2,446 research outputs found
Budgeting for Growth and Prosperity: A Long-Term Plan to Balance the Budget, Grow the Economy, and Strengthen the Middle Class
Proposes reducing the deficit by investing in education, infrastructure, and technology; spending more efficiently; bolstering the social safety net; containing healthcare costs; simplifying the tax code; and raising gas and financial transaction taxes
Excitations in disordered bosonic optical lattices
Spectral excitations of ultracold gases of bosonic atoms trapped in one
dimensional optical lattices with disorder are investigated by means of the
variational cluster approach applied to the Bose-Hubbard model. In particular,
qualitatively different disorder distributions typically employed in
experiments are considered. The computed spectra exhibit a strong dependence on
both the shape of the disorder distribution and the disorder strength. We
compare alternative results for the Mott gap obtained from its formal
definition and from the minimum peak distance, which is the quantity available
from experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, version as publishe
Drainage and retention of water in small drainage cavities : experimental assessment
Water that enters the drainage cavity of a rain screen wall assembly through deficiencies in the cladding will either be drained or retained by absorption or adhesion on the drainage surfaces. The objective of this study is to gain insight into the different factors that affect the quantity of water drained or retained in a drainage cavity. Drainage tests have been conducted for water flowing between two vertical polycarbonate plates with different gap widths to determine the effect on the drainage rate. Tests showed that even small cavities with a width of 1 mm can already drain more water than the amount that would enter the cavity during a rain event. Experiments were performed to determine the contact angle of water on a range of different sheathing materials such as asphalt saturated building paper, spun-bonded polyethylene wrap and cross-woven polyolefin wrap by the use of an optical goniometer. Drainage tests have been conducted for different combinations of these materials to quantify the effect of surface energy on the drainage rate. A larger contact angle results in a smaller quantity of water retained during the drainage test. These tests result in a retained portion of water and a drainage rate for different combinations of materials. The retained portion of water may be considered as a moisture load applied to the outer-most layer of the wall assembly’s back-up wall in hygrothermal simulations
Statistical methods for tissue array images - algorithmic scoring and co-training
Recent advances in tissue microarray technology have allowed
immunohistochemistry to become a powerful medium-to-high throughput analysis
tool, particularly for the validation of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers.
However, as study size grows, the manual evaluation of these assays becomes a
prohibitive limitation; it vastly reduces throughput and greatly increases
variability and expense. We propose an algorithm - Tissue Array Co-Occurrence
Matrix Analysis (TACOMA) - for quantifying cellular phenotypes based on
textural regularity summarized by local inter-pixel relationships. The
algorithm can be easily trained for any staining pattern, is absent of
sensitive tuning parameters and has the ability to report salient pixels in an
image that contribute to its score. Pathologists' input via informative
training patches is an important aspect of the algorithm that allows the
training for any specific marker or cell type. With co-training, the error rate
of TACOMA can be reduced substantially for a very small training sample (e.g.,
with size 30). We give theoretical insights into the success of co-training via
thinning of the feature set in a high-dimensional setting when there is
"sufficient" redundancy among the features. TACOMA is flexible, transparent and
provides a scoring process that can be evaluated with clarity and confidence.
In a study based on an estrogen receptor (ER) marker, we show that TACOMA is
comparable to, or outperforms, pathologists' performance in terms of accuracy
and repeatability.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS543 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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