Threshold Requirements Research Articles

Psychological support after stroke: unmet needs and workforce requirements of clinical neuropsychological provision for optimal rehabilitation outcomes.

Stroke services must detect and manage psychological and neuropsychological problems that occur after stroke, such as cognitive and language impairments, post-stroke apathy, post-stroke emotionalism, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, personality changes and suicidality. Stroke neuropsychology plays a key role in the assessment, understanding and management of these consequences of stroke, as well as contributing to complex case management, staff supervision and training. Where these provisions are absent from the stroke rehabilitation pathway, this significantly limits potential rehabilitation outcomes. To manage the scale of psychological and neuropsychological needs post stroke, clinical guidance recommends the use of a matched care system, in which these needs are triaged and matched with corresponding levels of support. Recent workforce guidelines provide clear professional recommendations for psychological staffing skill mix and threshold requirements for clinical oversight and clinical governance assurances.

Conscientious Objection in Healthcare: The Requirement of Justification, the Moral Threshold, and Military Refusals

ABSTRACTA dogma accepted in many ethical, religious, and legal frameworks is that the reasons behind conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare cannot be evaluated or judged by any institution because conscience is individual and autonomous. This paper shows that this background view is mistaken: the requirement to reveal and explain the reasons for conscientious objection in healthcare is ethically justified and legally desirable. Referring to real healthcare cases and legal regulations, this paper argues that these reasons should be evaluated either ex ante or ex post and defends novel conceptual claims that have not been analyzed in the debates on CO. First, a moral threshold requirement: CO is only justified if the reasons behind a refusal are of a moral nature and meet a certain threshold of moral importance. Second, this paper considers the rarely discussed conceptual similarities between CO in healthcare and the legal regulations concerning military refusals that place the burden of proof on conscientious objectors. This paper concludes that conscientious objection in healthcare can be accommodated only in some cases of destroying or killing human organisms.

Factors affecting establishment and population growth of the invasive weed Ambrosia artemisiifolia.

Ambrosia artemisiifolia is a highly invasive weed. Identifying the characteristics and the factors influencing its establishment and population growth may help to identify high invasion risk areas and facilitate monitoring and prevention efforts. Six typical habitats: river banks, forests, road margins, farmlands, grasslands, and wastelands, were selected from the main distribution areas of A. artemisiifolia in the Yili Valley, China. Six propagule quantities of A. artemisiifolia at 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 seeds m-2 were seeded by aggregation, and dispersion in an area without A. artemisiifolia. Using establishment probability models and Allee effect models, we determined the minimum number of seeds and plants required for the establishment and population growth of A. artemisiifolia, respectively. We also assessed the moisture threshold requirements for establishment and survival, and the influence of native species. The influence of propagule pressure on the establishment of A. artemisiifolia was significant. The minimum number of seeds required varied across habitats, with the lowest being 60 seeds m-2 for road margins and the highest being 398 seeds for forests. The minimum number of plants required for population growth in each habitat was 5 and the largest number was 43 in pasture. The aggregation distribution of A. artemisiifolia resulted in a higher establishment and survival rate. The minimum soil volumetric water content required for establishment was significantly higher than that required for survival. The presence of native dominant species significantly reduced the establishment and survival rate of A. artemisiifolia. A. artemisiifolia has significant habitat selectivity and is more likely to establish successfully in a habitat with aggregated seeding with sufficient water and few native species. Establishment requires many seeds but is less affected by the Allee effect after successful establishment, and only a few plants are needed to ensure reproductive success and population growth in the following year. Monitoring should be increased in high invasion risk habitats.

Detection of Mosaic Absence of Heterozygosity (AOH) Using Low-Pass Whole Genome Sequencing in Prenatal Diagnosis: A Preliminary Report.

