Consonant and syllable complexity of toddlers with Down syndrome and mixed-aetiology developmental delays

This study examines whether speech sound production of toddlers with Down syndrome (DS) is on par with or more severely impaired than that of mental age (MA) peers with developmental delay due to aetiologies other than Down syndrome at two points within an 18-month period near the onset of spoken word production. The utterances of 26 children with DS, aged 24–33 months, with a mean MA of 14.3 months, originally studied by Fey et al. (2006) and Warren et al. (2008) were compared to those of a group of 22 children with similar intellectual and communication delay but no DS (NDS). Phonological measures included the size of the consonant inventory, syllable shape complexity, and number of communication acts with canonical vocalizations. At Time 1, the DS group performed as well as or better than the NDS group on these measures of speech production. At Time 2, 18 months later, the DS group was behind the NDS group on the same measures. Results extended the pattern of more severe impairment in children with DS than NDS peers commonly noted in expressive language to measures of phonological development

Safety and efficacy of nateglinide/metformin combination therapy in the treatment of type 2 diabetes

The increasing prevalence of type 2 diabetes provides impetus for both development of new drugs to improve glycemic control and for reconsideration of treatment strategies with existing agents. Combination therapy with complementary drug classes that act on different aspects of glycemic control has been a particularly effective strategy. This work reviews the published literature reporting efficacy and safety/tolerability of nateglinide, a rapid-onset insulinotropic agent with a predominant effect to reduce postprandial glucose, when combined with metformin, a first-line agent that suppresses hepatic glucose production and thereby reduces fasting plasma glucose. The nateglinide/metformin combination has consistently been found to be both efficacious and well tolerated, whether given as initial combination therapy in drug-naïve patients or when added to metformin monotherapy. Maximum efficacy (Δ glycosylated hemoglobin [HbA1c]= −1.4% to −1.9%, sustained for up to 2 years of treatment) was seen in studies of drug-naïve patients in whom pharmacotherapy was initiated with the combination of nateglinide and metformin, and modest reductions in HbA1c (Δ = −0.5% to −1.2%, sustained for up to 24 weeks) were found when nateglinide was added to ongoing metformin monotherapy

Clinical heterogeneity among people with high functioning autism spectrum conditions: evidence favouring a continuous severity gradient.

BACKGROUND: Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASCs) are characterized by a high degree of clinical heterogeneity, but the extent to which this variation represents a severity gradient versus discrete phenotypes is unclear. This issue has complicated genetic studies seeking to investigate the genetic basis of the high hereditability observed clinically in those with an ASC. The aim of this study was to examine the possible clustering of symptoms associated with ASCs to determine whether the observed distribution of symptom type and severity supported either a severity or a symptom subgroup model to account for the phenotypic variation observed within the ASCs. METHODS: We investigated the responses of a group of adults with higher functioning ASCs on the fifty clinical features examined in the Autism Spectrum Quotient, a screening questionnaire used in the diagnosis of higher functioning ASCs. In contrast to previous studies we have used this instrument with no a priori assumptions about any underlying factor structure of constituent items. The responses obtained were analyzed using complete linkage hierarchical cluster analysis. For the members of each cluster identified the mean score on each Autism Spectrum Quotient question was calculated. RESULTS: Autism Spectrum Quotient responses from a total of 333 individuals between the ages of 16.6 and 78.0 years were entered into the hierarchical cluster analysis. The four cluster solution was the one that generated the largest number of clusters that did not also include very small cluster sizes, defined as a membership comprising 10 individuals or fewer. Examination of these clusters demonstrated that they varied in total Autism Spectrum Quotient but that the profiles across the symptoms comprising the Autism Spectrum Quotient did not differ independently of this severity factor. CONCLUSION: These results are consistent with a unitary spectrum model, suggesting that the clinical heterogeneity observed in those with an autistic spectrum condition at the higher-IQ end of the spectrum is associated with a gradient in the overall severity of the ASC rather than with the presence of different specific symptom profiles in different individuals. The implications of this for genetic research are considered.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Kaon and D meson masses with Nf = 2+1+1 twisted mass lattice QCD

We discuss the computation of the kaon and D meson masses in the Nf = 2+1+1 twisted mass lattice QCD setup, where explicit heavy flavor and parity breaking occurs at finite lattice spacing. We present three methods suitable in this context and verify their consistency

Intelligence and action agents: 185 years of state security

Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog voelden talrijke Belgische burgers, mannen en vrouwen, van alle leeftijden en beroepsklassen, verontwaardigd door de bezetting van hun vaderland, zich geroepen om ‘iets’ te doen. Zij zouden uitgroeien tot een zeer bijzondere vorm van het Verzet. In totaal 18.716 erkende IAA – Inlichtingen en Actie Agenten, in 129 IAD – Inlichtingen en Actie Diensten, actief in het bezette België. Zij werden aangestuurd door de Veiligheid van de Staat in ballingschap te Londen, in samenwerking met de Britse diensten MI.6, MI.9 en SOE. Zij waren actief in: politieke, economische en militaire spionage; sabotage; psychologische oorlogsvoering; propaganda; ontsnappingslijnen; meteorologische inlichtingen; ondersteuning van gedwongen werkweigeraars; ... Minstens 4.000 van hen werden gearresteerd en 1.815 vermoord (neergeschoten, onthoofd, omgekomen in concentratiekampen ...). Dit boek brengt hun verhaal en geeft deze onbekende helden na 70 jaar een naam

High Genetic Differentiation Among French Populations of the Orsini's Viper (Vipera ursinii ursinii) Based on Mitochondrial and Microsatellite Data: Implications for Conservation Management

