Correlation between late potentials duration and QTc dispersion: Is there a causal relationship?

This article is based on the current draft of a new AAMI equipment management standard (AAMI EQ56). Until now, no documentation has clearly specified the requirements for an equipment management program. At the time of the writing of this article, a February 1996 Committee Draft of the new standard was out for ballot and public review. Comments will be reviewed at a meeting of the AAMI Patient-Care Equipment Management Committee in June 1996, in conjunction with the AAMI Annual Meeting, and the standard could be formalized as early as October 1996. Readers should keep in mind that, while the final standard may differ somewhat from the material presented here, the author of this article and BI&T's staff felt that the interest of a very large portion of the AAMI membership warranted an advance article describing the content and general direction of the document.     

A unified access bound on comparison-based dynamic dictionaries

We present a dynamic comparison-based search structure that supports insertions, deletions, and searches within the unified bound. The unified bound specifies that it is quick to access an element that is near a recently accessed element. More precisely, if w(y)$w\left(y\right)$ distinct elements have been accessed since the last access to element y$y$, and d(x,y)$d(x,y)$ denotes the rank distance between x$x$ and y$y$ among the current set of elements, then the amortized cost to access element x$x$ is O(_minylog[w(y)+d(x,y)+2])$O({min}_{y}log[w\left(y\right)+d(x,y)+2])$. This property generalizes the working-set and dynamic-finger properties of splay trees.     

Power Efficient SDR Implementation of IEEE 802.11a/p Physical Layer

Software defined physical layer modems can be considered the new trend in the field of communications. Differently from dedicated hardware, software can be easily modified to implement a large variety of standards on the same platform. The use of software can significantly reduce development costs, but generally comes at the price of an increase in silicon area and power consumption. For different reasons, this price is something that is not always convenient or even possible to pay, as in the case of low-cost ICs implementing a single waveform, or even multi-mode modems embedding legacy IPs already available in hardware. In particular, power consumption overhead can be prohibitive for mobile terminals or in general for battery-powered devices. The very first challenge for a computing fabric to be competitive is to find and implement the right trade-off between flexibility and performance. This was the guideline for the design of the Block Processing Engine (BPE), a template architecture conceived for power-efficient baseband processing. The BPE core feature is a mixed-grain instruction set balancing general-purpose fine-grain instructions with more specific coarse-grain instructions wrapping custom hardware modules. To further limit the power consumption, the BPE also implements instruction-pipelining, variable-size SIMD and multi-task support. To prove the efficiency of such an approach, a dual-mode IEEE 802.11a/p receiver has been implemented.     

On the hierarchy of distribution-sensitive properties for data structures

In this paper new dependencies are added to the hierarchy of the distribution-sensitive properties for data structures. Most remarkably, we prove that the working-set property is equivalent to the unified-bound property; a fact that had gone unnoticed since the introduction of such bounds in the Eighties by Sleator and Tarjan.     

Untersuchung des Datenverkehrs aktueller Smart-TVs

Das Internet der Dinge (IoT) bezeichnet die Anbindung von Gegenständen des alltäglichen Gebrauchs an das Internet. Der Fernseher ist als Smart-TV bereits Teil des Internets. Einige Untersuchungen haben hier in jüngster Vergangenheit deutliche Missstände in Bezug auf Datenschutz und Datensicherheit aufgezeigt. Der Beitrag fasst die Ergebnisse einer aktuellen, umfangreichen Untersuchung von fünf Smart-TVs zusammen.     

Factorial invariance of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale across gender.

The Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; G. B. Spanier, 1976) is the most widely used inventory of relationship satisfaction in the social sciences, yet the question of whether it is measuring the same concept in men and women has never been addressed. In the current study, the authors examined the factor structure of the DAS in a sample of 900 currently married couples who participated in the Minnesota Twin Family Study. Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to a second-order factor solution with Spanier’s four factors (Dyadic Consensus, Dyadic Satisfaction, Dyadic Cohesion, Affectional Expression) loading on one higher order factor (Relationship Adjustment), to test for measurement invariance across gender. The second-order solution was relatively invariant across gender, even when taking into account the nonindependent nature of the data. This suggests that the best conceptualization of the DAS is one of a gender-invariant measure of marital adjustment with four distinct subfactors and that differences between men and women on any of these constructs can be interpreted by both clinicians and researchers as true mean differences rather than measurement bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Externalizing psychopathology and marital adjustment in long-term marriages: Results from a large combined sample of married couples.

