Display advertising is evolving from just selling eye balls to demographic segments, as in traditional print media, to performance based systems where advertisers have an ability to pay for the type of user response valuable to them. Depending on who owns the risk of variance in user response, the advertisers have multiple pricing types options to run their advertising campaign on. These includ...

OBJECTIVES To assess the incremental effects of adding extra antihypertensive drugs from a new class to a patient's regimen. DESIGN Instrumental variable analysis of data from SPRINT (Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial). To account for confounding by indication-when treatments seem less effective if they are administered to sicker patients-randomization status was used as the instrume...

This paper studies a new paradigm for improving the attention span of workers in tasks that heavily rely on user’s attention to the occurrence of rare events. Such tasks are highly common, ranging from crime monitoring to controlling autonomous complex machines, and many of them are ideal for crowdsourcing. The underlying idea in our approach is to dynamically augment the task with some dummy (...

Policy gradient methods have been widely applied in reinforcement learning. For reasons of safety and cost, learning is often conducted using a simulator. However, learning in simulation does not traditionally utilise the opportunity to improve learning by adjusting certain environment variables – state features that are randomly determined by the environment in a physical setting but controlla...

Turbulence structure on the gas side of a wavy stratified flow was experimentally investigated in a near horizontal 18.7 cm (H) 10 cm (W) 5.5m (L) rectangular duct.By applying the Variable Interval Time Averaging (VITA) technique to the hot wire anemometer measurements frequency of occurrence of turbulent events were detected near the air-water interface. Experimental results showed that fr...

OBJECTIVES To review previous reports and present our experience on the outcomes after treating pelvic fracture urethral injuries (PFUIs) with primary endoscopic realignment (PER) vs. placing a suprapubic tube (SPT) with elective bulbomembranous anastomotic urethroplasty (BMAU). METHODS We reviewed previous reports and identified articles that reported outcomes after PER vs. SPT and elective ...

The effectiveness of fine-needle aspiration (FNA) increases with the number of needle passes, but needle passes are also associated with increased risk of adverse events. The trade-off between needle passes and adequacy has not been well characterized. Clinical studies are limited because of their inherent variability and limited sample size. We developed mathematical models to compare the perf...

BACKGROUND High-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels are a strong inverse predictor of cardiovascular events. However, it is not clear whether this association is maintained at very low levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. METHODS A post hoc analysis of the recently completed Treating to New Targets (TNT) study assessed the predictive value of HDL cholesterol levels in...

BACKGROUND Renal function is a strong predictor of adverse events in heart failure. Current renal function measures are imperfect, and cystatin C (CysC) is promoted as a better marker of glomerular filtration rate. This study compares the prognostic use of CysC and derived glomerular filtration rate estimates with other measures of renal function in patients with chronic heart failure. METHOD...