A diagnostic reasoning and optimal treatment model for bacterial infections with fuzzy information

This study proposes an optimization model for optimal treatment of bacterial infections. Using an influence diagram as the knowledge and decision model, we can conduct two kinds of reasoning simultaneously: diagnostic reasoning and treatment planning. The input information of the reasoning system are conditional probability distributions of the network model, the costs of the candidate antibiotic treatments, the expected effects of the treatments, and extra constraints regarding belief propagation. Since the prevalence of the pathogens and infections are determined by many site-by-site factors, which are not compliant with conventional approaches for approximate reasoning, we introduce fuzzy information. The output results of the reasoning model are the likelihood of a bacterial infection, the most likely pathogen(s), the suggestion of optimal treatment, the gain of life expectancy for the patient related to the optimal treatment, the probability of coverage associated with the antibiotic treatment, and the cost-effect analysis of the treatment prescribed.     

Experimental systems analysis of simulated vehicle steering and safety training.

Made an experimental feedback analysis of the human factors in steering, driver training, and automobile safety relative to the theory that steering is a distinctive form of self-guided activity distinct from stimulus tracking, and that the automobile is a special kind of wheeled exoskeleton. Results of systems experiments with 9 male undergraduates on delayed simulated driving, eye-hand synchronism in delayed steering, comparison between eye-hand coordination in steering and stimulus tracking, effects of road speed on steering error, and on effects of space displacement of steering visual feedback supported the view that the operator projects steering action relative to the space, time, and force compliances between driving responses, and the actions of the exoskeleton machine in relation to the feedback received from the road display. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

UVB-Protective Effects of Isoflavone Extracts from Soybean Cake in Human Keratinocytes

It has been shown by chromatography that aglycone, glucoside, acetylglucoside and malonylglucoside isoflavone extracts prepared from soybean cake showed better antioxidant activities than isoflavone standards. Consequently, the aim of this study was to evaluate the protective effects of these isoflavone extracts against ultraviolet B (UVB)-induced keratinocyte damage. Our results demonstrated that these soybean cake isoflavone extracts could inhibit UVB-induced keratinocyte death. Moreover, they could inhibit UVB-induced intracellular release of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) Furthermore, these isoflavone extracts differentially inhibited UVB-induced MAPK phosphorylation. The ERK1/2 and p38 phosphorylation was not inhibited by all tested isoflavone extracts, whereas JNK phosphorylation was inhibited by group I to group III isoflavone extracts. Since these isoflavone extracts are relative stable and easily obtained than the isoflavone standards, we suggest that soybean cake may be a useful potential source for developing effective skin care agents in against photoaging.     

Electrical conductivity of plasma-treated poly(p-phenylene sulfide) doped with iodine

Plasma treatment of poly(p-phenylene sulfide) (PPS) doped with I₂ is found to increase both the electrical conductivity and the stability of the material. The average conductivity of plasma-treated samples reaches an apparently saturated value of 1.7 × 10^?3s cm^?1, which is about six orders of magnitude higher than that of the same material without plasma treatment, and this conductivity remains practically unchanged under exposure to ambient environment for 10 days. Infrared and secondary ion mass spectra of the samples before and after plasma treatment suggest that the charge-transfer complexes are formed in PPS doped with I₂ after plasma treatment. This is also consistent with the temperature dependence of conductivity results which show that the activation energy for electrical conduction decreases from 2.0 eV for pure PPS to 0.2 eV for plasma-treated I₂-doped PPS. Using isothermal potential and current decay techniques, we have also measured the trap density distribution. Plasma treatment, on the one hand, does create more traps in PPS, but, on the other hand, it enhances conductivity. The mechanism of electrical conduction is briefly discussed.     

Syntheses and characterizations of in situ blended metallocence polyethylene/clay nanocomposites

In this paper, we report the preparation of in situ blends of metallocence polyethylene (mPE) with montmorillonite (clay). The polymerization activity of polyethylene decreases upon increasing the amount of the clay feed. The mPE nanocomposites still possess their original melting and crystallization temperatures, but the melting and crystallization enthalpies decrease upon increasing the clay content. In addition, the polymer interaction parameter between mPE and exfoliated clay sheets was calculated to be −0.204 based on a modified Kim-Bae equilibrium melting depression equation. All of the isothermal crystallization kinetics data fit well to the Avrami crystallization equation. We found that increasing the clay content results in a faster rate of crystallization, but pure mPE still crystallizes the fastest. Using a small amount of pretreated clay results in a more homogeneous and finer dispersion of the clay in the polymer matrix, as determined by wide-angle X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy analyses. Both the values of T_1ρ^H in the solid-state NMR spectra of the fast and slow components show increment upon increasing the clay content, which indicates that either the mobile phase tends to increase its rigidity in the clay-containing system.     

