572 research outputs found
Report on the Minors’ Abortion Rights Project
The goal of this study was to learn more about the experience of minors in states with parental involvement laws who do not involve their parents in their abortion decision, and must therefore seek judicial authorization for an abortion, and to use this knowledge to explore ways to minimize the burden of these laws. At the outset, it should be made clear that having this goal does not indicate that we support imposing third-party involvement requirements on teens seeking to abort. Our research, as well as the work of others (much of which is cited in this report), raises serious questions about the value of compelling teens to give notice to or obtain the consent of a third party before terminating an unwanted pregnancy. However, in light of the Supreme Court‘s unequivocal acceptance of the constitutionality of these laws, and the fact that they are a reality for teens in a majority of states, we wanted to explore ways to make these laws less burdensome for teens
Syntactic or semantic gender agreement in Dutch, German, and German learner Dutch. A speeded grammaticality judgement task
Dutch is currently undergoing a ‘resemanticisation’ of its pronominal
gender, in which syntactic agreement is replaced with a system in which pronouns
are chosen in accordance with the degree of individuation of the antecedent. Current
accounts of resemanticisation link the process to the extent to which the
three-way nominal gender distinctions are still entrenched. Using experimental
data gathered with speeded grammaticality judgements from speakers of both
Netherlandic and Belgian varieties of Dutch, of German, and of German learners
of Dutch, we unambiguously relate the rise of semantic agreement in Dutch to an
increased uncertainty with respect to grammatical gender. In addition, reaction
time measurements suggest that an agreement system with a strong propensity
towards grammatical agreement allows for faster processing of agreement relations
than systems in which semantic agreement plays a larger role.Im Niederländischen findet zurzeit eine ‘Resemantisierung’
des pronominalen Genus statt, durch die syntaktische Kongruenz zunehmend
durch ein System ersetzt wird, in dem die Wahl pronominaler Formen vom Grad
der Individuierung des Antezedenten abhängt. Es wurde vermutet, dass der Prozess
mit dem Grad der Verankerung (entrenchment) des Drei-Genera-Systems
zusammenhängt. Anhand von Grammatikalitätsurteilen unter Zeitdruck (speeded
grammaticality judgements) mit Sprechern niederländischer und belgischer Varietäten
und mit Sprechern des Deutschen durchgeführt, sowie auch mit deutschen
Niederländischlernern, demonstrieren wir eindeutig den Zusammenhang zwischen
der Zunahme semantischer Kongruenz und einer Unsicherheit in Bezug auf
das grammatische Genus. Darüber hinaus sprechen die Analysen der Reaktionszeiten
dafür, dass sein stark grammatisch basiertes Genussystem eine schnellere
Verarbeitung von Kongruenzbeziehungen erlaubt als ein System, in dem semantische
Kongruenz eine größere Rolle spielt
Pharmacological inhibition of c-Abl compromises genetic stability and DNA repair in Bcr-Abl-negative cells
Imatinib inhibits the kinase activity of Bcr-Abl and is currently the most effective drug for treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Imatinib also blocks c-Abl, a physiological tyrosine kinase activated by a variety of stress signals including damaged DNA. We investigated the effect of pharmacological inhibition of c-Abl on the processing of irradiation-induced DNA damage in Bcr-Abl-negative cells. Cell lines and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from healthy volunteers were treated with imatinib or dasatinib before gamma-irradiation. Inhibition of c-Abl caused an enhanced irradiation-induced mutation frequency and slowdown of DNA repair, whereas imatinib was ineffective in cells expressing a T315I variant of c-Abl. Mutation frequency and repair kinetics were also studied in c-Abl-/- murine embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) retransfected with wild-type c-Abl (wt-Abl) or a kinase-defect variant of Abl (KD-Abl). Enhanced mutation frequency as well as delayed DNA repair was observed in cells expressing KD-Abl. These data indicate that pharmacological inhibition of c-Abl compromises DNA-damage response
Engineering properties and microstructure of a sustainable roof tile manufactured with waste rice husk ash and ceramic sludge addition
