Priapism: etiology and management

Priapism is a urologic emergency. All patients should receive prompt urologic consultation. Management is based on prompt recognition, differentiation between low- and high-flow priapism, reversal of any potential precipitating factors, and the use of corporal aspiration/irrigation combined with intracavernosal alpha-agonist injection therapy. It cannot be over-emphasized that severely prolonged erections are associated with the development of irreversible problems with erectile function and, therefore, immediate and aggressive management is mandatory.     

Transfer of a discrimination by pigeons (Columba livia) between pictured locations and the represented environments.

In Exp 1, pigeons (Columba livia) were trained in a successive slide presentation procedure to discriminate between pictures of 2 ends of a room and then trained to find food in the actual room. A congruent-transfer (CT) group learned the spatial discrimination more quickly than an incongruent-transfer (IT) group. In Exp 2's replication we used a simultaneous slide presentation procedure and added a control group. The IT group required significantly more trials than the CT or control groups. In Exp 3, order of the training conditions was reversed. CT and IT conditions had no effect on the speed of acquisition of the discrimination. This indicates that pigeons acquire a representation of spatial locations from pictures, which can then direct behavior, but the direction of transfer observed was unidirectional. This suggests that a discrimination between spatial locations may not be accurately represented in pictorial form. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Optimization of signal sets for partial-response channels. II.Asymptotic coding gain

For Pt. I see ibid., vol.37, no.5, p.1327-141 (1991). For a linear, time-invariant, discrete-time channel with a given transfer function H(f), and information rate R bits/ T, where T is the symbol interval, an optimal signal set of length K is defined to be a set of 2^RK inputs of length K that maximizes the minimum l₂ distance between pairs of outputs. The author studies the minimum distance between outputs, or equivalently, the coding gain of optimal signal sets as K→∞. He shows how to estimate the coding gain, relative to single-step detection, of an optimal signal set length K when K is large     

On the pH dependence of protein stability

This paper treats the free energy contribution of ionizable groups to protein stability. A method is presented for the calculation of the pH dependence of the denaturation free energy of a protein, which yields results that can be compared directly to experiment. The first step in the treatment is the determination of the average charges of all the ionizable groups in both the folded and unfolded protein. An expression due to Tanford then relates the pH dependence of the unfolding free energy to the difference in net charge between the two states. In order to determine absolute rather than relative unfolding free energies, it is necessary to calculate the total contribution of ionizable groups to protein stability at some reference pH. This is accomplished through a statistical mechanical treatment similar to the one used previously in the calculation of pKas. The treatment itself is rigorous but it suffers from uncertainties in the pKa calculations. Nevertheless, the overall shape of experimentally observed plots of denaturation free energy as a function of pH are reasonably well reproduced by the calculations. A number of general conclusions that arise from the analysis are: (1) knowledge of titration curves and/or effective pKa values of ionizable groups in proteins is sufficient to calculate the pH dependence of the denaturation free energy with respect to some reference pH value. However, in order to calculate the absolute contribution of ionizable groups to protein stability, it is necessary to also know the intrinsic pKa of each group. This is defined as the pKa of a group in a hypothetical state of the protein where all other groups are neutral. (2) Due to desolvation effects, ionizable groups destabilize proteins, although the effect is strongly dependent on pH. There are however, strongly stabilizing pairwise Coulombic interactions on the surface of proteins. (3) Plots of stability versus pH should not be interpreted in terms of a group whose pKa corresponds to the titration midpoint, but rather to a group with different pKas (that correspond approximately to the titration end points) in each state. (4) Any residual structure in the GuHCl-denatured state of proteins appears to have little effect on the pH dependence of stability. (5) pH-dependent unfolding, for example to the "molten globule" state, appears due to individual groups with anomalous pKas whose locations on the protein surface may determine the nature of the unfolded state.     