Identification of amino acid residues of abrin-a A chain is essential for catalysis and reassociation with abrin-a B chain by site-directed mutagenesis

Abrin is a toxic protein consisting of two subunits, an enzymatic A chain (ABRaA) and a lectin-active B chain (ABRaB), linked by a disulfide bond. Site-directed mutagenesis was performed using PCR to study how the conserved amino acid residues, Tyr74, Tyr113, Glu164 and Trp198, around the active site of ABRaA are involved in enzyme catalysis, enzyme-substrate recognition and reassociation of ABRaA with ABRaB. The protein biosynthesis inhibitory activities of Y74F, Y113F and W198F were decreased moderately to that of wild type reABRaA, while that of E164Q decreased dramatically. Kinetic analysis showed that the kat of Y74F, Y113F and W198F resembled that of wild type, while the Km increased significantly. W198F did not reassociate with ABRaB to form heterodimers, while Y74F, Y113F and E164Q did. SDS-PAGE analysis of ABRaA treated with trypsin showed that reABRaA, Y74F, Y113F and E164Q survived digestion, whereas W198F was not protected from digestion. CD spectra revealed that W198F showed significant conformational changes. These observations suggest that E164 is directly involved in catalysis, and Tyr74, Tyr113 and Trp198 in substrate binding, while Trp198 also plays an important role in maintaining the conformation of ABRaA required for its reassociation with ABRaB.      

Optimum operation of oxidative coupling of methane in porous ceramic membrane reactors

This paper presents analysis of oxidative coupling of methane on Li/MgO packed porous membrane reactor (PMR) by the fixed-bed reactor (FBR) model with reliable reaction kinetic equations. PMR can improve the selectivity and yield by controlling the oxygen feed to the catalyst bed through manipulating the feed pressure. At a fixed methane feed rate there is an optimal oxygen feed pressure that will achieve the highest yield. With a commercial ultrafiltration ceramic membrane, theoretical analysis shows that PMR can achieve, by operating with both side pressures at 1 bar at 750 °C, a maximal 30% yield at 53% selectivity. The maximal yield achieved in the FBR of identical dimension and temperature is 20.7% at 52.5% selectivity. Parametric study shows that lowering the membrane permeability improves the performance. Higher oxygen feed pressure will reduce the yield as well as the selectivity. Homogeneous reactions at high shell-side pressure can have adverse effect on the performance due to the fact that homogeneous reaction rates are strongly pressure dependent. The shell (oxygen feed) side volume must be minimized to reduce the homogeneous reactions. The results of PMR model calculation fit the published experimental result unexpectedly well.     

On anonymizing transactions with sensitive items

K-anonymity (Samarati and Sweeny 1998; Samarati, IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng, 13(6):1010–1027, 2001; Sweeny, Int J Uncertain, Fuzziness Knowl-Based Syst, 10(5):557–570, 2002) and its variants, l-diversity (Machanavajjhala et al., ACM TKDD, 2007) and tcloseness (Li et al. 2007) among others are anonymization techniques for relational data and transaction data, which are used to protect privacy against re-identification attacks. A relational dataset D is k-anonymous if every record in D has at least k-1 other records with identical quasi-identifier attribute values. The combination of released data with external data will never allow the recipient to associate each released record with less than k individuals (Samarati, IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng, 13(6):1010–1027, 2001). However, the current concept of k-anonymity on transaction data treats all items as quasi-identifiers. The anonymized data set has k identical transactions in groups and suffers from lower data utility (He and Naughton 2009; He et al. 2011; Liu and Wang 2010; Terrovitis et al., VLDB J, 20(1):83–106, 2011; Terrovitis et al. 2008). To improve the utility of anonymized transaction data, this work proposes a novel anonymity concept on transaction data that contain both quasi-identifier items (QID) and sensitive items (SI). A transaction that contains sensitive items must have at least k-1 other identical transactions (Ghinita et al. IEEE TKDE, 33(2):161–174, 2011; Xu et al. 2008). For a transaction that does not contain a sensitive item, no anonymization is required. A transaction dataset that satisfies this property is said to be sensitive k-anonymous. Three algorithms, Sensitive Transaction Neighbors (STN) Gray Sort Clustering (GSC) and Nearest Neighbors for K-anonymization (K-NN), are developed. These algorithms use adding/deleting QID items and only adding SI to achieve sensitive k-anonymity on transaction data. Additionally, a simple “privacy value” is proposed to evaluate the degree of privacy for different types of k-anonymity on transaction data. Extensive numerical simulations were carried out to demonstrate the characteristics of the proposed algorithms and also compared to other types of k-anonymity approaches. The results show that each technique possesses its own advantage under different criteria such as running time, operation, and information loss. The results obtained here can be used as a guideline of the selection of anonymization technique on different data sets and for different applications.     

Effect of chain microstructure on modulus of ethylene–α-olefin copolymers

A family of copolymers of ethylene and α-olefin resins with homogeneous branching distribution, which behaves as elastomers at high short-chain branching levels and acts as typical thermoplastics at low short-chain branching levels, is now available. Control of this broad range of properties stems from the ability to control the molecular architecture more effectively using Dow's INSITE

1 Trademark of The Dow Chemical Co.

technology than in the past. Due to the unique combination of narrow short-chain branching distribution (SCBD) and narrow molecular weight distribution (MWD), these resins provide a unique opportunity to model structure/property relationships in branched ethylene-α-olefin copolymers. The modulus in branched ethylene-α-olefin copolymers with aliphatic branches is shown to be primarily dictated by crystallinity. It is shown that the branch distribution and the branch type have an insignificant effect on the modulus of ethylene copolymers containing aliphatic branches at a given crystallinity. Modulus data have been successfully modeled in such systems using a lamellar fiber-reinforced amorphous matrix composite model. Switching from aliphatic branches to cyclic branches significantly affected the modulus at similar crystallinities. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.