#20 - A Role for Circadian Rhythms in Chlamydial Pathogenesis

Genital chlamydia infection causes complications such as pelvic inflammatory disease and tubal factor infertility, with some women being more susceptible to these conditions than others. However, the effect of circadian rhythms on chlamydia pathogenesis is not known. Using a genital chlamydia mouse model, we had previously shown that the time of day of chlamydia infection was important in determining the extent of chlamydial infectivity and pathogenesis. There is a need to verify if these differences in disease outcome is under circadian or diurnal control. To that end, we placed mice under constant dark conditions (24 hours dark), which is normally used in proving that changes associated with night or day are indeed truly circadian. In addition, we had a control group that included mice placed under normal 12/12 light and dark cycle. Mice were then infected intravaginally with Chlamydia muridarum either at 10:00 am and 10:00 pm. Infectivity was monitored by periodic vaginal swabbing, and blood/vaginal washes were collected for host immunologic response assessments. The reproductive tracts of the mice were examined for pathological changes. Results showed that in mice that were kept in constant darkness, mice infected during the day, shed significantly more chlamydia and had more pathology compared with mice infected at night. This result agrees with our previous study and in addition, the results from the control group also verified our previous results. These results suggest that the effect of time of day of chlamydial infection and its associated pathologies are under circadian and not diurnal control. This confirms a possible association between chlamydia infection and its complications with the host circadian rhythm. We are in the process of confirming these results using mice with their circadian gene (Bmal1 in this case) knocked out

Liquefaction Potential of the Hydrotechnical Dikes Foundation Ground

The complex hydrotechnical works achieved upon the lower basin of the Olt river, within the southern part of Romania, imposed the building of several large reservoirs situated within the geo-morphological unit of the above named river flood plane. During the last years, due to the recent earthquakes that affected Romania, the macro-earthquake zoning of the country was changed. In these conditions, the problem of studying the stability of dikes foundation ground from the liquefaction point of view has raised. The paper presents the survey done in site and laboratory tests performed in order to determine most accurately, the natural ground geotechnical and dynamic parameters as well as an original method in order to estimate the ground liquefaction potential. Finally, the general stability analyses of the assembled dike-foundation ground is presented in pseudo-static hypothesis with taking into account the geotechnical parameters expected in dynamic conditions

A brief review on micro-implants and their use in orthodontics and dentofacial orthopaedics

The aim of this study was to review the literature and evaluate the failure rates and factors that affect the stability and success of temporary anchorage devices (TADs) used as orthodontic anchorage. Data was collected from electronic databases: MEDLINE database and Google Scholar. Four combinations of term were used as keywords: \u201cmicro-implant\u201d, \u201cmini-implant\u201d, \u201cmini-screw\u201d, and \u201corthodontics\u201d. The following selection criteria were used to select appropriate articles: articles on implants and screws used as orthodontic anchorage, published in English, with both prospective and retrospective clinical and experimental investigations. The search provided 209 abstracts about TADs used as anchorage. After reading and applying the selection criteria, 66 articles were included in the study. The data obtained were divided into two topics: which factors affected TAD success rate and to what degree and in how many articles they were quoted. Clinical factors were divided into three main groups: patient-related, implant related, and management-related factors. Although all articles included in this meta-analysis reported success rates of greater than 80 percent, the factors determining success rates were inconsistent between the studies analyzed and this made conclusions difficult

Interaction with Nearly Environment and Old Structure for a Deep Excavation. Case History in Bucharest

The paper presents the influence of a deep excavation performed in Bucharest on the adjacent ground and on some old buildings around it; the damages and effects appeared during the excavation and the remedial measures are presented in detail, too. The excavation was designed to be 16.15 meters deep, sustained by a slurry wall enclosure of 60 cm thickness and pre-stressed anchors, and steel struts. Due to an accident that occured to the trench walls, a thorough monitoring by instrumentation started. The results of this monitoring are shown

Considerations of Privacy, Ethics and Legal Issues in Volunteered Geographic Information

International audienceToday almost any kind of User Generated Content (UGC) can be situated within a geographic context. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can include many types of UGC, such as georeferenced photographs, social media and text, geographic data themselves, etc. There are legal, privacy and ethical issues raised by VGI, and at present these are not very well studied or understood despite the rise in popularity of VGI. This chapter will discuss, investigate and define some 120 Mapping and the Citizen Sensor of the most prominent issues related to the legal, privacy and ethics topic within VGI. The chapter argues that these issues are not well understood by all of the actors in VGI, and in particular by the producers of this information as well as the users or consumers of this new data source. Creating a better understanding of these issues will be very important in the future development and evolution of VGI in society

