Objectives: Facial Nerve Paralysis (FNP) may cause disfigurement of the face, which result in psychological disturbances and isolation because of society’s reaction to people’s physical appearance. This study aimed to determine the relationship between psychological symptoms, age, the severity of symptoms, and societal integration in people with FNP. Methods: The present research is a cross-se...

We investigate utilizing the integer programming (IP) technique of reduced cost fixing to improve maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) solving. In particular, we show how reduced cost fixing can be used within the implicit hitting set approach (IHS) for solving MaxSAT. Solvers based on IHS have proved to be quite effective for MaxSAT, especially on problems with a variety of clause weights. The uniq...

A case-based reasoning system was created to support customers who purchased appliances from General Electric. When a customer calls General Electric for help, a call-taker uses the system to diagnose the problem and step the customer through its solution. The system has been in use by 300 call-takers since 1999. It has resulted in a 20 percent increase in the probability the customer’s problem...

The effect of a salient visual feature in orienting spatial attention was examined as a function of the learned association between the visual feature and the observer’s action. During an initial acquisition phase, participants learned that two keypress actions consistently produced red and green visual cues. Next, in a test phase, participants’ actions continued to result in singletons, but th...

We present a family of resource constraints which allow us to model scheduling problems with time variable resource cost. Our main use case is energy cost minimization, by avoiding peak electricity usage periods in the generated schedule. This at the same time helps to balance the overall demand profile, leading to reduced stress on the national electricity grid. The proposed constraints extend...

BACKGROUND To replicate, lentiviruses such as HIV must integrate DNA copies of their RNA genomes into host cell chromosomes. Lentiviral integration is favored in active transcription units, which allows efficient viral gene expression after integration, but the mechanisms directing integration targeting are incompletely understood. A cellular protein, PSIP1/LEDGF/p75, binds tightly to the lenti...

There are different finite element models in place for predicting the bending behavior of shear deformable beams and plates. Mostly, the literature abounds with traditional equi-spaced Langrange based low order finite element approximations using displacement formulations. However, the finite element models of Timoshenko beams and Mindlin plates with linear interpolation of all generalized disp...

Explaining the maintenance of sexual reproduction remains one of the greatest challenges in biology. The theoretical oddity of sex is based on at least three advantages that asexual organisms have over sexual ones: 1Asexuals, by not producing males, have a two fold advantage over sexuals, regarding the number of reproductive individuals; 2Sexuals have an evolutionary disadvantage over asexuals,...