Fibroblast Growth Factor 22 Is Not Essential for Skin Development and Repair but Plays a Role in Tumorigenesis

PMCID: PMC3380851This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Imaging the charge transport in arrays of CdSe nanocrystals

A novel method to image charge is used to measure the diffusion coefficient of electrons in films of CdSe nanocrystals at room temperature. This method makes possible the study of charge transport in films exhibiting high resistances or very small diffusion coefficients.Comment: 4 pages, 4 jpg figure

Enforcement Penalties at the ITC

The U.S. International Trade Commission (“ITC” or “Commission”) has grown in importance as a venue for U.S. companies to pursue intellectual property (“IP”) violators and to block the sale or importation of goods from overseas that infringe U.S. IP rights. Once a violation of the Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 is found, an order halting further infringement, including importation, is almost always entered. In theory, potentially sizeable penalties may be imposed on entities that do not comply with the terms of an import restriction. In practice, the terms of an import restriction are almost always honored, but when they are not, maximum enforcement penalties are rarely imposed. In fact, most penalties for non-defaulting respondents are one-third or less of the maximum penalty allowed by the law. Thus, non-compliance tends not to be too harshly punished. Penalty determinations at the ITC are governed by a set of six factors, called “the EPROMs factors,” which arose from the Commission’s 1989 decision in Certain Erasable Programmable Read Only Memories (“EPROMs”). To date, no scholarship has sought to examine how courts have treated these factors collectively or evaluated their relevance individually to the penalties ultimately adopted by the ITC. Without such an investigation, parties considering enforcement actions have been left with little guidance as to the merits of their case. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the EPROMs factors as well as an economic analysis of the relationship between these six factors and enforcement penalties imposed on ITC respondents. We undertake a qualitative and quantitative review of all ITC cases to date in which penalties have been assessed either by an Administrative Law Judge (“ALJ”) or by the Commission itself. In short, we find that maximum enforcement penalties are rarely imposed. Moreover, proof of the good faith or bad faith of respondent’s compliance with an import restriction (Factor 1) appears to be the most important of the EPROMs factors. Even proving respondent’s bad faith, however, rarely leads to imposition of the maximum penalty

Unitaries in banach spaces

We study the abstract geometric notion of unitaries in a Banach space characterized in terms of the equivalence of the norm determined by the state space

Summing free unitary random matrices

I use quaternion free probability calculus - an extension of free probability to non-Hermitian matrices (which is introduced in a succinct but self-contained way) - to derive in the large-size limit the mean densities of the eigenvalues and singular values of sums of independent unitary random matrices, weighted by complex numbers. In the case of CUE summands, I write them in terms of two "master equations," which I then solve and numerically test in four specific cases. I conjecture a finite-size extension of these results, exploiting the complementary error function. I prove a central limit theorem, and its first sub-leading correction, for independent identically-distributed zero-drift unitary random matrices.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure

A Random Matrix Approach to VARMA Processes

We apply random matrix theory to derive spectral density of large sample covariance matrices generated by multivariate VMA(q), VAR(q) and VARMA(q1,q2) processes. In particular, we consider a limit where the number of random variables N and the number of consecutive time measurements T are large but the ratio N/T is fixed. In this regime the underlying random matrices are asymptotically equivalent to Free Random Variables (FRV). We apply the FRV calculus to calculate the eigenvalue density of the sample covariance for several VARMA-type processes. We explicitly solve the VARMA(1,1) case and demonstrate a perfect agreement between the analytical result and the spectra obtained by Monte Carlo simulations. The proposed method is purely algebraic and can be easily generalized to q1>1 and q2>1.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, submitted to New Journal of Physic

Characteristics of drug-resistant tuberculosis in Abkhazia (Georgia), a high-prevalence area in Eastern Europe

