Animal models of Zika virus infection, pathogenesis, and immunity

Zika virus (ZIKV) is an emerging mosquito-transmitted flavivirus that now causes epidemics affecting millions of people on multiple continents. The virus has received global attention because of some of its unusual epidemiological and clinical features, including persistent infection in the male reproductive tract and sexual transmission, an ability to cross the placenta during pregnancy and infect the developing fetus to cause congenital malformations, and its association with Guillain-Barré syndrome in adults. This past year has witnessed an intensive effort by the global scientific community to understand the biology of ZIKV and to develop pathogenesis models for the rapid testing of possible countermeasures. Here, we review the recent advances in and utility and limitations of newly developed mouse and nonhuman primate models of ZIKV infection and pathogenesis

Actions and Events in Concurrent Systems Design

In this work, having in mind the construction of concurrent systems from components, we discuss the difference between actions and events. For this discussion, we propose an(other) architecture description language in which actions and events are made explicit in the description of a component and a system. Our work builds from the ideas set forth by the categorical approach to the construction of software based systems from components advocated by Goguen and Burstall, in the context of institutions, and by Fiadeiro and Maibaum, in the context of temporal logic. In this context, we formalize a notion of a component as an element of an indexed category and we elicit a notion of a morphism between components as morphisms of this category. Moreover, we elaborate on how this formalization captures, in a convenient manner, the underlying structure of a component and the basic interaction mechanisms for putting components together. Further, we advance some ideas on how certain matters related to the openness and the compositionality of a component/system may be described in terms of classes of morphisms, thus potentially supporting a compositional rely/guarantee reasoning.Comment: In Proceedings LAFM 2013, arXiv:1401.056

Automated Reasoning over Deontic Action Logics with Finite Vocabularies

In this paper we investigate further the tableaux system for a deontic action logic we presented in previous work. This tableaux system uses atoms (of a given boolean algebra of action terms) as labels of formulae, this allows us to embrace parallel execution of actions and action complement, two action operators that may present difficulties in their treatment. One of the restrictions of this logic is that it uses vocabularies with a finite number of actions. In this article we prove that this restriction does not affect the coherence of the deduction system; in other words, we prove that the system is complete with respect to language extension. We also study the computational complexity of this extended deductive framework and we prove that the complexity of this system is in PSPACE, which is an improvement with respect to related systems.Comment: In Proceedings LAFM 2013, arXiv:1401.056

Nurse telephone triage in out of hours primary care: a pilot study

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An Optimal Incentive System For Real Estate Agents

This article presents an alternative system for selling real estate. It overcomes the well-known deficiencies of the percentage commission system. In our system, the agent purchases the property from the seller and simultaneously receives a put option. The put option gives the agent the right to put the property back to the original owner. It is shown that this system has many of the desirable properties of a dealer system, while avoiding some of the problems that are inherent in that system.