A New Approach and Tool in Verifying Asynchronous Circuits

Research in asynchronous circuit approach has been carried out recently when asynchronous circuits are presented more widely in electronic systems. As they are more important in human life, their correctness should be considered carefully. Although there are some EDA tools for design and synthesis of asynchronous circuits, they are lack of methods for verifying the correctness of the produced circuits. In this work, we are about to propose a verification method and apply it in making a new version of the PAiD tool that can enable engineers to design, synthesize and verify asynchronous circuits. Experiments in verifying circuits have been also provided in this work

Appropriate Antibiotic Use and Associated Factors in Vietnamese Outpatients

Background: Inappropriate antibiotic use among outpatients is recognized as the primary driver of antibiotic resistance. A proper understanding of appropriate antibiotic usage and associated factors helps to determine and limit inappropriateness. We aimed to identify the rate of appropriate use of antibiotics and identify factors associated with the inappropriate prescriptions. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional descriptive study in outpatient antibiotic use at a hospital in Can Tho City, Vietnam, from August 1, 2019, to January 31, 2020. Data were extracted from all outpatient prescriptions at the Medical Examination Department and analyzed by SPSS 18 and Chi-squared tests, with 95% confidence intervals. The rationale for antibiotic use was evaluated through antibiotic selection, dose, dosing frequency, dosing time, interactions between antibiotics and other drugs, and general appropriate usage. Results: A total of 420 prescriptions were 51.7% for females, 61.7% with health insurance, and 44.0% for patients with one comorbid condition. The general appropriate antibiotic usage rate was 86.7%. Prescriptions showed that 11.0% and 9.5% had a higher dosing frequency and dose than recommended, respectively; 10.2% had an inappropriate dosing time; 3.1% had drug interactions; and only 1.7% had been prescribed inappropriate antibiotics. The risk of inappropriate antibiotic use increased in patients with comorbidities and antibiotic treatment lasting >7 days (p < 0.05). Conclusions: The study indicated a need for more consideration when prescribing antibiotics to patients with comorbidities or using more than 7 days of treatment

PALM-3000 high-order adaptive optics system for Palomar Observatory

Deployed as a multi-user shared facility on the 5.1 meter Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory, the PALM-3000 highorder upgrade to the successful Palomar Adaptive Optics System will deliver extreme AO correction in the near-infrared, and diffraction-limited images down to visible wavelengths, using both natural and sodium laser guide stars. Wavefront control will be provided by two deformable mirrors, a 3368 active actuator woofer and 349 active actuator tweeter, controlled at up to 3 kHz using an innovative wavefront processor based on a cluster of 17 graphics processing units. A Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor with selectable pupil sampling will provide high-order wavefront sensing, while an infrared tip/tilt sensor and visible truth wavefront sensor will provide low-order LGS control. Four back-end instruments are planned at first light: the PHARO near-infrared camera/spectrograph, the SWIFT visible light integral field spectrograph, Project 1640, a near-infrared coronagraphic integral field spectrograph, and 888Cam, a high-resolution visible light imager

PALM-3000 high-order adaptive optics system for Palomar Observatory

Deployed as a multi-user shared facility on the 5.1 meter Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory, the PALM-3000 highorder upgrade to the successful Palomar Adaptive Optics System will deliver extreme AO correction in the near-infrared, and diffraction-limited images down to visible wavelengths, using both natural and sodium laser guide stars. Wavefront control will be provided by two deformable mirrors, a 3368 active actuator woofer and 349 active actuator tweeter, controlled at up to 3 kHz using an innovative wavefront processor based on a cluster of 17 graphics processing units. A Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor with selectable pupil sampling will provide high-order wavefront sensing, while an infrared tip/tilt sensor and visible truth wavefront sensor will provide low-order LGS control. Four back-end instruments are planned at first light: the PHARO near-infrared camera/spectrograph, the SWIFT visible light integral field spectrograph, Project 1640, a near-infrared coronagraphic integral field spectrograph, and 888Cam, a high-resolution visible light imager

