Foundation Funding For Children's Health: an Overview of Recent Trends

This report of the New York-based Foundation Center documents the main trends in foundation giving for children's health in the US, the most salient of which being the increase in funding by more than 50 percent between 1999 and 2003. The analysis was conducted on grants awarded by more than 1,000 private and community foundations. Relevant figures are displayed in tables and charts

On the background estimation by time slides in a network of gravitational wave detectors

Time shifting the outputs of Gravitational Wave detectors operating in coincidence is a convenient way to estimate the background in a search for short duration signals. However this procedure is limited as increasing indefinitely the number of time shifts does not provide better estimates. We show that the false alarm rate estimation error saturates with the number of time shifts. In particular, for detectors with very different trigger rates this error saturates at a large value. Explicit computations are done for 2 detectors, and for 3 detectors where the detection statistic relies on the logical ``OR'' of the coincidences of the 3 couples in the network.Comment: accepted for publication in CQ

Recessive osteogenesis imperfecta caused by LEPRE1 mutations: clinical documentation and identification of the splice form responsible for prolyl 3-hydroxylation

Abstract: Background: Recessive forms of osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) may be caused by mutations in LEPRE1, encoding prolyl 3-hydroxylase-1 (P3H1) or in CRTAP, encoding cartilage associated protein. These proteins constitute together with cyclophilin B (CyPB) the prolyl 3-hydroxylation complex that hydroxylates the Pro986 residue in both the type I and type II collagen alpha 1-chains. Methods: We screened LEPRE1, CRTAP and PPIB (encoding CyPB) in a European/Middle Eastern cohort of 20 lethal/severe OI patients without a type I collagen mutation. Results: Four novel homozygous and compound heterozygous mutations were identified in LEPRE1 in four probands. Two probands survived the neonatal period, including one patient who is the eldest reported patient (17(7/12) years) so far with P3H1 deficiency. At birth, clinical and radiologic features were hardly distinguishable from those in patients with autosomal dominant (AD) severe/lethal OI. Follow-up data reveal that the longer lived patients develop a severe osteochondrodysplasia that overlaps with, but has some distinctive features from, AD OI. A new splice site mutation was identified in two of the four probands, affecting only one of three LEPRE1 mRNA splice forms, detected in this study. The affected splice form encodes a 736 amino acid (AA) protein with a "KDEL'' endoplasmic reticulum retention signal. While western blotting and immunocytochemical analysis of fibroblast cultures revealed absence of this P3H1 protein, mass spectrometry and SDS-urea-PAGE data showed severe reduction of alpha 1(I) Pro986 3-hydroxylation and overmodification of type I (pro) collagen chains in skin fibroblasts of the patients. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the 3-hydroxylation function of P3H1 is restricted to the 736AA splice form

Adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs): RNA-editing enzymes

Adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs) were discovered as a result of their ability extensively to deaminate adenosines in any long double-stranded RNA, converting them to inosines. Subsequently, ADARs were found to deaminate adenosines site-specifically within the coding sequences of transcripts encoding ion-channel subunits, increasing the diversity of these proteins in the central nervous system. ADAR1 is now known to be involved in defending the genome against viruses, and it may affect RNA interference. ADARs are found in animals but are not known in other organisms. It appears that ADARs evolved from a member of another family, adenosine deaminases acting on tRNAs (ADATs), by steps including fusion of two or more double-stranded-RNA binding domains to a common type of zinc-containing adenosine-deaminase domain

Fiabilité et efficacité de la télélogopédie et des outils numériques chez les enfants

Cette présentation se donne pour objectif d'aborder la fiabilité et l'efficacité des outils numériques en logopédie chez les enfants et adolescents. La première partie de la présentation s'axera sur les données issues de la littérature concernant la prise en charge et l'évaluation en télélogopédie dans différentes pathologies. La deuxième partie abordera les données issues de la littérature concernant d’une part les outils permettant d'entraîner les patients à maîtriser des compétences considérées comme altérées, et d’autre part les outils numériques d’assistance ou compensatoires, c'est-à-dire les outils permettant d’aider les patients présentant différentes pathologies dans leurs activités quotidiennes

D2HT: the best of both worlds, Integrating RPS and DHT

International audienceDistributed Hash Tables (DHTs) and Random Peer Sampling (RPS) provide important and complementary services in the area of P2P overlay networks. DHTs achieve efficient lookup while RPS enables nodes to build and maintain connectivity in the presence of high churn. Clearly, many applications, e.g. in the area of search, would greatly benefit if both these services were available together at a reasonable cost. This paper integrates a structured P2P overlay and a Random Peer Sampling service through gossip protocols. This system called D2HT, leverages the small-world nature of DHTs and relies on two cohabiting gossip protocols maintaining the close and long-range links respectively. The long links are chosen according to a harmonic distribution, following the Kleinberg small-world model. This approach exhibits several benefits: (i) The resulting DHT is highly dynamic and self-stabilizing, changes are tracked for free through the gossip nature of the protocol. This removes the need for complex, usually disjoint, and expensive join and repair procedures. Yet, it achieves reasonable routing performance with respect to standard DHTs; (ii) The resulting peer sampling service provides a biased sampling following a harmonic distribution: this improves the routing without jeopardizing the quality of the RPS. The set of long-range links which are a source of RPS can be used independently by others applications for free. They change continuously, achieving well-balanced routing across the nodes. We perform extensive simulations and compare the performances of D2HT with Cyclon, HRing, Symphony and Pastry to demonstrate the gains achieved by the approach proposed in this paper

Reconstruction of source location in a network of gravitational wave interferometric detectors

This paper deals with the reconstruction of the direction of a gravitational wave source using the detection made by a network of interferometric detectors, mainly the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We suppose that an event has been seen in coincidence using a filter applied on the three detector data streams. Using the arrival time (and its associated error) of the gravitational signal in each detector, the direction of the source in the sky is computed using a chi^2 minimization technique. For reasonably large signals (SNR>4.5 in all detectors), the mean angular error between the real location and the reconstructed one is about 1 degree. We also investigate the effect of the network geometry assuming the same angular response for all interferometric detectors. It appears that the reconstruction quality is not uniform over the sky and is degraded when the source approaches the plane defined by the three detectors. Adding at least one other detector to the LIGO-Virgo network reduces the blind regions and in the case of 6 detectors, a precision less than 1 degree on the source direction can be reached for 99% of the sky.Comment: Accepted in Phys. Rev.