Defining Dry Eye from a Clinical Perspective

Over the past decades, the number of patients with dry eye disease (DED) has increased dramatically. The incidence of DED is higher in Asia than in Europe and North America, suggesting the involvement of cultural or racial factors in DED etiology. Although many definitions of DED have been used, discrepancies exist between the various definitions of dry eye disease (DED) used across the globe. This article presents a clinical consensus on the definition of DED, as formulated in four meetings with global DED experts. The proposed new definition is as follows: “Dry eye is a multifactorial disease characterized by a persistently unstable and/or deficient tear film (TF) causing discomfort and/or visual impairment, accompanied by variable degrees of ocular surface epitheliopathy, inflammation and neurosensory abnormalities.” The key criteria for the diagnosis of DED are unstable TF, inflammation, ocular discomfort and visual impairment. This definition also recommends the assessment of ocular surface epitheliopathy and neurosensory abnormalities in each patient with suspected DED. It is easily applicable in clinical practice and should help practitioners diagnose DED consistently. This consensus definition of DED should also help to guide research and clinical trials that, to date, have been hampered by the lack of an established surrogate endpoint.     

Towards a Dual-Tip STM Application in Mesoscopic Electron Transport

A new design for a dual-tip scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is presented. The design is a variation on the mechanically controllable break-junction with two electron beam-induced deposition nano-tips. The new design enables one to scan surfaces simultaneously with two probes having a nano-gap separation. By collecting the lateral current flowing between the tips, the transconductance map can then be compared with the STM images for local characterizations of the electron transport. Since the lateral beam carries the property of the density of states of the surface at momentum space, the dispersion of the electronic structure should give an orientation and position dependence of the local transconductance current. In addition, the reduced terminal separation, on the order of the characteristic mesoscopic length scales, is likely to be sensitive to a variety of typically observed interactions and interference effects.     

The stable topology for residuated lattices

The spectrum of a residuated lattice L is the set Spec(L) of all prime i-filters. It is well known that Spec(L) can be endowed with the spectral topology. The main scope of this paper is to introduce and study another topology on Spec(L),?the so called stable topology, which turns out to be coarser than the spectral one. With this and in view, we introduce the notions of pure i-filter for a residuated lattice and the notion of normal residuated lattice. So, we generalize to case of residuated lattice some results relative to MV-algebras (Belluce and Sessa in Quaest Math 23:269–277, 2000; Cavaccini et?al. in Math Japonica 45(2):303–310, 1997) or BL-algebras (Eslami and Haghani in Kybernetika 45:491–506, 2009; Leustean in Central Eur J Math 1(3): 382–397, 2003; Turunen and Sessa in Mult-Valued Log 6(1–2):229–249, 2001).     

Crystallization of poly(3‐hydroxybutyrate) by exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets

Poly(3‐hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) has been shown to be efficiently nucleated by exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets (xGnP). The nucleating effect of xGnP was investigated using differential scanning calorimetry, optical microscopy and atomic force microscopy. Nonisothermal crystallization of PHB from the melt required lower activation energies for PHB containing 1 wt % and 3 wt % xGnP (?214 and ?102 kJ/mol respectively) than for pure PHB (?60 kJ/mol). A kinetic study of the PHB/xGnP crystallization employing a modified form of the Avrami equation revealed that the presence of xGnP increased the PHB crystallization temperature, as well as the crystallization rates, and generated smaller and more numerous spherulites. Optical microscopy and atomic force microscopy confirmed the incorporation of xGnP into the lamellar structure of the PHB spherulites and provided insight into the influence of xGnP on spherulite size and lamellae thickness. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2007     

Forces required to jettison a simulated S92 passenger exit: Optimal helicopter underwater egress training techniques

This paper outlines the first known examination of the forces required to jettison a simulated exit used during helicopter underwater egress training (HUET). To capture the forces placed on the simulated cabin exit, a purpose build force plate was designed to replace an existing simulator exit used during HUET. A 25-point map was created to identify specific jettison forces required across the entire exit surface. Ten participants completed a total of 120 underwater egress sequences in–air and in-water from a normal flight and fully compressed crash attenuating seat position. The results indicate that the force required to jettison the simulated exit is significantly different in relationship to location on the exit surface. From the results, it can be concluded that helicopter underwater egress training protocols should ensure that offshore candidates are informed of the different force requirements as well as have the opportunity to practice jettisoning a high physical fidelity exit from a fully compressed crash attenuating seat.     

Random Bichromatic Matchings

Given a graph with edges colored Red and Blue, we study the problem of sampling and approximately counting the number of matchings with exactly k Red edges. We solve the problem of estimating the number of perfect matchings with exactly k Red edges for dense graphs. We study a Markov chain on the space of all matchings of a graph that favors matchings with k Red edges. We show that it is rapidly mixing using non-traditional canonical paths that can backtrack. We show that this chain can be used to sample matchings in the 2-dimensional toroidal lattice of any fixed size ℓ with k Red edges, where the horizontal edges are Red and the vertical edges are Blue. An extended abstract appeared in J.R. Correa, A. Hevia and M.A. Kiwi (eds.) Proceedings of the 7th Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium, LNCS 3887, pp. 190–201, Springer, 2006. N. Bhatnagar’s and D. Randall’s research was supported in part by NSF grants CCR-0515105 and DMS-0505505. V.V. Vazirani’s research was supported in part by NSF grants 0311541, 0220343 and CCR-0515186. N. Bhatnagar’s and E. Vigoda’s research was supported in part by NSF grant CCR-0455666.     

3D SSD tracking with estimated 3D planes

We present a tracking method where full camera position and orientation is tracked from intensity differences in a video sequence. The camera pose is calculated based on 3D planes, and hence does not depend on point correspondences. The plane based formulation also allows additional constraints to be naturally added, e.g., perpendicularity between walls, floor and ceiling surfaces, co-planarity of wall surfaces etc. A particular feature of our method is that the full 3D pose change is directly computed from temporal image differences without making a commitment to a particular intermediate (e.g., 2D feature) representation. We experimentally compared our method with regular 2D SSD tracking and found it more robust and stable. This is due to 3D consistency being enforced even in the low level registration of image regions. This yields better results than first computing (and hence committing to) 2D image features and then from these compute 3D pose.