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This study aimed to examine whether different agricultural work patterns may cause MSDs in different body areas and assess their severity. In previous studies, musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) have been recognized as an occupational disease in agricultural workers. However, not all MSDs resulting from agriculture occur in the same body areas or have similar severity. This study conducted a questionnaire survey to inquire about the body areas and severity of MSDs among fruit farmers. A total of 212 valid answers were collected. Subsequently, their main harvesting postures were classified into three groups to examine the differences in MSD occurrence and severity among those groups. The results indicate that the harvesting posture did result in different severities of MSDs in certain body areas. Raising hands above the shoulders caused significantly higher MSD severity in the neck, shoulder, upper back, and elbows despite the same standing posture. Additionally, those who squatted, bent, or kneeled had a significantly higher severity of MSDs in the shoulders compared to those who stood but did not raise their hands above their shoulders. This study confirmed that the different harvesting heights of fruits can affect farmers' posture, leading to differences in the body areas affected by, and severity of, MSDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a common life-threatening clinical syndrome which accounts for 10% of intensive care unit admissions. Since the Berlin definition was developed, the clinical diagnosis and therapy have changed dramatically by adding a minimum positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) to the assessment of hypoxemia compared to the American-European Consensus Conference (AECC) definition in 1994. High-flow nasal cannulas (HFNC) have become widely used as an effective respiratory support for hypoxemia to the extent that their use was proposed in the expansion of the ARDS criteria. However, there would be problems if the diagnosis of a specific disease or clinical syndrome occurred, based on therapeutic strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing the number of AND gates in logic networks benefits the applications in cryptography, security, and quantum computing. This work proposes a don’t-care-based (DC-based) approach to reduce the number of AND gates further in the well-optimized network. Furthermore, this work also proposes an enhanced synthesis flow by integrating our approach with the state-of-the-art. The experimental results show that our approach can further reduce up to 25% of the number of AND gates in the network. For the experiments about the enhanced synthesis flow, we achieve a speedup of almost $10\times $ on average for the cryptography benchmarks while having competitive results as compared to the flow in the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threshold logic has been attracting great attention from researchers due to the rapid development in nanotechnology-based devices. In the state-of-the-art approach to the threshold logic network (TLN) synthesis using don’t cares, we observed that not all the computed don’t cares contribute to the cost minimization of threshold logic gate (TLG). Therefore, in this work, we focus on computing the don’t cares that effectively provide the opportunities for cost minimization. Furthermore, De Morgan’s law for TLGs is applied such that global TLN optimization considering the cost and the number of inverters can be achieved. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of obtaining efficiently a smaller cost and fewer inverters for a set of TLN benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fluctuation in the minority carrier lifetime (MCLT) measurement is observed when monitoring the metal contamination for the furnace performing denuded zone formation, and the mechanism responsible for this phenomenon is examined in this paper. Among various possible causes, the oxygen precipitates are found to be the main contributor for this MCLT fluctuation because the amount of oxygen precipitates after denuded zone formation is strongly related to the initial oxygen concentration in the wafer and this makes the MCLT value liable to be affected even for tiny initial oxygen difference. A gate oxide recipe is suggested to be adopted for MCLT monitoring in furnace performing denuded zone formation to circumvent the problem. For the gate oxide recipe, not only is the monitoring result stable but it is feasible to produce MCLT test wafers with real products without sacrificing tool productivity. Index Terms--Denuded zone, gate oxide, metal contamination, minority carrier lifetime (MCLT), oxygen precipitates.

This paper is concerned with organic contamination from a partially fluorinated o-ring used in a furnace for a high-temperature process. The organic outgas was confirmed by Fourier transform infrared analysis of the furnace exhaust gas. Experiments from practical trench dynamic random access memory disclosed that outgassed organic contaminants from the nitride process would severely worsen the tunneling leakage current performance of the storage dielectric and lead to fatal yield loss even though the cell capacitance was almost uninfluenced. To eliminate this yield detractor requires several test runs prior to real production after installation of the partially fluorinated o-ring; otherwise, a fully fluorinated o-ring is needed. From a cost viewpoint, the latter is highly suggested. Index Terms--Fully fluorinatd o-ring, organic contamination, organic outgass, partially fluorinated o-ring high-temperature process.

