Multielement geochemical reconnaissance for uranium in the Palmyrides region, central Syria

Imperial Users onl

RE-DEFINING VERNACULAR ARCHITECTUREIN THIRD MILLENNIUM

The key purpose of this paper concerns the definition of vernacular architecture in third millennium; a topic which gives the impression of confusion from the beginning when it was a word in the book of Rudofsky. In redefining this term, supplementary conceptual issue will need to be focused briefly and the role of classification will need to be more generally because of an inextricably linked between these two matters. It may seem strange to raise such a basic question again about What is vernacular architecture? ; because, up till now, it needs to be addressed. There has been a major revitalization of interest in vernacular architecture, indicated by an ever increasing number of conferences, meetings, exhibitions and publications dealing with this subject. So far, strangely, the nature of what is being deliberated has been taken as self-evident and not tackled. There has been no reconsideration of what vernacular is, no definition either of the domain broadly or the subject matter specifically. During the discussion, this paper includes some design approaches and processes to clarify the technique which can be used to achieve an architectural building design addressed by vernacularism

Implementing electronic scales to support standardized phenotypic data collection - the case of the Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA)

The main objective of this doctoral thesis was to facilitate the integration of the semantics required to automatically interpret collections of standardized clinical data. In order to address the objective, we combined the best performances from clinical archetypes, guidelines and ontologies for developing an electronic prototype for the Scale of the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA), broadly used in neurology. A scaled-down version of the Human Phenotype Ontology was automatically extracted and used as backbone to normalize the content of the SARA through clinical archetypes. The knowledge required to exploit reasoning on the SARA data was modeled as separate information-processing units interconnected via the defined archetypes. Based on this approach, we implemented a prototype named SARA Management System, to be used for both the assessment of cerebellar syndrome and the production of a clinical synopsis. For validation purposes, we used recorded SARA data from 28 anonymous subjects affected by SCA36. Our results reveal a substantial degree of agreement between the results achieved by the prototype and human experts, confirming that the combination of archetypes, ontologies and guidelines is a good solution to automate the extraction of relevant phenotypic knowledge from plain scores of rating scales

IL-36/IL-36R Signaling Promotes CD4+ T Cell-Dependent Colitis via Pro-Inflammatory Cytokine Production

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a multifactorial, chronic disease that affects approximately 1.5 million people in the United States [1]. It presents with inflammation of the intestine with unknown etiology. Its two main forms are Crohn’s disease (CD), which can affect any part of the GI tract, and ulcerative colitis (UC), which impacts primarily the colon. Several important factors are implicated in the pathogenesis of IBD, one factor being dysregulation of the immune system. This dysregulation results in the accumulation and stimulation of innate and adaptive immune cells and subsequent release of soluble factors, including pro-inflammatory cytokines. One of these cytokines is a member of the IL-36 cytokine family, IL-36γ, which is overexpressed in human IBD and experimental models of colitis. In this study, we explored the role of IL-36γ in promoting CD4+ T cell activation and cytokine secretion. We found that IL-36γ stimulation of naïve CD4+ T cells significantly induced IFNγ expression in vitro and was associated with augmented intestinal inflammation in vivo using the T cell transfer model of colitis. Using IFNγ-/- naive T cells, we observed a dramatic decrease in the ability of these cells to produce TNFα and IL-12. Moreover, the transfer of these cell did not cause robust colitis. These data not only suggest that IL-36γ is a master regulator of a pro-inflammatory cytokine network involving IFNγ, TNFα and IL-12, but also highlight the importance of targeting IL-36y and IFNy as therapeutic approaches. Our studies have broad implications in relation to targeting of specific cytokines in human IBD

XML Integrated Environment for Service-Oriented Data Management

The proliferation of XML as a family of related standards including a markup language (XML), formatting semantics (XSL style sheets), a linking syntax (XLINK), and appropriate data schema standards have emerged as a de facto standard for encoding and sharing data between various applications. XML is designed to be simple, easily parsed and self-describing. XML is based on and support the idea of separation of concerns: information content is separated from information rendering, and relationships between data elements are provided via simple nesting and references. As the XML content grows, the ability to handle schemaless XML documents becomes more critical as most XML documents do not have schema or Document Type Definitions (DTDs). In addition, XML content and XML tools are often required to be combined in effective ways for better performance and higher flexibility. In this research, we proposed XML Integrated Environment (XIE) which is a general-purpose service-oriented architecture for processing XML documents in a scalable and efficient fashion. The XIE supports a new software service model that provides a proper abstraction to describe a service and divide it into four components: structure, connection, interface and logic. We also proposed and implemented XIE Service Language (XIESL) that can capture the creation and maintenance of the XML processes and the data flow specified by the user and then orchestrates the interactions between different XIE services. Moreover, XIESL manages the complexity of XML processing by implementing an XML processing pipeline that enables better management, control, interpretation and presentation of the XML data even for non-professional users. The XML Integrated Environment is envisioned to revolutionize the way non-professional programmers see, work and manage their XML assets. It offers them powerful tools and constructs to fully utilize the XML processing power embedded in its unified framework and service-oriented architecture