BACKGROUND Mechanical bowel preparation (MBP) prior to elective colorectal surgery has been in use for many years. It is considered important in preventing post-operative infectious complications after colorectal surgery. The evidence to support these claims is lacking within the medical literature and yet this still remains standard practice in many hospitals. A literature search was undertake...

conclusions the farsi version of the pass is a valid and reliable tool to measure academic procrastination in iranian undergraduate medical students. background procrastination is a common behavior which affects different aspects of life. the procrastination assessment scale-student (pass) evaluates academic procrastination apropos its frequency and reasons. objectives the aims of the present s...

Although several approaches have been developed for planning in nondeterministic domains, solving large planning problems is still quite difficult. In this work, we present a new planning algorithm, called Yoyo, for solving planning problems in fully observable nondeterministic domains. Yoyo combines an HTN-based mechanism for constraining its search and a Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) represen...

Bottleneck-based scheduling is a popular approach in production scheduling, and it has achieved promising results in industry. To incorporate this approach in discrete event simulation tools is difficult since the approach requires multiple passes, forward and backward, to reach a good solution for the scheduling problem. In this paper, we propose a two-pass scheduling approach using discrete-e...

We present a strategy to obtain milligrams of highly post-translationally modified eukaryotic proteins, transiently expressed in mammalian cells as rigid or cleavable fusions with a mammalianized version of bacterial maltose-binding protein (mMBP). This variant was engineered to combine mutations that enhance MBP solubility and affinity purification, as well as provide crystal-packing interacti...

We genetically modified tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) to surface display a characterized peptide with potent metal ion binding and reducing capacity (MBP TMV), and demonstrate that unlike wild type TMV, this construct can lead to the formation of discrete 10-40 nm gold nanoparticles when mixed with 3 mM potassium tetrachloroaurate. Using a variety of analytical physicochemical approaches it was fo...

In iterative learning control (ILC), it is highly desirable to have a learning compensator with a unitgain for all frequencies, in order to avoid noise amplification and learning speed degradation during the learning process. In this paper, we show that the realization of a unit-gain compensator is straightforward in ILC, using both forward and backward filtering. As an illustrative example, a ...

We present a computationally efficient soft-output equalizer for communication over dispersive channels. The proposed equalizer has a forward and backward recursion structure similar to the classic BCJR MAP algorithm, but its complexity is reduced by constructing a reduced-state trellis, as in the decision feedback sequence estimator (DFSE). We are able to achieve consistent state definitions b...

We propose a new method for estimating Line Spectral Frequency (LSF) trajectories that uses unscented Kalman filtering (UKF). This method is based upon an iterative Expectation Maximisation (EM) approach in which LSF estimates are generated during a forward pass and then smoothed during a backward pass. The EM approach also provides re-estimated Kalman filter parameters for further forward-back...

This paper describes a method to incorporate the HMM output constraints in frame based hybrid NN/HMM systems during training. While usually the NN parameters are adjusted to maximize the cross-entropy between the frame target probabilities and the network predictions assuming statistically independent outputs in time, in the approach described here the full likelihood of the utterance(s) using ...