dB power splitters and two pairs of band-rejection resonators, provides four transmission zeros outside the passband. Detail study with an equivalent circuit is presented to understand the working principle of the filtering PS. By utilizing this PS, a two element DRA array is designed at sub-6 GHz frequency band (3.20 GHz-3.54 GHz) with an average broadside gain of 7.8 dBi in the passband and four radiation dips outside the passband. The proposed filtering DRA array effectively suppresses the out-of-band signal, delivers sharp selectivity at band edges. Finally, coalescing the two-filtering array, a MIMO antenna system is presented here. The filtering array MIMO antenna gives reasonable port isolation of greater than 20 dB throughout the operating band. All the major diversity parameters to establish MIMO characteristics e.g. envelop correlation coefficient (ECC), diversity gain (DG), channel loss capacity (CCL), and total reflection coefficient (TARC) persists within their tolerable ranges

Surface operators, dual quivers and contours

We study half-BPS surface operators in four dimensional N=2 SU(N) gauge theories, and analyze their low-energy effective action on the four dimensional Coulomb branch using equivariant localization. We also study surface operators as coupled 2d/4d quiver gauge theories with an SU(N) flavour symmetry. In this description, the same surface operator can be described by different quivers that are related to each other by two dimensional Seiberg duality. We argue that these dual quivers correspond, on the localization side, to distinct integration contours that can be determined by the Fayet-Iliopoulos parameters of the two dimensional gauge nodes. We verify the proposal by mapping the solutions of the twisted chiral ring equations of the 2d/4d quivers onto individual residues of the localization integrand.Comment: 42 pages. v2: Sections 4 and 5 partially restructured in order to describe in a more compact ad unified way the association of contours to quiver

The Daemo crowdsourcing marketplace

The success of crowdsourcing markets is dependent on a strong foundation of trust between workers and requesters. In current marketplaces, workers and requesters are often unable to trust each other’s quality, and their mental models of tasks are misaligned due to ambiguous instructions or confusing edge cases. This breakdown of trust typically arises from (1) flawed reputation systems which do not accurately reflect worker and requester quality, and from (2) poorly designed tasks. In this demo, we present how Boomerang and Prototype Tasks, the fundamental building blocks of the Daemo crowdsourcing marketplace, help restore trust between workers and requesters. Daemo’s Boomerang reputation system incentivizes alignment between opinion and ratings by determining the likelihood that workers and requesters will work together in the future based on how they rate each other. Daemo’s Prototype tasks require that new tasks go through a feedback iteration phase with a small number of workers so that requesters can revise their instructions and task designs before launch

Prototype tasks: Improving crowdsourcing results through rapid, iterative task design

Low-quality results have been a long-standing problem on microtask crowdsourcing platforms, driving away requesters and justifying low wages for workers. To date, workers have been blamed for low-quality results: they are said to make as little effort as possible, do not pay attention to detail, and lack expertise. In this paper, we hypothesize that requesters may also be responsible for low-quality work: they launch unclear task designs that confuse even earnest workers, under-specify edge cases, and neglect to include examples. We introduce prototype tasks, a crowdsourcing strategy requiring all new task designs to launch a small number of sample tasks. Workers attempt these tasks and leave feedback, enabling the requester to iterate on the design before publishing it. We report a field experiment in which tasks that underwent prototype task iteration produced higher-quality work results than the original task designs. With this research, we suggest that a simple and rapid iteration cycle can improve crowd work, and we provide empirical evidence that requester “quality” directly impacts result quality

Crowd guilds: Worker-led reputation and feedback on crowdsourcing platforms

Crowd workers are distributed and decentralized. While decentralization is designed to utilize independent judgment to promote high-quality results, it paradoxically undercuts behaviors and institutions that are critical to high-quality work. Reputation is one central example: crowdsourcing systems depend on reputation scores from decentralized workers and requesters, but these scores are notoriously inflated and uninformative. In this paper, we draw inspiration from historical worker guilds (e.g., in the silk trade) to design and implement crowd guilds: centralized groups of crowd workers who collectively certify each other’s quality through double-blind peer assessment. A two-week field experiment compared crowd guilds to a traditional decentralized crowd work model. Crowd guilds produced reputation signals more strongly correlated with ground-truth worker quality than signals available on current crowd working platforms, and more accurate than in the traditional model

Photocatalytic Nanolithography of Self-Assembled Monolayers and Proteins

Self-assembled monolayers of alkylthiolates on gold and alkylsilanes on silicon dioxide have been patterned photocatalytically on sub-100 nm length-scales using both apertured near-field and apertureless methods. Apertured lithography was carried out by means of an argon ion laser (364 nm) coupled to cantilever-type near-field probes with a thin film of titania deposited over the aperture. Apertureless lithography was carried out with a helium–cadmium laser (325 nm) to excite titanium-coated, contact-mode atomic force microscope (AFM) probes. This latter approach is readily implementable on any commercial AFM system. Photodegradation occurred in both cases through the localized photocatalytic degradation of the monolayer. For alkanethiols, degradation of one thiol exposed the bare substrate, enabling refunctionalization of the bare gold by a second, contrasting thiol. For alkylsilanes, degradation of the adsorbate molecule provided a facile means for protein patterning. Lines were written in a protein-resistant film formed by the adsorption of oligo(ethylene glycol)-functionalized trichlorosilanes on glass, leading to the formation of sub-100 nm adhesive, aldehyde-functionalized regions. These were derivatized with aminobutylnitrilotriacetic acid, and complexed with Ni2+, enabling the binding of histidine-labeled green fluorescent protein, which yielded bright fluorescence from 70-nm-wide lines that could be imaged clearly in a confocal microscope