Role of crossmatch testing when Luminex-SAB is negative in renal transplantation

The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system plays an important role in the acceptance of renal graft. Long and better graft survival has been reported in patients with HLA-identical siblings and a nonreactive cytotoxicity assay (CDC). New methods of HLA-typing and anti-HLA antibody detection techniques such as flow cytometry, solid-phase immunoassays, or antigen bead assays have further improved the outcomes of renal transplant recipients. In the present review, the explicit details of these methodologies are discussed in detail

Reverberation Mapping and the Physics of Active Galactic Nuclei

Reverberation-mapping campaigns have revolutionized our understanding of AGN. They have allowed the direct determination of the broad-line region size, enabled mapping of the gas distribution around the central black hole, and are starting to resolve the continuum source structure. This review describes the recent and successful campaigns of the International AGN Watch consortium, outlines the theoretical background of reverberation mapping and the calculation of transfer functions, and addresses the fundamental difficulties of such experiments. It shows that such large-scale experiments have resulted in a ``new BLR'' which is considerably different from the one we knew just ten years ago. We discuss in some detail the more important new results, including the luminosity-size-mass relationship for AGN, and suggest ways to proceed in the near future.Comment: Review article to appear in Astronomical Time Series, Proceedings of the Wise Observatory 25th Ann. Symposium. 24 pages including 7 figure

Functional kernel estimators of conditional extreme quantiles

We address the estimation of "extreme" conditional quantiles i.e. when their order converges to one as the sample size increases. Conditions on the rate of convergence of their order to one are provided to obtain asymptotically Gaussian distributed kernel estimators. A Weissman-type estimator and kernel estimators of the conditional tail-index are derived, permitting to estimate extreme conditional quantiles of arbitrary order.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1107.226

Rotation and Spin in Physics

We delineate the role of rotation and spin in physics, discussing in order Newtonian classical physics, special relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and general relativity. In the latter case, we discuss the generalization of the Kepler formula to post-Newtonian order $(c^{-2}$) including spin effects and two-body effects. Experiments which verify the theoretical results for general relativistic spin-orbit effects are discussed as well as efforts being made to verify the spin-spin effects

Quantum information can be negative

Given an unknown quantum state distributed over two systems, we determine how much quantum communication is needed to transfer the full state to one system. This communication measures the "partial information" one system needs conditioned on it's prior information. It turns out to be given by an extremely simple formula, the conditional entropy. In the classical case, partial information must always be positive, but we find that in the quantum world this physical quantity can be negative. If the partial information is positive, its sender needs to communicate this number of quantum bits to the receiver; if it is negative, the sender and receiver instead gain the corresponding potential for future quantum communication. We introduce a primitive "quantum state merging" which optimally transfers partial information. We show how it enables a systematic understanding of quantum network theory, and discuss several important applications including distributed compression, multiple access channels and multipartite assisted entanglement distillation (localizable entanglement). Negative channel capacities also receive a natural interpretation

Regarding: Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors α7 and α9 modify tobacco smoke risk for multiple sclerosis.

This is a author manuscript of an article accepted for publication in Multiple Sclerosis Journal. Version of record is available online at Jacobs BM, Smets I, Giovannoni G, Noyce A, Jokubaitis V, Dobson R. Regarding: Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors α7 and α9 modify tobacco smoke risk for multiple sclerosis. Multiple Sclerosis Journal. December 2020. doi:10.1177/1352458520969941. Copyright (c) 2020. The Authors. doi:10.1177/135245852096994

Adding New Tasks to a Single Network with Weight Transformations using Binary Masks

Visual recognition algorithms are required today to exhibit adaptive abilities. Given a deep model trained on a specific, given task, it would be highly desirable to be able to adapt incrementally to new tasks, preserving scalability as the number of new tasks increases, while at the same time avoiding catastrophic forgetting issues. Recent work has shown that masking the internal weights of a given original conv-net through learned binary variables is a promising strategy. We build upon this intuition and take into account more elaborated affine transformations of the convolutional weights that include learned binary masks. We show that with our generalization it is possible to achieve significantly higher levels of adaptation to new tasks, enabling the approach to compete with fine tuning strategies by requiring slightly more than 1 bit per network parameter per additional task. Experiments on two popular benchmarks showcase the power of our approach, that achieves the new state of the art on the Visual Decathlon Challenge

Epidemiology of Syphilis in regional blood transfusion centres in Burkina Faso, West Africa

Introduction: Syphilis remains a major public health problem in  sub-Saharan Africa, including Burkina Faso. However, few published data are available on the prevalence of syphilis in the population. This study had two main objectives: to determine the seroprevalence of syphilis in acohort of 37,210 first time blood donors and to study socio-demographic factors associated with the risk of infection by Treponema pallidum.Methods: Antibodies to Treponema pallidum were screened by using  Reagin Rapid Test (RPR) and confirmed by treponema pallidum  haemagglutination test (TPHA). Results: The overall seroprevalence of syphilis was 1.5% among first time blood donors and was significantly different between centers (p <0.001). The infection was significantly higher in men than women among blood  donors in Ouagadougou and Fada N´gourma (P = 0.001 and P = 0.034). The overall seroprevalence of syphilis among blood donors was not  associated with either age group or HIV status. In contrast, a significantly high seroprevalence of syphilis was observed in blood donors with HBsAg (P = 0.014) and anti-HCV (P = 0.007) positive.Conclusion: Our report shows a low seroprevalence of syphilis in the  representative sample of the population of Burkina Faso. The  seroprevalence of syphilis remains unequally distributed between urban and rural areas and was not associated with HIV infection

Series Solution and Minimal Surfaces in AdS

According to the Alday-Maldacena program the strong coupling limit of Super Yang-Mills scattering amplitudes is given by minimal area surfaces in AdS spacetime with a boundary consisting of a momentum space polygon. The string equations in AdS systematically reduce to coupled Toda type equations whose Euclidean classical solutions are then of direct relevance. While in the simplest case of AdS_3 exact solutions were known from earlier studies of the sinh-Gordon equation, there exist at present no similar exact forms for the generalized Toda equations related to AdS_d with d>=4. In this paper we develop a series method for the solution to those equations and evaluate their contribution to the finite piece of the worldsheet area. For the known sinh-Gordon case the method is seen to give results in excellent agreement with the exact answer.Comment: 19 pages, no figures; references added, one note adde