278 research outputs found

    Optimal Operating Condition of Substrate Removal in Oxidation Ditch Process with Intermittent Aeration

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    An oxidation ditch can be used for the simultaneous removal of organic carbon and nitrogen compounds, as a relatively small scale wastewater treatment process. In this study, substrate removal and its optimal operating conditions in an oxidation ditch process with intermittent aeration was investigated through the treatment tests of synthetic sewage, and the theoretical model system combining the kinetic models of substrates removal with the tank-in series model of mixing. In the treatment tests, over 93% of T-N could be removed under the optimal condition of the intermittent aeration without decreasing the BOD removal efficiency compared with continuous aeration. Even under the worst condition of intermittent aeration, 72.5% removal of T-N obtained, whereas T-N removal under continuous aeration was less than 60%. Therefore, it was concluded that an efficient and stable simultaneous removal of organic carbon and nitrogen compounds is possible by selecting and keeping the best condition of intermittent aeration. Also, the theoretical model gave good agreement with the experimental data, and then proved to be applicable for predicting the quality of effluent from an oxidation ditch with intermittent aeration. By another computation using the model, the simultaneous removal of over 95% of BOD and over 90% of T-N was expected under the operating conditions which gave the value of 2 to 4 (mg/l) to the index OCM proposed to evaluate the total amount of oxygen supplied in a retention time

    Expression of Neurotrophins and Their Receptors Tropomyosin-related kinases (Trk) under Tension-stress during Distraction Osteogenesis

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    The localization and expression of neurotrophins and their receptors during distraction osteogenesis was investigated in 72 male rat femurs (11 weeks old) to further clarify the concurrence of cellular and molecular events of new bone formation. After osteotomy, a 7-day lag phase was followed by distraction at the rate of 0.25 mm/12 h for 21 days (distraction phase), and a 7-day consolidation phase. The localization of neurotrophins (NGF, BDNF and NT-3) and their receptors tropomyosinrelated kinases (TRKA, TRKB and TRKC) by immunostaining showed positive staining in bone forming cells in each stage, although the presence and staining intensity varied by cell type and phase. The expressions of NGF, BDNF and NT-3 by real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR) showed that the peak of the mRNA expression of NGF occurred 10 days after distraction. NT-3 increased during bone extension, but decreased when distraction stopped. In contrast, BDNF continued to increase gradually throughout the distraction and consolidation phases. These findings suggest that neurotrophins and their receptors may play different roles in endochondral and intramembranous ossification in distraction osteogenesis. The tension stress caused by distraction may stimulate the expression of neurotrophins and their receptors, and promote osteogenesis

    International comparison of pharmaceutical industry payment disclosures in the UK and Japan: implications for self-regulation, public regulation, and transparency

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    BackgroundSelf-regulation of payment disclosure by pharmaceutical industry trade groups is a major global approach to increasing transparency of financial relationships between drug companies and healthcare professionals and organisations. Nevertheless, little is known about the relative strengths and weaknesses of self-regulation across countries, especially beyond Europe. To address this gap in research and stimulate international policy learning, we compare the UK and Japan, the likely strongest cases of self-regulation of payment disclosure in Europe and Asia, across three dimensions of transparency: disclosure rules, practices, and data.ResultsThe UK and Japanese self-regulation of payment disclosure had shared as well unique strengths and weaknesses. The UK and Japanese pharmaceutical industry trade groups declared transparency as the primary goal of payment disclosure, without, however, explaining the link between the two. The rules of payment disclosure in each country provided more insight into some payments but not others. Both trade groups did not reveal the recipients of certain payments by default, and the UK trade group also made the disclosure of some payments conditional on recipient consent. Drug company disclosure practices were more transparent in the UK, allowing for greater availability and accessibility of payment data and insight into underreporting or misreporting of payments by companies. Nevertheless, the share of payments made to named recipients was three times higher in Japan than in the UK, indicating higher transparency of disclosure data.ConclusionsThe UK and Japan performed differently across the three dimensions of transparency, suggesting that any comprehensive analysis of self-regulation of payment disclosure must triangulate analysis of disclosure rules, practices, and data. We found limited evidence to support key claims regarding the strengths of self-regulation, while often finding it inferior to public regulation of payment disclosure. We suggest how the self-regulation of payment disclosure in each country can be enhanced and, in the long run, replaced by public regulation to strengthen the industry’s accountability to the public

