Influence of Herbal Complexes Containing Licorice on Potassium Levels: A Retrospective Study

To observe the influence of these complexes on potassium levels in a clinical setting, we investigated the influence of herbal complexes containing licorice on potassium levels. We retrospectively examined the medical records of patients treated with herbal complexes containing licorice from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2010. We recorded the changes in the levels of potassium, creatinine, and blood urea nitrogen and examined the differences between before and after herbal complexes intake using a paired t-test. In addition, we investigated the prevalence of hypokalemia among these patients and reviewed such patients. We identified 360 patients who did not show significant changes in the levels of potassium and creatinine (P=0.815, 0.289). We observed hypokalemia in 6 patients. However, in 5 patients, the hypokalemia did not appear to be related to the licorice. Thus, we could suggest that herbal complexes containing licorice do not significantly influence the potassium levels in routine clinical herbal therapies. However, we propose that follow-up examination for potassium levels is required to prevent any unpredictable side effects of administration of licorice in routine herbal medicine care

The Format Converting/Transfer Agent and Repository System based on ebXML

As introducing XML in EC-environment, various document formats have been used due to XML characteristic. Also, other document format except XML have been used to exchange EC-related information. That is, as increasing trading partner, as increasing exchanged document format and business processing being complex. So, management difficulty and duplication problem happened as trading partners increasing. And, they want to change plural business workflow to general and uniform form as defining and arranging BP(Business Process). Therefore, in this paper, we define XML as future document standard agreement and discuss about service system architecture and Repository. Repository stores and manages document standard, information related to Business Processing, Messaging Profile, and so on. Repository structure is designed to cover various XML standards. Also, we design system to support ebXML communication protocol, MSH, as well as traditional communication protocol, such as X.25, X.400, etc. and implement to exchange information via FTP

Design of LSM-tree-based Key-value SSDs with Bounded Tails

Key-value store based on a log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree) is preferable to hash-based key-value store, because an LSM-tree can support a wider variety of operations and show better performance, especially for writes. However, LSM-tree is difficult to implement in the resource constrained environment of a key-value SSD (KV-SSD), and, consequently, KV-SSDs typically use hash-based schemes. We present PinK, a design and implementation of an LSM-tree-based KV-SSD, which compared to a hash-based KV-SSD, reduces 99th percentile tail latency by 73%, improves average read latency by 42%, and shows 37% higher throughput. The key idea in improving the performance of an LSM-tree in a resource constrained environment is to avoid the use of Bloom filters and instead, use a small amount of DRAM to keep/pin the top levels of the LSM-tree. We also find that PinK is able to provide a flexible design space for a wide range of KV workloads by leveraging the read-write tradeoff in LSM-trees. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.1

PinK: High-speed In-storage Key-value Store with Bounded Tails

Key-value store based on a log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree) is preferable to hash-based KV store because an LSM-tree can support a wider variety of operations and show better performance, especially for writes. However, LSM-tree is difficult to implement in the resource constrained environment of a key-value SSD (KV-SSD) and consequently, KV-SSDs typically use hash-based schemes. We present PinK, a design and implementation of an LSM-tree-based KV-SSD, which compared to a hash-based KV-SSD, reduces 99th percentile tail latency by 73%, improves average read latency by 42% and shows 37% higher throughput. The key idea in improving the performance of an LSM-tree in a resource constrained environment is to avoid the use of Bloom filters and instead, use a small amount of DRAM to keep/pin the top levels of the LSM-tree. Copyright © Proc. of the 2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, ATC 2020. All rights reserved

Performance Characterization of Twin-Scroll Turbine Stage for Vehicular Turbocharger Under Unsteady Pulsating Flow Environment Introduction and Background

Unsteady three-dimensional computations have been implemented on a turbocharger twinscroll turbine system (volute-turbine wheel-diffuser). The flow unsteadiness in a turbocharger turbine system is essentially driven by a highly pulsating flow from the upstream combustor which causes a pulsating stagnation pressure boundary condition at the inlet to the turbine system. Computed results have been postprocessed and interrogated in depth in order to infer the significance of the induced flow unsteadiness on performance. The induced flow unsteadiness could be deemed important, since the reduced frequency of the turbine system (based on the time scale of the inlet flow fluctuation and the flow through time) is higher than unity. Thus, the computed time-accurate pressure field and the loss generation process have been assessed to establish the causal link to the induced flow unsteadiness in the turbine system. To do this consistently both for the individual subcomponents and the system, a framework of characterizing the operation of the turbine system linked to the fluctuating inlet stagnation pressure is proposed. The framework effectively categorizes the operation of the unsteady turbine system in both spatial and temporal dimensions; such a framework would facilitate determining whether the loss generation process in a subcomponent can be approximated as unsteady (e.g., volute) or as locally quasi-steady (LQS) (e.g., turbine wheel) in response to the unsteady inlet pulsation in the inlet-to-outlet stagnation pressure ratios of the two inlets. The notion that a specific subcomponent can be approximated as locally quasi-steady while the entire turbine system in itself is unsteady is of interest as it suggests a strategy for an appropriate flow modeling and scaling as well as for the turbine system performance improvement. Also, computed results are used to determine situations where the flow effects in a specific subcomponent can be approximated as quasi-one-dimensional; thus, for instance, the flow mechanisms in the volute can reasonably be approximated on an unsteady one-dimensional basis. For a turbine stage with sudden-expansion type diffuser, the framework for integrating subcomponent models into a turbine system is formulated. The effectiveness and generality of the proposed framework are demonstrated by applying it to three distinctly different turbocharger operating conditions. The estimated power from the integrated turbine system model is in good agreement with the full unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results for all three situations. The formulated framework will be generally applicable for assessing the new design configurations as long as the corresponding high-fidelity steady CFD results are utilized to determine the quasi-steady (or acoustically compact) behavior of each new subcomponent