Articulatory compensation for low-pass filtered formant-altered auditory feedback.

Auditory feedback while speaking plays an important role in stably controlling speech articulation. Its importance has been verified in formant-altered auditory feedback (AAF) experiments where speakers utter while listening to speech with perturbed first (F1) and second (F2) formant frequencies. However, the contribution of the frequency components higher than F2 to the articulatory control under the perturbations of F1 and F2 has not yet been investigated.

Effect of high fiber density ratio polysulfone dialyzer on protein removal.

Background/aims: A dialyzer (APS-EX) with a higher hollow fiber density ratio was manufactured using the highest performance polysulfone hollow fiber from Asahi-Kasei Medical.

Methods: We compared the performance of this device in comparison with hemodialysis (HD; APS-S) and hemodiafiltration (HDF) conditions (APS-S, 10 l post-HDF) to evaluate its merit as an internal filtration-enhanced dialyzer.

Results: With low molecular weight proteins, APS-EX had a reduction ratio of 74.

Metabolic syndrome and chronic kidney disease in Okinawa, Japan.

We assessed the prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in a hospital-based screening program in Okinawa, Japan. The significance of metabolic syndrome as a determinant of CKD was examined using multivariate logistic regression analysis. A total of 6980 participants, aged 30-79 years, participated in a screening program in Tomishiro Chuo Hospital.

Simultaneous determination of radionuclides separable into natural decay series by use of time-interval analysis.

A delayed coincidence method, time-interval analysis (TIA), has been applied to successive alpha- alpha decay events on the millisecond time-scale. Such decay events are part of the (220)Rn-->(216)Po ( T(1/2) 145 ms) (Th-series) and (219)Rn-->(215)Po ( T(1/2) 1.78 ms) (Ac-series).