Funding Cuts to Public Health in Massachusetts: Losses Over Gains

Examines ten public health areas, from children's health to substance abuse, and describes the widening health disparities, reduced data collection, and other effects of budget cuts to programs in prevention, outreach, training, and technical assistance

DiTo-Datenbank : Datendokumentation zu Verbrektion und Koordination

In dieser Arbeit werden die Daten eines Testwerkzeugs für die Fehlerdiagnose bei Syntaxkomponenten natürlichsprachlicher Systeme vorgestellt. Mit unserem DiagnostikTool unternehmen wir den Versuch, einen Datenkatalog zu erstellen, der die wesentlichen Phänomene deutscher Syntax erfasst, um die Fehlerdiagnose zu unterstützen. Bisher beinhaltet der Datenkatalog die Bereiche Verbrektion und Koordination. Wir arbeiten mit anderen Gruppen zusammen, die weitere Syntaxthemen entsprechend den Richtlinien unseres Ansatzes erarbeiten. Damit ausgewählte Syntaxgebiete separat abgetestet werden können, sind die Daten in einer relationalen Datenbank organisiert. In den Teildokumentationen zu den einzelnen Syntaxgebieten werden zunächst die behandelten Phänomene skizzenhaft beschrieben. Dann wird die der Datensammlung zugrundeliegende Systematik erläutert. Anschließend wird gezeigt, wie die Daten in der relationalen Datenbank organisiert sind. Die Dokumentationen enden mit einem Ausblick auf mögliche Erweiterungen der Datenbank

Natural Language Dialogue Service for Appointment Scheduling Agents

Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by e-mail. We describe COSMA, a fully implemented German language server for existing appointment scheduling agent systems. COSMA can cope with multiple dialogues in parallel, and accounts for differences in dialogue behaviour between human and machine agents. NL coverage of the sublanguage is achieved through both corpus-based grammar development and the use of message extraction techniques.Comment: 8 or 9 pages, LaTeX; uses aclap.sty, epsf.te

Smart Pre- and Post-Processing for STAR MT Translate

After many successful experiments it has become evident that smart pre- and post-processing can significantly improve the output of neural machine translation. Therefore, various generic and language-specific processes are applied to the training corpus, the user input and the MT output for STAR MT Translate

Südtirols Medienlandschaft

Massenkommunikation durchwebt unser Leben in vieler Hinsicht. Durch die moderne Kommunikationstechnik ist sie so weit Teil unseres Lebens geworden, dass unsere Welt ohne ihre Einwirkung nicht mehr vorstellbar ist. "Was wir über unsere Gesellschaft, ja über die Welt, in der wir leben, wissen, wissen wir durch die Massenmedien. Das gilt nicht nur für unsere Kenntnis der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, sondern auch für unsere Kenntnis der Natur." (Luhmann 2004: 9) Die Medien vermitteln die Welt, holen sie zu uns nach Hause, informieren und unterhalten uns in jeder Lage unseres Lebens. Dabei fallen den Massenmedien noch andere wichtigen Aufgaben zu: Medien werden als Vermittler und Anbieter von Kultur betrachtet. In erster Linie durch die Definition des öffentlich-rechtlichen Mediensystems werden Medien als Transportmittel für Themen der Politik, der Wirtschaft und für Kulturprodukte angesehen. Medien werden aber auch länderspezifisch betrachtet: jedes Land hat ein eigenes Medienangebot, Nutzungsformen für eine eigene Medienkultur. Medien transportieren nicht nur Kultur, sie beeinflussen sie auch. (Faulstich 2004) Doch Medien erfüllen nicht nur diese Vermittlerfunktionen, sie tun viel mehr als nur informieren und unterhalten, sie tragen zur sozialen Integration bei, prägen und beeinflussen persönliche Werthaltungen. "Medien begleiten und beschäftigen uns Tag für Tag von morgens bis abends und beeinflussen unser scheinbar 'privates' Wahrnehmen, Fühlen, Agieren ganz fundamental, noch vor aller Virtualisierung von Wirklichkeit durch die neuen digitalen Medien." (Faulstich 2004: 7

