Neutralizing antibodies in cats infected with feline immunodeficiency virus.

Sera from cats experimentally infected with five isolates of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) from various geographical regions and from FIV enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay-seropositive field cats from four European countries neutralized the Petaluma strain of FIV (FIV-P), originally isolated in California, at high titers. In addition, FIV-P and a European isolate proved equally susceptible to neutralization by all sera tested. Coupled with observations by Fevereiro et al. (M. Fevereiro, C. Roneker, A. Laufs, L. Tavares, and F. de Noronha, J. Gen. Virol. 72:617-622, 1991), these findings indicate that most if not all FIV strains circulating in Europe and the United States share important neutralization-inducing epitopes

Space mission design ontology : extraction of domain-specific entities and concepts similarity analysis

Expert Systems, computer programs able to capture human expertise and mimic experts’ reasoning, can support the design of future space missions by assimilating and facilitating access to accumulated knowledge. To organise these data, the virtual assistant needs to understand the concepts characterising space systems engineering. In other words, it needs an ontology of space systems. Unfortunately, there is currently no official European space systems ontology. Developing an ontology is a lengthy and tedious process, involving several human domain experts, and therefore prone to human error and subjectivity. Could the foundations of an ontology be instead semi-automatically extracted from unstructured data related to space systems engineering? This paper presents an implementation of the first layers of the Ontology Learning Layer Cake, an approach to semi-automatically generate an ontology. Candidate entities and synonyms are extracted from three corpora: a set of 56 feasibility reports provided by the European Space Agency, 40 books on space mission design publicly available and a collection of 273 Wikipedia pages. Lexica of relevant space systems entities are semi-automatically generated based on three different methods: a frequency analysis, a term frequency-inverse document frequency analysis, and a Weirdness Index filtering. The frequency-based lexicon of the combined corpora is then fed to a word embedding method, word2vec, to learn the context of each entity. With a cosine similarity analysis, concepts with similar contexts are matched

Mega-exposição dos Açores em S. Paulo, Brasil

Na qualidade de Diretora Regional das Comunidades, fomos responsável pela redação dos artigos e coordenação da página "Comunidades", integrada no jornal Açoriano Oriental, servindo a mesma para a divulgação das atividades realizadas pela Direção Regional Das Comunidades do Governo dos Açores.Se existe manifestação religiosa que possa caracterizar o povo açoriano, nas ilhas e sua diáspora, o culto ao Divino Espírito Santo, é, sem dúvida, o que reúne a primazia. Consciente de que as Festas ao Divino são fator de união entre todos os açorianos pelo mundo e motivo de interesse e estudo por parte de académicos, a DRC encontra-se a organizar o V Congresso Internacional do Culto do Divino Espírito Santo, que se vai realizar, em Maio, na Terceira. Contamos com a presença de largas dezenas de açorianos e açordescendentes que representarão as nossas comunidades. [...]

Clinical global impression-severity score as a reliable measure for routine evaluation of remission in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders

Aims: This study aimed to compare the performance of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) symptom severity criteria established by the Remission in Schizophrenia Working Group (RSWG) with criteria based on Clinical Global Impression (CGI) severity score. The 6-month duration criterion was not taken into consideration. Methods: A convenience sample of 112 chronic psychotic outpatients was examined. Symptomatic remission was evaluated according to RSWG severity criterion and to a severity criterion indicated by the overall score obtained at CGI-Schizophrenia (CGI-SCH) rating scale (≤3) (CGI-S). Results: Clinical remission rates of 50% and 49.1%, respectively, were given by RSWG and CGI-S, with a significant level of agreement between the two criteria in identifying remitted and non-remitted cases. Mean scores at CGI-SCH and PANSS scales were significantly higher among remitters, independent of the remission criteria adopted. Measures of cognitive functioning were largely independent of clinical remission evaluated according to both RSWG and CGI-S. When applying RSWG and CGI-S criteria, the rates of overall good functioning yielded by Personal and Social Performance scale (PSP) were 32.1% and 32.7%, respectively, while the mean scores at PSP scale differed significantly between remitted and non-remitted patients, independent of criteria adopted. The proportion of patients judged to be in a state of well-being on Social Well-Being Under Neuroleptics-Short Version scale (SWN-K) were, respectively, 66.1% and 74.5% among remitters according to RSWG and CGI-S; the mean scores at the SWN scale were significantly higher only among remitters according to CGI-S criteria. Conclusions: CGI severity criteria may represent a valid and user-friendly alternative for use in identifying patients in remission, particularly in routine clinical practic

Manuale di malattie virali degli animali

Questo manuale è destinato agli studenti del corso di laurea magistrale in Medicina Veterinaria. A differenza dei testi classici non contiene immagini e bibliografia, ma sono indicati una serie di siti web di organismi ufficiali (laboratori di referenza nazionali ed internazionali ed istituzioni qualificate) dove il lettore può trovare documentazioni fotografiche, filmati, dati epidemiologici e normativa aggiornata. Con questo si è cercato di incoraggiare un nuovo metodo di studio basato sull'aggiornamento continuo, senza rinunciare a fornire agli studenti un testo guida per la preparazione dell'esame. Abbiamo dedicato attenzione alle malattie di attualità nel contesto europeo e ad alcune malattie esotiche emergenti. Sono stati curati gli aspetti applicativi relativi a controllo e profilassi con l'intento che il testo possa servire anche all'aggiornamento dei colleghi veterinari