Characterization of an insulated SCL non-relativistic electron-beamdiode operating at 300 kV/cm

High current density (>100 A/cm²) electron beam diodes operating beyond 250 kV/cm in a 1 cm gap configuration are described. The principal features of the electron source are the high current density and high field without the onset of vacuum arcs or arc collapse prior to gap closure. The electron beam diode was controlled by a variable pulse-width output Marx generator. Fields to 600 kV/cm were applied for 25 to 30 ns, and to 300 kV/cm during space-charge limited current conduction at pulse lengths of 100 to 120 ns. Evidence of the transition to space-charge limited unipolar flow and transition to bipolar space-charge limited flow was obtained. Traces of the typical behavior and the different transitions are shown. Beam uniformity was measured by using a set of Faraday cups. The Faraday cup setup was then used to demonstrate suppression of electron emission from surfaces coated with a dielectric film     

On waiting for simultaneous access to two resources: Deterministic service distribution

Suppose that a test customer in anM/D/1queueing system can get service only if he has access to the server and a separate eventEhas occurred. All other customers only require access to the server. The time until the eventEoccurs is assumed to be an exponentially distributed random variable, if the test customer reaches the server beforeEoccurs, he must then return to the back of the queue. At any time, however, the test customer is allowed to give up his place in the queue and join the back of the queue. The test customer represents a computational task that depends upon the results of an associated task. The test customer's mean delay until service is derived assuming that he always maintains his position in the queue until he reaches the server. Conditions are given for which this "move-along" policy is optimal, i.e., minimizes the test customer's mean delay until service. A condition is also given for which the move-along policy is not optimal.     

Utility-based power control for a two-cell CDMA data network

Power allocation across users in two adjacent cells is studied for a code-division multiple access (CDMA) data service. The forward link is considered and cells are modeled as one-dimensional with uniformly distributed users and orthogonal signatures within each cell. Each user is assumed to have a utility function that describes the user's received utility, or willingness to pay, for a received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). The objective is to allocate the transmitted power to maximize the total utility summed over all users subject to power constraints in each cell. It is first shown that this optimization can be achieved by a pricing scheme in which each base station announces a price per unit transmitted power to the users, and each user requests power to maximize individual surplus (utility minus cost). Setting prices to maximize total revenue over both cells is also considered, and it is shown that, in general, the solution is different from the one obtained by maximizing total utility. Conditions are given for which independent optimization in each cell, which leads to a Nash equilibrium (NE), is globally optimal. It is shown that, in general, coordination between the two cells is needed to achieve the maximum utility or revenue.     

What is the value of limited feedback for MIMO channels?

Feedback in a communications system can enable the transmitter to exploit channel conditions and avoid interference. In the case of a multiple-input multiple-output channel, feedback can be used to specify a precoding matrix at the transmitter, which activates the strongest channel modes. In situations where the feedback is severely limited, important issues are how to quantize the information needed at the transmitter and how much improvement in associated performance can be obtained as a function of the amount of feedback available. We give an overview of some recent work in this area. Methods are presented for constructing a set of possible precoding matrices, from which a particular choice can be relayed to the transmitter. Performance results show that even a few bits of feedback can provide performance close to that with full channel knowledge at the transmitter.     

A fluid analysis of a utility-based wireless scheduling policy

In this paper, we consider packet scheduling for the downlink in a wireless network, where each packet's service preferences are captured by a utility function that depends on the total delay incurred. The goal is to schedule packet transmissions to maximize the total utility. In this setting, we examine a simple gradient-based scheduling algorithm called the U/spl dot/R-rule, which is a type of generalized c/spl mu/-rule (Gc/spl mu/) that takes into account both a user's channel condition and derived utility when making scheduling decisions. We study the performance of this scheduling rule for a draining problem, where there is a given set of initial packets and no further arrivals. We formulate a "large system" fluid model for this draining problem where the number of packets becomes large while the packet-size decreases to zero, and give a complete characterization of the behavior of the U/spl dot/R scheduling rule in this limiting regime. Comparison with simulation results show that the fluid limit accurately predicts the corresponding behavior of finite systems of interest. We then give an optimal control formulation for finding the optimal scheduling policy for the fluid draining model. Using Pontryagin's minimum principle, we show that, when the user rates are chosen from a TDM-type of capacity region, the U/spl dot/R rule is in fact optimal in many cases. Sufficient conditions for optimality are also given. Finally, we consider a general capacity region and show that the U/spl dot/R rule is optimal only in special cases.