A mixture of feature experts approach for protein-protein interaction prediction

High-throughput methods can directly detect the set of interacting proteins in yeast but the results are often incomplete and exhibit high false positive and false negative rates. A number of researchers have recently presented methods for integrating direct and indirect data for predicting interactions. However, due to missing data and the high redundancy among the features used, different samples may benefit from different features based on the set of attributes available. In addition, in many cases it is hard to directly determine which of the datasets led to the prediction, which is an important issue for the biologists using these predications to design new experiments. To address these challenges we use a Mixture-of-Experts method. We split the data into four (roughly) homogeneous sets. The individual experts use logistic regression and their scores are combined using another logistic regression. However, when combining the scores the weighting of each expert depends on the set of input attributes. Thus different experts will have different influence on the prediction depending on the available features. We applied our method to predict the set of interacting proteins in yeast. Our method improved upon the best previous methods for this task. In addition, using the weighting of the experts the prediction can be easily evaluated by biologists based on the features that they feel are the most reliable.

Preferential binding of allosteric modulators to active and inactive conformational states of metabotropic glutamate receptors

Metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) are G protein coupled receptors that play important roles in synaptic plasticity and other neuro-physiological and pathological processes. Allosteric mGluR ligands are particularly promising drug targets because of their modulatory effects – enhancing or suppressing the response of mGluRs to glutamate. The mechanism by which this modulation occurs is not known. Here, we propose the hypothesis that positive and negative modulators will differentially stabilize the active and inactive conformations of the receptors, respectively. To test this hypothesis, we have generated computational models of the transmembrane regions of different mGluR subtypes in two different conformations. The inactive conformation was modeled using the crystal structure of the inactive, dark state of rhodopsin as template and the active conformation was created based on a recent model of the light-activated state of rhodopsin. Ligands for which the nature of their allosteric effects on mGluRs is experimentally known were docked to the modeled mGluR structures using ArgusLab and Autodock softwares. We find that the allosteric ligand binding pockets of mGluRs are overlapping with the retinal binding pocket of rhodopsin, and that ligands have strong preferences for the active and inactive states depending on their modulatory nature. In 8 out of 14 cases (57%), the negative modulators bound the inactive conformations with significant preference using both docking programs, and 6 out of 9 cases (67%), the positive modulators bound the active conformations. Considering results by the individual programs only, even higher correlations were observed: 12/14 (86%) and 8/9 (89%) for ArgusLab and 10/14 (71%) and 7/9 (78%) for AutoDock. These findings strongly support the hypothesis that mGluR allosteric modulation occurs via stabilization of different conformations analogous to those identified in rhodopsin where they are induced by photochemical isomerization of the retinal ligand – despite the extensive differences in sequences between mGluRs and rhodopsin

Withering the citizen, managing the consumer: complaints in healthcare settings

This paper considers concepts of citizenship and consumerism in light of complaints about healthcare, which have risen since the early1990s, due to a greater willingness by the healthcare user to complain, and also the reforms in complaint systems. The narrow legal model for dealing with complaints has been replaced by a managerial model based on corporate sector practice that views complaint handling as a way of retaining customers and organisational learning. The managerial model has proved difficult to embed into the English NHS and has been superposed with a centralised regulatory system that aims to manage performance while also being responsible for reviewing, complaints and being responsive to complainants. It is argued that this may have positive consequences in terms of improving healthcare quality but more negatively, the promotion of consumerism within complaints processes has led to a loss of the right to due process and public accountability

M+D: conceptual guidelines for compiling a materials library

This article proposes to present a study conducted by the Raw Materials research group, the results of which comprise the conceptual guidelines for compiling an M+D material library. The study includes the topic, materials and design taking the impact of the changes that came into being in the post industrial era on project methodologies and the search for information regarding materials. Taking into account the importance and complexity that these relationships have taken on currently, we have studied the issue of materials based on Manzini (1983) and Ashby and Johnson (2002). Afterward different databases and materials libraries located in the Brazil, the United States, France and Italy geared toward design professionals and students were analyzed to understand what information and means of access to them were available. The project methodologies were approached based on Löbach (1991), Bürdeck (1994), Schulmann (1994), Baxter (1998), Dantas (1998 and 2005) and Papanek (1995 and 2000). This study sought to identify the key elements of the role of materials in the project process today, to serve as a parameter for the analysis of the models studied. A comparative analysis of the models investigated enabled identification of positive and negative aspects to adapt to the needs previously mentioned and identify conceptual guidelines for compiling a collection of materials for use in design projects. Keywords: Design, Materials, Project Methodology, Library</p