OBJECTIVE Greater intake of Cruciferous vegetables (e.g. broccoli) may prevent cancer at several sites. Urinary excretion of isothiocyanate conjugates (dithiocarbamates, DTC) provides a specific biomarker of Cruciferous vegetable consumption suitable for epidemiological investigations. However, no gold-standard referent is available for evaluating urinary DTC levels as an estimator of Crucifero...

background: hyperbilirubinemia is considered one of the most prevalent problems in newborns. phototherapy, exchange transfusion, and herbal medicine are common therapeutic approaches for preventing any neurologic damage in infants with neonatal jaundice. however, herbal medicine is less commonly used. aim: this study aimed to investigate the effect of bilineaster drop on neonatal hyperbilirubin...

background: stem-cell technology has been advocated as a potentially curative option for treatment of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. in the current study, we aimed to assess the effectiveness of allotransplantation of fetal liver-derived cells for treatment of patients with type 1 diabetes. methods: for the purpose of the current study, 72 patients with recently diagnosed type 1 dm were recru...

Poor sleep in elderly populations is associated with detrimental neuropsychological, and physiological changes including premature immunosenescence and reduced brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Here, we evaluated the effects of acupuncture on sleep quality, psychological distress and immunosenescence in elderly, as well as effects on BDNF levels. Forty-eight community-dwelling elderly w...

Low encoding/decoding complexity is essential for practical RAID-6 storage systems. In this paper, we describe a new coding scheme, which we call Rotary-code, for RAID-6 disk arrays. We construct Rotarycode based on a bit matrix-vector product similar to the Reed-Solomon coding, and provide the geometry encoding method and detailed non-recursive decoding algorithms. The capability of two-disk f...

RAID, a storage architecture designed to exploit I/O parallelism and provide data reliability, has been deployed widely in computing systems as a storage building block. In large scale storage systems, in particular, RAID-6 is gradually replacing RAID-5 as the dominant form of disk arrays due to its capability of tolerating concurrent failures of any two disks. MDS (maximum distance separable) ...

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) is the standard for large scale, fault-tolerant storage solutions. The various RAID levels combine space and/or performance optimization to meet the needs of the user. In the paper we introduce UPGRAID, which can be seen as a new RAID level built upon RAID5. The idea behind UPGRAID is that, by allocating a small amount of disk space for RAID stripe re...

The effectiveness of the redundancy schemes that have been developed to enhance the reliability of storage systems has predominantly been evaluated based on the mean time to data loss (MTTDL) metric. This metric has been widely used to compare schemes, to assess tradeoffs, and to estimate the effect of various parameters on system reliability. Analytical expressions for MTTDL are typically deri...