Objective: Mosaicism is a common biological phenomenon in organisms and has been reported in many types of chromosome abnormalities, including the absence of heterozygosity (AOH). Due to the detection limitations of the sequencing approach, mosaic AOH events are rarely assessed in clinical cases. Herein, we report the performance of mosaic AOH identification using a low-pass (5~8-fold) WGS method (termed 'CMA-seq', an abbreviation for 'Chromosome Analysis by Sequencing') in fetal genetic diagnosis. Methods: Thirty AOH-negative, eleven constitutional AOH, and three mosaic AOH samples were collected as training data sets to develop the algorithm and evaluate the suitable thresholds for distinguishing mosaic AOH. Twenty-four new chromosomal aberrant cases, along with sixteen constitutional AOH samples, which were previously ascertained via the SNP-array-based method, were used as a validation data set to measure the performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity of this algorithm. Results: A new statistic, 'D-value', was implemented to identify and distinguish constitutional and mosaic AOH events. The reporting thresholds for constitutional and mosaic AOH were also established. In the validation set consisting of 24 new cases, seven constitutional AOH cases and 1 mosaic AOH case were successfully identified, indicating that the results were consistent with those of the SNP-array-based method. The results of all sixteen constitutional AOH validation samples also met the threshold requirements. Conclusions: In this study, we developed a new bioinformatic algorithm to accurately distinguish mosaic AOH from constitutional AOH by low-pass WGS. However, due to the small sample size of the training data set, the algorithm proposed in this manuscript still needs further refinements.

HMM-Based Joint Modeling of Condition Monitoring Signals and Failure Event Data for Prognosis

Accurate estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) of a unit is critical to fulfill reliability commitments. In the presence of hard failures (i.e., absence of a predefined failure threshold), accurate prognosis of RUL using condition monitoring (CM) signals becomes challenging. To tackle this problem, we present a prognostic framework by jointly modeling CM signals and failure event data. Development of the presented method depends on the idea that while the unit operates, it continually degrades through a series of hidden states and the CM signals are functionally related to this hidden failure process. The unit fails once the hidden failure process reaches a dead state. Through this modeling, requirement of a failure threshold on CM signals is eliminated. We provide a modified expectation-maximization procedure to estimate parameters, and through a comprehensive set of numerical as well as real-world experiments, we demonstrate superior prognosis performance against some benchmark methods.

Methodological approaches to assessing economic security in foreign trade

Economic security of foreign trade can be measured through a set of different special indicators with no standardised composition and regulations. The purpose of the study is to analyse the existing methods for assessing the level of economic security in the sphere of foreign trade and to develop an optimal system of indicators for its identification. The research involved scientific publications by national and foreign scholars, official statistical data in the field of Russian export and import as well as the following methods – monography, observation, comparison, economic analysis, analogue and hypothetical modelling. The article assesses various indicators for assessing economic security in foreign trade, applied in Russia and abroad. The authors identified the most informative indicators, proposed a number of threshold requirements for them; included two additional indicators (increment rate of counterfeit goods, share of counterfeit goods in imports), developed a rating-based approach to identify high, average, low, critical and catastrophic levels of economic security in the sphere of export/import operations. Foreign trade is an important activity for any state; however, it involves a number of risks and threats to be carefully assessed and minimised. Therefore, it is necessary to select efficient ways of assessing economic security in foreign trade transactions.

Sensor Development and Testing for the NEWS-G Dark Matter Experiment

The NEWS-G collaboration utilizes Spherical Proportional Counters (SPCs) in direct detection searches for low-mass dark matter. The detectors use gasses with a high voltage sensor in the centre to collect incoming electrons ionized from particle interactions in the gas. The experiment is currently running at SNOLAB and uses its low threshold requirements to search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with sub-GeV mass. To support charge collection from greater distances within the SPC volume, the detector uses a multi-anode achinos sensor. This style of sensor uses a resistive support structure to hold the anodes in place and correct the electric field in the volume of the detector. Previous sensor versions used support structures made from Bakelite or were 3D printed with a Diamond-Like Carbon coating.
 I worked on further development of the achinos utilizing electrostatic discharge resin to directly 3D print the support structure, allowing for increased precision and production rates. This included adding internal guide tubes to support the wires, reducing pressure points that could cause damage to the wire. These structures were then tested with increasing voltages in an argon gas mixture while being observed for discharges. The sensors were further tested in 30cm diameter sphere to monitor the stability during data-taking runs, leading to design iterations to improve the stability of the sensors and increase the maximum usable voltage. Tests were conducted considering the resistive properties of alternative structure materials, including glass capillary tubes of varying thicknesses, but the resin was further developed for its easier applications to multi-anode structures.
 I also worked to implement new methods of attaching the metal anodes to insulated wire, including the use of silver conductive paste to strengthen the electrical connection. This was measured to have a resistance of about 10Ω, where previous methods had connections too weak to observe.

