Background: Chromomycin A3 (CMA3) staining, with the slide method or fluorescence microscopy, is widely used for indirect assessment of protamine deficiency in a semen sample. Flow cytometry is the most suitable tool which to improve assessment accuracy, both in terms of statistical analysis and to prevent observer variation. This study provides a simple procedure to account for merocyanine 540...

We examined the measurement error in inhaled and exhaled aerosol concentration resulting from the bolus delivery system when small volumes of monodisperse aerosols are inspired to different lung depths. A laser photometer that illuminated approximately 75% of the breathing path cross section recorded low inhaled bolus half-widths (42 ml) and negative deposition values for shallow bolus inhalati...

Clifford A. Meyer and Christodoulos A. Floudas Department of Chemical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Abstract This paper presents an efficient branch and bound approach to address the global optimization of constrained optimization problems with twice differentiable functions. A lower bound on the global minimum is determined via a convex nonlinear programming probl...

It was with great interest that we read the article by Tutuian et al1 in a recent issue of CHEST (August 2006). The authors investigated temporal relationships between non-acid reflux and cough events in patients with persistent cough, utilizing impedance/pH monitoring and subjective recording of cough events by means of a diary and a self-operated digital data logger. Examining temporal relati...

A function on R with multiple local minima is approximated from below, via linear programming, by a linear combination of convex kernel functions using sample points from the given function. The resulting convex kernel underestimator is then minimized, using either a linear equation solver for a linear-quadratic kernel or by a Newton method for a Gaussian kernel, to obtain an approximation to a...

BACKGROUND Leptospirosis is a neglected zoonosis affecting mainly tropical and subtropical regions worldwide, particularly South America and the Caribbean. As in many other countries, under-reporting of cases was suspected in the French West Indies because of inadequate access to diagnostic tests for the general population. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In order to estimate the real incidenc...

a r t i c l e i n f o Based on the underestimation model in bear markets and the overestimation model in bull markets, we propose two types of sentiment asset pricing models to study the effects of investor sentiment on stock prices and limit of arbitrage. The two sentiment asset pricing models demonstrate that investor sentiment has a systematic and significant impact on stock prices; furtherm...

[1] Historical evidence shows that atmospheric greenhouse gas (GhG) concentrations increase during periods of warming, implying a positive feedback to future climate change. We quantified this feedback for CO2 and CH4 by combining the mathematics of feedback with empirical icecore information and general circulation model (GCM) climate sensitivity, finding that the warming of 1.5–4.5 C associat...