De skeletten uit het grafmonument te Rijnsburg: een hernieuwd onderzoek

A renewed research of the remains of skeletons in the sepulchral monument at Rijnsburg, which were excavated in the years 1949/50 and were then ascribed to family members of the count of Holland, took place in the years 1995/96. A bone sample was taken from the left thighbone of each of the 16 skeletons for the purpose of 14C datings. The results show a 300 to 600 years' discrepancy with the supposed historical data. From the physiological-anthropological research it was concluded that the demographic and osteopathological findings are inconsistent with the historically known information to such a degree, that there is no ground for a positive identification with the members of the count's family of Holland buried at Rijnsburg. An extensive analysis of all the historical and archaeological information with respect to these skeletons, in combination with the above-mentioned research results, led to the conclusion that the researched skeletons belonged to a sepulchral field below the foundations of the church, which was there before the abbey church was built. This sepulchral field forms part of the settlement known from historical and archaeological information and for the greater part dates back to the 9th to 11th centuries, with a few graves dating from the Merovingian period (early 7th century)

Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for a Low-Resource Language: New Corpus and BERT Models for Maltese

Multilingual language models such as mBERT have seen impressive cross-lingual transfer to a variety of languages, but many languages remain excluded from these models. In this paper, we analyse the effect of pre-training with monolingual data for a low-resource language that is not included in mBERT – Maltese – with a range of pre-training set ups. We conduct evaluations with the newly pre-trained models on three morphosyntactic tasks – dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, and named-entity recognition – and one semantic classification task – sentiment analysis. We also present a newly created corpus for Maltese, and determine the effect that the pre-training data size and domain have on the downstream performance. Our results show that using a mixture of pre-training domains is often superior to using Wikipedia text only. We also find that a fraction of this corpus is enough to make significant leaps in performance over Wikipedia-trained models. We pre-train and compare two models on the new corpus: a monolingual BERT model trained from scratch (BERTu), and a further pretrained multilingual BERT (mBERTu). The models achieve state-of-the-art performance on these tasks, despite the new corpus being considerably smaller than typically used corpora for high-resourced languages. On average, BERTu outperforms or performs competitively with mBERTu, and the largest gains are observed for higher-level tasks

Towards reviving post-Olympic Athens as a cultural destination

This paper examines the effects of global change on the status and qualities of the Greek national capital, Athens, focusing on how they affect the development of cultural tourism in the city. Although Athens constituted one of the most significant destinations for Greek tourism in the past, in recent years it started to weaken. Athens is characterised by a series of problems, among them are the degradation of its environment and quality of life and traffic congestion. However, in terms of tourism development, the Olympic Games helped in re-imaging the city and upgrading its infrastructure. This study based on semi-structured interviews with top officials reveals how global change has affected Athens’ socio-cultural/economic status, identity and image. Despite the tourism policy/planning responses to global changes, Athens’ tourism continues to decline leaving unexplored potential such as its rich cultural heritage, new multicultural identity and the New Acropolis Museum. The paper suggests that cultural elements of capital cities must be multidimensional including a variety of attractions and amenities. The use of cultural heritage assets needs to be in line with global developments in order for cities to effectively leverage heritage for cultural tourism

Identification of cancer predisposition variants in apparently healthy individuals using a next-generation sequencing-based family genomics approach

Cancer, like many common disorders, has a complex etiology, often with a strong genetic component and with multiple environmental factors contributing to susceptibility. A considerable number of genomic variants have been previously reported to be causative of, or associated with, an increased risk for various types of cancer. Here, we adopted a next-generation sequencing approach in 11 members of two families of Greek descent to identify all genomic variants with the potential to predispose family members to cancer. Cross-comparison with data from the Human Gene Mutation Database identified a total of 571 variants, from which 47 % were disease-associated polymorphisms, 26 % disease-associated polymorphisms with additional supporting functional evidence, 19 % functional polymorphisms with in vitro/laboratory or in vivo supporting evidence but no known disease association, 4 % putative disease-causing mutations but with some residual doubt as to their pathological significance, and 3 % disease-causing mutations. Subsequent analysis, focused on the latter variant class most likely to be involved in cancer predisposition, revealed two variants of prime interest, namely MSH2 c.2732T>A (p.L911R) and BRCA1 c.2955delC, the first of which is novel. KMT2D c.13895delC and c.1940C>A variants are additionally reported as incidental findings. The next-generation sequencing-based family genomics approach described herein has the potential to be applied to other types of complex genetic disorder in order to identify variants of potential pathological significance

