When you are assessing the quality of the evidence, it’s not how the data are analyzed that’s important. Far more important is how the data are collected. Don’t agonize over whether the researchers should have used a non-parametric test or whether a random effects meta-analysis is appropriate (just to cite two obscure examples). These are important issues and they generate a lot of debate. But ...

BACKGROUND There are inconsistent reports about multiple sclerosis (MS) risk among migrants from low to high MS risk geographical regions. This study assessed the overall MS incidence and evaluated seasonality in birth and subsequent MS risk later in the life in second generation of migrants born and lived in Kuwait. METHODS We assessed the overall and gender-specific MS risk in second genera...

BACKGROUND Currently, natural and synthetic scaffolds are being explored as augmentation devices for rotator cuff repair. When used in this manner, these devices are believed to offer some degree of load sharing; however, no studies have quantified this effect. Furthermore, the manner in which loads on an augmented rotator cuff repair are distributed among the various components of the repair i...

BACKGROUND Although non-normal data are widespread in biomedical research, parametric tests unnecessarily predominate in statistical analyses. METHODS We surveyed five biomedical journals and - for all studies which contain at least the unpaired t-test or the non-parametric Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test - investigated the relationship between the choice of a statistical test and other variables ...

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The use of gestural devices in shape generation is getting more and more accepted. The advantages of this approach are threefold: (a) it provides a highly interactive way of regeneration and modification of free from shape models, (b) it hides the mathematical details of parametric surface design from the user, and (c) this type of analogue input devices are more powerful in shape data generati...

Optical parametric oscillators are versatile devices for generating a tunable coherent radiation from an incident laser beam. They rely on nonlinear frequency conversion to cover spectral ranges that poorly or not covered by direct emission. This article presents short overview of the optical principles operation, main implementations and related applications.

Energy harvesting (EH) is the process of capturing and storing energy from external sources or ambient environment. The EH devices have found various emerging applications, particularly, in healthcare sector. Kinetic-based micro energy-harvesting a promising technology that could prolong lifetime batteries small wearable implantable devices. In this paper, using mathematical model Coulomb-force...

The ability to generate particles from the quantum vacuum is one of the most profound consequences of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Although the significance of vacuum fluctuations can be seen throughout physics, the experimental realization of vacuum amplification effects has until now been limited to a few cases. Superconducting circuit devices, driven by the goal to achieve a viable qu...

Acoustic models based on long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNNs) were applied to statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) and showed significant improvements in naturalness and latency over those based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). This paper describes further optimizations of LSTM-RNN-based SPSS for deployment on mobile devices; weight quantization, multi-frame inf...