The Enhanced WUDMA Image Processing System

This document describes recent enhancements to the WUDMA image processing laboratory that implement improvements suggested by experience gained during the WUDMA I program. More recent improvements to the software are mentioned as well as a discussion of some of the design issues faced during the early stages of conception. Finally, some ongoing projects and future plans are mentioned

The WUDMA Image Processing System

The WUDMA Image Processing System provides a framework that allows many image processing packages to function as the single system. It currently contains several packages that provide a powerful range of image processing tools for use in teaching and research. The WUDMA System overcomes the lack of standardization in image processing by providing bridges between diverse software packages and shielding the user from incompatibilities inherent in the software. As such, it may be considered as a paradigm from integrating packages in other application areas

Infusing mathematics with culture: Teaching technical subjects for social justice

How can disciplines that are commonly regarded as culturally neutral be taught in ways that connect technical content with social and cultural issues?Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57354/1/291_ftp.pd

“Everyone assumes a man to be quite strong”: Men, masculine identity and rheumatoid arthritis: A case-study approach

Objective: Current literature has overlooked the impact of chronic illness on masculine identity. We therefore aimed to investigate the impact of Rheumatoid Arthritis (a long term condition, affecting more women than men) on masculine identity. Methods: Six focus groups with 22 men with RA (data reported elsewhere) followed by five one-to-one interviews with men (English, mean age: 59 years) sampled to reflect a heterogeneous experience of life with RA based on knowledge gained from the focus groups. Transcripts were analysed using Thematic Analysis and are presented as individual case studies. Results: Whilst the case studies provide five distinct experiences, common themes can be drawn across them, such as the importance of paid work. The men needed to renegotiate their masculine identity to deal with their RA. Two dealt with this by pushing through pain to retain masculine activities, two replaced masculine roles they could no longer do with other roles, and one rejected masculinity completely. Conclusion: Men with long term conditions may need to re-write their masculinity scripts to enable them to accept and adapt to their condition. However, some men struggle with this, which should be taken into consideration when designing self-management services for men with long term conditions

Party competition and European integration in east and west: Different structure, same causality

How does the ideological profile of a political party affect its support or opposition to European integration? The authors investigate this question with a new expert data set on party positioning on European integration covering 171 political parties in 23 countries. The authors' findings are (a) that basic structures of party competition in the East and West are fundamentally and explicably different and (b) that although the positions that parties in the East and West take on European integration are substantively different, they share a single underlying causality. © 2006 SAGE Publications

Sound Signalling in Orthoptera

The sounds produced by orthopteran insects are very diverse. They are widely studied for the insight they give into acoustic behaviour and the biophysical aspects of sound production and hearing, as well as the transduction of sound to neural signals in the ear and the subsequent processing of information in the central nervous system. The study of sound signalling is a multidisciplinary area of research, with a strong physiological contribution. This review considers recent research in physiology and the links with related areas of acoustic work on the Orthoptera

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Measurement and QCD analysis of double-differential inclusive jet cross sections in pp collisions at √s=8 TeV and cross section ratios to 2.76 and 7 TeV

A measurement of the double-differential inclusive jet cross section as a function of the jet transverse momentum pT and the absolute jet rapidity |y| is presented. Data from LHC proton-proton collisions at √ s = 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb−1 , have been collected with the CMS detector. Jets are reconstructed using the anti-kT clustering algorithm with a size parameter of 0.7 in a phase space region covering jet pT from 74 GeV up to 2.5 TeV and jet absolute rapidity up to |y| = 3.0. The low-pT jet range between 21 and 74 GeV is also studied up to |y| = 4.7, using a dedicated data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.6 pb−1 . The measured jet cross section is corrected for detector effects and compared with the predictions from perturbative QCD at next-to-leading order (NLO) using various sets of parton distribution functions (PDF). Cross section ratios to the corresponding measurements performed at 2.76 and 7 TeV are presented. From the measured double-differential jet cross section, the value of the strong coupling constant evaluated at the Z mass is αS(MZ) = 0.1164+0.0060 −0.0043, where the errors include the PDF, scale, nonperturbative effects and experimental uncertainties, using the CT10 NLO PDFs. Improved constraints on PDFs based on the inclusive jet cross section measurement are presented