Treatment of Intractable Neurogenic Cough with Cricopharyngeal Myotomy

Objectives: Neuropathic cough that is incompletely responsive to medical therapy may be due to cricopharyngeal hypertonicity. The objective was to describe the utility of cricopharyngeal myotomy in alleviating symptoms of intractable neuropathic cough. Study Design: Retrospective review. Methods: A retrospective chart review was performed for three patients who underwent cricopharyngeal myotomy for intractable cough. Trigger phenomena, previous evaluation and treatment, and outcomes after surgery, namely patient perception of improvement and medication use after surgery, were assessed and documented. Results: After cricopharyngeal myotomy, all three patients noted symptomatic improvement and were weaned off medication. Continued improvement was noted at follow up, with a mean length of 22 months (range: 7-36 months). Conclusions: Cricopharyngeal myotomy may be an alternative treatment for chronic cough in patients for whom workup is negative and medical management, dilation, and botulinum toxin have failed to provide long-term relief. Poster presented at CSOM: Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meeting in Orlando Florida, April 10-14, 2013

Using Interpolation to Estimate System Uncertainty in Gene Expression Experiments

The widespread use of high-throughput experimental assays designed to measure the entire complement of a cell's genes or gene products has led to vast stores of data that are extremely plentiful in terms of the number of items they can measure in a single sample, yet often sparse in the number of samples per experiment due to their high cost. This often leads to datasets where the number of treatment levels or time points sampled is limited, or where there are very small numbers of technical and/or biological replicates. Here we introduce a novel algorithm to quantify the uncertainty in the unmeasured intervals between biological measurements taken across a set of quantitative treatments. The algorithm provides a probabilistic distribution of possible gene expression values within unmeasured intervals, based on a plausible biological constraint. We show how quantification of this uncertainty can be used to guide researchers in further data collection by identifying which samples would likely add the most information to the system under study. Although the context for developing the algorithm was gene expression measurements taken over a time series, the approach can be readily applied to any set of quantitative systems biology measurements taken following quantitative (i.e. non-categorical) treatments. In principle, the method could also be applied to combinations of treatments, in which case it could greatly simplify the task of exploring the large combinatorial space of future possible measurements

Power and welfare in bargaining for coalition structure formation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10458-015-9310-8.We investigate a noncooperative bargaining game for partitioning n agents into non-overlapping coalitions. The game has n time periods during which the players are called according to an exogenous agenda to propose offers. With probability δ, the game ends during any time period t< n. If it does, the first t players on the agenda get a chance to propose but the others do not. Thus, δ is a measure of the degree of democracy within the game (ranging from democracy for δ= 0 , through increasing levels of authoritarianism as δ approaches 1, to dictatorship for δ= 1). We determine the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) and study how a player’s position on the agenda affects his bargaining power. We analyze the relation between the distribution of power of individual players, the level of democracy, and the welfare efficiency of the game. We find that purely democratic games are welfare inefficient and that introducing a degree of authoritarianism into the game makes the distribution of power more equitable and also maximizes welfare. These results remain invariant under two types of player preferences: one where each player’s preference is a total order on the space of possible coalition structures and the other where each player either likes or dislikes a coalition structure. Finally, we show that the SPE partition may or may not be core stable

Advanced Marine Information Delivery

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / November 14-16, 1978 / Hyatt House Hotel, Los Angeles, CaliforniaSEASAT-1 is now an established fact. It is providing continuous sensing of the world's oceans and related meteorological phenomena from its satellite platform in space. What is the next step? This paper considers the information delivery challenges of the follow-on programs to SEASAT as they progress through the next decade. These include coping with the vast quantities of data to be transferred, fulfilling the temporal requirements on data delivery, and the trade-offs and developments needed to accomplish the various levels of processing required to convert sensor output into useful information. A need for critical development is clearly identifiable in the areas of low cost ground terminals capable of image extraction and image correlation; dynamic data assimilation to accomodate forecasters; low resolution onboard correlators; and low cost user advisory (display) terminals. The system planners for the Ocean Satellite advanced programs are utilizing an end-to-end data systems approach in meeting these challenges. The economic and scientific impact of delivering decision making information to the marine community in real time and in useful form is recognized and is potentially achievable.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection

A Parallel GPU Implementation of SWIFFTX

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.The SWIFFTX algorithm is one of the candidates of SHA-3 Hash Competition that uses the number theoretic transform (NTT). It has 256-byte input blocks and 65-byte output blocks. In this paper, a parallel implementation of the algorithm and particular techniques to make it faster on GPU are proposed. We target version 6.1 of NVIDIA®CUDA™compute architecture that employs an ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) called Parallel Thread Execution (PTX) which possesses special instrinsics, hence we modify the reference implementation for better results. Experimental results indicate almost 10x improvement in speed and 5 W decrease in power consumption per 216 hashes