Comparison of the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale with disability outcome measures in acute stroke trials

<p><b>Background and Purpose:</b> Acute stroke trials typically use disability scales as their primary end point. Neurologic impairment scales such as the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) are possibly more sensitive to change in patient status. We aimed to compare a range of potential NIHSS end points with modified Rankin Scale (mRS) and Barthel Index (BI) end points.</p> <p><b>Methods:</b> We simulated a total of 6000 clinical trials, each with 1400 patients. We estimated statistical power for a range of NIHSS end points, including prognosis-adjusted and fixed dichotomized end points. These end points were compared with the BI and mRS dichotomized at 95 and 1, respectively.</p> <p><b>Results:</b> The most powerful fixed end point was the NIHSS dichotomized at 1. For prognosis-adjusted outcome, we found greatest power if we defined success as achieving a score of ≤1 or improvement by at least 11 points from baseline. We are more likely to achieve a statistically significant result by using this prognosis-adjusted end point instead of NIHSS ≤1 (odds ratio, 2.8; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.5 to 3.2). Use of the optimal NIHSS prognosis-adjusted end point rather than BI ≥95 could justify a reduction in sample size of approximately 68% (95% CI, 67% to 69%) without loss of statistical power.</p> <p><b>Conclusions:</b> The NIHSS neurologic scale appears more sensitive than the BI or mRS, allowing smaller sample sizes or greater statistical power. The use of an NIHSS prognosis-adjusted end point could allow therapeutic effects from drugs to be more easily identified.</p&gt

Determining WWW User's Next Access and Its Application to Pre-fetching

World-Wide Web (WWW) services have grown to levels where significant delays are expected to happen. Techniques like pre-fetching are likely to help users to personalize their needs, reducing their waiting times. However, pre-fetching is only effective if the right documents are identified and if user's move is correctly predicted. Otherwise, pre-fetching will only waste bandwidth. Therefore, it is productive to determine whether a revisit will occur or not, before starting pre-fetching. In this paper we develop two user models that help determining user's next move. One model uses Random Walk approximation and the other is based on Digital Signal Processing techniques. We also give hints on how to use such models with a simple pre-fetching technique that we are developing.CNP

High resolution imaging of dielectric surfaces with an evanescent field optical microscope

An evanescent field optical microscope (EFOM) is presented which employs frustrated total internal reflection o­n a localized scale by scanning a dielectric tip in close proximity to a sample surface. High resolution images of dielectric gratings and spheres containing both topographic and dielectric information have been obtained. The resolution obtained is 30 nm in the lateral directions and 0.1 nm in height depending o­n proper tip fabricatio

Focused ion beam milling of three dimensional nanostructures with high precision

The fabrication of an extended three-dimensional nanostructure with dimensions much larger than the feature size using a focused ion beam is described. By milling two identical patterns of pores with a designed diameter of 460 nm in orthogonal directions, a photonic crystal with an inverse woodpile structure was made in a gallium phosphide single crystal. The patterns are aligned with an unprecedented accuracy of 30 nm with respect to each other. The influence of GaP redeposition on the depth, shape, and size of the pores is described. The work is published in J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B [1]

Controlling the Microstructure of Arc Sprayed Shells

Techniques for controlling the microstructure of sprayed steel structures are discussed in this paper. Steel is arc sprayed onto shaped substrates to form tooling. The quality of the tool is greatly influenced by the microstructure of the material and the interlamella regions of the deposit. This work is focused on characterizing the microstructure, improving the state of the inter-lamella regions, and discusses our success in forming pseudo-alloys and graded shells by mixing sprayed materials. Microstructure control has interesting implications for other research as well, such as the MASK & DEPOSITS approach of forming objects.Mechanical Engineerin

Wilson chains are not thermal reservoirs

Wilson chains, based on a logarithmic discretization of a continuous spectrum, are widely used to model an electronic (or bosonic) bath for Kondo spins and other quantum impurities within the numerical renormalization group method and other numerical approaches. In this short note we point out that Wilson chains can not serve as thermal reservoirs as their temperature changes by a number of order Delta E when a finite amount of energy Delta E is added. This proves that for a large class of non-equilibrium problems they cannot be used to predict the long-time behavior.Comment: 2 page

Insider Dealings and The Problems of Business Ethics in the Banking Industry in Nigeria

Professionalism in banking is violated when ethical or legal fundamentals are breached or blatantly disregarded. Ethics is a strong code of morality, which for an occupation such as banking, plays an important role in the well being of individuals, businesses, national and international economies. Unethical conduct manifests itself in various ways, including insider abuse, fraudulent dealings; irregularity/inaccuracy in rendition of reports, these are problems bordering on business ethics as evident in the Nigerian banking crisis. A multiple regression analysis was used and from the summary of the finding, we can infer that the consequences of insider dealing and problem of business ethics can be disastrous and could result in loss of confidence and trust in the industry, loss of business for the institutions, shareholders, board/management disputes, operational losses, distress of the sector, and liquidation of institutions, capital flight, and stagnation of the economy