Photonic production of B_c-mesons

The cross section of the $\gamma \gamma \rightarrow B_c(B_c^*) \bar b c$ process is calculated. It is shown that near threshold the pseudoscalar state production is much suppressed with respect to the vector one. At large energies their ratio becaims $\sigma(B_c^*)/sigma(B_c)\sim 4$. The process of heavy quark recombination dominates in the production of $B_c(B_c^*)$ states. The fragmentation process $b\to B_c$ comes to play at high $p_t$ values only, while its contribution will remain nondominant.Comment: Preprint IHEP 94-8

Hypertension is independently associated with lumbar disc degeneration: a large-scale population-based study

Electronic Poster Presentations: P34INTRODUCTION: Hypertension, as elevated systolic blood pressure (SBP) and / or diastolic blood pressure (DBP), is a factor related to cardiovascular disease; however, its role in development of disc degeneration remains speculative. Hence, this large-scale population-based study addressed the association of blood pressure with lumbar disc ...postprin

Body mass index and its association with lumbar disc herniation and sciatica: a large-scale, population-based study

Electronic Poster Presentations: P33INTRODUCTION: This large-scale study addressed the association of body mass index (BMI), especially overweight / obesity with lumbar disc herniation, its global lumbar involvement and implications with sciatica that little of which is ...postprin

Cognitive behavioral therapies for insomnia and hypnotic medications : considerations and controversies

- Insomnia is a prevalent and costly health problem that often remains untreated or is treated inadequately. There are, however, several evidence-based treatment options, including cognitive behavioral therapies (CBTs) and pharmacologic therapies, each with its own advantages and limitations. - Medications with specific indications for insomnia produce rapid symptomatic relief, but there is little to no evidence that sleep improvements are maintained after drug discontinuation or long-term, continued usage. Conversely, CBT takes longer than drugs to produce sleep improvements, but these improvements are well sustained over time. - Aside from their short-term and long-term benefits, other key considerations need to be taken into account when selecting among the different insomnia therapies. These include patients’ treatment preferences, how best to deliver CBT, whether to combine or sequence CBTs and medication therapies, and who should treat insomnia. These considerations may have a significant impact on efficacy, compliance, attrition, and access to treatment. - Several innovative treatment delivery methods relying on digital technology are increasingly used to treat insomnia. Although these self-help approaches may reduce cost and human resources and increase access, an important shortcoming is the high attrition rate during the course of these self-guided approaches. - The publications of clinical practice guidelines by several international medical and sleep organizations have reached the same recommendation, that is, CBT should be the first-line treatment of insomnia, and only when such treatment is not available or not effective should medication be considered for treating persistent insomnia. It is hoped that such strong and uniform endorsement by the medical and sleep community will help narrow the current gap between the available research evidence and clinical practices

The generalized parton distributions of the nucleon in the NJL model based on the Faddeev approach

We study the generalized parton distributions, including the helicity-flip ones, using Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model based on a relativistic Faddeev approach with `static approximation'. Sum rules relating the generalized parton distributions to nucleon electromagnetic form factors are satisfied. Moreover, quark-antiquark contributions in the region $-\xi<x<\xi$ are non-vanishing. Our results are qualitatively similar to those calculated with Radyushkin's double distribution ansatz using forward parton distribution functions calculated in the NJL model as inputs.Comment: 35 pages, 15 figure

Transliteration of Contact Names and/or Other Data Using an Automated Assistant

Techniques are disclosed herein for transliterating contact names and/or other data from a source language to one or more target languages. The contact names and/or other data are received from a client device (e.g., a feature phone) having an automated assistant. The data in the target language(s) can then be utilized in determining that further input, received from the client device in one of the target language(s), corresponds to certain data in the source language. In one aspect, a method includes receiving, over a network and at one or more remote servers, contact names that are in a source language and that are transmitted from a client device. The method can further include transliterating each of the contact names from the source language to one or more corresponding transliterated contact names in one or more target languages, and mapping each transliterated contact name in the target language(s) to a corresponding contact name in the source language and/or to a corresponding contact entry. The method can further include storing the mapping, along with an identifier of the client device, such as a temporary identifier of the client device. Thereafter, in response to further input received from the client device (e.g., spoken input) in one of the target language(s), the spoken input can be matched to a transliterated contact name, and the mapping utilized to identify a corresponding contact entry and/or contact name in the source language. Thus, techniques disclosed herein can enable a user to create, at a client device, a contact name in a first alphabet (e.g., Latin). The contact name can then be provided to remote server(s), which transliterates the contact name to one or more additional alphabets (e.g., Devanāgarī). Subsequently, the user can provide, at the client device, spoken input that indicates a desire to contact (e.g., call, message, etc.) the contact name, but that references the contact name in the Hindi language (which corresponds to the Devanāgarī alphabet). The spoken input can be provided to one or more of the servers, and the server(s) can match the contact name of the spoken input to a transliteration, of the contact name, that is in the Devanāgarī alphabet. Thus, the contact name can be contacted responsive to the spoken input

Local Manifold Augmentation for Multiview Semantic Consistency

Multiview self-supervised representation learning roots in exploring semantic consistency across data of complex intra-class variation. Such variation is not directly accessible and therefore simulated by data augmentations. However, commonly adopted augmentations are handcrafted and limited to simple geometrical and color changes, which are unable to cover the abundant intra-class variation. In this paper, we propose to extract the underlying data variation from datasets and construct a novel augmentation operator, named local manifold augmentation (LMA). LMA is achieved by training an instance-conditioned generator to fit the distribution on the local manifold of data and sampling multiview data using it. LMA shows the ability to create an infinite number of data views, preserve semantics, and simulate complicated variations in object pose, viewpoint, lighting condition, background etc. Experiments show that with LMA integrated, self-supervised learning methods such as MoCov2 and SimSiam gain consistent improvement on prevalent benchmarks including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, STL10, ImageNet100, and ImageNet. Furthermore, LMA leads to representations that obtain more significant invariance to the viewpoint, object pose, and illumination changes and stronger robustness to various real distribution shifts reflected by ImageNet-V2, ImageNet-R, ImageNet Sketch etc