This review highlights the synthesis and applications of the carbon nitride (CN x) family with not only the different carbon/nitrogen ratios but also different basic units and linkages (triazine, triazole, and azo-linkage). Carbon nitride is a polymer semiconductor composed of carbon and nitrogen, with a basic sp2/sp3 unit of aromatic C–N rings. The most commonly synthesized form of graphitic carbon nitride (g-C 3 N 4) has a bandgap energy of 2.6–2.7 eV, making it suitable as a visible light-driven photocatalyst. Further, nitrogen atoms at the edges of 2D g-C 3 N 4 nanosheets have lone pair electrons, which can act as Lewis base sites in catalytic conversion reactions. The carbon/nitrogen ratio in carbon nitride and its structural features are affected by its precursors and the synthetic process. When the nitrogen content or carbon vacancy is increased in g-C 3 N 4 , the defects or unbonded nitrogen may act as recombination centers or introduce states within the forbidden gap, which affect the photocatalytic reaction. Contrastingly, the additional lone pair electrons provided by the unbonded nitrogen are advantageous to the catalytic reaction. However, excess nitrogen may result in the formation of unstable C–N–N bonds that weaken its structural stability. The correlation between different units, including triazine, triazole, tri-heptazine, and azo-linkage, in C 3 N x (x = 3–7) was studied to understand its structural features and their activity in photocatalytic and catalytic reactions. In this review, we summarize the latest synthetic approaches of CN x and discuss the outlooks of these materials for energy and environmental applications. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is considered as a promising emerging technology due to its low power dissipation and high device density. Since the majority function is the main operation in QCA circuits, minimizing the number of majority gates in QCA circuits is crucial to the corresponding QCA circuit minimization. A previous work used the node-merging technique to replace one target node with an existing substitute node in majority circuits for optimization. However, this technique may fail when no substitute nodes exist for a target node. In this article, we propose an enhanced optimization technique for majority circuits by adding a new node into the circuits and removing the target node and its fanin nodes. The experimental results show that this technique improves the results of the node-merging technique on a set of EPFL logic synthesis benchmarks. Additionally, this enhanced technique can work together with other optimization techniques. The circuit size reduction in the integrated approach reaches 1.26 times as compared to the results using the node-merging technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LOOPLock is the state-of-the-art cyclic logic locking method in hardware security. LOOPLock is able to invalidate SAT Attack, Removal Attack, and CycSAT simultaneously by introducing two types of cycle pairs in a circuit. In this work, we analyze LOOPLock’s locking mechanism and propose an attacking approach based on locking structure analysis. Furthermore, to defend the new attack, we propose LOOPLock 2.0, which strengthens the original cyclic logic locking method—LOOPLock. Experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed attacking approach to LOOPLock and the high defense capability of LOOPLock 2.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new necessary condition and the corresponding speedup strategies to the threshold function (TF) identification problem. The state-of-the-art to this identification problem could be very time-consuming when the function-under-identification is a non-TF with the unateness property. The proposed new necessary condition can be seamlessly integrated into this identification algorithm. As compared with the state-of-the-art, the improved identification algorithm with the proposed necessary condition can more effectively and efficiently detect non-TFs. Furthermore, according to the experimental results, the ratio of CPU time overhead in the process of checking the proposed necessary condition for identifying all the 8-input TF is only 0.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SAT Attack, CycSAT, and Removal Attack have demonstrated their abilities to break most existing logic locking methods. In this article, we propose a new cyclic logic locking method to invalidate these attacks simultaneously. Our main intention is to create noncombinational cycles to lock a circuit. Specifically, the noncombinational behavior in the noncombinational cycles that is unobservable at the primary outputs (POs) needs to be preserved when the correct key-vector is fed to resist CycSAT, and the noncombinational behavior in the noncombinational cycles affecting POs needs to be preserved when the incorrect key-vector is fed to invalidate SAT Attack. Furthermore, some nodes will be removed when applying our locking method, which is able to defend Removal Attack. The experimental results show the effectiveness and low area overhead of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lithium metal anodes form a dendritic structure after cycling which causes an internal short circuit in flammable electrolytes and results in battery fires. Today's separators are insufficient for suppressing the formation of lithium dendrites. Herein, we report on the use of mesoporous silica thin films (MSTFs) with perpendicular