Complement reaction in leprosy. Activation by potassium Iodide

nuloI n 1929, while we studied the effects of the administration of potassium iodide to lepers for the purpose of obtaining a complement reaction (the fat free bacillus of Deycke being used as antigen) we had occasion to note that, almost all cases were activated, so that individuais with a previous negative serum reaction, in spite of the existence of some syrnptoms of leprosy, became positive cases

Proposal of a lightweight, offline, full-text search engine for an mHealth app

A patients ability to recall and retrieve health information contributes to a better health management. HealthTalks was developed to address these issues by recording a summary of a medical appointment, uttered by the physician, and transcribing it. For each appointment, the user can also take free-text notes. Nowadays, search engines have become a ubiquitous part of everyones life and are expected on most applications. Here, we describe the development of a search engine for HealthTalks. The apps characteristics demand a lightweight and offline engine, which requires a specific solution rather than an existing library or service. Our approach combines SQLites Full-Text Search 4 module, which includes n-gram indexing, with traditional information retrieval techniques to rank the documents. We created a test collection with summaries of clinical appointments (our documents), information needs, search queries, and relevance assessments for an initial search engine evaluation. Using this test collection, we assessed performance using NDCG@10, the first rank position of a totally relevant result, and query latency. Results are promising, with an average NDCG of 0.97. The median rank position of the first relevant result varies between 1.9 and 1.95, depending on the use of 4-gram character tokenization, an aspect that did not significantly affect the results. We expect this work to be useful for future developments of full-text search engines in mobile environments

La identidad del sacerdote. Un estudio en Giovanni Battista Montini [Crónica]

Texto leído en la defensa de la tesis doctoral el 19 de mayo de 2010 en la Facultad de Teología de la Universidad de Navarra, ante el siguiente tribunal: Prof. Lucas Francisco Mateo Seco (Presidente), profra. Elisabeth Reinhardt, prof. Pablo Blanco, prof. Santiago Casas, prof. Fermín Labarga (Secretario)

Factors affecting SMEs' strategic decisions to approach international markets

[EN] The internationalisation challenges that face all companies are no longer the exclusive concern of multinationals. Participation in the international marketplace has become a reality for large firms and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) alike. This kind of participation can be rewarding for both companies and employees. The markets that SMEs enter and the success of this entry depend on several factors such as cultural differences, company tradition, venture capital, products and competitors. The goal of this study is therefore to understand whether the characteristics of the external market, the characteristics of the company itself and the barriers to internationalisation influence the strategic approach that SMEs adopt in their internationalisation processes. Using data on 320 Portuguese SMEs, we apply multivariate analyses to test the dimensions of internationalisation. We find that the decision of SMEs to internationalise involves an institutional change in response to external pressures in the home country. SMEs under greater institutional pressure not only tend to expand further but also engage in their initial international activities more radically.This work is supported by FEDER funds from COMPETE 2020 and Portuguese funds - PORTUGAL 2020. Project IEcPBI - Interactive Ecosystem for Portuguese Business Internationalization - POCI-01-0145-FEDER-032139.Azevedo Lobo, C.; Fernandes, CI.; Ferreira, JJ.; Peris-Ortiz, M. (2020). Factors affecting SMEs' strategic decisions to approach international markets. European J of International Management. 14(4):617-639. https://doi.org/10.1504/EJIM.2020.107607S61763914

La identidad del sacerdote. Un estudio en Giovanni Battista Montini

Texto leído en la defensa de la tesis doctoral el 19 de mayo de 2010 en la Facultad de Teología de la Universidad de Navarra, ante el siguiente tribunal: Prof. Lucas Francisco Mateo Seco (Presidente), profra. Elisabeth Reinhardt, prof. Pablo Blanco, prof. Santiago Casas, prof. Fermín Labarga (Secretario)

Mapping material use and embodied carbon in UK construction

The latest available high-level top-down analysis shows that the embodied carbon of the UK construction in 2018 was 43 MtCO2e, of which 80% came from materials and on-site activities. In this paper, for the first time, we combine a detailed bottom-up model of representative residential and non-residential buildings with top-down infrastructure and other material consumption data to quantify the material use and embodied carbon in UK construction. We found that almost 100 Mt of materials were used with an embodied carbon of 25 Mt CO2e. Half of these emissions were from concrete. We found that existing top-down approaches underestimate emissions by up to 20%. We developed a benchmark for UK building typologies and explore interventions to achieve the UK's carbon reduction goals. We found that conversion from non-domestic to domestic purposes can bring 34% embodied carbon savings of the construction total, 30% by avoiding demolition, 20% by switching to the most material and carbon efficient technology options and by 10% if all new houses were multi-storey buildings. We have shown that the bottom-up approach allows identifying areas with high potential for decarbionisation. Due to the flexibility of the model, it can be successfully used in other countries and regions

Scaling anomaly in cosmic string background

We show that the classical scale symmetry of a particle moving in cosmic string background is broken upon inequivalent quantization of the classical system, leading to anomaly. The consequence of this anomaly is the formation of single bound state in the coupling interval \gamma\in(-1,1). The inequivalent quantization is characterized by a 1-parameter family of self-adjoint extension parameter \omega. It has been conjectured that the formation of loosely bound state in cosmic string background may lead to the so called anomalous scattering cross section for the particles, which is usually seen in molecular physics.Comment: 4 pages,1 figur