Generating optimal states for a homodyne Bell test

Published versio

Torsion of Undescended Testis in a 14-Month-Old Child Refusing to Bear Weight

In this report, we discuss a case of a 14-month-old male presenting in the emergency department with refusal to bear weight on his left leg. Plain radiographic studies revealed no evidence of effusion, fracture, or dislocation. Laboratory studies were significant for an elevated white blood cell count, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and C-reactive protein. Further studies included unremarkable ultrasound of the left hip and normal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of both hips. An incidental finding on MRI was a left inguinal mass concerning an incarcerated hernia. Ultrasound of this mass demonstrated a left undescended testis within the inguinal canal and possible incarcerated paratesticular inguinal hernia. The final pathologic diagnosis of a torsed gangrenous left testicle within the inguinal canal was confirmed during surgery

Single-qubit rotations in two-dimensional optical lattices with multiqubit addressing

Published versio

Verifying Atom Entanglement Schemes by Testing Bell's Inequality

Recent experiments to test Bell's inequality using entangled photons and ions aimed at tests of basic quantum mechanical principles. Interesting results have been obtained and many loopholes could be closed. In this paper we want to point out that tests of Bell's inequality also play an important role in verifying atom entanglement schemes. We describe as an example a scheme to prepare arbitrary entangled states of N two-level atoms using a leaky optical cavity and a scheme to entangle atoms inside a photonic crystal. During the state preparation no photons are emitted and observing a violation of Bell's inequality is the only way to test whether a scheme works with a high precision or not.Comment: Proceedings for the conference Garda 2000, to appear in Zeitschrift fuer Naturforschung, 7 pages, 7 figure

Non-muscle myosins 2A and 2B drive changes in cell morphology that occur as myoblasts align and fuse

The interaction of non-muscle myosins 2A and 2B with actin may drive changes in cell movement, shape and adhesion. To investigate this, we used cultured myoblasts as a model system. These cells characteristically change shape from triangular to bipolar when they form groups of aligned cells. Antisense oligonucleotide knockdown of nonmuscle myosin 2A, but not non-muscle myosin 2B, inhibited this shape change, interfered with cell-cell adhesion, had a minor effect on tail retraction and prevented myoblast fusion. By contrast, non-muscle myosin 2B knockdown markedly inhibited tail retraction, increasing cell length by over 200% by 72 hours compared with controls. In addition it interfered with nuclei redistribution in myotubes. Nonmuscle myosin 2C is not involved as western analysis showed that it is not expressed in myoblasts, but only in myotubes. To understand why non-muscle myosins 2A and 2B have such different roles, we analysed their distributions by immuno-electron microscopy, and found that nonmuscle myosin 2A was more tightly associated with the plasma membrane than non-muscle myosin 2B. This suggests that non-muscle myosin 2A is more important for bipolar shape formation and adhesion owing to its preferential interaction with membrane-associated actin, whereas the role of non-muscle myosin 2B in retraction prevents over-elongation of myoblasts

Measurement-induced localization of relative degrees of freedom

Published versio

mockrobiota: a Public Resource for Microbiome Bioinformatics Benchmarking.

Mock communities are an important tool for validating, optimizing, and comparing bioinformatics methods for microbial community analysis. We present mockrobiota, a public resource for sharing, validating, and documenting mock community data resources, available at http://caporaso-lab.github.io/mockrobiota/. The materials contained in mockrobiota include data set and sample metadata, expected composition data (taxonomy or gene annotations or reference sequences for mock community members), and links to raw data (e.g., raw sequence data) for each mock community data set. mockrobiota does not supply physical sample materials directly, but the data set metadata included for each mock community indicate whether physical sample materials are available. At the time of this writing, mockrobiota contains 11 mock community data sets with known species compositions, including bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic mock communities, analyzed by high-throughput marker gene sequencing. IMPORTANCE The availability of standard and public mock community data will facilitate ongoing method optimizations, comparisons across studies that share source data, and greater transparency and access and eliminate redundancy. These are also valuable resources for bioinformatics teaching and training. This dynamic resource is intended to expand and evolve to meet the changing needs of the omics community

Evaluation of a wearable computer system for telemonitoring in a critical environment

This paper reports on the evaluation of a wearable computer system designed for use in a critical environment, namely the intensive care unit of a hospital. The nature of the application raised ethical issues for testing in a clinical environment and standard evaluation techniques could not easily be applied. The system was therefore evaluated by clinicians in a multi-tasking environment with a simulated set of patient scenarios. Measures of suitability and wearability were applied. The results were encouraging and the system was deemed suitable for further evaluation in the clinical setting, subject to ethical approval

Which Market Entry and Product Line Strategies Ought Organisations to Adopt for Emerging Economies?

Emerging economies offer tremendous potential for organisations seeking to expand globally and to attain the associated rewards. However, organisations differ in their entrepreneurial tendencies to enter new markets and to introduce new products in emerging economies. Organisations also differ in their abilities to manage their development programs, that is, their execution of different types of projects that lead to success in emerging markets. Finally, organisations differ in which overall measures of program performance are consistent with their strategic objectives. This study provides a literature foundation and conceptual framework designed to understand which market entry and product line strategies and performance measures are appropriate for organisations pursuing strategic success in emerging markets. This study sets forward grounded propositions that different strategic types will vary in their market entry and product line strategies, in the project composition of their development programs, and in the orientations of performance measures used to evaluate their development programs. Prospectors, according to type, will enter emerging economies by introducing new product lines to new customer types, and by emphasizing new-to-the-world products. They will evaluate their development programs with Growth-oriented performance measures. Defenders will more typically occupy secure niches within emerging economies by emphasizing product improvement and cost reduction projects for current types of customers. They will evaluate their development programs with Efficiency-oriented performance measures. Analyzers will either target new customer types with proven products, or serve an existing market niche with new product lines. They will evaluate their development program performance with Strategy-oriented measures

Modeling software design diversity

Design diversity has been used for many years now as a means of achieving a degree of fault tolerance in software-based systems. Whilst there is clear evidence that the approach can be expected to deliver some increase in reliability compared with a single version, there is not agreement about the extent of this. More importantly, it remains difficult to evaluate exactly how reliable a particular diverse fault-tolerant system is. This difficulty arises because assumptions of independence of failures between different versions have been shown not to be tenable: assessment of the actual level of dependence present is therefore needed, and this is hard. In this tutorial we survey the modelling issues here, with an emphasis upon the impact these have upon the problem of assessing the reliability of fault tolerant systems. The intended audience is one of designers, assessors and project managers with only a basic knowledge of probabilities, as well as reliability experts without detailed knowledge of software, who seek an introduction to the probabilistic issues in decisions about design diversity