Delayed and Accelerated Aging Share Common Longevity Assurance Mechanisms

Mutant dwarf and calorie-restricted mice benefit from healthy aging and unusually long lifespan. In contrast, mouse models for DNA repair-deficient progeroid syndromes age and die prematurely. To identify mechanisms that regulate mammalian longevity, we quantified the parallels between the genome-wide liver expression profiles of mice with those two extremes of lifespan. Contrary to expectation, we find significant, genome-wide expression associations between the progeroid and long-lived mice. Subsequent analysis of significantly over-represented biological processes revealed suppression of the endocrine and energy pathways with increased stress responses in both delayed and premature aging. To test the relevance of these processes in natural aging, we compared the transcriptomes of liver, lung, kidney, and spleen over the entire murine adult lifespan and subsequently confirmed these findings on an independent aging cohort. The majority of genes showed similar expression changes in all four organs, indicating a systemic transcriptional response with aging. This systemic response included the same biological processes that are triggered in progeroid and long-lived mice. However, on a genome-wide scale, transcriptomes of naturally aged mice showed a strong association to progeroid but not to long-lived mice. Thus, endocrine and metabolic changes are indicative of “survival” responses to genotoxic stress or starvation, whereas genome-wide associations in gene expression with natural aging are indicative of biological age, which may thus delineate pro- and anti-aging effects of treatments aimed at health-span extension

A flexible framework for sparse simultaneous component based data integration

<p>Abstract</p> <p>1 Background</p> <p>High throughput data are complex and methods that reveal structure underlying the data are most useful. Principal component analysis, frequently implemented as a singular value decomposition, is a popular technique in this respect. Nowadays often the challenge is to reveal structure in several sources of information (e.g., transcriptomics, proteomics) that are available for the same biological entities under study. Simultaneous component methods are most promising in this respect. However, the interpretation of the principal and simultaneous components is often daunting because contributions of each of the biomolecules (transcripts, proteins) have to be taken into account.</p> <p>2 Results</p> <p>We propose a sparse simultaneous component method that makes many of the parameters redundant by shrinking them to zero. It includes principal component analysis, sparse principal component analysis, and ordinary simultaneous component analysis as special cases. Several penalties can be tuned that account in different ways for the block structure present in the integrated data. This yields known sparse approaches as the lasso, the ridge penalty, the elastic net, the group lasso, sparse group lasso, and elitist lasso. In addition, the algorithmic results can be easily transposed to the context of regression. Metabolomics data obtained with two measurement platforms for the same set of <it>Escherichia coli </it>samples are used to illustrate the proposed methodology and the properties of different penalties with respect to sparseness across and within data blocks.</p> <p>3 Conclusion</p> <p>Sparse simultaneous component analysis is a useful method for data integration: First, simultaneous analyses of multiple blocks offer advantages over sequential and separate analyses and second, interpretation of the results is highly facilitated by their sparseness. The approach offered is flexible and allows to take the block structure in different ways into account. As such, structures can be found that are exclusively tied to one data platform (group lasso approach) as well as structures that involve all data platforms (Elitist lasso approach).</p> <p>4 Availability</p> <p>The additional file contains a MATLAB implementation of the sparse simultaneous component method.</p

Portfolio of compositions

My Masters research has been to the aim of my development as a composer of original music with an individual voice that is nonetheless informed by the musical and aesthetic currents alive in our contemporary society. This paper is an exegesis on my portfolio of compositions, written during my Masters candidature from 2006-08, in which I pursue a generally-consistent language towards a music that situates itself across a number of dualities with the aim to resolve their opposing strands, while exploring a wide range of thematic and philosophical concerns. The musical analyses contained within demonstrate my compositional technical apparatus which bridges between microstructural cellular detail and an organically unified whole, and promotes a consideration of metaphorical issues that arise through further aesthetic contemplation

Health-related physical fitness of adolescents and young adults with myelomeningocele

To assess components of health-related physical fitness in adolescents and young adults with myelomeningocele (MMC), and to study relations between aerobic capacity and other health-related physical fitness components. This cross-sectional study included 50 adolescents and young adults with MMC, aged 16–30 years (25 males). Aerobic capacity was quantified by measuring peak oxygen uptake (peakVO2) during a maximal exercise test on a cycle or arm ergometer depending on the main mode of ambulation. Muscle strength of upper and lower extremity muscles was assessed using a hand-held dynamometer. Regarding flexibility, we assessed mobility of hip, knee and ankle joints. Body composition was assessed by measuring thickness of four skin-folds. Relations were studied using linear regression analyses. Average peakVO2 was 1.48 ± 0.52 l/min, 61% of the participants had subnormal muscle strength, 61% had mobility restrictions in at least one joint and average sum of four skin-folds was 74.8 ± 38.8 mm. PeakVO2 was significantly related to gender, ambulatory status and muscle strength, explaining 55% of its variance. Adolescents and young adults with MMC have poor health-related physical fitness. Gender and ambulatory status are important determinants of peakVO2. In addition, we found a small, but significant relationship between peakVO2 and muscle strength