Sharif Digital Repository

We study the overlap between the medical malpractice (med mal) and medical disciplinary systems using the records of almost 90,000 Illinois physicians who held an active license at any point from 1990–2016. We quantify the specialty-specific risk of having a paid med mal claim or a disciplinary action; how many physicians have both; and the extent to which physicians with two or more paid claims or two or more disciplinary actions account for a disproportionate share of the activity of both systems. We also examine which factors are associated with paid claims and disciplinary actions, and whether physicians with multiple paid claims or disciplinary actions are concentrated at particular... 

How concentrated is the market for medical malpractice (med mal) legal representation? Do successful plaintiffs’ lawyers start off with better cases to begin with, do they add more value to the cases they handle, or both? How do top plaintiffs’ lawyers market their services, and where did they go to school? How large are the “wages of risk”—the compensation to plaintiffs’ lawyers for working on contingency? How often do plaintiffs proceed pro se, and with what results? We address these questions using a data set of every insured med mal case closed in Illinois during 2000–2010. We show that most plaintiffs have a lawyer. We quantify the market share, case mix, and amounts recovered by the... 

Thermal management and temperature control of the electrical, electronic, and electrochemical devices during their operation have always been a challenge for proper performance and further development of them. In this regard, the utilization of liquid-cooled mini-channel heat sinks (MCHSs) and improving their capability for heat dissipation have been considered an effective method in past decades. The current study aims to improve the hydrothermal performance and temperature uniformity of MCHS. To this end, several channel configurations with novel geometrical cross sections, namely basic case and cases 1–4, are designed to investigate the influence of geometrical parameters on the... 

In this research, the flow of kerosene oil with ternary hybrid nanoparticles on a stretchable exponential surface has been investigated. There is also a discussion about the entropy analysis of the flow of hydromagnetic radiation by the surface. The ternary hybrid nanofluid (THyNF) contains graphene oxide (GO), magnesium oxide (MgO), and zinc oxide (ZnO) as nanoparticles and kerosene oil as a base fluid. Using useful transformations, differential equations with partial derivatives (PDEs) were transformed into ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Then, the ODEs were solved using the RK5th method. Furthermore, the impacts of parameters like radiation parameter ((Formula presented.)),... 

Gamma-ray observations in the low and medium energy range (0.1-100 MeV) with sufficiently sensitive telescopes will provide unique insights into many outstanding high-energy astrophysics questions. The University of California, Riverside (UCR) Tracking and Imaging Gamma-Ray Telescope (TIGRE) Compton gamma-ray telescope uses multilayers of silicon strip detectors to, for the first time, track the Compton electron and CsI(Tl)-photodiode detectors to measure the scattered photon energy. By combining the Compton telescope's inherent imaging capability with improved background discrimination, a larger field-of-view and improved spectral and spatial resolutions, a significant improvement in... 

In this study, numerical computations are performed with the main purpose of shedding light on the mixing characteristics in an innovative T-shaped micromixer equipped with a twisted structure. A 3-D model is presented and verified to mix two miscible fluids in a single phase. By considering different geometrical cases, the proposed T-mixer is compared using the standard T-mixer (Base case) running in the same operational conditions. Furthermore, the impacts of variation in the geometry of twisted design are scrutinized for Re (Reynolds number) in the extent of 1≤Re≤500 with the focus of obtaining a significant mixing quality for flow through the micromixer. MI (Mixing index), PI... 

Adiabatic quantum algorithms are characterized by their run time and accuracy. The relation between the two is essential for quantifying adiabatic algorithmic performance yet is often poorly understood.We study the dynamics of a continuous time, adiabatic quantum search algorithm and find rigorous results relating the accuracy and the run time. Proceeding with estimates, we show that under fairly general circumstances the adiabatic algorithmic error exhibits a behavior with two discernible regimes: The error decreases exponentially for short times and then decreases polynomially for longer times.We show that the well-known quadratic speedup over classical search is associated only with the... 

Drying of green peas in a Fluidized Bed Dryer (FBD) with inert particle, heated by combined sources of hot air and InfraRed (IR) radiation, has been experimentally and theoretically studied. For this purpose, an experimental set up was constructed. This setup was composed of a cylindrical bed dryer containing some inert particles which are fluidized by hot air. Some infrared lamps were also placed around the bed for heating assistance. A sample of green pea was hung in the fluidized bed and its moisture content, surface and central temperature were measured with time. A mathematical model, based on the two layers concept of penetration and conduction was also proposed for this process. The... 

A sequential implicit numerical method based on discrete-fracture model and the Galerkin Finite Element method, for time-dependent coupled fluid flow and geomechanics problems in fractured subsurface formations is presented. Discrete-fracture model has been used to explicitly represent the fracture network inside porous media. The Galerkin Finite Element method with adaptive unstructured gridding is implemented to numerically solve the spatially three-dimensional and time-dependent problem. The presented method is validated with previously obtained solutions. Two problems are numerically solved by applying the presented methodology in a three-dimensional fractured petroleum reservoir under... 

