Current activities in standardization of high-temperature, low-cycle-fatigue testing techniques in the United States

The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard E606-80 is the most often used recommended testing practice for low-cycle-fatigue (LCF) testing in the United States. The standard was first adopted in 1977 for LCF testing at room temperature and was modified in 1980 to include high-temperature testing practices. Current activity within ASTM is aimed at extending the E606-80 recommended practices to LCF under thermomechanical conditions, LCF in high-pressure hydrogen, and LCF in metal-matrix composite materials. Interlaboratory testing programs conducted to generate a technical base for modifying E606-80 for the aforementioned LCF test types are discussed

The therapeutic potential of exercise to improve mood, cognition, and sleep in Parkinson's disease

Published in final edited form as: Mov Disord. 2016 January ; 31(1): 23–38. doi:10.1002/mds.26484.In addition to the classic motor symptoms, Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with a variety of nonmotor symptoms that significantly reduce quality of life, even in the early stages of the disease. There is an urgent need to develop evidence‐based treatments for these symptoms, which include mood disturbances, cognitive dysfunction, and sleep disruption. We focus here on exercise interventions, which have been used to improve mood, cognition, and sleep in healthy older adults and clinical populations, but to date have primarily targeted motor symptoms in PD. We synthesize the existing literature on the benefits of aerobic exercise and strength training on mood, sleep, and cognition as demonstrated in healthy older adults and adults with PD, and suggest that these types of exercise offer a feasible and promising adjunct treatment for mood, cognition, and sleep difficulties in PD. Across stages of the disease, exercise interventions represent a treatment strategy with the unique ability to improve a range of nonmotor symptoms while also alleviating the classic motor symptoms of the disease. Future research in PD should include nonmotor outcomes in exercise trials with the goal of developing evidence‐based exercise interventions as a safe, broad‐spectrum treatment approach to improve mood, cognition, and sleep for individuals with PD.This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (F31MH102961 to G.O.R.)

Exocentric direction judgements in computer-generated displays and actual scenes

One of the most remarkable perceptual properties of common experience is that the perceived shapes of known objects are constant despite movements about them which transform their projections on the retina. This perceptual ability is one aspect of shape constancy (Thouless, 1931; Metzger, 1953; Borresen and Lichte, 1962). It requires that the viewer be able to sense and discount his or her relative position and orientation with respect to a viewed object. This discounting of relative position may be derived directly from the ranging information provided from stereopsis, from motion parallax, from vestibularly sensed rotation and translation, or from corollary information associated with voluntary movement. It is argued that: (1) errors in exocentric judgements of the azimuth of a target generated on an electronic perspective display are not viewpoint-independent, but are influenced by the specific geometry of their perspective projection; (2) elimination of binocular conflict by replacing electronic displays with actual scenes eliminates a previously reported equidistance tendency in azimuth error, but the viewpoint dependence remains; (3) the pattern of exocentrically judged azimuth error in real scenes viewed with a viewing direction depressed 22 deg and rotated + or - 22 deg with respect to a reference direction could not be explained by overestimation of the depression angle, i.e., a slant overestimation

EM localization and separation using interaural level and phase cues

We describe a system for localizing and separating multiple sound sources from a reverberant two-channel recording. It consists of a probabilistic model of interaural level and phase differences and an EM algorithm for finding the maximum likelihood parameters of this model. By assigning points in the interaural spectrogram probabilistically to sources with the best-fitting parameters and then estimating the parameters of the sources from the points assigned to them, the system is able to separate and localize more sound sources than there are available channels. It is also able to estimate frequency-dependent level differences of sources in a mixture that correspond well to those measured in isolation. In experiments in simulated anechoic and reverberant environments, the proposed system improved the signal-to-noise ratio of target sources by 2.7 and 3.4dB more than two comparable algorithms on average

Dalbavancin in the treatment of complicated skin and soft-tissue infections: a review

