Headache as a manifestation of myocardial infarction

A 33-year-old pregnant woman at 26 weeks gestation, who had a history of bipolar mood disorder, type I, was admitted to the hospital for hypomania and poorly controlled diabetes mellitus. The patient had had her first episode of affective illness at age 28, after the birth of her second child. After an initial postpartum depression, she had cycled into a manic state. She had subsequently been hospitalized seven times for acute mania. A combination of valproate and chlorpromazine had proven effective in managing most of her manic episodes, while her two most severe episodes had been successfully managed with bilateral ECT.     

Acquisition and extinction of a shuttling response in honeybees (Apis mellifera) as a function of the probability of reward.

The effects of partial (intermittent) vs consistent reward on the acquisition and extinction of a shuttling response were studied in 3 experiments with foraging honeybees. Adding nonrewarded trials to rewarded trials (the equated-reinforcements design) improved performance in acquisition and increased resistance to extinction. Substituting nonrewarded trials for some rewarded trials (the equated-trials design), which had little effect on acquisition, also increased resistance to extinction but to a lesser extent than adding nonrewarded trials. Marked variations in the schedule of partial reward (the sequence of rewarded and nonrewarded trials) were without effect. The results are compared with those of analogous experiments on vertebrates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Diagnosability and Distinguishability Analysis and Its Applications

As systems become more complex, it becomes necessary to understand, simplify, and apply fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant design. Although some graph-theoretical diagnostic models such as self-diagnosis model have been studied, the model can not be applied to most systems due to the assumption that each unit has its own testing capability. This paper presents a graph-theoretical diagnosis model expressed by a set of fallible units, a set of measurements, and an incident matrix indicating binary relation between these two sets. Since this model explicitly separates tested units (fallible units) and testing units (measurements), we can discuss diagnostic aspects from both sides. Diagnosability and distinguishability of the model with multiple faults are discussed from combinatorial point of view. Measures of t-fault diagnosability and t-out-of-s diagnosability which was introduced on the self-diagnosis model are discussed. Conditions for these diagnosabilities are expressed by a topological concept of fault distance. The concept of distinguishability is generalized to multiple fault situations called t-fault distinguishability. A lower bound for the distinguishability is obtained by using fault distance. The new concept of s-distinguishability class (s-dc) is presented. This analysis is recommended in the design of systems to attain a required level of diagnosability and distinguishability as well as in the analysis of present systems to investigate their diagnostic aspects. Two application examples are presented: Diagnosability and distinguishability analysis of error-correcting codes, and design of instrumentation systems of large plants with a required level of diagnosability.     

Parallel rule firing in production systems

To improve the performance of forward chaining production systems, a new parallel execution model in which multiple production rules are fired in parallel in each production cycle is proposed. Solutions for three major problems in parallel rule firing are provided. The first solution, interference analysis, detects cases where a parallel firing result is different from the result of any sequential firing. Based on a data dependency graph of production systems, general techniques applicable to both compile- and run-time interference analyses are proposed. The second solution, parallel firing algorithms, achieve the parallel firing on multiple processor architectures. An efficient selection algorithm is provided to select multiple rules to be fired in parallel by combining the compile- and run-time interference analysis techniques. The parallel programming environment, the third solution, provides language facilities to enable programmers to make full use of potential parallelism without considering the internal parallel mechanisms. A parallel firing simulator is also implemented to estimate the effectiveness of parallel firings of production system programs. The effectiveness of parallel rule firings on several production system applications is evaluated. Results show that the degree of concurrency can be increased by a factor of 2-9. The sources of parallelism are investigated based on the evaluation results     

Wide-margin polarity-convertible Josephson drivers

A polarity-convertible Josephson driver, which consists of four two-junction interferometer gates and three resistors, has been developed and successfully tested. Driver test chips have been fabricated by using a niobium planarisation technique. Polarity-convertible operations have been experimentally tested and an approximately ±43% gate current margin has been obtained     

Incoherent pattern detection using a liquid-crystal active lens

Incoherent pattern detection by a simple imaging system using a liquid-crystal active lens is proposed. The imaging system works as a spatial filtering system with a rewritable phase-only filter. We found that, in the incoherent matched filtering system, a conventional phase-only filter has a higher optical efficiency but a lower pattern discrimination than a complex filter. To improve the pattern discrimination ability, we optimized the phase-only filter by using simulated annealing and a genetic algorithm. We designed phase-only filters that have discrimination ability comparable with that in a complex filter. The performance of optimized phase-only filters is experimentally demonstrated.     

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay of neocarzinostatin chromophore (NCS-chr) by use of a monoclonal antibody against NCS-chr analog

Allelic exclusion at the IgH locus was examined in B lineage cells of wild-type mice and mice unable to express the surrogate light chain molecule lambda 5 using a single-cell PCR approach. By analyzing B precursor cells containing two VHDHJH rearrangements, we found that in wild-type animals, cells are allelically excluded as soon as mu chains are expressed. Furthermore, we provide evidence that in cells expressing D mu proteins VH-->DHJH rearrangement is inhibited. In contrast, in the absence of lambda 5 protein, B precursor cells were allelically "included", indicating that allelic exclusion at the IgH locus requires expression of the pre-B cell receptor either containing a mu chain or a D mu chain. However, although mu chain double-producing B precursor cells are generated in lambda 5-deficient mice, such cells were not detected among surface immunoglobulin positive B cells.