Organization and use of a Software/Hardware Avionics Research Program (SHARP)

The organization and use is described of the software/hardware avionics research program (SHARP) developed to duplicate the automatic portion of the STOLAND simulator system, on a general-purpose computer system (i.e., IBM 360). The program's uses are: (1) to conduct comparative evaluation studies of current and proposed airborne and ground system concepts via single run or Monte Carlo simulation techniques, and (2) to provide a software tool for efficient algorithm evaluation and development for the STOLAND avionics computer

Pathophysiology of Himalayan endemic goiter

Goiter prevalence and iodine metabolism were studied in areas of endemic goiter in the Himalayas in India and Nepal. Similar studies were also made in Ceylon. The results are compatible with the hypothesis that severe environmental deficiency of iodide is the primary factor responsible for endemic goiter in these areas. The endemicity was less severe in Ceylon than in India and Nepal. The thyroid glands of persons living in endemic areas show an interesting adaptive response to maintain internal homeostasis in the face of severe iodine deficiency. The mechanism of this adaptation was studied in thyroids of goats raised in endemic and nonendemic areas. Thyroids of goats living in an area of severe iodine deficiency showed higher MIT/DIT and T3/T4 ratios than glands of those in an area of iodine abundance. There was a higher incorporation of 131I in 27S iodoproteins in the iodide-deficient glands. A decrease in iodine concentration of the thyroid and an increase in circulating TSH levels are possibly involved in mediating this response but of the two, the former mechanism seems more likely than the latter

On finitely ambiguous B\"uchi automata

Unambiguous B\"uchi automata, i.e. B\"uchi automata allowing only one accepting run per word, are a useful restriction of B\"uchi automata that is well-suited for probabilistic model-checking. In this paper we propose a more permissive variant, namely finitely ambiguous B\"uchi automata, a generalisation where each word has at most $k$ accepting runs, for some fixed $k$. We adapt existing notions and results concerning finite and bounded ambiguity of finite automata to the setting of $\omega$-languages and present a translation from arbitrary nondeterministic B\"uchi automata with $n$ states to finitely ambiguous automata with at most $3^n$ states and at most $n$ accepting runs per word

Migratory winter bag-net fishery in coastal waters of the Hooghly estuary

The migratory winter big-net fishery is a typical feature of the coastal waters of the Hooghly estuary, 4,000 man with about 800 bag-nets migrated from different estuarine areas and established fishing camps In different islands during 1934 85 and 1985-86. Three and a half months seasonal fishery accounted for an average estimated fish yield of 17,872 t, forming about 71% of the total fish yield from the estuary as against 29% to 33% about 15 year* ago. An average catch per unit of effort of 152 kg was about 18 to 36 times that obtained in the upper and middle stretches and about 3 times more than that 15 years ago in the lower coastal waters. Harpodon nehereus, Trichlurus spp., Psma pama, Setipinna spp. and different species of prawns dominated in the catches. The bulk of the catches are tundrlsd and exported to marketing centres. The reasons for tremendous increase in the winter migratory bag-net catches have been discusse

A second order cone formulation of continuous CTA model

The final publication is available at link.springer.comIn this paper we consider a minimum distance Controlled Tabular Adjustment (CTA) model for statistical disclosure limitation (control) of tabular data. The goal of the CTA model is to find the closest safe table to some original tabular data set that contains sensitive information. The measure of closeness is usually measured using l1 or l2 norm; with each measure having its advantages and disadvantages. Recently, in [4] a regularization of the l1 -CTA using Pseudo-Huber func- tion was introduced in an attempt to combine positive characteristics of both l1 -CTA and l2 -CTA. All three models can be solved using appro- priate versions of Interior-Point Methods (IPM). It is known that IPM in general works better on well structured problems such as conic op- timization problems, thus, reformulation of these CTA models as conic optimization problem may be advantageous. We present reformulation of Pseudo-Huber-CTA, and l1 -CTA as Second-Order Cone (SOC) op- timization problems and test the validity of the approach on the small example of two-dimensional tabular data set.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Acute encephalitis syndrome surveillance, Kushinagar district, Uttar Pradesh, India, 2011-2012

