BACKGROUND: Spina bifida (SB) is monitored through birth defects surveillance across the United States and in most developed countries. Although much is known about the management of SB and its many comorbid conditions in affected individuals, there are few systematic, longitudinal studies on population-based cohorts of children or adults. The natural history of SB across the life course of person

Reality shifting (RS) is a trendy mental activity that emerged abruptly following the flare-up of the COVID-19 pandemicin 2020 and seems to be practiced mainly by members of the post-millennial generation. RS, described as the experience ofbeing able to transcend one’s physical confines and visit alternate, mostly fictional, universes, is discussed by many on Internetplatforms. One RS forum boasts

When developing reliable and useful models for selective laser melting processes of large parts, various simplifications are necessary to achieve computationally efficient simulations. Due to the complex processes taking place during the manufacturing of such parts, especially the material and heat source models influence the simulation results. If accurate predictions of residual stresses and def

Background: Skin cancer incidence is rapidly increasing. The main risk factor, sun exposure, can be modified. Informational campaigns can be effective in raising skin cancer awareness and target the high-risk population. Still, sun exposure habits in people at high risk of skin cancer are not well-known.Objective: To investigate if and how sun exposure habits differ between low-risk and high-risk

Various constructions of authentication codes using spaces related to the general linear group have been proposed and analyzed. In the paper the authors describe two new constructions of Cartesian authentication codes using symplectic spaces. This illustrates the feasibility of codes from spaces based on geometries of the other classical groups.

The P-context algorithm as introduced by Weinberger and Seroussi (see IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, p.1697-1706, 1996) offers a way to reduce the parameter description costs. This paper concerns a possible improvement of the P-context algorithm. By using weighting techniques an accurate redundancy bound is derived and a possible implementation is proposed.

A windmill generator is a high-speed sequence generator capable of producing blocks of v consecutive symbols in parallel. It consists of v feedback-shift registers linked into a ring. The sequences are identical to those produced by a linear feedback-shift register with feedback polynomial of the special ('windmill') form f(t) = α(tv) - tLβ(t-v), where α(t) and β(t) are polynomials of degree less

Frontal cortex activity is reduced in the left hemisphere during depression. Transcranial direct current stimulation is a noninvasive neuromodulation technique that can increase frontal cortex activity. Therapy based on transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and positive psychology therapy was applied for improving patients' quality of life. The present study compared three conditions of subjects

Data from experiments on the phenomenon of recognition failure of recallable words show moderate dependence between recognition and recall. TECO, a connectionist theory, is proposed to account for the phenomenon. Cued recall is assumed to be cued with the cue word and the event. Recognition is assumed to be cued with the event and the copy cue. Moderate dependence is predicted because recall and r

Forgetting in long-term memory, as measured in a recall or a recognition test, is faster for items encoded more recently than for items encoded earlier. Data on forgetting curves fit a power function well. In contrast, many connectionist models predict either exponential decay or completely flat forgetting curves. This paper suggests a connectionist model to account for power-function forgetting c

In this comment we show that a recently proposed public key cryptosystem is not safe for most of the practical cases. Furthermore, it is shown that the security of this system is closely connected with the problem of computing logarithms over a finite field.

The long standing question whether the free distance of fixed rate convolutional codes is as good as the Costello bound was almost solved by K.S. Zigangirov and J.L. Massey (1987). They proved that this is indeed the case for codes with long branch length and rates 2/c, c>or=5. It is shown that there exist fixed convolutional codes of rate 2/4 whose free distance d/sub free/ meets the Costello bou

The windmill technique has several practical advantageous over other techniques for high-speed generation or blockwise generation of pn-sequences. In this paper we generalize previous results by showing that if f(t)=α(t v) − β(t −v)t L is the minimal polynomial of a pn-sequence, then the sequence can be generated by a windmill generator. For L = 1,..127, and ν = 4, 8, 16 such that L ≡ ±3 mod 8 no