Safety and efficacy of fluoxetine on functional outcome after acute stroke (AFFINITY): a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Background Trials of fluoxetine for recovery after stroke report conflicting results. The Assessment oF FluoxetINe In sTroke recoverY (AFFINITY) trial aimed to show if daily oral fluoxetine for 6 months after stroke improves functional outcome in an ethnically diverse population. Methods AFFINITY was a randomised, parallel-group, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial done in 43 hospital stroke units in Australia (n=29), New Zealand (four), and Vietnam (ten). Eligible patients were adults (aged ≥18 years) with a clinical diagnosis of acute stroke in the previous 2–15 days, brain imaging consistent with ischaemic or haemorrhagic stroke, and a persisting neurological deficit that produced a modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score of 1 or more. Patients were randomly assigned 1:1 via a web-based system using a minimisation algorithm to once daily, oral fluoxetine 20 mg capsules or matching placebo for 6 months. Patients, carers, investigators, and outcome assessors were masked to the treatment allocation. The primary outcome was functional status, measured by the mRS, at 6 months. The primary analysis was an ordinal logistic regression of the mRS at 6 months, adjusted for minimisation variables. Primary and safety analyses were done according to the patient's treatment allocation. The trial is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12611000774921. Findings Between Jan 11, 2013, and June 30, 2019, 1280 patients were recruited in Australia (n=532), New Zealand (n=42), and Vietnam (n=706), of whom 642 were randomly assigned to fluoxetine and 638 were randomly assigned to placebo. Mean duration of trial treatment was 167 days (SD 48·1). At 6 months, mRS data were available in 624 (97%) patients in the fluoxetine group and 632 (99%) in the placebo group. The distribution of mRS categories was similar in the fluoxetine and placebo groups (adjusted common odds ratio 0·94, 95% CI 0·76–1·15; p=0·53). Compared with patients in the placebo group, patients in the fluoxetine group had more falls (20 [3%] vs seven [1%]; p=0·018), bone fractures (19 [3%] vs six [1%]; p=0·014), and epileptic seizures (ten [2%] vs two [<1%]; p=0·038) at 6 months. Interpretation Oral fluoxetine 20 mg daily for 6 months after acute stroke did not improve functional outcome and increased the risk of falls, bone fractures, and epileptic seizures. These results do not support the use of fluoxetine to improve functional outcome after stroke

A bitwise-based indexing and heuristic-driven on-the-fly approach forWeb service composition and verification

During the last decade, software engineeringcommunity has witnessed the emerging of SOA architecture,where Web services play a crucial role. It prompts theconcept of Web Service Composition (WSC). Even thoughinteresting, this issue posed some remarkable challenges, oneof which is constraint handling. To be more precise, oneneeds to ensure that the composite Web service fulfills, atthe same time, many constraints, including functional constraints,Quality of Service (QoS), and the execution order ofthe component services, or temporal relations. Those constraintsare of different natures, thus finding an efficientverification on all kinds of constraints during the compositionprocess is by no means a trivial task. Backed by asolid foundation of temporal logic, model checking (MC) isa suitable approach to handle this issue. However, MC-basedapproach suffers from the infamous problem of state-spaceexplosion, making it limited when applied to real-life situations.The work in this paper addresses the problem byproposing various approaches for handling the state-spaceexploration, including (i) an introduction of an LTS-basedmodel known as LTS4WS, which can avoid generating fullschema ofWeb service composition and allowon-the-fly verificationon the state space; (ii) heuristics strategies to find thebest potential composition, and (iii) a bitwise-based indexingmechanism for fast location of suitable Web services.All of those approaches are unified in a single tool, known asB Khai T. [email protected] T. [email protected] H. [email protected] Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ho Chi MinhCity University of Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, VietnamWSCOVER. As a result, a significant improvement of performancehas been made, especially as compared with theother existing works in the same field

Metamaterial-enhanced vibrational absorption spectroscopy for the detection of protein molecules

From visible to mid-infrared frequencies, molecular sensing has been a major successful application of plasmonics because of the enormous enhancement of the surface electromagnetic nearfield associated with the induced collective motion of surface free carriers excited by the probe light. However, in the lower-energy terahertz (THz) region, sensing by detecting molecular vibrations is still challenging because of low sensitivity, complicated spectral features, and relatively little accumulated knowledge of molecules. Here, we report the use of a micron-scale thin-slab metamaterial (MM) architecture, which functions as an amplifier for enhancing the absorption signal of the THz vibration of an ultrathin adsorbed layer of large organic molecules. We examined bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a prototype large protein molecule and Rhodamine 6G (Rh6G) and 3,3'-diethylthiatricarbocyanine iodide (DTTCI) as examples of small molecules. Among them, our MM significantly magnified only the signal strength of bulky BSA. On the other hand, DTTCI and Rh6G are inactive, as they lack low-frequency vibrational modes in this frequency region. The results obtained here clearly demonstrate the promise of MM-enhanced absorption spectroscopy in the THz region for detection and structural monitoring of large biomolecules such as proteins or pathogenic enzymes