In India, quality surveillance for acute encephalitis syndrome (AES), including laboratory testing, is necessary for understanding the epidemiology and etiology of AES, planning interventions, and developing policy. We reviewed AES surveillance data for January 2011-June 2012 from Kushinagar District, Uttar Pradesh, India. Data were cleaned, incidence was determined, and demographic characteristics of cases and data quality were analyzed. A total of 812 AES case records were identified, of which 23\% had illogical entries. AES incidence was highest among boys<6 years of age, and cases peaked during monsoon season. Records for laboratory results (available for Japanese encephalitis but not AES) and vaccination history were largely incomplete, so inferences about the epidemiology and etiology of AES could not be made. The low-quality AES/Japanese encephalitis surveillance data in this area provide little evidence to support development of prevention and control measures, estimate the effect of interventions, and avoid the waste of public health resources

Bounds on the Complexity of Halfspace Intersections when the Bounded Faces have Small Dimension

We study the combinatorial complexity of D-dimensional polyhedra defined as the intersection of n halfspaces, with the property that the highest dimension of any bounded face is much smaller than D. We show that, if d is the maximum dimension of a bounded face, then the number of vertices of the polyhedron is O(n^d) and the total number of bounded faces of the polyhedron is O(n^d^2). For inputs in general position the number of bounded faces is O(n^d). For any fixed d, we show how to compute the set of all vertices, how to determine the maximum dimension of a bounded face of the polyhedron, and how to compute the set of bounded faces in polynomial time, by solving a polynomial number of linear programs

Random Costs in Combinatorial Optimization

The random cost problem is the problem of finding the minimum in an exponentially long list of random numbers. By definition, this problem cannot be solved faster than by exhaustive search. It is shown that a classical NP-hard optimization problem, number partitioning, is essentially equivalent to the random cost problem. This explains the bad performance of heuristic approaches to the number partitioning problem and allows us to calculate the probability distributions of the optimum and sub-optimum costs.Comment: 4 pages, Revtex, 2 figures (eps), submitted to PR

A Relevance of Serological Tests in Diagnosis of Early Congenital Syphilis: A Case Report

Abstract Congenital syphilis is acquired by an infant from an infected mother by transplacental transmission of Treponema pallidum during pregnancy or possibly at birth from contact with maternal lesions. Early form of congenital syphilis is when the clinical manifestations occur before two years of age and late congenital syphilis is when manifestations occur among untreated patients after two years of age. Serological tests hold a mainstay in syphilis diagnosis. Nontreponemal tests are commonly used as a screening test for syphilis, which may turn negative after full course of treatment, while treponemal tests are diagnostic and remain positive for life in low titre even after treatment. Here, we present a case of early congenital syphilis and its confirmation with serological tests with emphasis on the relevance of these tests in confirmation of diagnosis

Magnetic control of large room-temperature polarization

Numerous authors have referred to room-temperature magnetic switching of large electric polarizations as The Holy Grail of magnetoelectricity.We report this long-sought effect using a new physical process of coupling between magnetic and ferroelectric relaxor nano-regions. Here we report magnetic switching between the normal ferroelectric state and the ferroelectric relaxor state. This gives both a new room-temperature, single-phase, multiferroic magnetoelectric, PbZr0.46Ti0.34Fe0.13W0.07O3, with polarization, loss (<4%), and resistivity (typically 108 -109 ohm.cm) equal to or superior to BiFeO3, and also a new and very large magnetoelectric effect: switching not from +Pr to negative Pr with applied H, but from Pr to zero with applied H of less than a Tesla. This switching of the polarization occurs not because of a conventional magnetically induced phase transition, but because of dynamic effects: Increasing H lengthens the relaxation time by x500 from 100 ?s, and it couples strongly the polarization relaxation and spin relaxations. The diverging polarization relaxation time accurately fits a modified Vogel-Fulcher Equation in which the freezing temperature Tf is replaced by a critical freezing field Hf that is 0.92 positive/negative 0.07 Tesla. This field dependence and the critical field Hc are derived analytically from the spherical random bond random field (SRBRF) model with no adjustable parameters and an E2H2 coupling. This device permits 3-state logic (+Pr,0,negative Pr) and a condenser with >5000% magnetic field change in its capacitance.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure