Hasil untuk "America"

L. L. Sloss

S. Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton

R. Putnam

R. Kagan

R. Alba

J. Stoddard, D. Jeffries, A. Lükewille et al.

G. Atkinson, D. Boore

Predictive relations are developed for ground motions from eastern North American earthquakes of 4.0 ≦ M ≦ 7.25 at distances of 10 ≦ R ≦ 500 km. The predicted parameters are response spectra at frequencies of 0.5 to 20 Hz, and peak ground acceleration and velocity. The predictions are derived from an empirically based stochastic ground-motion model. The relations differ from previous work in the improved empirical definition of input parameters and empirical validation of results. The relations are in demonstrable agreement with ground motions from earthquakes of M 4 to 5. There are insufficient data to adequately judge the relations at larger magnitudes, although they are consistent with data from the Saguenay (M 5.8) and Nahanni (M 6.8) earthquakes. The underlying model parameters are constrained by empirical data for events as large as M 6.8.

M. Emerson, D. Conley

Deborah J. Yashar

L. Jeannotte, M. Moore

N. Fishman

Walter D. Mignolo

Carl Gunhouse

M. Silverberg, B. Lau, A. Justice et al.

D. Ragsdale, D. Landis, J. Brodeur et al.

A. Escobar

Samuel Darkwah, Namwin S. Somda, Samiratu Mahazu et al.

BackgroundStreptococcus pneumoniae and its infections are a global public health concern. Invasive pneumococcal disease accounts for significant mortality in the aged and immunocompromised. Over 100 unique capsular serotypes have been identified, with 80–90% of invasive disease attributable to about 23 serotypes. Pneumococcal serotype influences invasiveness, virulence, carriage, and IPD outcome. Case fatality rates among different pneumococcal serotypes in IPD have been inconsistently reported, prompting the need for a comprehensive meta-analysis. We hypothesized that specific pneumococcal serotypes would be associated with higher case fatality rates and that non-vaccine serotypes may exhibit increased mortality risks over time.MethodsWe conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of serotype-specific risk of death due to invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in the last decade. We calculated the risk ratio (RR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) for each serotype compared with serotype 14 in each study. Pooled risk ratios were computed using random effects size model analysis. We also conducted heterogeneity testing and meta-regression sub-analysis.ResultsIn total, 45 eligible studies were included, and 16 were selected for meta-analysis. Study distribution showed a global disparity, with Europe as the major data source. Serotype 31 had the highest case fatality rate (31.4%), indicating a concerning mortality risk associated with this serotype, particularly in immunocompromised patients. Overall, IPD patients with serotypes 3, 6A, 11A, 15A, 19F, and 31 were more likely to die. In contrast, serotypes 1, 5, 7F, and 8 IPD isolates recorded a reduced risk ratio compared to serotype 14. Subgroup analysis showed that vaccine serotypes were associated with a greater risk of death than non-vaccine serotypes, but there were no significant differences in risk estimates between population groups.ConclusionThe study confirms the stable role of pneumococcal serotype in determining the clinical outcomes of invasive pneumococcal disease. Our findings underscore the importance of serotype-specific surveillance in IPD and call for the reconsideration of current pneumococcal vaccine formulations to address high-risk non-vaccine serotypes. Efforts to build research capacity, especially in low-resource regions such as Africa and South America, are highly recommended.

Kian Habashi, Jayme A. Ching, Allison G. McNickle

Introduction: Healthcare providers should ask advance care planning (ACP) questions early, especially in the often frail population of geriatric trauma patients. To improve ACP documentation at our institution, we implemented a smart phrase for use in patients over 60 with hip and/or femur fractures. The smart phrase addresses living situations, patient wishes and pre-existing ACP documents. Methods: We completed a retrospective chart review analyzing the prevalence of ACP documentation, its timing (pre or post-operatively), and the service completing it for 1 year pre- and post-implementation. Results: After smart phrase inception, ACP documentation increased from 23.1 % to 91.7 %. Pre-operative documentation increased from 15.1 % to 90.2 % Trauma service frequency of documentation increased from 20.7 % to 92.3 %. Conclusions: There was a significant improvement of ACP documentation pre-operatively and by the primary trauma team with a smart phrase. This increased knowledge of treatment preferences can provide better informed medical decision-making for a high risk population.

Itai Allouche, Itay Asael, Rotem Rousso et al.

Despite their success in speech processing, neural networks often operate as black boxes, prompting the question: what informs their decisions, and how can we interpret them? This work examines this issue in the context of lexical stress. A dataset of English disyllabic words was automatically constructed from read and spontaneous speech. Several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures were trained to predict stress position from a spectrographic representation of disyllabic words lacking minimal stress pairs (e.g., initial stress WAllet, final stress exTEND), achieving up to 92% accuracy on held-out test data. Layerwise Relevance Propagation (LRP), a technique for neural network interpretability analysis, revealed that predictions for held-out minimal pairs (PROtest vs. proTEST ) were most strongly influenced by information in stressed versus unstressed syllables, particularly the spectral properties of stressed vowels. However, the classifiers also attended to information throughout the word. A feature-specific relevance analysis is proposed, and its results suggest that our best-performing classifier is strongly influenced by the stressed vowel's first and second formants, with some evidence that its pitch and third formant also contribute. These results reveal deep learning's ability to acquire distributed cues to stress from naturally occurring data, extending traditional phonetic work based around highly controlled stimuli.

Nithyanandan Thyagarajan, Bojan Nikolic, Chris Carilli et al.

We introduce a novel technique using closure amplitudes, inspired by radio interferometry, to determine with high angular resolution the two-dimensional profile of a light beam using an interferogram from a non-redundantly masked aperture. Previous techniques have required multiple interferograms or accurate estimates of the non-uniform illuminations across the aperture. In contrast, our method using closure amplitudes avoids the need to estimate the aperture illuminations while determining the two-dimensional beam shape from a single interferogram. The invariance of closure amplitudes to even time-varying aperture illuminations makes it suitable to longer averaging intervals, with potential to reducing data rates and computational overheads. By using data from the ALBA synchrotron light source to validate the method and its results against existing methods, this paper represents the first real-world application of closure amplitudes to directly determine the light beam's profile using optical interferometry in the high angular resolution regime.