The pule placement design principle pruvides a good way of determining a closed loop system with desired properties. The method has been used in adaptive contexts for many years. A drawback of the method is, however, that the polynomial formulation mav lead to robustness problems because of the sensitivity with respect to the coefficients of the polynomials. Further, unless all process zeros are c

Preterm birth is associated with increased risk of complications, specifically with regards to the gastrointestinal tract. These complications mainly include the maldigestion and malabsorption of nutrients resulting from the immaturity of the small intestine. The current study investigated whether pre-digestion of fat in infant formula would affect the developmental remodeling of the structure of

Background: Gallstones affect women more frequently than men, and symptomatic gallstones are increasingly treated with surgical removal of the gallbladder (cholecystectomy). Breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancer share several risk factors with gallstones, including overweight, obesity, and exposure to female sex hormones. We intended to assess the association between chole-cystectomy and female

There are many things to consider when implementing an adaptive controller. The paper contains a discussion of some of these issues. When an adaptive controller is going to to work in an industrial environment it is of outmost importance that the designer has thought of all situations and combination of conditions that may occure. Special attention is given to the interaction between the controlle

The healthcare sector throughout the world is identified for its outsized carbon footprint. Despite the mounting importance of employees’ pro-environmental behavior (PEB) for decarboniza-tion, the role of PEB in a healthcare context was less emphasized previously, especially in a developing country context. To address this knowledge gap, the current work was carried out to examine the relationship

Background: HIV self-testing (HIVST) has been found to have high acceptability among men who have sex with men (MSM) internationally and might contribute to increase testing frequencies, but many countries, including Sweden, lack policies for using HIVST. Objective: To examine interest to use and willingness to pay for HIVST, and associated factors, among MSM attending HIV testing venues in Sweden

Ring signatures enable a signer to sign a message on behalf of a group anonymously, without revealing her identity. Similarly, threshold ring signatures allow several signers to sign the same message on behalf of a group; while the combined signature reveals that some threshold t of the group members signed the message, it does not leak anything else about the signers’ identities. Anonymity is a c

Fluctuating climate, heat, and drought are expected to considerably impact bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) quality in the coming years and, as wheat is an essential food element worldwide, this will have significant implications for future food security and the global economy. This leads to an urgent need for developing wheat varieties with stable yield and gluten quality. In this study, we invest

Background: Parents of young children are a vulnerable group with an increased risk of stress-related health problems compared to adults without children. Low occupational balance has been identified as a risk factor for stress-related disorders. Aim: The study aimed to describe occupational balance in parents of pre-school children and to explore potential differences between mothers and fathers.

Glioblastoma has remained the deadliest primary brain tumor while its current therapy offers only modest survival prolongation. Immunotherapy has failed to record notable benefits in routine glioblastoma treatment. Conventionally, immunotherapy relies on T cells as tumor-killing agents; however, T cells are outnumbered by macrophages in glioblastoma microenvironment. In this study, we explore the

Recently, it was shown that sensory relearning of the upper limb (SENSUPP) is a promising intervention to improve sensorimotor function after stroke. There is limited knowledge, however, of how participants perceive the training. Here, we explored how persons with sensory impairments in the upper limb experienced the SENSUPP protocol (combined sensory-and motor training and home exercises for 5 we

Assessing the causal effects of individual dietary macronutrients and cardiometabolic disease is challenging owing to the complexity to distinguish direct effects from those mediated or confounded by other factors. To estimate these effects, intake of protein, carbohydrate, sugar, fat, and its subtypes were obtained using food frequency data derived from a Swedish population-based cohort (n~60,000

Plasma assisted combustion has been proposed as an efficient technique to enhance combustion, especially under the extreme conditions. For shedding light on the interactions between plasma and turbulent flame at extended conditions, a burner design with integrated electrodes was used to couple a non-thermal gliding arc (GA) discharge to a turbulent flame. The morphology and dynamic behaviors of th

In most control schemes it is advantageous to introduce integrators to eliminate off-set due to load disturbances. It is, however, also important to introduce nonlinearities, for instance due to limitations in actuators. The interaction between the integrator and the nonlinearities will cause problems with reset windup. Ways to handle anti-reset windup for different controller configurations are d

Pole-placement design for SISO systems are discussed in input-output formulation. It is shown how the different design parameters influence the performance of the closed loop system. For instance, the influence of sampling period, anti-aliasing filter, and desired closed loop performance are treated in detail. Rules of thumb for the choice of the different parameters are given.

In this paper we describe how to determine the time delays caused by synchronous and asynchronous control loops. These time delays can vary in a quite irregular way and can cause problems for the control loops closed over a communication network of, for instance, field-buses. Different setups allowing an arbitrary number of communication layers are analyzed. The theoretical derivations are illustr

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model and control algorithm for the slab temperature control problem, which is the control of a number of steel blocks (slabs) passing through a furnace burner zone. The slab temperature is controlled by varying the zone temperatrure. First a model for a single slab passing through the furnace is developed and the parameters are estimated. Data from the re

This paper discusses some problems that can arise in distributed real-time control systems, for instance, sampling- interval jitter, timeout, and asynchronous loops.

Importance: Coverage of essential child health and nutrition interventions in low- and middle-income countries remains suboptimal. Adverse exposures, such as undernutrition and infections, are particularly harmful during the 1000 days from conception until 2 years of age.Objective: To investigate whether deaths in children younger than 5 years-which also reflect adverse exposures faced by children