Although multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in Eastern Europe, the factors contributing to emergence, spread and containment of MDR-TB are not well defined. Here, we analysed the characteristics of drug-resistant TB in a cross-sectional study in Abkhazia (Georgia) between 2003 and 2005, where standard short-course chemotherapy is supplemented with individualized drug-resistance therapy. Drug susceptibility testing (DST) and molecular typing were carried out for Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains from consecutive smear-positive TB patients. Out of 366 patients, 60.4% were resistant to any first-line drugs and 21% had MDR-TB. Overall, 25% of all strains belong to the Beijing genotype, which was found to be strongly associated with the risk of MDR-TB (OR 25.9, 95% CI 10.2-66.0) and transmission (OR 2.8, 95% CI 1.6-5.0). One dominant MDR Beijing clone represents 23% of all MDR-TB cases. The level of MDR-TB did not decline during the study period, coinciding with increasing levels of MDR Beijing strains among previously treated cases. Standard chemotherapy plus individualized drug-resistance therapy, guided by conventional DST, might be not sufficient to control MDR-TB in Eastern Europe in light of the spread of "highly transmissible" MDR Beijing strains circulating in the community

Demography, trade and state power: a tripartite model of medieval farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyu Islands

Hunter-gatherer occupations of small islands are rare in world prehistory and it is widely accepted that island settlement is facilitated by agriculture. The Ryukyu Islands contradict that understanding on two counts: not only did they have a long history of hunter-gatherer settlement, they also have a very late date for the onset of agriculture, which only reached the archipelago between the 8th and 13th centuries AD. Here, we combine archaeology and linguistics to propose a tripartite model for the spread of agriculture and Ryukyuan languages to the Ryukyu Islands. Employing demographic growth, trade/piracy and the political influence of neighbouring states, this model provides a synthetic yet flexible understanding of farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyus within the complex historical background of medieval East Asia.Introduction Methods Results - Archaeological Approach -- Demographic growth -- Trade/piracy -- State intervention - Linguistic Approach -- Linguistic inferences about the most probable tree structure -- Linguistic inferences about the most probable homeland of Proto-Ryukyuan -- Linguistic inferences about the most probable break-up time of Proto-Kyushu-Ryukyuan -- Inferences about the most probable linguistic outcome of the migration Discussion Conclusion

Treatment of tuberculosis in a region with high drug resistance: Outcomes, drug resistance amplification and re-infection

Introduction: Emerging antituberculosis drug resistance is a serious threat for tuberculosis (TB) control, especially in Eastern European countries. Methods: We combined drug susceptibility results and molecular strain typing data with treatment outcome reports to assess the influence of drug resistance on TB treatment outcomes in a prospective cohort of patients from Abkhazia (Georgia). Patients received individualized treatment regimens based on drug susceptibility testing (DST) results. Definitions for antituberculosis drug resistance and treatment outcomes were in line with current WHO recommendations. First and second line DST, and molecular typing were performed in a supranational laboratory for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) strains from consecutive sputum smear-positive TB patients at baseline and during treatment. Results: At baseline, MTB strains were fully drug-susceptible in 189/326 (58.0%) of patients. Resistance to at least H or R (PDR-TB) and multidrug-resistance (MDR-TB) were found in 69/326 (21.2%) and 68/326 (20.9%) of strains, respectively. Three MDR-TB strains were also extensively resistant (XDR-TB). During treatment, 3/189 (1.6%) fully susceptible patients at baseline were re-infected with a MDR-TB strain and 2/58 (3.4%) PDR-TB patients became MDR-TB due to resistance amplification. 5/ 47 (10.6%) MDR- patients became XDR-TB during treatment. Treatment success was observed in 161/189 (85.2%), 54/69 (78.3%) and 22/68 (32.3%) of patients with fully drug susceptible, PDR- and MDR-TB, respectively. Development of ofloxacin resistance was significantly associated with a negative treatment outcome. Conclusion: In Abkhazia, a region with high prevalence of drug resistant TB, the use of individualized MDR-TB treatment regimens resulted in poor treatment outcomes and XDR-TB amplification. Nosocomial transmission of MDR-TB emphasizes the importance of infection control in hospitals

Quasilocality of joining/splitting strings from coherent states

Using the coherent state formalism we calculate matrix elements of the one-loop non-planar dilatation operator of ${\cal N}=4$ SYM between operators dual to folded Frolov-Tseytlin strings and observe a curious scaling behavior. We comment on the {\it qualitative} similarity of our matrix elements to the interaction vertex of a string field theory. In addition, we present a solvable toy model for string splitting and joining. The scaling behaviour of the matrix elements suggests that the contribution to the genus one energy shift coming from semi-classical string splitting and joining is small.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures in 11 file