nanochannels (pore size ∼5 nm) stacking on an anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membrane as the MSTF⊥AAO separator for advancing Li metal batteries. The nanoporous MSTF⊥AAO separator with novel inorganic structures shows ultra-long term stability of Li plating/stripping in Li–Li cells at an ultra-high current density and capacity (10 mA cm−2 and 5 mA h cm−2). A significant improvement over the state-of-the-art separator is evaluated based on three performance indicators, e.g. cycle life, current density and capacity. In Li–Cu cells, the MSTF⊥AAO separator shows a coulombic efficiency of >99.9% at a current density of 10 mA cm−2 for more than 250 h of cycling. The separator gives improved rate capability in Li–LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries. The excellent performance of the MSTF⊥AAO separator is due to good wetting of electrolytes, straight nanopores with negative charges, uniform Li deposition and blocking the finest dendrite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of threshold function (TF), which determines whether a Boolean function can be represented by an linear threshold logic gate (LTG) or not, is a fundamental but important task in the theories of threshold logic. In this paper, we propose a more efficient and effective algorithm of TF identification by constructing the system of irredundant inequalities and adjusting the weight assignment comprehensively. This is the first non-ILP-based approach that is able to identify all the eight-input TFs. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach is more effective than all the existing non-ILP-based approaches and the LTGs obtained by the proposed approach are optimal for near 100% cases. For TFs with 9–15 inputs, the proposed approach can identify 100 000 randomly generated TFs as well in a reasonable CPU time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memristor, which is a two-terminal nanodevice, widely used in various fields, e.g., machine learning and neuromorphic systems, has attracted much attention these years. Memristor can also be used to realize an implication logic gate and thus logic circuits. However, the fanouts in a memristor-based logic circuit have some constraints and need to be processed with special care. On the other hand, in addition to the number of memristors, the number of operational pulses is another metric to measure the quality of a memristor-based logic circuit. Hence, in this paper, we propose a synthesis algorithm to deal with the fanout problems in memristor-based logic circuits using implication logic gates for having a minimal number of operational pulses. We conducted experiments on a set of MCNC benchmarks. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce 29% operational pulses and 36% memristor count on average compared with the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The displacement ductility limit for seismic design of concrete piles is determined for the range of cohesionless soils expected in practice. The curvature ductility capacity associated with specified performance limit states, namely, the “serviceability” and “damage-control” limits, is determined based on the current provisions for confining steel. An analytical model is applied to assess the displacement ductility factor at the specified curvature ductility level. The investigated parameters include the soil stiffness, pile diameter, longitudinal reinforcement ratio, axial force level, and pile above-ground height. A set of design displacement ductility factors is recommended and verified to ensure the satisfactory seismic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pharmacologic stress ulcer prophylaxis (SUP) is recommended in critically ill patients with high risk of stress-related gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding. However, as to patients receiving enteral feeding, the preventive effect of SUP is not well-known. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the effect of pharmacologic SUP in enterally fed patients on stress-related GI bleeding and other clinical outcomes.Methods: We searched PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane database from inception through 30 Sep 2017. Eligible trials were RCTs comparing pharmacologic SUP to either placebo or no prophylaxis in enterally fed patients in the ICU. Results were expressed as risk ratio (RR) and mean difference (MD) with accompanying 95% confidence interval (CI). Heterogeneity, subgroup analysis, sensitivity analysis and publication bias were explored.Results: Seven studies (n = 889 patients) were included. There was no statistically significant difference in GI bleeding (RR 0.80; 95% CI, 0.49 to 1.31, p = 0.37) between groups. This finding was confirmed by further subgroup analyses and sensitivity analysis. In addition, SUP had no effect on overall mortality (RR 1.21; 95% CI, 0.94 to 1.56, p = 0.14), Clostridium difficile infection (RR 0.89; 95% CI, 0.25 to 3.19, p = 0.86), length of stay in the ICU (MD 0.04 days; 95% CI, -0.79 to 0.87, p = 0.92), duration of mechanical ventilation (MD -0.38 days; 95% CI, -1.48 to 0.72, p = 0.50), but was associated with an increased risk of hospital-acquired pneumonia (RR 1.53; 95% CI, 1.04 to 2.27; p = 0.03).Conclusions: Our results suggested that in patients receiving enteral feeding, pharmacologic SUP is not beneficial and combined interventions may even increase the risk of nosocomial pneumonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Serum procalcitonin (PCT) concentration is used to guide antibiotic decisions in choice, timing, and duration of anti-infection therapy to avoid antibiotic overuse. Thus, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to seek evidence of different PCT-guided antimicrobial strategies for critically ill patients in terms of predefined clinical outcomes. Methods: We searched for relevant studies in PubMed, Embase, Web of Knowledge, and the Cochrane Library up to 25 February 2017. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were included if they reported data on any of the predefined outcomes in adult ICU patients managed with a PCT-guided algorithm or according to standard care. Results were expressed as risk ratio (RR) or mean difference (MD) with accompanying 95% confidence interval (CI). Data synthesis: We included 13 trials enrolling 5136 patients. These studies used PCT in three clinical strategies: initiation, discontinuation, or combination of antibiotic initiation and discontinuation strategies. Pooled analysis showed a PCT-guided antibiotic discontinuation strategy had fewer total days with antibiotics (MD − 1.66 days; 95% CI − 2.36 to − 0.96 days), longer antibiotic-free days (MD 2.26 days; 95% CI 1.40-3.12 days), and lower short-term mortality (RR 0.87; 95% CI 0.76-0.98), without adversely affecting other outcomes. Only few studies reported data on other PCT-guided strategies for antibiotic therapies, and the pooled results showed no benefit in the predefined outcomes. Conclusions: Our meta-analysis produced evidence that among all the PCT-based strategies, only using PCT for antibiotic discontinuation can reduce both antibiotic exposure and short-term mortality in a critical care setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-electron transistor (SET) at room temperature has been demonstrated as a promising device for extending Moore’s law due to its ultralow-power consumption. Previous works proposed mapping approaches to implement Boolean functions on SET arrays. However, these approaches were based on an ideal assumption that the SET arrays are defect-free. Recently, a diagnosis method was proposed targeting at defective SET arrays. However, the approach was static, such that the performance is inefficient. As a result, in this paper, we propose a dynamic diagnosis approach that can efficiently identify the locations and the types of the defects in the SET arrays. The experimental results show that the proposed dynamic diagnosis approach can achieve the same results as the previous work with much less CPU time on a set of benchmarks. Furthermore, the proposed method spent a few seconds while the previous work exceeded the CPU time limit of 3600 s on some benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For modal testing, active vibration control, or structural health monitoring, determination of sensing locations becomes a crucial issue once the interesting mode has nodal lines on which the sensors are bonded. Theoretically, only nodal points but not nodal lines would exist along free edges of the structures. Thus, measurements of vibrations along free edges of structures would maximize the number of detecting (i.e., for monitoring application) or observing (i.e., for active control application) modes. However, conventional sensors such as strain gauges or accelerometers can only be bonded on flat or smooth surfaces. In this work, fiber Bragg gratings, which possess linear geometric shape, are employed to investigate the feasibility of detecting more vibration modes along free edges of structures. A traction-free aluminum solid with symmetric geometry subjected to various impact loadings is considered. To verify the capability of the free-edge bonded FBG sensors for detecting vibration modes from impact-induced responses, relationships between sensing locations, impact locations, and intensities of modes, are discussed with the aid of mode shapes obtained by the finite element me\thod. Within frequencies up to 30 kHz, 14 out-of-plane dominated and 25 in-plane dominated modes in frequency domain are examined. Multiple modes, that is, repeated roots, two or more modes with identical frequencies due to symmetric geometry, are also analyzed. Our experimental results show that placing the FBGs along free edges of structures to acquire and analyze more vibration modes is feasible. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-electron transistor (SET) at room temperature has been demonstrated as a promising device for extending Moore’s law due to its ultralow power consumption. However, early realizations of SET array lacked variability and reliability due to their fixed architectures and high defect rates of nanowire segments. Therefore, a reconfigurable version of SET was proposed to deal with these issues. Recently, several automated mapping approaches have been proposed for area minimization of reconfigurable SET arrays. However, to the best of our knowledge, seldom mapping algorithms that consider the existence of defective nanowire segments were proposed. Furthermore, before the defect-aware mapping, we have to know the locations of defects in SET arrays. Thus, this paper presents the first diagnosis approach to identify the locations of defects in SET arrays followed by two defect-aware algorithms for mapping SET arrays in different scenarios. The experimental results show that the proposed diagnosis method can detect 100% of defects under a defect rate and distribution