    Controlling keywords and their positions in text generation

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    One of the challenges in text generation is to control generation as intended by a user. Previous studies have proposed to specify the keywords that should be included in the generated text. However, this is insufficient to generate text which reflect the user intent. For example, placing the important keyword beginning of the text would helps attract the reader's attention, but existing methods do not enable such flexible control. In this paper, we tackle a novel task of controlling not only keywords but also the position of each keyword in the text generation. To this end, we show that a method using special tokens can control the relative position of keywords. Experimental results on summarization and story generation tasks show that the proposed method can control keywords and their positions. We also demonstrate that controlling the keyword positions can generate summary texts that are closer to the user's intent than baseline. We release our code

    Effects of interfascial injection of bicarbonated Ringer’s solution, physiological saline and local anesthetic under ultrasonography for myofascial pain syndrome -Two prospective, randomized, double-blinded trials-

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    Myofascial pain syndrome (MPS) is a common clinical condition of muscle pain. Previous studies indicated that local injection of physiological saline (PS) into a muscle is equal to or more effective than a local anesthetic for MPS. We performed 2 randomized, double-blinded trials of interfascial injection under ultrasonography for outpatients with MPS over 3 months to assess the effects of PS (pH 6.0), 0.5% mepivacaine hydrochloride (MH) (pH 6.0), and bicarbonate Ringer’s solution (BRS) (pH 7.4), and to elucidate their action mechanisms. Maximum pain related to motion, time of pain relief, and pain related to injection (intensity and duration) were measured up to 72 hrs. The first trial showed that PS decreased maximum pain related to motion compared to MH (p < 0.05), although it increased pain related to injection compared to MH (p < 0.05). The second trial showed that BRS exhibited as much efficacy in relieving maximum pain related to motion as PS (p = 0.33), but decreased pain related to injection compared to PS (p < 0.05). In conclusion, the interfascial injection of PS has a greater analgesic effect on MPS but produced stronger pain related to injection compared to MH. BRS is equivalent to PS in analgesic effect and produced less pain related to injection compared to PS. These results indicate that BRS is the appropriate solution for an interfascial injection to treat MPS, and that the action mechanisms are not related to the pain intensity associated with the injections or the pharmacological anesthetic effect

    Long Unit Word Tokenization and Bunsetsu Segmentation of Historical Japanese

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    Conference name: the 1st Workshop on Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL 2024), Conference place: Bangkok, Thailand, Session period: 2024/08/15, Organizer: Association for Computational Linguisticsapplication/pdfTokyo University of Agriculture and TechnologyTokyo University of Agriculture and TechnologyNational Institute for Japanese Language and LinguisticsNational Institute for Japanese Language and Linguisticsconference pape

    Detecting System Failures with GPUs and LLVM

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    Since system failures cause a huge financial loss, they should be detected as early and accurately as possible and then be recovered rapidly. To detect system failures, there are mainly two methods: black-box and white-box monitoring. However, external black-box monitoring cannot obtain detailed information on system failures, while internal white-box one is largely affected by system failures. This paper proposes GPUSentinel for more reliable white-box monitoring using general-purpose GPUs. In GPUSentinel, system monitors running in a GPU analyze main memory and indirectly obtain the state of the target system. Since GPUs are isolated from the target system, system monitors are not easily affected by system failures. For easy development of system monitors, GPUSentinel provides a development environment including program transformation with LLVM. In addition, it also provides reliable notification mechanisms to remote hosts. We have implemented GPUSentinel using CUDA and the Linux kernel and confirmed that GPUSentinel could detect three types of system failures.10th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys 2019), August 19 - 20, 2019 , Hangzhou, Chin
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