The Orsini's viper (Vipera ursinii) is one of the most threatened snakes in Europe due to its highly fragmented distribution and specific open environment (steppic habitat) requirement. French populations are isolated on top of mountain massifs of the southern Prealps/Alps. Mitochondrial sequences (cytochrome b) and 6 microsatellite loci have been used to estimate the levels of genetic diversity and isolation within and among 11 French fragmented populations (a total of 157 individuals). Eleven cytochrome b haplotypes with a limited divergence were observed (mean divergence between haplotypes: 0.31%). However, we detected considerable genetic differentiation among populations (global FST = 0.76 and 0.26 for mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, respectively). Results indicate that 3 populations possibly went through a bottleneck and 1 population showed low genetic diversity compared with the others. Although a significant isolation by distance was detected for both markers, strong differentiation was also observed between geographically close populations, probably due to the ragged landscape that constitutes a serious barrier to gene flow owing to the limited dispersal capability of the viper. Despite some discrepancies between the 2 markers, 8 Management Units have been identified and should be considered for future management project

A time-sensitive historical thesaurus-based semantic tagger for deep semantic annotation

Automatic extraction and analysis of meaning-related information from natural language data has been an important issue in a number of research areas, such as natural language processing (NLP), text mining, corpus linguistics, and data science. An important aspect of such information extraction and analysis is the semantic annotation of language data using a semantic tagger. In practice, various semantic annotation tools have been designed to carry out different levels of semantic annotation, such as topics of documents, semantic role labeling, named entities or events. Currently, the majority of existing semantic annotation tools identify and tag partial core semantic information in language data, but they tend to be applicable only for modern language corpora. While such semantic analyzers have proven useful for various purposes, a semantic annotation tool that is capable of annotating deep semantic senses of all lexical units, or all-words tagging, is still desirable for a deep, comprehensive semantic analysis of language data. With large-scale digitization efforts underway, delivering historical corpora with texts dating from the last 400 years, a particularly challenging aspect is the need to adapt the annotation in the face of significant word meaning change over time. In this paper, we report on the development of a new semantic tagger (the Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger), and discuss challenging issues we faced in this work. This new semantic tagger is built on existing NLP tools and incorporates a large-scale historical English thesaurus linked to the Oxford English Dictionary. Employing contextual disambiguation algorithms, this tool is capable of annotating lexical units with a historically-valid highly fine-grained semantic categorization scheme that contains about 225,000 semantic concepts and 4,033 thematic semantic categories. In terms of novelty, it is adapted for processing historical English data, with rich information about historical usage of words and a spelling variant normalizer for historical forms of English. Furthermore, it is able to make use of knowledge about the publication date of a text to adapt its output. In our evaluation, the system achieved encouraging accuracies ranging from 77.12% to 91.08% on individual test texts. Applying time-sensitive methods improved results by as much as 3.54% and by 1.72% on average

Livestock-associated methicillin and multidrug resistant Staphylococcus aureus is present among industrial, not antibiotic-free livestock operation workers in North Carolina

Objectives Administration of antibiotics to food animals may select for drug-resistant pathogens of clinical significance, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). In the United States, studies have examined prevalence of MRSA carriage among individuals exposed to livestock, but prevalence of multidrug-resistant S. aureus (MDRSA) carriage and the association with livestock raised with versus without antibiotic selective pressure remains unclear. We aimed to examine prevalence, antibiotic susceptibility, and molecular characteristics of S. aureus among industrial livestock operation (ILO) and antibiotic-free livestock operation (AFLO) workers and household members in North Carolina. Methods Participants in this cross-sectional study were interviewed and provided a nasal swab for S. aureus analysis. Resulting S. aureus isolates were assessed for antibiotic susceptibility, multi-locus sequence type, and absence of the scn gene (a marker of livestock association). Results Among 99 ILO and 105 AFLO participants, S. aureus nasal carriage prevalence was 41% and 40%, respectively. Among ILO and AFLO S. aureus carriers, MRSA was detected in 7% (3/41) and 7% (3/42), respectively. Thirty seven percent of 41 ILO versus 19% of 42 AFLO S. aureus-positive participants carried MDRSA. S. aureus clonal complex (CC) 398 was observed only among workers and predominated among ILO (13/34) compared with AFLO (1/35) S. aureus-positive workers. Only ILO workers carried scn-negative MRSA CC398 (2/34) and scn-negative MDRSA CC398 (6/34), and all of these isolates were tetracycline resistant. Conclusions Despite similar S. aureus and MRSA prevalence among ILO and AFLO-exposed individuals, livestock-associated MRSA and MDRSA (tetracycline-resistant, CC398, scn-negative) were only present among ILO-exposed individuals. These findings support growing concern about antibiotics use and confinement in livestock production, raising questions about the potential for occupational exposure to an opportunistic and drug-resistant pathogen, which in other settings including hospitals and the community is of broad public health importance

Validation et Vérification Formelles de Systèmes Interactifs Multi-Modaux Fondées sur la Preuve.

International audienceCet article s'intéresse à la validation et à la vérification formelles d'IHM Multi-Modales (IHM3). Il décrit une partie des résultats obtenus dans le cadre du projet RNRT VERBATIM, dont l'objet est la VERification Biformelle et l'Automatisation du Test des Interfaces Multimodales. Ce projet s'intéresse, entre autres, à la mise en œuvre d'une technique formelle fondée sur la preuve : la méthode B événementiel. Nous discutons les apports de cette technique pour la conception d'IHM3, en particulier, sa capacité à exprimer et à vérifier des propriétés de la famille CARE. Notre approche utilise et propose de formaliser des notations et techniques semi-formelles issues du domaine des IHM