We describe a procedure by which surfactant/albumin ratios in bronchoalveolar fluid (BALF) may be quantified with the Abbott Laboratories TDx fluorescence polarization analyzer and fetal lung maturity reagents. Adding albumin to BALF samples shifted the surfactant/albumin ratios to within the analytical range of the method. The analytical CV for assay of modified BALF samples was 2.9%. Ratios o...

In the course of the 20th century limnology and oceanography have been transformed from purely descriptive disciplines to sciences that champion quantitative approaches and aim to reveal mechanistic relationships. In particular, the increasing use of mathematical formulations and models to understand lakes, streams and oceans as dynamical systems can be viewed as a paradigm shift. The mathemati...

The history of the study of judgment and decision making has been marked by an iterative tension between what are known as prescriptive and descriptive advances. Prescriptive theories, which typically have their roots in economics, seek to define efficient or optimal decision making. Descriptive empirical advances, with roots typically in psychology, then invariably suggest that these prescript...

Clustering categorical sequences is currently a difficult problem due to the lack of an efficient representation model for sequences. Unlike the existing models, which mainly focus on the fixed-length tuples representation, in this paper, a new representation model on the variablelength tuples is proposed. The variable-length tuples are obtained using a pruning method applied to delete the redu...

Mobile wireless video delivery is still challenging due to its limited bandwidth and dynamic channel status. In this paper, a novel approach named Dubbing Video Slides (DVS) is proposed to cope with the bandwidth limitation problem. Based on a statistical video content importance analysis, DVS method can dynamically select and transmit representative video frames which are relatively more impor...

We propose a new descriptive complexity notion of uniformity for branching programs solving problems defined on structured data. We observe that FO[=]-uniform (n-way) branching programs are unable to solve the tree evaluation problem studied by Cook, McKenzie, Wehr, Braverman and Santhanam [8] because such programs possess a variant of their thriftiness property. Similarly, FO[=]-uniform (n-way...