In this paper we study and evaluate the performance of a spectral-phase encoded optical CDMA (SPE-OCDMA) system using advanced receiver structures based on second harmonic generation (SHG) effect imposed in a Thick or Thin crystal. This receiver structure is employed as the nonlinear pre-processor prior to the conventional low-speed photodetector. In our performance evaluation amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) of the optical amplifiers, receiver front end thermal noise and photodetector shot noise which are effective in low power conditions, and multiple access interference (MAI) noise which is the dominant source of noise in high power conditions in any coherent OCDMA communications... 

In this work, we address peak power and maximum temperature in multi-core Mixed-Criticality (MC) systems. In these systems, a rise in peak power consumption may generate more heat beyond the cooling capacity. Additionally, the reliability and timeliness of MC systems may be affected due to excessive temperature. Therefore, managing peak power consumption has become imperative in multi-core MC systems. In this regard, we propose an online peak power management heuristic for multi-core MC systems. This heuristic reduces the peak power consumption of the system as much as possible during runtime by exploiting dynamic slack and Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). Specifically, our... 

In modern multi-core Mixed-Criticality (MC) systems, a rise in peak power consumption due to parallel execution of tasks with maximum frequency, specially in the overload situation, may lead to thermal issues, which may affect the reliability and timeliness of MC systems. Therefore, managing peak power consumption has become imperative in multi-core MC systems. In this regard, we propose an online peak power and thermal management heuristic for multi-core MC systems. This heuristic reduces the peak power consumption of the system as much as possible during runtime by exploiting dynamic slack and per-cluster Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). Specifically, our approach examines... 

In modern multicore mixed-criticality (MC) systems, a rise in peak power consumption due to parallel execution of tasks with maximum frequency, specially in the overload situation, may lead to thermal issues, which may affect the reliability and timeliness of MC systems. Therefore, managing peak power consumption has become imperative in multicore MC systems. In this regard, we propose an online peak power and thermal management heuristic for multicore MC systems. This heuristic reduces the peak power consumption of the system as much as possible during runtime by exploiting dynamic slack and per-cluster dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). Specifically, our approach examines... 

Users often have very specific visual content in mind that they are searching for. The most natural way to communicate this content to an image search engine is to use key-words that specify various properties or attributes of the content. A naive way of dealing with such multi-attribute queries is the following: train a classifier for each attribute independently, and then combine their scores on images to judge their fit to the query. We argue that this may not be the most effective or efficient approach. Conjunctions of attribute often correspond to very characteristic appearances. It would thus be beneficial to train classifiers that detect these conjunctions as a whole. But not all... 

Beside their worldwide abundance, oil recovery from fractured carbonate reservoirs is commonly low. Such reservoirs are usually oil-wet, thus, waterflooding leads into early breakthrough and low recovery due to the high conductivity of the fracture network, negative capillary pressure of the matrix and, consequently, the poor spontaneous imbibitions of water from fractures into the matrix during the course of waterflooding. In such problematic reservoirs, changing the wettability of the matrix toward water-wetness can improve spontaneous imbibition by changing the sign and, thus, the direction of capillary forces, resulting in an improvement of waterflood efficiency and, consequently, oil... 

Small non-coding RNAs can be secreted through a variety of mechanisms, including exosomal sorting, in small extracellular vesicles, and within lipoprotein complexes. However, the mechanisms that govern their sorting and secretion are not well understood. Here, we present ExoGRU, a machine learning model that predicts small RNA secretion probabilities from primary RNA sequences. We experimentally validated the performance of this model through ExoGRU-guided mutagenesis and synthetic RNA sequence analysis. Additionally, we used ExoGRU to reveal cis and trans factors that underlie small RNA secretion, including known and novel RNA-binding proteins (RBPs), e.g., YBX1, HNRNPA2B1, and RBM24. We... 

This paper deals with the mixed convective heat transfer of nanofluids through a concentric vertical annulus. Because of the non-adherence of the fluid-solid interface in the presence of nanoparticle migrations, known as slip condition, the Navier's slip boundary condition was considered at the pipe walls. The employed model for nanofluid includes the modified two-component four-equation non-homogeneous equilibrium model that fully accounts for the effects of nanoparticles volume fraction distribution. Assuming the fully developed flow and heat transfer, the basic partial differential equations including continuity, momentum, and energy equations have been reduced to two-point ordinary... 

This paper is devoted to the characterization of an extended family of continuous-time autoregressive moving average (CARMA) processes that are solutions of stochastic differential equations driven by white Lévy innovations. These are completely specified by: 1) a set of poles and zeros that fixes their correlation structure and 2) a canonical infinitely divisible probability distribution that controls their degree of sparsity (with the Gaussian model corresponding to the least sparse scenario). The generalized CARMA processes are either stationary or nonstationary, depending on the location of the poles in the complex plane. The most basic nonstationary representatives (with a single pole... 

In this work, we implement a relatively new analytical technique, the exp-function method, for solving nonlinear special form of generalized nonlinear (2 + 1) dimensional Broer-Kaup-Kupershmidt equation, which may contain high nonlinear terms. This method can be used as an alternative to obtain analytic and approximate solutions of different types of fractional differential equations which applied in engineering mathematics. Some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency and reliability of exp method. It is predicted that exp-function method can be found widely applicable in engineering