We study three quasar radio sources (B1257-326, B1519-273, and J1819+385) that show large amplitude intraday and annual scintillation variability produced by the Earth’s motion relative to turbulent-scattering screens located within a few parsecs of the Sun. We find that the lines of sight to these sources pass through the edges of partially ionized warm interstellar clouds where two or more cl...

Tamás Frajka Kenneth Zeger University of California Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0407 E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. One main focus of research in stereo image coding has been disparity estimation, a technique used to reduce the coding rate by taking advantage of the redundancy in a stereo image pair. Significantly less effort h...

Current epidemiological data from the USA, Europe, Asia and the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Far East, South America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe all point to the increasing incidence of renal failure encompassing acute kidney injury (AKI), chronic kidney disease (CKD) and endstage renal disease (ESRD). While the explanations for these worldwide epidemics remain speculative, it must ...

OBJECTIVES To investigate HLA class I allele frequencies in a Kenyan commercial sex worker (CSW) cohort, and to examine HIV-1 specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses directed against epitopes derived from locally prevalent clade A virus. METHODS PCR-single strand polymorphism HLA class I typing. Sequencing of novel alleles and examination of their distribution in the CSW cohort, and a...

This paper reviews, extends and analyzes a new class of penalty methods for nonlinear optimization. These methods adjust the penalty parameter dynamically; by controlling the degree of linear feasibility achieved at every iteration, they promote balanced progress toward optimality and feasibility. In contrast with classical approaches, the choice of the penalty parameter ceases to be a heuristi...

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM It is not known whether different high-palladium alloys of similar composition possess comparable tensile strength properties associated with connector soldering. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the tensile strength properties of 2 high-palladium alloys on soldered connectors under simulated pre-ceramic and post-ceramic soldering conditions. MATERIAL A...

The rate of a network code is the ratio of the block size of the network’s messages to that of its edge codewords. We compare the linear capacities and achievable rate regions of networks using finite field alphabets to the more general cases of arbitrary ring and module alphabets. For non-commutative rings, two-sided linearity is allowed. Specifically, we prove the following for directed acycl...

This paper presents a parallel surrogate-based global optimization method for computationally expensive objective functions that is more effective for larger numbers of processors. To reach this goal, we integrated concepts from multi-objective optimization and tabu search into, single objective, surrogate optimization. Our proposed derivative-free algorithm, called SOP, uses non-dominated sort...

BACKGROUND Several studies have demonstrated a fundamental role for the histocompatibility antigens (ie, human leukocyte antigens or HLA) in the susceptibility of, or protection to, type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). However, this has not been adequately studied in racially admixtured populations. OBJECTIVES To assess the frequency of HLA class II (DQA1, DQB1 and DRB1) associated to susceptibil...