Increasing rates of antimicrobial resistance among strains of Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, and Enterococcus spp. have been widely documented. At least 50% of nosocomial Staphylococcus aureus infections in intensive care units in the US and UK are due methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). Drug resistance is not confined to hospitals, and community-acquired MRSA (CA-MRSA) strains are now common causes of complicated skin and soft-tissue infections (cSSTIs) in many regions. Dalbavancin is a novel parenterally administered semisynthetic lipoglycopeptide similar to the naturally produced glycopeptides vancomycin and teicoplanin. Dalbavancin features a multifaceted mechanism of action that inhibits bacterial cell wall formation by two different mechanisms that enhances its activity against a wide range of gram-positive bacteria including staphylococci, streptococci, enterococci, and some anaerobes. Additionally, dalbavancin possesses unique pharmacokinetic properties, the most significant of which is a long terminal half-life that allows for once weekly dosing. This attribute may prove to yield clinical and cost benefit. Overall, clinical trials indicate that dalbavancin is a safe, well-tolerated, and effective antimicrobial agent. In the largest investigation evaluating dalbavancin for the treatment of cSSTIs, it appeared to be as effective as linezolid. Dalbavancin, which is expected to receive FDA approval in 2008, appears to be a promising new antimicrobial agent for the treatment of cSSTIs

Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing in the Hubble Deep Field: The Halo Tully-Fisher Relation at Intermediate Redshift

A tangential distortion of background source galaxies around foreground lens galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field is detected at the 99.3% confidence level. An important element of our analysis is the use of photometric redshifts to determine distances of lens and source galaxies and rest-frame B-band luminosities of the lens galaxies. The lens galaxy halos obey a Tully-Fisher relation between halo circular velocity and luminosity; the typical lens galaxy, at a redshift z = 0.6, has a circular velocity of 210 +/-40 km/s at M_B = -18.5, if q_0 = 0.5. Control tests, in which lens and source positions and source ellipticities are randomized, confirm the significance level of the detection quoted above. Furthermore, a marginal signal is also detected from an independent, fainter sample of source galaxies without photometric redshifts. Potential systematic effects, such as contamination by aligned satellite galaxies, the distortion of source shapes by the light of the foreground galaxies, PSF anisotropies, and contributions from mass distributed on the scale of galaxy groups are shown to be negligible. A comparison of our result with the local Tully-Fisher relation indicates that intermediate-redshift galaxies are fainter than local spirals by 1.0 +/- 0.6 B mag at a fixed circular velocity. This is consistent with some spectroscopic studies of the rotation curves of intermediate-redshift galaxies. This result suggests that the strong increase in the global luminosity density with redshift is dominated by evolution in the galaxy number density.Comment: Revised version with minor changes. 13 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX2e, uses emulateapj and multicol styles (included). Accepted by Ap

The oxygen-II luminosity density of the Universe

Equivalent widths of [OII] 3727 A lines are measured in 375 faint galaxy spectra taken as part of the Caltech Faint Galaxy Redshift Survey centered on the Hubble Deep Field. The sensitivity of the survey spectra to the [OII] line is computed as a function of magnitude, color and redshift. The luminosity function of galaxies in the [OII] line and the integrated luminosity density of the Universe in the [OII] line are computed as a function of redshift. It is found that the luminosity density in the [OII] line was a factor of ~10 higher at redshifts z~1 than it is at the present day. The simplest interpretation is that the star formation rate density of the Universe has declined dramatically since z~1.Comment: accepted for publication in Ap

An EM Algorithm for Localizing Multiple Sound: Sources in Reverberant Environments

We present a method for localizing and separating sound sources in stereo recordings that is robust to reverberation and does not make any assumptions about the source statistics. The method consists of a probabilistic model of binaural multisource recordings and an expectation maximization algorithm for finding the maximum likelihood parameters of that model. These parameters include distributions over delays and assignments of time-frequency regions to sources. We evaluate this method against two comparable algorithms on simulations of simultaneous speech from two or three sources. Our method outperforms the others in anechoic conditions and performs as well as the better of the two in the presence of reverberation

Improving MIDI-audio alignment with acoustic features

This paper describes a technique to improve the accuracy of dynamic time warping-based MIDI-audio alignment. The technique implements a hidden Markov model that uses aperiodicity and power estimates from the signal as observations and the results of a dynamic time warping alignment as a prior. In addition to improving the overall alignment, this technique also identifies the transient and steady state sections of the note. This information is important for describing various aspects of a musical performance, including both pitch and rhythm