Spontaneous rise of fetal platelet counts despite increasing anti-HPA-5b antibodies

A 47-year-old woman with seronegative polyarthritis, diarrhea, and photosensitivity dermatitis was found to have Crohn's disease and pellagra. The presence of high values of 5-hydroxyindolacetic acid in the urine began the exhaustive investigations and finally enterotomy. No mass lesion was found. Argyrophilic cells were not increased in areas of inflamed intestinal mucosa or the normal mucosa. The disagreement between biochemical and histologic findings was attributed to sampling error. Antiinflammatory treatment for Crohn's disease was given and the gastrointestinal and articular symptoms improved, excretion of 5-hydroxyindolacetic acid returned to normal and there was no relapse of pellagra. Pellagra as a complication of Crohn's disease has been described in 4 cases; malnutrition and intestinal malabsorption were the proposed mechanisms for the niacin deficiency and pellagra of those patients. In the current case, the pathogenesis of pellagra may be accounted to wastage of tryptophan by an increased pool of intestinal argyrophilic cells, suggested by increased urinary excretion of 5-hydroxyindolacetic acid.     

Cloning and characterization of the human and Caenorhabditis elegans homologs of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae MSH5 gene

Genetic variation among malaria parasites has important consequences with regard to drug resistance, pathogenicity, immunity, transmission, and speciation. In this regard, malaria parasites have been shown to display a high degree of inter- and intra-species genetic divergence. The nuclear genomes of Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium yoelii, and Plasmodium gallinaceum are vastly divergent yet share a similar codon usage and total A/T content of approximately 82%. This is in contrast to other primate-specific species including P. vivax which have an A/T content of approximately 67%. To assess the effects of this evolutionary divergence on the conservation of gene content, organization, and codon usage in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of malaria parasites, we have cloned and sequenced the mitochondrial genome of Plasmodium vivax, and compared it with the mtDNAs of P. falciparum, P. yoelii, and P. gallinaceum. The P. vivax mitochondrial genome was found to be 5990 base pairs in length, and displayed a gene organization identical to that of P. falciparum, P. yoelii, and P. gallinaceum. Furthermore, there was a remarkable 90% conservation of sequence identity between the mitochondrial genomes of all four species. As an example of intra-species conservation, comparison of mtDNAs from two independently cloned P. falciparum isolates, Malay Camp and C10, revealed only a single nucleotide substitution. A/T content of the P. vivax mitochondrial genome was found to be identical to other species of Plasmodium, hence, we have postulated that the mitochondrial genomes of malaria parasites were refractory to the evolutionary shifts in nucleotide content seen among the nuclear genomes of malaria parasites. Among different Plasmodium species, the second position of mitochondrial codons were found to be the least prone to substitutions and displayed a significant bias in pyrimidines. These aspects of mitochondrial codon usage were distinct from the nuclear genome and may reflect functional aspects of decoding by the mitochondrial translational system.     

Optimizing counter-terror operations: Should one fight fire with “fire” or “water”?

This paper deals dynamically with the question of how recruitment to terror organizations is influenced by counter-terror operations. This is done within an optimal control model, where the key state is the (relative) number of terrorists and the key controls are two types of counter-terror tactics, one (“water”) that does not and one (“fire”) that does provoke recruitment of new terrorists. The model is nonlinear and does not admit analytical solutions, but an efficient numerical implementation of Pontryagin's minimum principle allows for solution with base case parameters and considerable sensitivity analysis. Generally, this model yields two different steady states, one where the terror organization is nearly eradicated and one with a high number of terrorists. Whereas water strategies are used at almost any time, it can be optimal not to use fire strategies if the number of terrorists is below a certain threshold.     

Approximability of Clausal Constraints

We study a family of problems, called Maximum Solution (Max Sol), where the objective is to maximise a linear goal function over the feasible integer assignments to a set of variables subject to a set of constraints. When the domain is Boolean (i.e. restricted to {0,1}), the maximum solution problem is identical to the well-studied Max Ones problem, and the complexity and approximability is completely understood for all restrictions on the underlying constraints. We continue this line of research by considering the Max Sol problem for relations defined by regular signed logic over finite subsets of the natural numbers; the complexity of the corresponding decision problem has recently been classified by Creignou et al. (Theory Comput. Syst. 42(2):239–255, 2008). We give sufficient conditions for when such problems are polynomial-time solvable and we prove that they are APX-hard otherwise. Similar dichotomies are also obtained for variants of the Max Sol problem.     

Induction and Synchronous Motors Compared for System Stability

A comparison is made between synchronous motors and induction motors with regard to industrial power system stability. Representation of motor loads in stability studies is reviewed. The specific system studied is an infinite bus supplying a combination induction and synchronous motor load through a transmission line and transformer. The system is subjected to a fault at the transformer and critical values of fault clearing time are computer calculated for ratios of synchronous motor load to induction motor load from zero to unity. The effect of variation of motor parameters on clearing times is discussed.     

Convex optimization of measurement allocation for magnetic tracking systems

Magnetic tracking is a popular technique that exploits static and low-frequency magnetic fields for positioning of quasi-stationary objects. One important system design aspect, which substantially influences the performance of the tracking system, is how to collect as much information as possible with a given number of measurements. In this work, we optimize the allocation of measurements given a large number of possible measurements of a generic magnetic tracking system that exploits time-division multiplexing. We exploit performance metrics based on the Fisher information matrix. In particular, the performance metrics measure worst-case or average performance in a measurement domain, i.e. the domain where the tracking is to be performed. An optimization problem with integer variables is formulated. By relaxing the constraint that the variables should be integer, a convex optimization problem is obtained. The two performance metrics are compared for several realistic measurement scenarios with planar transmitter constellations. The results show that the worst performance is obtained in the most distant parts of the measurement domain. Furthermore, measurement allocations optimized for worst-case performance require measurements in a larger area than measurement allocations optimized for average performance.     

Ion Electrodiffusion Governs Silk Electrogelation

Silk electrogelation involves the transition of an aqueous silk fibroin solution to a gel state (E-gel) in the presence of an electric current. The process is based on local pH changes as a result of water electrolysis - generating H(+) and OH(-) ions at the (+) and (-) electrodes, respectively. Silk fibroin has a pI=4.2 and when local pH相似文献   

Style-Controllable Speech-Driven Gesture Synthesis Using Normalising Flows

Automatic synthesis of realistic gestures promises to transform the fields of animation, avatars and communicative agents. In off-line applications, novel tools can alter the role of an animator to that of a director, who provides only high-level input for the desired animation; a learned network then translates these instructions into an appropriate sequence of body poses. In interactive scenarios, systems for generating natural animations on the fly are key to achieving believable and relatable characters. In this paper we address some of the core issues towards these ends. By adapting a deep learning-based motion synthesis method called MoGlow, we propose a new generative model for generating state-of-the-art realistic speech-driven gesticulation. Owing to the probabilistic nature of the approach, our model can produce a battery of different, yet plausible, gestures given the same input speech signal. Just like humans, this gives a rich natural variation of motion. We additionally demonstrate the ability to exert directorial control over the output style, such as gesture level, speed, symmetry and spacial extent. Such control can be leveraged to convey a desired character personality or mood. We achieve all this without any manual annotation of the data. User studies evaluating upper-body gesticulation confirm that the generated motions are natural and well match the input speech. Our method scores above all prior systems and baselines on these measures, and comes close to the ratings of the original recorded motions. We furthermore find that we can accurately control gesticulation styles without unnecessarily compromising perceived naturalness. Finally, we also demonstrate an application of the same method to full-body gesticulation, including the synthesis of stepping motion and stance.