PENERAPAN METODE SIMPLE ADDITIVE WEIGHTING (SAW) PADA SISTEM PENDUKUNG KEPUTUSANDALAM MENENTUKAN KENDARAAN YANG LAYAK BEROPERASI (Studi Kasus: PT. Yasunli Abadi Utama Plastik)

Vehicle testing is a series of inspection of vehicle components that must meet the roadworthiness threshold requirements, to ensure the vehicles to be operated on the road are in good technical condition in order to maintain safety and smoothness in the process of sending goods to the customer. However, currently vehicles that are operated often experience obstacles such as strikes in the middle of the road, broken tires, hit by a ticket because the vehicle documents are not renewed so there is a delay in delivery that will harm the customer and the company itself. The problem with the company is that there is no specific method used by the mechanics and the head pool to find out which vehicles are feasible to operate. In this study using the Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) method to find optimal alternatives from a number of alternatives with certain criteria. This study will rank vehicles that are roadworthy, based on criteria such as vehicle year, completeness of letter, completeness of supporting accessories, periodic service period. The results of this study were obtained the value of the weight of a vehicle that is most feasible to operate.

Predictions of the ratio and asymmetry probes of the invisible Z-boson decay

Higher-order predictions through the combined accuracy including next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak (EW) and next-to-NLO (NNLO) quantum chromodynamics (QCD) corrections in underlying perturbation theories are presented thoroughly for the invisible decay of the Z boson into neutrino pair relative to its decay into charged-lepton pair (leptonic decay). The combined NNLO QCD+NLO EW predictions are achieved based on the fully-differential calculations of cross sections of both the invisible and leptonic processes in proton-proton (pp) collisions at 13 TeV center-of-mass energy. Differential distributions of cross-section ratios of the invisible process to the leptonic process are presented as a function of the transverse momentum of the Z boson . For the first time, the predictions for differential distributions of cross-section asymmetries between the invisible process and the leptonic process are presented in bins of the . The cross-section ratio and asymmetry distributions, which are referred to as the invisible probes, are considered to be important for controlling the invisible process by the leptonic process of the Z boson and probing deviation from the Standard Model (SM) for new-physics searches. The predictions are extensively presented beyond the Z-boson mass resonance region to assess the potential of the invisible ratio and asymmetry probes for new-phenomena searches in high-invariant mass region of the lepton-pair final states. Various tests with threshold requirements of transverse momenta of neutrino pair and leptons are performed to assess the impact on the combined predictions. The invisible ratio and asymmetry probes are proposed to be important probes for indirect searches of new-physics scenarios.

Transcranial MEP threshold voltages and current densities simulated with finite element modelling

ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to compare stimulation thresholds and current densities in the brain for transcranial motor evoked potentials (tcMEPs) from the hands and feet with linked quadripolar (LQP), M3-M4 and C1-C2 electrode montages. MethodsTwenty-five patients underwent cerebral vascular surgery with tcMEP monitoring. tcMEP voltage thresholds were compared between LQP (C1, M3, C2, M4), C1-C2, and M3-M4 montages. In a finite element model (FEM), hand, arm, and leg regions of interest (ROIs) on the cortical motor homunculus were segmented. Current densities in these ROIs at tcMEP thresholds were compared across tcMEP electrode montages. ResultsLQP tcMEP thresholds were 61.5 volts for hands and 95.2 volts for feet. Thresholds were higher for M3-M4 (hands, 89.4 V; feet, 141.3 V) and C1-C2 (hands: 137.3 V; feet: 194.7 V). Total current at threshold voltage was greater for LQP (hands, 210.9 mA; feet, 311.3 mA) compared to M3-M4 (hands, 166.8 mA; feet, 256.6 mA), but similar to C1-C2 (hands, 246.7 mA; feet, 341.1 mA). In FEM simulations, current density and local current density topography in the hand ROI at threshold were very similar for LQP, M3-M4 and C1-C2. ConclusionsTcMEP voltage thresholds were least for LQP, and lesser for M3-M4 compared to C1-C2. In FEM simulations, resistance to current to hand ROI was ordered the same (LQP < M3-M4 < C1-C2). The local distribution of current density in motor cortex with tcMEP was mainly determined by cortical geometry. SignificanceCurrent densities and resistance to current simulated with FEM may explain threshold requirements for tcMEP electrode montages.