The current study evaluated the associations between externalizing psychopathology and marital adjustment in a combined sample of 1,805 married couples. We further considered the role of personality in these associations, as personality has been found to predict both the development of externalizing psychopathology as well as marital distress and instability. Diagnostic interviews assessed conduct disorder, adult symptoms of antisocial personality disorder, and alcohol dependence. Personality was assessed using the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire. The Dyadic Adjustment Scale was used to measure marital adjustment. Results indicate that more externalizing psychopathology, greater negative emotionality, and lower communal positive emotionality were associated with reduced marital adjustment in both individuals and their spouses. Low constraint was associated with reduced marital adjustment for individuals but not for their spouses. Multivariate analyses indicated externalizing psychopathology continued to predict marital adjustment even when accounting for overlap with personality. These results highlight the importance of examining the presence of externalizing psychopathology and the personality attributes of both members of a dyad when considering psychological predictors of marital adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Features that distinguish the smooth-pursuit eye-tracking performance of schizophrenic, affective-disorder, and normal individuals.

Examined the eye-tracking records of 25 schizophrenic (mean age 37.6 yrs), 25 unipolar (mean age 37.9 yrs), 24 bipolar (mean age 36 yrs), and 46 medical control (mean age 35 yrs) patients. All the psychiatric patients were in symptom remission. All three psychiatric groups produced more oscillations than controls, and spiky tracking was correlated with poor performance as indexed by the production of large saccades. Schizophrenics did, however, produce smaller saccades and tracked with more phase lag than did each of the other groups. Results suggest that the smooth-pursuit system of schizophrenics is functionally different from that of normal people. Use of the phase lag as a potential marker of schizophrenia is discussed. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Game theory and time utility functions for a radio aware scheduling algorithm for WiMAX networks

In WiMAX systems the Base Station scheduler plays a key role as it controls the sharing of the radio resources among the users. The goal of the scheduler is multiple: achieve fair usage of the resources, satisfy the QoS requirements of the users, maximize goodput, and minimize power consumption, and at the same time ensuring feasible algorithm complexity and system scalability. Since most of these goals are contrasting, scheduler designers usually focus their attention on optimizing one aspect only. In this scenario, we propose a scheduling algorithm (called GTS_N\mathrm{GTS_N}) whose goal is to contemporaneously achieve efficiency and fairness, while also taking into account the QoS requirements and the channel state. GTS_N\mathrm{GTS_N} exploits the properties of Time Utility Functions (TUFs) and Game Theory. Simulations prove that the performance of GTS_N,\mathrm{GTS_N}, when compared to that of several well-known schedulers, is remarkable. GTS_N\mathrm{GTS_N} provides the best compromise between the two contrasting objectives of fairness and efficiency, while QoS requirements are in most cases guaranteed. However, the exponential complexity introduced by the game theory technique makes it rather impractical and not computationally scalable for a large number of users. Thus we developed a suboptimal version, named sub-GTS_N.\mathrm{GTS_N}. We show that this version retains most of the features and performance figures of its brother, but its complexity is linear with the number of users.     

The association between parent–child conflict and adolescent conduct problems over time: Results from a longitudinal adoption study.

A handful of prior adoption studies have confirmed that the cross-sectional relationship between child conduct problems and parent–child conflict at least partially originates in the shared environment. However, as the direction of causation between parenting and delinquency remains unclear, this relationship could be better explained by the adolescent's propensity to elicit conflictive parenting, a phenomenon referred to as an evocative gene–environment correlation. In the current study, the authors thus examined the prospective relationship between conduct problems and parent–child conflict in a sample of adoptive families. Participants included 672 adolescents in 405 adoptive families assessed at 2 time points roughly 4 years apart. Results indicated that parent–child conflict predicts the development of conduct problems, whereas conduct problems do not predict increases in parent–child conflict. Such findings suggest that evocative gene–environment correlations are highly unlikely to be an explanation of prior shared environmental effects during adolescence. Moreover, because the adolescents in this study do not share genes with their adoptive parents, the association between conduct problems and parent–child conflict is indicative of shared environmental mediation in particular. Implications of the findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)