Harman (United States)

Water soluble polyacrylamides (PAMs) have been proposed as soil amendments for various agricultural purposes. Recent interest has centered on very high molecular weight (10–20 g mol−1), low to moderate charge (10–20 mol %) anionic materials, added to irrigation water to prevent silt loss from irrigated fields. These PAMs are within a broad spectrum of commercially available compounds employed for a variety of applications in other industries. These include solid-liquid separations in clarification of potable and waste waters, dewatering of sludges, mining separations, food processing and paper making, as well as petroleum recovery, textile additives, friction reduction, personal care products, and cosmetics. This paper reviews PAM characteristics (chemistry, synthesis, molecular weight, product form), residual monomer concentrations, toxicology, regulations, and fate and effects in soil and plant systems. Anionic PAMs for soil systems have residual acrylamide (AMD) concentrations of <0.05%. AMD has been found to be readily biodegradable in soil and aquatic environments. Anionic PAMs exhibit low toxicity to mammalian systems (oral and dermal LD50 > 5 mg Kg−1) and fish (LC50 > 100 mg L−1)

BackgroundChildhood obesity has increased dramatically in the past 3 decades, particularly among children aged 2–5 years. In this group, Latino children are among those with the highest prevalence of obesity.PurposeThis paper describes a pilot study to evaluate a community intervention, known as the Growing Healthy Kids Program (GHK), to prevent childhood obesity among low-income families in a Southern state.MethodsThe intervention included a weekly gardening session, a 7-week cooking and nutrition workshop, and social events for parents and children. Matched pre- and post-program height and weight data were collected for 95 children aged 2–15 years. Children's BMI was determined. Also, families reported on the availability and consumption of fruits and vegetables at the beginning and the end of the family's participation in the GHK program. Data were collected in 2008–2010 and analyzed in 2011.ResultsAbout 60% of participants who enrolled in the program were Latino families (n=60 families/120 children). By the end of their participation in the program, 17% (n=6, p<0.004) of obese or overweight children had improved their BMI classification and 100% of the children with a BMI classification of normal had maintained that BMI classification. According to parental reports, there was an increase of 146% (p<0.001) in the availability of fruits and vegetables and an increase in the consumption of fruits (28%; p<0.001) and vegetables (33%; p<0.001) among children of families participating in the GHK program.ConclusionsFindings from this pilot study are consistent with previous studies reporting an increase in availability and consumption of fruits and vegetables among families participating in community gardens. Although there are limitations because this is a pilot study, this strategy seems to be promising for addressing childhood obesity, particularly among low-income Latino immigrant families. Childhood obesity has increased dramatically in the past 3 decades, particularly among children aged 2–5 years. In this group, Latino children are among those with the highest prevalence of obesity. This paper describes a pilot study to evaluate a community intervention, known as the Growing Healthy Kids Program (GHK), to prevent childhood obesity among low-income families in a Southern state. The intervention included a weekly gardening session, a 7-week cooking and nutrition workshop, and social events for parents and children. Matched pre- and post-program height and weight data were collected for 95 children aged 2–15 years. Children's BMI was determined. Also, families reported on the availability and consumption of fruits and vegetables at the beginning and the end of the family's participation in the GHK program. Data were collected in 2008–2010 and analyzed in 2011. About 60% of participants who enrolled in the program were Latino families (n=60 families/120 children). By the end of their participation in the program, 17% (n=6, p<0.004) of obese or overweight children had improved their BMI classification and 100% of the children with a BMI classification of normal had maintained that BMI classification. According to parental reports, there was an increase of 146% (p<0.001) in the availability of fruits and vegetables and an increase in the consumption of fruits (28%; p<0.001) and vegetables (33%; p<0.001) among children of families participating in the GHK program. Findings from this pilot study are consistent with previous studies reporting an increase in availability and consumption of fruits and vegetables among families participating in community gardens. Although there are limitations because this is a pilot study, this strategy seems to be promising for addressing childhood obesity, particularly among low-income Latino immigrant families.

PURPOSE: To determine whether lidocaine jelly is as efficacious as tetracaine drops for obtaining ocular anesthesia and to evaluate sublingual lorazepam as premedication for sedation in cataract surgery. SETTING: An ambulatory surgical center dedicated to ophthalmic surgery. METHODS: The study was divided into 2 phases. In the first, 100 patients were divided into 2 groups of 50 each. The first group received tetracaine 0.5% drops for anesthesia. The second group received lidocaine 2% jelly for topical anesthesia. In the second stage, 100 patients were divided into 2 groups of 50 each. The first 50 patients were given 1 mg of sublingual lorazepam before surgery. The second group had cataract surgery without sublingual lorazepam. All patients were operated on by the same surgeon in an ambulatory surgical center. The technique was temporal clear corneal cataract surgery with foldable intraocular lens implantation. Exclusions from the study were the need to convert to peribulbar or retrobulbar anesthesia, intraocular complications, and altered mental status. RESULTS: In the first phase of the study, lidocaine 2% jelly was as efficacious as tetracaine 0.5% drops for topical anesthesia in cataract surgery. In the second phase of the study, overall, patients in the lorazepam group had less anxiety, greater amnesia, and lower blood pressure than those not receiving lorazepam as sedation for topical anesthesia. CONCLUSIONS: Lidocaine 2% jelly combined with sublingual lorazepam provided excellent cost-effective anesthesia and sedation for topical anesthesia in cataract surgery and enhanced patient satisfaction with the procedure.

The IEEE 802.1 Audio/Video Bridging Task Group has created a series of IEEE standards that specify methods used to provide the appropriate quality of service (QoS) for audio/video (A/V) streams in a heterogeneous network. This paper describes the requirements for such a network and summarizes the methods described in these standards and how they are used in some example higher layer protocols.

SummaryLyrebird vocal display consists of mimicry of natural sounds interspersed with territorial song and other specific signals. Mimicked sounds are culturally transmitted by adult males and not learned by young birds from the models, but further sounds may subsequently be added to or deleted from the repertoire. There was no evidence of mimicry of man-made sounds. Albert's Lyrebird Menura alberti mimicry has a repeating sequential pattern that is quieter than the loud territorial song and has developed into an extended song directed at nearby females. A loud signal within the song alerts distant females. Superb Lyrebird M. novaehollandiae mimicry has no specific order and is as loud as the territorial song but is more subdued in the presence of the female prior to copulation. It acts as a non-threatening directional beacon to keep the lines of communication open. The territorial songs of both species are wholly learned and vary regionally more in the Superb Lyrebird than in Albert's Lyrebird. Analysis of the prolonged and complex nature of these displays in a dispersed lek situation suggests early steps in the evolution of passerine song. Winter breeding and freedom from parental duties provide males with a vast vocabulary of mimicked sounds and the opportunity to develop vocal learning that has produced a prolonged statement containing diverse and clear messages, whereas spring-breeding male passerines have been forced into compressed coded messages that are harder to interpret.

Near-dorsal aspect target strengths (TS) of individual live juvenile and adult Pacific herring Clupea pallasi and juvenile Pacific sand lance Ammodytes hexapterus were measured ex situ with 120-kHz dual-beam acoustics. An experimental frame was designed to support a transducer, fish cage, standard calibration target, and two video cameras. Pacific herring were measured at a variety of depths while they swam freely in an acoustically transparent cylinder that was secured 3 m below the transducer. Pacific sand lance were measured while tethered at a 4-m depth. We found that both depth and season affected the target strength of Pacific herring. The TS of individual Pacific herring declined as they were lowered in the water column. The decline was in accord with that expected from the effects of Boyle's Law on the swim bladder volume. This impact of depth may explain the apparent discrepancy in published target strength algorithms for Atlantic herring C. harengus and Pacific herring. The depth distribution of Atlantic herring is typically deeper. The results suggest that the depth of measurement needs to be considered in both target strength measurements and acoustic surveys of herring. We also found higher target strengths of Pacific herring during spring than in fall. Larger swim bladder volumes may be associated with spent fish or reduced lipid content during spring. The measurements on the juvenile Pacific sand lance, which lack swim bladders, yielded a much lower target strength than Pacific herring of equivalent size. However, the observed values were appreciably higher than the TS algorithm published for sand lance Ammodytes spp. in the Atlantic Ocean.

The time mean spectral energy and enstrophy budgets for blocking versus nonblocking periods from the winters of 1978–79 and 1976–77 are calculated. The major differences in the 1978–79 cases were in the nonlinear interaction terms. A pronounced upscale cascade of kinetic energy and enstrophy from intermediate to planetary-scale wavenumbers during blocking was found. During December 1976, the energy and enstrophy budgets of a case of Atlantic blocking were very similar to the cases in 1978–79, but quite different from the persistent, greatly amplified, planetary-wave pattern that followed in January and February 1977 (as identified by Charney et al., 1981). Planetary-scale baroclinic processes were greatly increased during the 1977 event along with reduced intermediate-scale baroclinic activity and the absence of the upscale enstrophy cascade noted in the other blocking cases.The predictability time (Lilly, 1970) based on the enstrophy flux function showed an increased predictability for the January-February 1977 event but no significant differences between the other blocking cases compared to the nonblocking sample. However, the reversal of the low wavenumber enstrophy cascade during blocking does suggest that blocking may be more persistent (due to reduced dissipation of the large-scale circulation) and therefore more predictable.

Experimental hardware-research interfaces form a crucial role during developmental stages of any medical, signal-monitoring system as it allows researchers to test and optimize output results before perfecting the design for the actual FDA approved medical device and large-scale production. These testing platforms, intake raw signals through which performance of novel algorithms can be analyzed and modified to generate the desired data points for an optimized output, allowing the advancement of the medical device. With cochlear implants (CIs) and hearing aids (HAs) becoming a more common solution for varying degrees of hearing impairment, having modern signal processing strategies tested for such speech sensitive systems is a necessity. But the rigid design requirements of commercial CI and HA processors make it difficult to explore novel algorithms for research investigations and conducting longitudinal studies. This study presents the design, development, clinical evaluation, and applications of CCi-MOBILE, a computationally powerful signal processing testing platform built for researchers in the hearing-impaired field. The custom-made, portable research platform allows researchers to design and perform complex speech processing algorithm assessment offline and in real-time. It can be operated through user-friendly, open-source software and is compatible with implants manufactured by Cochlear Corporation. The FPGA design and hardware processing pipeline for CI stimulation is discussed followed by results from an acute study with implant users' speech intelligibility in quiet and noisy conditions. The results show a consistent level of performance compared with CI users' clinical processor, thus confirming the viability of the platform in chronic CI based studies.

Activity recognition is a core component of many intelligent and context-aware systems. In this paper, we present a solution for discreetly and unobtrusively recognizing common work activities above a work surface without using cameras. We demonstrate our approach, which utilizes an RF-radar sensor mounted under the work surface, in two work domains; recognizing work activities at a convenience-store counter (useful for post-hoc analytics) and recognizing common office deskwork activities (useful for real-time applications). We classify seven clerk activities with 94.9% accuracy using data collected in a lab environment, and recognize six common deskwork activities collected in real offices with 95.3% accuracy. We show that using multiple projections of RF signal leads to improved recognition accuracy. Finally, we show how smartwatches worn by users can be used to attribute an activity, recognized with the RF sensor, to a particular user in multi-user scenarios. We believe our solution can mitigate some of users privacy concerns associated with cameras and is useful for a wide range of intelligent systems.

PURPOSE: To present cases of uveitis-glaucoma-hyphema (UGH) syndrome due to reverse pupillary block in sulcus-placed posterior chamber intraocular lenses (PC IOLs) that were managed with laser peripheral iridotomy (LPI). SETTING: Community-based subspecialty clinics. DESIGN: Retrospective interventional case series. METHODS: A chart review of patients with a sulcus-placed PC IOLs presenting with UGH syndrome and reverse pupillary block with posterior iris bowing as diagnosed by gonioscopy and anterior segment optical coherence tomography was carried out. Laser peripheral iridotomy was performed in the eyes included in the study. The main outcome measure was clinical resolution of UGH syndrome. RESULTS: The study included 6 eyes of 6 patients with a mean age of 59.8 years (range 43.0 to 66.0 years) who presented with unilateral UGH syndrome a mean of 28.7 months (range 0.3 to 84.0 months) after PC IOL implantation. All patients were previously myopic, with 5 (83.3%) having a history of vitrectomy. The mean axial length was 27.0 mm ± 1.4 (SD). An LPI was used to treat the reverse pupillary block with resultant improvement in iris profile and resolution of UGH syndrome in all eyes. The mean intraocular pressure decreased from 30.5 ± 10.0 mm Hg on 0.5 ± 0.8 glaucoma medications to 15.5 ± 3.2 mm Hg postoperatively on 0.7 ± 1.2 medications. CONCLUSIONS: The UGH syndrome due to reverse pupillary block occurred after sulcus-placed PC IOLs in susceptible patients, those with axial myopia, and post-vitrectomized eyes. The cases were managed with LPIs. FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: Dr. Ahmed is a consultant to Alcon Laboratories, Inc. and Abbott Medical Optics, Inc. No author has a financial or proprietary interest in any material or method mentioned.

Today, remote collaboration techniques between field workers and remotely located experts mainly focus on traditional communication channels, such as voice- or video-conferencing. Those systems may not be suitable in every situation or the communication gets cumbersome if both parties do not share a common ground. In this paper, we explore three supporting communication channels based on audio, visual, and tactile cues. We built a prototypical application implementing those cues and evaluated them in a user study. Based on the user feedback, we report first insights for building remote assistance systems utilizing additional cues.

Cognitive load (CL) is one of the leading factors moderating states and performance among drivers. Heavily increased CL may contribute to the development of mental stress. Averaged heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) indices are shown to reflect CL levels in different tasks. The aim of this large-scale study was to explore how accurately HR and HRV metrics can differentiate between varying CL conditions during driving. Participants (N = 892, 44% female, from 18 to 79 years old) performed simulated driving in highway and urban scenarios. The n-back task was used as a mental distraction to further increase CL. The results have shown that increased CL was accompanied by higher HR, lower HRV, as measured by RMSSD, and higher HR complexity, as measured by permutation entropy. HR displayed the highest accuracy in discriminating between short windows (30 s) of different CL conditions, particularly highway versus urban driving and mental distraction during highway driving. We found gender and age effects on discriminative accuracy of HR and HRV metrics which were related to subjective ratings of CL. These results illustrate that HR and HRV indices provide a valid source for applications in the field of CL monitoring and mental stress detection.

This paper deals with the design of a fault detection and isolation (FDI) system for an intelligent vehicle, a vehicle equipped with advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). The ADASs are outfitted with sensors for acquiring various information about the vehicle and its surroundings. Since these sensors are sensitive to faults, an efficient FDI system should be developed. The designed FDI system is comprised of three parts: a detection part, a decision part, and a fault management part. The detection part applies a generalized observer scheme (GOS). In the GOS, there is bank of extended Kalman filters (EKFs), each excited by all except one sensor measurement. The residual generated from the measurement update of each EKF is therefore sensitive to all sensor faults but one. This way, the fault sensitivity pattern of the residual makes it possible to detect a fault and locate the faulty sensor. The designed FDI system has been implemented and tested off-line with actual experiment data. Good results have been obtained with diagnosing individual sensor faults and outputting fault-free vehicle states.

IEEE 802.1AS is a standard being developed in the 802.1 Working Group to provide precise timing and synchronization for bridged networks. It is one of the 802.1 audio/video bridging (AVB) standards, and a major use of it will be to ensure that jitter, wander, and time synchronization requirements for time-sensitive applications in a residential AVB network are met. However, 802.1AS (and the other AVB standards) can be used in other applications as well. Each application will be specified by an `AVB profile', and each profile will provide for very few options to simplify the configuration and operation by the user and result in low cost. IEEE 802.1AS includes an IEEE 802-specific layer-2 profile of IEEE Std. 1588trade - 2008; plus additional specifications to allow transport over 802.11 (WiFi), Ethernet PONs, and coordinated shared networks such as MoCA; plus additional requirements needed to ensure timing performance. IEEE 802.1AS is nearing completion, and is expected to be balloted by 4Q2009. This paper gives a brief overview of IEEE 802.1AS, focusing on recent developments. It then describes new simulation modeling and results for jitter, wander, and synchronization performance. Finally, it describes performance test results using 802.1AS bridges and end-stations.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the frequency and severity of gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms in patients with fibromyalgia (FM). METHODS: We included 152 women with FM (mean age 45.4 +/- 12.2 yrs), 98 women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA; mean age 45.5 +/- 12.3 yrs), and 60 healthy female controls (mean age 44 +/- 11.3 yrs). All patients were questioned about the severity of their chronic widespread pain, symptoms of FM, symptoms of dyspepsia, using a visual analog scale (VAS), and anxiety-depression scale. Patients were asked self-reported (yes/no), symptom-based (>/= 2 criteria) constipation and severity of constipation questions, and about the severity of quality of life (QOL) disturbance secondary to dyspepsia and constipation. RESULTS: Patients with FM had higher symptom severities for belching, reflux, bloating, sour taste, and vomiting than patients with RA and controls (all p values < 0.01). Patients with FM had significantly more dyspepsia-related QOL disturbances than the other 2 groups (p < 0.01). FM and RA patients had more frequent self-reported constipation than controls (respectively, 42.1%, 48%, 21.7%; p < 0.01). The frequency of symptom-based constipation was significantly higher in the RA group (49%) than in FM (29.6%) and control groups (23.3%) (p < 0.01). Constipation-related QOL disturbance was significantly higher in patients with FM than in controls (p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: In patients with FM, the severity scores of dyspepsia symptoms, constipation, and dyspepsia-related QOL disturbance were higher than in patients with RA and controls. The higher GI symptom severity in patients with FM might have negative effects on their QOL.

&lt;div class="htmlview paragraph"&gt;DiMethyl Ether (DME) has been shown to be a very attractive fuel for low emission direct injection compression ignition (DICI) engines. It combines the advantages of the high efficiencies of diesel cycle engines with soot free combustion. However, its greatest drawback is the need to develop new fuel injection and handling systems.&lt;/div&gt; &lt;div class="htmlview paragraph"&gt;Previous approaches have been common rail type injection systems which have shown great potential in reducing harmful exhaust emissions and achieving good engine performance and efficiency due to good control of both the fuel injection characteristics and temperature. The concept also has proven benefits with respect to convenient and safe fuel handling. The logical evolution of this concept simplifies the fuel system and avoids special components for DME handling such as high pressure rail pumps while retaining all the benefits of the common rail principle.&lt;/div&gt; &lt;div class="htmlview paragraph"&gt;This system uses hydraulically intensified fuel injectors driven by oil in a common rail concept using digital valve technology. Such an approach shifts the high pressure to the oil which is more convenient in its handling than DME. Furthermore, amplifier pistons enable significantly higher injection pressures to be achieved while maintaining fuel pressures outside the injector at moderate levels.&lt;/div&gt;

Recent developments in the wearable devices domain with the several high profile product launches around smart watches and glasses have captured the collective public imagination. These developments suggest the inevitable next step in the evolution of mobile devices and how we interact with the technology. The expectations for wearable devices range from an always-on information provider, a data recorder, a body signal collector, and a sense transformer, to an ultimate mind reader and a confidante. However, before trying to achieve these impossibly high expectations, wearable devices need to address the many obstacles of a highly complex personal design space, including delicate support for expressive, intimate, visual and auditory properties as well as respect for the personal-public boundary.

This paper considers the problem of selecting a set of parameter values from a given parameter space, in order to perform rate-distortion optimization in the context of audio compression. Due to interdependencies between parameters, separate optimization of parameter values is inherently suboptimal, yet a straightforward brute-force joint search involves prohibitive computational complexity. This work proposes a new method for joint rate-distortion optimization, while accounting for interparameter dependencies. The optimal solution is achieved, at significantly reduced complexity as compared to a brute-force search, by employing a Viterbi search over a trellis. Two objective distortion metrics are specifically considered: the average, and the maximum noise-to-mask ratio. Subjective (AB/MOS) and objective (average/maximum noise-to-mask ratio) tests demonstrate considerable gains at low bit rates of 16 kbps per channel for a 44.1-kHz sampled audio signal using the proposed approach.

