Detailed diagnoses and procedures, National Hospital Discharge Survey, 1993

This report presents statistics on conditions diagnosed and surgical and nonsurgical procedures performed in non-Federal short-stay hospitals. The statistics are based on data collected through the National Hospital Discharge Survey from a national sample of the hospital records of discharged inpatients. Estimates of first-listed diagnoses, all-listed diagnoses, days of care for first-listed diagnoses, and all-listed procedures are shown by sex and age of patient and geographic region of hospital.     

Scheduling Policies for Automatic Warehousing Systems: Simulation Results

This paper examines and extends previous analytical work on the scheduling of stacker cranes in automatic warehousing systems. In particular, the following are examined by means of a computer simulation:

(1) The performance of the closest-open-location rule compared to random storage assignment;

(2) The dynamic behavior of the system under stochastic conditions, using various crane and rack utilization levels;

(3) The actual versus predicted reduction in crane travel time due to improved scheduling rules;

(4) The effect of imperfect information concerning the length of stay of an incoming pallet on system performance.

The results of our experiments provide evidence in support of the proposed analytical models. Most important, the experiments demonstrate the value of previously-proposed scheduling rules in a dynamic, stochastic environment operating with imperfect information.     

Oxidation behavior of hot isostatically pressed silicon nitride containing Y2O3

Oxidation in the presence of air and water vapor at high temperatures wasstudied for Si₃N₄ ceramics containing Y₂O₃ and Al₂O₃ as sintering aids.The test environments for this study consisted of air with 0, 1.2,and 6.4 v/o H₂O at temperatures from 1000°C to 1350°C. Theoxidation exposure times were up to 500 hours. The presence of water vaporenhances oxidation and crystallization of the oxidation phases. Weight losswas observed for the oxidation in air or dry air because of Na contaminationduring the fabrication processing. The effect of applied stress on the growthof oxide scale is minimal, however, the applied stress resulted in deeperpenetration of oxygen and pit formation in the oxide phase.     

In-Memory Computing with Memristor Content Addressable Memories for Pattern Matching

The dramatic rise of data-intensive workloads has revived application-specific computational hardware for continuing speed and power improvements, frequently achieved by limiting data movement and implementing “in-memory computation”. However, conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuit designs can still suffer low power efficiency, motivating designs leveraging nonvolatile resistive random access memory (ReRAM), and with many studies focusing on crossbar circuit architectures. Another circuit primitive—content addressable memory (CAM)—shows great promise for mapping a diverse range of computational models for in-memory computation, with recent ReRAM–CAM designs proposed but few experimentally demonstrated. Here, programming and control of memristors across an 86 × 12 memristor ternary CAM (TCAM) array integrated with CMOS are demonstrated, and parameter tradeoffs for optimizing speed and search margin are evaluated. In addition to smaller area, this memristor TCAM results in significantly lower power due to very low programmable conductance states, motivating CAM use in a wider range of computational applications than conventional TCAMs are confined to today. Finally, the first experimental demonstration of two computational models in memristor TCAM arrays is reported: regular expression matching in a finite state machine for network security intrusion detection and definable inexact pattern matching in a Levenshtein automata for genomic sequencing.     

The effect of acclimation temperature on the interactions of chlorine, ΔT and exposure duration to eggs, prolarvae and larvae of striped bass, Morone saxatilis

The effect of five acclimation temperatures on the interactions of total residual chlorine (TRC) (0.00, 0.15 and 0.30 mg l⁻¹, ΔT (2, 6, 10°C above acclimation temperature) and exposure duration (0.08, 2.0, 4.0 h) conditions were evaluated for striped bass, Morone saxatilis, eggs, prolarvae and larvae. The range of acclimation temperatures (12.5, 15.0, 17.5, 20.0, 22.5°C for eggs and prolarvae; 15.0, 17.5, 20.0, 22.5 and 25.0°C for larvae) tested with each life stage included the lower, optimum and upper environmental temperatures that exist when these life stages may be subjected to power plant chlorination conditions. All organisms were tested using a fractional composite design in a 3 × 3 × 3 factorial matrix. Mortality of the eggs was highest at temperatures below 17.5°C; overall mortality decreased with increasing acclimation temperature. The factor causing the greatest effect with this developmental stage was ΔT, followed by TRC and exposure time. Mortality of striped bass prolarvae increased with acclimation temperature after exposure to interacting treatment factors. Interactions involving TRC were most important from 12.5 to 17.5°C; ΔT interactions were prominent at acclimation temperatures of 20.0 and 22.5°C. Larvae mortality was highest at 20°C with a gradual decrease at 25.0°C. Interactions involving ΔT, TRC and exposure time all contributed to the mortality of this life stage; TRC and ΔT caused the main effects. Striped bass eggs were the most resistant life stage; mean mortality averaged over all acclimation temperatures was approximately the same for prolarvae and larvae.     

VENUS-LEVIS and its spline-Fourier interpolation of 3D toroidal magnetic field representation for guiding-centre and full-orbit simulations of charged energetic particles

Curvilinear guiding-centre drift and full-orbit equations of motion are presented as implemented in the VENUS-LEVIS code. A dedicated interpolation scheme based on Fourier reconstruction in the toroidal and poloidal directions and cubic spline in the radial direction of flux coordinate systems is detailed. This interpolation method exactly preserves the order of the RK4 integrating scheme which is crucial for the investigation of fast particle trajectories in 3D magnetic structures such as helical saturated tokamak plasma states, stellarator geometry and resonant magnetic perturbations (RMP). The initialisation of particles with respect to the guiding-centre is discussed. Two approaches to implement RMPs in orbit simulations are presented, one where the vacuum field is added to the 2D equilibrium, creating islands and stochastic regions, the other considering 3D nested flux-surfaces equilibrium including the RMPs.