1,063 research outputs found
Depression in COPD – management and quality of life considerations
Depression is common in COPD patients. Around 40% are affected by severe depressive symptoms or clinical depression. It is not easy to diagnose depression in COPD patients because of overlapping symptoms between COPD and depression. However, the six-item Hamilton Depression Subscale appears to be a useful screening tool. Quality of life is strongly impaired in COPD patients and patients’ quality of life emerges to be more correlated with the presence of depressive symptoms than with the severity of COPD. Nortriptyline and imipramine are effective in the treatment of depression, but little is known about the usefulness of newer antidepressants. In patients with milder depression, pulmonary rehabilitation as well as cognitive-behavioral therapy are effective. Little is known about the long-term outcome in COPD patients with co-morbid depression. Preliminary data suggest that co-morbid depression may be an independent protector for mortality
Advances in the theory of III-V Nanowire Growth Dynamics
Nanowire (NW) crystal growth via the vapour_liquid_solid mechanism is a
complex dynamic process involving interactions between many atoms of various
thermodynamic states. With increasing speed over the last few decades many
works have reported on various aspects of the growth mechanisms, both
experimentally and theoretically. We will here propose a general continuum
formalism for growth kinetics based on thermodynamic parameters and transition
state kinetics. We use the formalism together with key elements of recent
research to present a more overall treatment of III_V NW growth, which can
serve as a basis to model and understand the dynamical mechanisms in terms of
the basic control parameters, temperature and pressures/beam fluxes.
Self-catalysed GaAs NW growth on Si substrates by molecular beam epitaxy is
used as a model system.Comment: 63 pages, 25 figures and 4 tables. Some details are explained more
carefully in this version aswell as a new figure is added illustrating
various facets of a WZ crysta
Doping incorporation paths in catalyst-free Be-doped GaAs nanowires
The incorporation paths of Be in GaAs nanowires grown by the Ga-assisted
method in molecular beam epitaxy has been investigated by electrical
measurements of nanowires with different doping profiles. We find that Be atoms
incorporate preferentially via the nanowire side facets, while the
incorporation path through the Ga droplet is negligible. We also demonstrate
that Be can diffuse into the volume of the nanowire giving an alternative
incorporation path. This work is an important step towards controlled doping of
nanowires and will serve as a help for designing future devices based on
nanowires.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
The Validation and Assessment of Machine Learning: A Game of Prediction from High-Dimensional Data
In applied statistics, tools from machine learning are popular for analyzing complex and high-dimensional data. However, few theoretical results are available that could guide to the appropriate machine learning tool in a new application. Initial development of an overall strategy thus often implies that multiple methods are tested and compared on the same set of data. This is particularly difficult in situations that are prone to over-fitting where the number of subjects is low compared to the number of potential predictors. The article presents a game which provides some grounds for conducting a fair model comparison. Each player selects a modeling strategy for predicting individual response from potential predictors. A strictly proper scoring rule, bootstrap cross-validation, and a set of rules are used to make the results obtained with different strategies comparable. To illustrate the ideas, the game is applied to data from the Nugenob Study where the aim is to predict the fat oxidation capacity based on conventional factors and high-dimensional metabolomics data. Three players have chosen to use support vector machines, LASSO, and random forests, respectively
Is Socioeconomic Status of the Rearing Environment Causally Related to Obesity in the Offspring?
We attempt to elucidate whether there might be a causal connection between the socioeconomic status (SES) of the rearing environment and obesity in the offspring using data from two large-scale adoption studies: (1) The Copenhagen Adoption Study of Obesity (CASO), and (2) The Survey of Holt Adoptees and Their Families (HOLT). In CASO, the SES of both biological and adoptive parents was known, but all children were adopted. In HOLT, only the SES of the rearing parents was known, but the children could be either biological or adopted. After controlling for relevant covariates (e.g., adoptee age at measurement, adoptee age at transfer, adoptee sex) the raw (unstandardized) regression coefficients for adoptive and biological paternal SES on adoptee body mass index (BMI: kg/m2) in CASO were -.22 and -.23, respectively, both statistically significant (p = 0.01). Controlling for parental BMI (both adoptive and biological) reduced the coefficient for biological paternal SES by 44% (p = .034) and the coefficient for adoptive paternal SES by 1%. For HOLT, the regression coefficients for rearing parent SES were -.42 and -.25 for biological and adoptive children, respectively. Controlling for the average BMI of the rearing father and mother (i.e., mid-parental BMI) reduced the SES coefficient by 47% in their biological offspring (p≤.0001), and by 12% in their adoptive offspring (p = .09). Thus, despite the differing structures of the two adoption studies, both suggest that shared genetic diathesis and direct environmental transmission contribute about equally to the association between rearing SES and offspring BMI
Observation of supercurrent enhancement in SNS junctions by non-equilibrium injection into supercurrent carrying bound Andreev states
We report for the first time enhancement of the supercurrent by means of
injection in a mesoscopic three terminal planar SNSNS device made of Al on
GaAs. When a current is injected from one of the superconducting Al electrodes
at an injection bias , the DC Josephson current between the
other two superconducting electrodes has a maximum, giving evidence for an
enhancement due to a non-equilibrium injection into bound Andreev states of the
underlying semiconductor. The effect persists to temperatures where the
equilibrium supercurrent has vanished.Comment: 7 pages + 3 figures. Resubmitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. Contents change
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