Differences in Dialysis Practice Are the Main Reasons for the High Mortality Rate in the United States Compared to Japan

The cumulative survival of Japanese hemodialysis patients is more than 2.5 times better than that of dialysis patients in the United States (U.S.). The difference is particularly pronounced in older patients, being 4 times better in patients over the age of 50 years. The mortality in U.S. patients has increased from 10 to 25% over the last three decades, but has remained stable at around 10% in Japan.
There is no obvious difference in patient selection. The Japanese accept almost as high a proportion of diabetic patients as does the United States, and the mean age of incident patients is higher in Japan.
Renal transplantation, virtually absent in Japan, should increase mortality in U.S. dialysis patients by removing patients with the highest probability of survival, but even if one adds surviving transplant patients and studies prevalent populations, the survival rate is much better in Japan. Genetic factors are unlikely to explain differences in mortality, as older Americans live much longer than older Japanese.
We speculate that the difference lies in the practice of dialysis. Patients in the United States are generally treated by much faster and shorter dialysis than in Japan. This puts a severe burden on the cardiovascular system of older patients, leading to the poorer survival rate. Japanese physicians also appear to be better trained in dialysis and to spend more time with their patients. The nursing shortage in the United States may also contribute to the increased mortality. Whatever the explanations, the U.S. dialysis community must work to equal and, hopefully, surpass the now superior survival of Japanese dialysis patients.     

Plasticity of feature-based selection in triple-conjunction search.

Two experiments examined the disruption of feature-based selection in triple-conjunction search at multiple target transfers. In Experiment 1, after 10 training sessions, a new target possessing previous distractor features was introduced. This produced disruption in RT and fixation number, but no disruption in feature-based selection. Specifically, there was a tendency to fixate objects sharing the target's contrast polarity and shape and this did not change even upon transfer to the new target. In Experiment 2, 30 training sessions were provided with three target transfers. At the first transfer, the results replicated Experiment 1. Subsequent transfers did not produce disruption on any measure. These findings are discussed in terms of strength theory, Guided Search, rule-based approaches to perceptual learning, and the area activation model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Failures of retrieval and comparison constrain change detection in natural scenes.

In a change detection paradigm, a target object in a natural scene either rotated in depth, was replaced by another object token, or remained the same. Change detection performance was reliably higher when a target postcue allowed participants to restrict retrieval and comparison processes to the target object (Experiment 1). Change detection performance remained excellent when the target object was not attended at change (Experiment 2) and when a concurrent verbal working memory load minimized the possibility of verbal encoding. (Experiment 3). Together, these data demonstrate that visual representations accumulate in memory from attended objects as the eyes and attention are oriented within a scene and that change blindness derives, at least in part, from retrieval and comparison failure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

卡尔曼滤波器在光电经纬仪中的应用

为了解决光电经纬仪电视跟踪系统脱靶量滞后对控制系统跟踪精度及稳定性的影响，将预测滤波技术应用到光电跟踪系统中，提出了极坐标下卡尔曼滤波算法，目标模型采用等速运动并附有时间相关的随机加速度，增加了延时补偿。仿真结果表明，跟踪误差减小，当跟踪目标从视场消失时，控制系统按照预测的目标信息跟踪。     

Incremental wrapper-based gene selection from microarray data for cancer classification

Gene expression microarray is a rapidly maturing technology that provides the opportunity to assay the expression levels of thousands or tens of thousands of genes in a single experiment. We present a new heuristic to select relevant gene subsets in order to further use them for the classification task. Our method is based on the statistical significance of adding a gene from a ranked-list to the final subset. The efficiency and effectiveness of our technique is demonstrated through extensive comparisons with other representative heuristics. Our approach shows an excellent performance, not only at identifying relevant genes, but also with respect to the computational cost.     

A clustering method for automatic biometric template selection

The problem addressed in this paper is the template selection and update in biometrics based on clustering. Template selection is a reliable method to reduce the number of templates used in a biometric system to account for variations observed in a person's biometric data. An efficient method based on clustering with automatic selection of the number of clusters is proposed in this work for finding subgroups of similar templates which are used for prototype selection.Experimental results confirm the advantage of the new method and the importance of adopting a procedure to perform template selection.     

Development of an Expert System for Selection of Dam Type on Alluvium Foundations

. A knowledge-based expert system was developed to aid in the selection of the type of dam. The dam type selector expert system (DTSA ES) was designed to determine the type of dam on the alluvium foundations. Detailed expert knowledge is required to estimate the type of dam and to develop an expert system. The DTSA ES utilizes rules of thumb used by an expert for determining the selection of the type of dam. The DTSA ES was developed using a shell program. The expert system was tested on several dam sites in order to validate the decision obtained. The use of this expert system, containing knowledge about the selection of dam type, can be helpful to students, potential owners or contractors in selecting dam types. The current prototype always needs additional parameters for more detailed analyses of new developments. However, the current DTSA ES is designed to include existing information about dam types.     

Adaptive flexibility and maladaptive routines in selecting fast and frugal decision strategies.

Decision routines unburden the cognitive capacity of the decision maker. In changing environments, however, routines may become maladaptive. In 2 experiments with a hypothetical stock market game (n = 241), the authors tested whether decision routines tend to persist at the level of decision strategies rather than at the level of options in strategy selection. The payoff structure of the task was changed after 80 decision trials, rendering a new strategy optimal with respect to expected payoff. Whereas most participants detected the appropriate strategy at the beginning of the task, they tended to retain it even when it was no longer optimal. A hint about a possible change had only a small influence on this maladaptive routine; a monetary incentive had none. Switching to a similar but not identical task relaxed the routine, but not much. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

真空阴极弧离子镀类金刚石碳（DLC）膜的碳弧稳定性研究

选用氩气、氩气加氢气、氩气加乙炔等气体作为介质，石墨作为靶材进行真空阴极弧离子镀来制备类金刚石碳膜。石墨电弧有其独特的电弧特性曲线，不同气体介质对碳弧特性的影响不同，磁场的大小对电弧的稳定性有很大作用，碳弧下基片偏流随电弧电压的增加而减小，试验得到表面光滑的类金刚石碳（DLC）膜，对膜的表面进行了SEM分析。     

基于类间分散度和类内集中度的文本特征选择。

特征选择是文本分类的关键步骤之一,所选特征子集的优劣直接影响文本分类的结果。论文首先定义了两种特征分类能力：一种是特征对类间文档的分散程度,该分散度越大越好;另一种是特征对类内文档的聚集程度,该集中度越大越好。然后把这两种特征影响度有机地结合起来设计了一个新的特征选择方法,该方法能够对所选特征进行综合考虑,从而使获得的特征集具有较好的代表性。仿真实验表明所提特征选择方法在一定程度上能够提高文本分类性能。