Treating subclinical hypothyroidism in individuals with or without mental health problems -A Delphi based expert consensus study in two countries.

Subclinical hypothyroidism (SCH) is a common endocrine problem with prevalence estimates between 4% and 20%. Symptoms are often non-specific but can substantially affect well-being leading to repeated medical consultations. The effect of thyroid hormone replacement therapy (THRT) in patients with SCH remains uncertain. Current guidelines, limited by the lack of high-quality evidence, have been controversial with limited adherence in clinical practice. Three-round modified Delphi method to establish consensus regarding diagnosis and treatment of individuals with SCH with and without affective disorder or anxiety, conducted with clinicians from three specialties, general practice, endocrinology and psychiatry, and two countries, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Sixty clinicians, 20 per specialty, were recruited. Fifty-three (88%) participants completed all three rounds. The participants reached consensus on five of the 26 practice statements that (a) repeated testing was required for the diagnosis of subclinical hypothyroidism, (b) antibody screening should usually occur, and (c and d) antibody screening would strengthen the indication for thyroid hormone replacement therapy in both individuals with or without affective disorder or anxiety. The participants disagreed with (e) a requirement of a TSH threshold ≥ 20 mIU/L for thyroid hormone replacement therapy start. Psychiatrists and GPs but not endocrinologists, agreed that there was a frequent discrepancy between laboratory results and clinical symptoms, and disagreed that testing for thyroid dysfunction was overused in patients presenting with depression or anxiety, or fatigue. In many aspects, attitudes toward diagnosing and treating SCH remain diverse. The inability of our Delphi panel to achieve consensus on most items and the disagreement with a TSH ≥ 20 mIU/L threshold for treatment suggest that the concept of SCH may need rethinking with a better understanding of the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid physiology. Given that the scientific evidence is currently not conclusive, guidelines in this area should not be taken as definitive.

A future with no individual ownership is not a happy one: Property theory shows why

The World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted that, by 2030, individuals would own nothing and be happy. This article examines the prediction from a property perspective. We situate the prediction by considering the societal transformations that inform it and show how they concern property. We use property theory to advance property as a socio-legal construct that has formed around the human-thing relationships that are claimed to be deeply embedded in the human condition. By assuring access to the things to which humans relate, property ownership can support personhood, the realisation of which is, we contend, a threshold requirement for human happiness. Accordingly, any transformative agenda that promotes the abolition of individual ownership should be rejected on account of its failure to properly take account not only of human happiness, but of the human condition more generally. We argue that, contrary to the WEF prediction, an owner-less future would not be a happy one for individuals. Ownership should thus be preserved as a property concept and we offer an aspiration for it that better supports not just human happiness, but also a more socially just, sustainable, and emancipatory future.

Development and Assessment of a Social Media-Based Construct of Firearm Ownership: Computational Derivation and Benchmark Comparison.