We propose two quantization techniques for improving the bit-rate scalability of compression systems that optimize a weighted squared error (WSE) distortion metric. We show that quantization of the base-layer reconstruction error using entropy-coded scalar quantizers is suboptimal for the WSE metric. By considering the compandor representation of the quantizer, we demonstrate that asymptotic (high resolution) optimal scalability in the operational rate-distortion sense is achievable by quantizing the reconstruction error in the compandor's companded domain. We then fundamentally extend this work to the low-rate case by the use of enhancement-layer quantization which is conditional on the base-layer information. In the practically important case that the source is well modeled as a Laplacian process, we show that such conditional coding is implementable by only two distinct switchable quantizers. Conditional coding leads to substantial improvement over the companded scalable quantization scheme introduced in the first part, which itself significantly outperforms standard techniques. Simulation results are presented for synthetic memoryless Laplacian sources with mu-law companding, and for real-world audio signals in conjunction with MPEG AAC. Using the objective noise-mask ratio (NMR) metric, the proposed approaches were found to result in bit-rate savings of a factor of 2 to 3 when implemented within the scalable MPEG AAC. Moreover, the four-layer scalable coder consisting of 16-kb/s layers achieves performance close to that of the 64-kb/s nonscalable coder on the standard test database of 44.1-kHz audio

Surgical clip localization and image quality were evaluated for different types of kilovoltage cone beam imaging modalities as applied to partial breast irradiation (PBI) setup. These modalities included (i) clinically available radiographs and cone beam CT (CB-CT) and (ii) various alternative modalities based on partial/sparse/truncated CB-CT. An anthropomorphic torso-breast phantom with surgical clips was used for the imaging studies. The torso phantom had artificial lungs, and the attached breast phantom was a mammographic phantom with realistic shape and tissue inhomogeneities. Three types of clips of variable size were used in two orthogonal orientations to assess their in-/cross-plane characteristics for image-guided setup of the torso-breast phantom in supine position. All studies were performed with the Varian on-board imaging (OBI, Varian) system. CT reconstructions were calculated with the standard Feldkamp-Davis-Kress algorithm. First, the radiographs were studied for a wide range of viewing angles to characterize image quality for various types of body anatomy in the foreground/background of the clips. Next, image reconstruction quality was evaluated for partial/sparse/truncated CB-CT. Since these modalities led to reconstructions with strong artifacts due to insufficient input data, a knowledge-based CT reconstruction method was also tested. In this method, the input data to the reconstruction algorithm were modified by combining complementary data sets selected from the treatment and reference projections. Different partial/sparse/truncated CB-CT scan types were studied depending on the total are angle, angular increment between the consequent views (CT projections), orientation of the arc center with respect to the imaged breast and chest wall, and imaging field size. The central angles of the viewing arcs were either tangential or orthogonal to the chest wall. Several offset positions of the phantom with respect to the reference position were studied. The acquired and reconstructed image data sets were analyzed using home-built software focusing on the ability to localize clips in 3D. Streaking and leakage reconstruction artifacts and spatial distortions of breast surface were analyzed as well. Advantages and disadvantages of each kilovoltage CB imaging modality as applied to partial breast setup evaluation based on clips are presented. Because clips were found to be difficult to recognize in radiographs, 3D reconstructions were preferred. Even though it was possible to localize clips with about +/-1 mm accuracy based on reconstructions for short arcs of 40 degrees and incremental angle up to about 5 degrees, identification of clips in such reconstructions is difficult. Reconstructions obtained for arcs of as low as 80 degrees and incremental angle of as high as 3 degrees were suggested for easier clip identification. For more severely undersampled data, iterative CB-CT reconstruction is recommended to decrease the artifacts.