Estimating Distributed Representation Performance in Disaster-Related Social Media Classification

This paper examines the effectiveness of a range of pre-trained language representations in order to determine the informativeness and information type of social media in the event of natural or man-made disasters. Within the context of disaster tweet analysis, we aim to accurately analyse tweets while minimising both false positive and false negatives in the automated information analysis. The investigation is performed across a number of well known disaster-related twitter datasets. Models that are built from pre-trained word embeddings from Word2Vec, GloVe, ELMo and BERT are used for performance evaluation. Given the relative ubiquity of BERT as a standout language representation in recent times it was expected that BERT dominates results. However, results are more diverse, with classical Word2Vec and GloVe both displaying strong results. As part of the analysis, we discuss some challenges related to automated twitter analysis including the fine-tuning of language models to disaster-related scenarios

Mapping and the Citizen Sensor

Maps are a fundamental resource in a diverse array of applications ranging from everyday activities, such as route planning through the legal demarcation of space to scientific studies, such as those seeking to understand biodiversity and inform the design of nature reserves for species conservation. For a map to have value, it should provide an accurate and timely representation of the phenomenon depicted and this can be a challenge in a dynamic world. Fortunately, mapping activities have benefitted greatly from recent advances in geoinformation technologies. Satellite remote sensing, for example, now offers unparalleled data acquisition and authoritative mapping agencies have developed systems for the routine production of maps in accordance with strict standards. Until recently, much mapping activity was in the exclusive realm of authoritative agencies but technological development has also allowed the rise of the amateur mapping community. The proliferation of inexpensive and highly mobile and location aware devices together with Web 2.0 technology have fostered the emergence of the citizen as a source of data. Mapping presently benefits from vast amounts of spatial data as well as people able to provide observations of geographic phenomena, which can inform map production, revision and evaluation. The great potential of these developments is, however, often limited by concerns. The latter span issues from the nature of the citizens through the way data are collected and shared to the quality and trustworthiness of the data. This book reports on some of the key issues connected with the use of citizen sensors in mapping. It arises from a European Co-operation in Science and Technology (COST) Action, which explored issues linked to topics ranging from citizen motivation, data acquisition, data quality and the use of citizen derived data in the production of maps that rival, and sometimes surpass, maps arising from authoritative agencies

Four Lessons in Versatility or How Query Languages Adapt to the Web

Exposing not only human-centered information, but machine-processable data on the Web is one of the commonalities of recent Web trends. It has enabled a new kind of applications and businesses where the data is used in ways not foreseen by the data providers. Yet this exposition has fractured the Web into islands of data, each in different Web formats: Some providers choose XML, others RDF, again others JSON or OWL, for their data, even in similar domains. This fracturing stifles innovation as application builders have to cope not only with one Web stack (e.g., XML technology) but with several ones, each of considerable complexity. With Xcerpt we have developed a rule- and pattern based query language that aims to give shield application builders from much of this complexity: In a single query language XML and RDF data can be accessed, processed, combined, and re-published. Though the need for combined access to XML and RDF data has been recognized in previous work (including the W3C’s GRDDL), our approach differs in four main aspects: (1) We provide a single language (rather than two separate or embedded languages), thus minimizing the conceptual overhead of dealing with disparate data formats. (2) Both the declarative (logic-based) and the operational semantics are unified in that they apply for querying XML and RDF in the same way. (3) We show that the resulting query language can be implemented reusing traditional database technology, if desirable. Nevertheless, we also give a unified evaluation approach based on interval labelings of graphs that is at least as fast as existing approaches for tree-shaped XML data, yet provides linear time and space querying also for many RDF graphs. We believe that Web query languages are the right tool for declarative data access in Web applications and that Xcerpt is a significant step towards a more convenient, yet highly efficient data access in a “Web of Data”

Supporting the Multi-Criteria Decision Aiding process: R and the MCDA package

Reaching a decision when multiple, possibly conflicting, criteria are taken into account is often a difficult task. This normally requires the intervention of an analyst to aid the decision maker in following a clear methodology with respect to the steps that need to be taken, as well as the use of different algorithms and software tools. Most of these tools focus on one or a small number of algorithms, some are difficult to adapt and interface with other tools, while only a few belong to dynamic communities of contributors allowing them to expand in use and functionality. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing to use the R statistical environment and the MCDA package of decision aiding algorithms and tools. This package is meant to provide a wide range of MCDA algorithms that may be used by an analyst to tailor a decision aiding process to their needs, while the choice of R takes advantage of the yet poorly explored opportunity to interface data analysis and decision aiding. We additionally demonstrate the use of this tool on a practical application following a well-defined decision aiding process