OBJECTIVE To evaluate the performance and cost of an HIV reverse transcriptase-enzyme activity (HIV-RT) assay in comparison to an HIV-1 RNA assay for routine viral load monitoring in resource limited settings. DESIGN A cohort-based longitudinal study. SETTING Two antiretroviral therapy (ART) centres in Karnataka state, South India, providing treatment under the Indian AIDS control programme...

Traffic load-balancing in datacenters alleviates hot spots and improves network utilization. In this paper, a stable innetwork load-balancing algorithm is developed in the setting of software-defined networking. A control plane configures a data plane over successive intervals of time. While the MaxWeight algorithm can be applied in this setting and offers certain throughput optimality properti...

This paper presents the settings of automatic voltage regulator (AVR) and power system stabilizer (PSS) on a single machine infinite bus (SMIB) to improve the dynamic stability of the power system. This setting is done by determining the fitness function of AVR (KA) and PSS (KPSS) gain using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The main purpose of this setting is to minimize the oscilla...

Zinc oxide-eugenol (ZOE) is usually applied clinically as dental filling material for thermal insulation and temporary restoration. The objective of this study was to use ZOE as a composite matrix and low melting-point polyester fibers or fabrics as reinforcement. The added fibers or fabrics increased the composite materials’ compressive load by 250 N and 290 N, respectively. Fiber length and t...

This paper compares the performance of Tail Drop and three different flavors of the RED (Random Early Detection) queue management mechanism: RED with a standard parameter setting, RED with an optimized parameter setting based on a model of RED with TCP flows, and finally a version of RED with a smoother drop function called “gentle RED”. Performance is evaluated under various load situations fo...

This paper considers heavy-traffic limit theorems for polling models with periodic server routing with general renewal arrivals and with mixtures of gated and exhaustive service policies, in a general parameter setting. We provide a strong conjecture for the limiting waiting-time distribution in a general parameter setting when the load tends to 1, under proper heavy-traffic scalings. The resul...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate the activation of the vastus medialis oblique muscle (VMO) and vastus lateralis muscle (VL) during squat exercise with various hip adduction loads using a pressure-biofeedback unit, and to suggest the most effective exercise method. [Subjects] We recruited 15 healthy adult females with no pain in the knee joint and no other orthopedic probl...