Gun violence research is characterized by a dearth of data available for measuring key constructs. Social media data may offer a potential opportunity to significantly reduce that gap, but developing methods for deriving firearms-related constructs from social media data and understanding the measurement properties of such constructs are critical precursors to their broader use. This study aimed to develop a machine learning model of individual-level firearm ownership from social media data and assess the criterion validity of a state-level construct of ownership. We used survey responses to questions on firearm ownership linked with Twitter data to construct different machine learning models of firearm ownership. We externally validated these models using a set of firearm-related tweets hand-curated from the Twitter Streaming application programming interface and created state-level ownership estimates using a sample of users collected from the Twitter Decahose application programming interface. We assessed the criterion validity of state-level estimates by comparing their geographic variance to benchmark measures from the RAND State-Level Firearm Ownership Database. We found that the logistic regression classifier for gun ownership performs the best with an accuracy of 0.7 and an F1-score of 0.69. We also found a strong positive correlation between Twitter-based estimates of gun ownership and benchmark ownership estimates. For states meeting a threshold requirement of a minimum of 100 labeled Twitter users, the Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients are 0.63 (P<.001) and 0.64 (P<.001), respectively. Our success in developing a machine learning model of firearm ownership at the individual level with limited training data as well as a state-level construct that achieves a high level of criterion validity underscores the potential of social media data for advancing gun violence research. The ownership construct is an important precursor for understanding the representativeness of and variability in outcomes that have been the focus of social media analyses in gun violence research to date, such as attitudes, opinions, policy stances, sentiments, and perspectives on gun violence and gun policy. The high criterion validity we achieved for state-level gun ownership suggests that social media data may be a useful complement to traditional sources of information on gun ownership such as survey and administrative data, especially for identifying early signals of changes in geographic patterns of gun ownership, given the immediacy of the availability of social media data, their continuous generation, and their responsiveness. These results also lend support to the possibility that other computationally derived, social media-based constructs may be derivable, which could lend additional insight into firearm behaviors that are currently not well understood. More work is needed to develop other firearms-related constructs and to assess their measurement properties.

Efficient Allocation of Resource for Energy Optimization in Heterogeneous V2X with Imperfect CSI

In heterogeneous V2X networks, the channel state information (CSI) undergoes rapid fluctuations owing to the dynamic mobility of vehicles. Therefore, it is important to redevelop a more suitable channel description for resource allocation in vehicular communications. In this paper, we concentrate on the effect of imperfect CSI with practical channel description to achieve maximum energy efficiency (EE) of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) links by jointly performing power-control and channel-allocation. A fractional nonlinear programming model is constructed to address power-control while satisfying link reliability and interference threshold requirements. Since the target function and restrictions are quasi-concave, the problem can be tackled via Dinkelbach and Lagrangian duality. In addition, to further improve the spectrum utilization for channel-allocation, we propose an improved Gale-Shapley strategy so that multiple V2V pairs can reuse the spectrum resource of a single cellular vehicular user (C-VUE). Finally, the numerical experiments simulations validate the performance of our offered strategy and the employed strategy effectively boosts energy-efficiency in dynamic communication environments.

The regulation of threshold levels for prohibited substances in the world anti-doping program

Technological advancements in the equipment and laboratories used by anti-doping bodies means that minute levels of prohibited substances can be detected in an athlete's blood or urine. This had led to an increase in athletes testing positive for prohibited substances where the quantity of that substance in the athlete's sample is very low. This article will consider the role that decision limits and minimum reporting levels play with respect to prohibited substances identified in the World Anti-Doping Program. Recent CAS awards are analyzed to determine whether, and how, the issue of threshold requirements for prohibited substances should be further regulated.

Temperature but Not Photoperiod Can Predict Development and Survival of an Invasive Apple Pest.

The apple leaf-curling midge, Dasineura mali Kieffer (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae), is an invasive pest of apple, and can contaminate fresh fruit for export, causing biosecurity problems. To provide crucial information for its pest risk analysis, forecast, and management, we investigated the effects of temperatures (5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 °C) and daylengths (10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 h) on its development and survival. The midge eggs failed to hatch at 5 °C and larvae could not complete development at 10 °C. Pupation and emergence rates were significantly higher at 20 °C than at 15 °C and 25 °C. Daylength had no effect on these parameters. The low temperature threshold and thermal requirement to complete development from eggs to adults were 3.7 °C and 627 degree-days, respectively. The midge had a significantly lower thermal requirement for the completion of its lifecycle at 20 °C (614.5 degree-days) than at 15 °C (650.1 degree-days) and 25 °C (634.8 degree-days). The thermal model developed in this study provided accurate predictions of the number of D. mali generations and adult emergence time in each generation in different regions of New Zealand. We suggest that the model could be used to predict population dynamics of this pest in other parts of the world.