in SET arrays. As for the mapping algorithms, the results show that our approach can successfully map the SET arrays with 11.13% and 7.69% width overhead on average in the baseline detour mapping algorithm and defect-reuse mapping algorithm, respectively, in the presence of 5000-ppm defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power consumption has become one of the primary challenges to meetMoore’s law. For reducing power consumption, single-electron transistor (SET) at room temperature has been demonstrated as a promising device for extending Moore’s law due to its ultralow power consumption in operation. Previous works have proposed automated mapping approaches for SET arrays that focused on minimizing the number of hexagons in the SET arrays. However, the area of an SET array is the product of the bounded height and the bounded width, and the height usually equals the number of inputs in the Boolean function. Consequently, in this paper, we focus on the width minimization to reduce the overall area in the mapping of the SET arrays. Our approach consists of techniques of product term minimization, branch-then-share (BTS)-aware variable reordering, SET array architecture relaxation, and BTS-aware product term reordering. The experimental results on a set of MCNC and IWLS 2005 benchmarks show that the proposed approach saves 45% of width compared with the work by Chiang et al., which focused on hexagon count minimization, and also saves 13% of width compared with the work by Chen et al., which focused on width minimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, we expect that circuit designs can be executed without errors. However, for error resilient applications such as image processing, 100% correctness is not necessary. By pursuing less than 100% correctness, power consumption can be significantly reduced. Recently, probabilistic CMOS and probabilistic Boolean circuits (PBCs) have been proposed to deal with power consumption issue. However, to the best of our knowledge, no correctness analysis and power optimization algorithms have been proposed for PBCs. Thus, in this paper, we first propose a statistical approach for evaluating the correctness of PBCs. Then, we propose strategies for power optimization of PBCs. Finally, we integrate these strategies with the correctness analysis as a power optimization algorithm for PBCs. The experimental results show that the proposed correctness analysis method is highly efficient and accurate, and that the power optimization algorithm saves 36% of total power-delay-product on average under a correctness constraint of 90% on a set of International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis (IWLS) 2005 benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The effects of the spatial arrangement of the conjugated side chains of two-dimensional polymers on their optical, electrochemical, molecular-packing, and photovoltaic characteristics were investigated. Accordingly, novel polythiophenes with horizontally (PBTTTV-h) and vertically (PBTTTV-v) grafted terthiophene–vinylene (TTV) conjugated side chains were synthesized that display two and one UV-vis peaks, respectively; the difference is due to the different constitutions of the conjugated side-chains. Because the spatial arrangement affects the molecular self-assembly, PBTTTV-h shows stronger crystallinity than PBTTTV-v, which enhances the charge mobility in devices. Moreover, PBTTTV-h has a lower HOMO energy level (−5.49 eV) than PBTTTV-v (−5.40 eV). Bulk heterojunction solar cells fabricated from PBTTTV-h/PC71BM and PBTTTV-v/PC71BM exhibit power conversion efficiencies of 4.75% and 4.00%, respectively, and Voc values of 800 and 730 mV, respectively, under AM1.5G illumination (100 mW cm−2). Thus, the architecture of the TTV conjugated side chains affects the optical, electrochemical, and photovoltaic properties; this study provides more ideas for improving 2-D conjugated polymers for semiconductor devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were reported of revealing gait disorders and balance problems, there is still lack of objective quantitative measurement of gait patterns and balance capability of AD patients. Based on an inertial-sensor-based wearable device, this paper develops gait and balance analyzing algorithms to obtain quantitative measurements and explores the essential indicators from the measurements for AD diagnosis. The gait analyzing algorithm is composed of stride detection followed by gait cycle decomposition so that gait parameters are developed from the decomposed gait details. On the other hand, the balance is measured by the sway speed in anterior-posterior (AP) and medial-lateral (ML) directions of the projection path of body's center of mass (COM). These devised gait and balance parameters were explored on twenty-one AD patients and fifty healthy controls (HCs). Special evaluation procedure including single-task and dual-task walking experiments for observing the cognitive function and attention is also devised for the comparison of AD and HC groups. Experimental results show that the wearable instrument with the designed gait and balance analyzing system is a promising tool for automatically analyzing gait information and balance ability, serving as assistant indicators for early diagnosis of AD. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the study which investigates the morphological and ultrastructural characterization of hair follicle of Yuyi curly rats.