Clay replacement with waste rice husk ash (RHA) and ceramic sludge (CS), helps to reduce the consumption of natural clay and solves the ecological issues created by waste disposal. In this study, properties of waste RHA and CS added fired clay tile were investigated, focusing on structural, durability, thermal performance as well as the water quality of the harvested run-off from fired clay roof tiles manufactured in an industrial scale plant. Tiles were cast by clay replacement with waste RHA and CS in four mixtures: 10 %RHA and 0 % CS, 10 % RHA and 10 % CS, 10 % RHA and 15 % CS, and 10 % RHA and 20 % CS (by weight). For 10 %RHA and 10 %CS tiles, dry mass was reduced by 4.9 %, compared with conventional roof tiles, promising a light weight roof tile. Roof tiles with 10 % RHA and 10 %CS showed a transverse breaking load of 1519 N, whereas that of 20 %CS tiles showed 1427 N, indicating that a further 6.5 % strength improvement can be achieved with clay replacement with a combination of two waste materials. Clay replacement with 10 % RHA and 10 % CS resulted in water absorption of 15.25 %. When increasing the clay replacement with combined waste from 10% (10 %RHA and 0%CS) to 30 % (10%RHA and 20 %CS), weight gain due to acid and alkaline attacks reduced from 3.5% to 3.0%, and from 2.2 % to 1.6 %, respectively, indicating enhanced durability performance by incorporating combined waste. High porosity, also confirmed by SEM, contributed to enhanced thermal performance: tile with 10 % RHA and 10 % CS achieved 4.4 °C temperature reduction, compared to the conventional tile. pH value and total solid concentration of run-off water were in the range of recommended values of water for agricultural purposes, ensuring that the collected run-off can be utilized as an alternative water source for potable activities.publishedVersio
"Forget" the Forget Gate: Estimating Anomalies in Videos using Self-contained Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Abnormal event detection is a challenging task that requires effectively
handling intricate features of appearance and motion. In this paper, we present
an approach of detecting anomalies in videos by learning a novel LSTM based
self-contained network on normal dense optical flow. Due to their sigmoid
implementations, standard LSTM's forget gate is susceptible to overlooking and
dismissing relevant content in long sequence tasks like abnormality detection.
The forget gate mitigates participation of previous hidden state for
computation of cell state prioritizing current input. In addition, the
hyperbolic tangent activation of standard LSTMs sacrifices performance when a
network gets deeper. To tackle these two limitations, we introduce a bi-gated,
light LSTM cell by discarding the forget gate and introducing sigmoid
activation. Specifically, the LSTM architecture we come up with fully sustains
content from previous hidden state thereby enabling the trained model to be
robust and make context-independent decision during evaluation. Removing the
forget gate results in a simplified and undemanding LSTM cell with improved
performance effectiveness and computational efficiency. Empirical evaluations
show that the proposed bi-gated LSTM based network outperforms various LSTM
based models verifying its effectiveness for abnormality detection and
generalization tasks on CUHK Avenue and UCSD datasets.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, Computer Graphics International (CGI) 202
Prevention of the Recurrence of Anaemia in Gambian Children Following Discharge from Hospital
BACKGROUND: In malaria endemic countries, children who have experienced an episode of severe anaemia are at increased risk of a recurrence of anaemia. There is a need to find ways of protecting these at risk children from malaria and chemoprevention offers a potential way of achieving this objective. METHODS: During the 2003 and 2004 malaria transmission seasons, 1200 Gambian children with moderate or severe anaemia (Hb concentration <7 g/dL) were randomised to receive either monthly sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) or placebo until the end of the malaria transmission season in which they were enrolled, in a double-blind trial. All study subjects were treated with oral iron for 28 days and morbidity was monitored through surveillance at health centres. The primary endpoint was the proportion of children with moderate or severe anaemia at the end of the transmission season. Secondary endpoints included the incidence of clinical episodes of malaria during the surveillance period, outpatient attendances, the prevalence of parasitaemia and splenomegaly, nutritional status at the end of the malaria transmission season and compliance with the treatment regimen. RESULTS: The proportions of children with a Hb concentration of <7 g/dL at the end of the malaria transmission season were similar in the two study groups, 14/464 (3.0%) in children who received at least one dose of SP and 16/471 (3.4%) in those who received placebo, prevalence ratio 0.89 (0.44,1.8) P = 0.742. The protective efficacy of SP against episodes of clinical malaria was 53% (95% CI 37%, 65%). Treatment with SP was safe and well tolerated; no serious adverse events related to SP administration were observed. Mortality following discharge from hospital was low among children who received SP or placebo (6 in the SP group and 9 in the placebo group respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Intermittent treatment with SP did not reduce the proportion of previously anaemic children with moderate or severe anaemia at the end of the malaria season, although it prevented malaria. The combination of appropriate antimalarial treatment plus one month of iron supplementation and good access to healthcare during follow-up proved effective in restoring haemoglobin to an acceptable level in the Gambian setting. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00131716
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