Seismic resilience evaluation of water distribution systems considering hydraulic and water quality performance

The resilience evaluation of infrastructures provides an essential basis for resilience enhancement and disaster mitigation in urban communities. This study presents a seismic resilience evaluation framework of water distribution systems (WDSs) that integrates hydraulic with water quality simulation. The seismic damage scenarios of WDSs are generated according to the seismic fragility model of pipelines and Monte Carlo simulation, and the post-earthquake recovery of pipeline damages is simulated by a dynamic importance-based recovery sequence. The negative influence of earthquake hazards on water quality is investigated by the reduction of chlorine concentration in water, which depends on the changes in water age and supply path caused by pipeline damages. The water quality performance of WDSs is measured by the residual chlorine concentration at user nodes, and two water quality performance indexes, namely, the water supply that meets the quality threshold requirements and the water supply without quality deterioration after the earthquake. The proposed framework is implemented in three benchmark WDSs with different layouts and operational features. Application results show that the water quality resilience of WDSs tends to be lower than that of hydraulic services, and the relative difference in system resilience loss between the water quality and hydraulic service performance ranges from 17% to 286%, which varied according to the layout of WDSs. The water source redundancy, and not the loop pattern of the pipeline network, has crucial impacts on the water quality resilience of WDSs after an earthquake event.

Performance Optimization for Decode and Forward Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper considers the problem of optimizing the data rate of the cooperative cognitive system subject to the dual constraints of the interference threshold of primary users and power budget of secondary users. In particular, under a single constraint, the rate can reach its peak easily. But under the double restrictions, the peak rate problem becomes complicated and changeable. According to different interference conditions and power supplies, four scenarios are formulated: total interference threshold and total power budget, total interference threshold and separate power budget, separate interference threshold and total power budget, and separate interference threshold and separate power budget. Each scenario needs to be further divided into many situations for discussion due to the sheer particularity. Through careful comparison and classification, we summarize and formulate each situation one by one to achieve the optimal value of the rate. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed resource allocation policy represents the best compromise between enhancing the rate of the secondary users and satisfying the interference threshold requirements of the primary users.

The Proscription Paradox: Banning Parties Based on Threshold Requirements and Electoral Volatility in Latin America

ABSTRACTBanning political parties is an extreme institutional measure that democracies tend to use sparingly. Nevertheless, Latin American countries frequently proscribe their parties through rules that activate dissolution for not reaching a certain number of votes or seats in an election. Such rules are expected to stabilize and simplify party systems. However, a competing theory suggests that such rules instead promote electoral volatility by injecting political uncertainty into the party system through cyclical refoundation of extinct parties and the mechanical effects of parties’ exits. Attempting to resolve this paradox, this analysis tests the effect of dissolution thresholds on electoral volatility in all Latin American democratic elections since 1980. Party bans based on dissolution thresholds are found to promote electoral volatility, which bears implications for democratic governance.

Tailored XZZX codes for biased noise

Quantum error correction (QEC) for generic errors is challenging due to the demanding threshold and resource requirements. Interestingly, when physical noise is biased, we can tailor our QEC schemes to the noise to improve performance. Here we study a family of codes having XZZX-type stabilizer generators, including a set of cyclic codes generalized from the five-qubit code and a set of topological codes that we call generalized toric codes (GTCs). We show that these XZZX codes are highly qubit efficient if tailored to biased noise. To characterize the code performance, we use the notion of effective distance, which generalizes code distance to the case of biased noise and constitutes a proxy for the logical failure rate. We find that the XZZX codes can achieve a favorable resource scaling by this metric under biased noise. We also show that the XZZX codes have remarkably high thresholds that reach what is achievable by random codes, and furthermore they can be efficiently decoded using matching decoders. Finally, by adding only one flag qubit, the XZZX codes can realize fault-tolerant QEC while preserving their large effective distance. In combination, our results show that tailored XZZX codes give a resource-efficient scheme for fault-tolerant QEC against biased noise.