Extragonadal LH/hCG action-Not yet time to rewrite textbooks

Gonadotropins are indispensable in both sexes in the regulation of gonadal sex steroid production and gametogenesis. In addition to their well-established classical actions, numerous recent publications have indicated the presence and function of luteinizing hormone/chorionic gonadotropin receptors (LH/hCG-R) in a variety of extragonadal tissues. However, the physiological significance of such effects has remained unclear. We have generated two genetically modified mouse models, one with excessive production of hCG and the other with targeted disruption of LH/hCG-R gene, and used them to address the functions of LH and hCG. Numerous gonadal and extragonadal phenotypes were found in the models with the two extremes of LH/hCG action. However, when the extragonadal effects were scrutinized in greater detail, they all appeared to arise through modification of gonadal function, either through enhanced or inhibited response to LH/hCG stimulation. Hence, further evidence is needed before the extragonadal LH/hCG-R expression can be considered functionally significant.Fil: Pakarainen, Tomi. University of Turku; FinlandiaFil: Ahtiainen, Petteri. University of Turku; FinlandiaFil: Zhang, Fu Ping. University of Helsinki; FinlandiaFil: Rulli, Susana Beatriz. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Fundación de Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental. Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental; ArgentinaFil: Poutanen, Matti. University of Turku; FinlandiaFil: Huhtaniemi, Ilpo. University of Turku; Finlandia. IMperial College London; Reino Unid

DuETT: Dual Event Time Transformer for Electronic Health Records

Electronic health records (EHRs) recorded in hospital settings typically contain a wide range of numeric time series data that is characterized by high sparsity and irregular observations. Effective modelling for such data must exploit its time series nature, the semantic relationship between different types of observations, and information in the sparsity structure of the data. Self-supervised Transformers have shown outstanding performance in a variety of structured tasks in NLP and computer vision. But multivariate time series data contains structured relationships over two dimensions: time and recorded event type, and straightforward applications of Transformers to time series data do not leverage this distinct structure. The quadratic scaling of self-attention layers can also significantly limit the input sequence length without appropriate input engineering. We introduce the DuETT architecture, an extension of Transformers designed to attend over both time and event type dimensions, yielding robust representations from EHR data. DuETT uses an aggregated input where sparse time series are transformed into a regular sequence with fixed length; this lowers the computational complexity relative to previous EHR Transformer models and, more importantly, enables the use of larger and deeper neural networks. When trained with self-supervised prediction tasks, that provide rich and informative signals for model pre-training, our model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models on multiple downstream tasks from the MIMIC-IV and PhysioNet-2012 EHR datasets.Comment: Accepted at MLHC 2023, camera-ready versio

PoGOLite - A High Sensitivity Balloon-Borne Soft Gamma-ray Polarimeter

We describe a new balloon-borne instrument (PoGOLite) capable of detecting 10% polarisation from 200mCrab point-like sources between 25 and 80keV in one 6 hour flight. Polarisation measurements in the soft gamma-ray band are expected to provide a powerful probe into high-energy emission mechanisms as well as the distribution of magnetic fields, radiation fields and interstellar matter. At present, only exploratory polarisation measurements have been carried out in the soft gamma-ray band. Reduction of the large background produced by cosmic-ray particles has been the biggest challenge. PoGOLite uses Compton scattering and photo-absorption in an array of 217 well-type phoswich detector cells made of plastic and BGO scintillators surrounded by a BGO anticoincidence shield and a thick polyethylene neutron shield. The narrow FOV (1.25msr) obtained with well-type phoswich detector technology and the use of thick background shields enhance the detected S/N ratio. Event selections based on recorded phototube waveforms and Compton kinematics reduce the background to that expected for a 40-100mCrab source between 25 and 50keV. A 6 hour observation on the Crab will differentiate between the Polar Cap/Slot Gap, Outer Gap, and Caustic models with greater than 5 sigma; and also cleanly identify the Compton reflection component in the Cygnus X-1 hard state. The first flight is planned for 2010 and long-duration flights from Sweden to Northern Canada are foreseen thereafter.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, 2 table

Automation of Telecom Network Vulnerability Management : risk driven approach

Many network assets use some free and open-source software (FOSS) or commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) to provide industry standard services or functionality. This makes vulnerability management a crucial part of network security, same applies also to telecommunication networks. Modern, highly complex, telecommunications networks are constantly evolving and use of old methods in managing vulnerabilities, risks, in the networks will not work much longer. At the same time the number of possible vulnerabilities is increasing year by year. This thesis helps commissioner company to map the information in the pre-existing systems and services in a way that brings most value to the operators. Limiting the visibility to the risks, vulnerabilities, that really matter. This will allow efficient use of resources. The thesis is limited to the Security Manager and Vulnerability Management Service database integration, this was also the first to be implemented in the study. Integration of external vulnerability feeds and scanner reports were excluded. Excluded were also the connectivity from operator networks towards the vulnerability management database and the UX/UI layer. Most of these will require further studies

Kesätyöntekijän perehdytysohje

Opinnäytetyön tarkoitus oli parantaa kesätyöntekijöiden perehdytysprosessia Konecranes Finland Oy:n Hyvinkään komponenttitehtaan logistiikkatiimissä. Työ toteutettiin toimeksiantona Konecranes Finland Oy:lle. Tavoitteena oli luoda kattavat ja helposti luettavat sähköiset ohjeet, jotka auttavat uuden kesätyöntekijän perehdytyksessä sekä työnopastuksessa. Teoriaosuudessa käsitellään ohjeen koostamisen kannalta tärkeitä aiheita perehdyttämisestä, työnopastuksesta sekä työturvallisuudesta. Työtä varten toteutettiin logistiikkatiimissä myös avoimia haastatteluita ja keskusteluita. Haastatteluissa saatujen tulosten perusteella kasattiin itse ohje käyttäen hyödyksi myös aikaisempaa kokemusta toiminnasta kyseisessä kesätyötehtävässä. Ohjeessa kesätyöntekijälle opastetaan työhön oleellisesti liittyviä työturvallisuusasioita sekä työtehtäviin liittyvää toimintaa. Opinnäytetyön seurauksena syntynyt ohje otetaan logistiikkatiimissä käyttöön tulevaisuudessa uusien kesätyöntekijöiden perehdytysprosessin tueksi

NetCents protocol for inexpensive Internet payments

grantor: University of TorontoNetCents is a lightweight, flexible and secure protocol for electronic commerce over the Internet. It is designed to support purchases ranging in value from a fraction of a penny to several dollars, with an emphasis on micropayments. It is based on decentralized verification of electronic currency at a vendor's server with offline payment capture and policing. This is accomplished with floating scrips, or signed containers of electronic currency, that are passed from vendor to vendor. No customer trust is required, but the system does place a certain amount of trust in vendors, for example, to guard against double spending, and therefore requires a probabilistic verification scheme to limit vendor fraud to unprofitable levels. The protocol can be extended to support fully anonymous payments. An online arbiter is implemented that will ensure proper delivery of purchased goods and that can settle most customer/vendor disputes.M.A.Sc

Fertility in luteinizing hormone receptor-knockout mice after wild-type ovary transplantation demonstrates redundancy of extragonadal luteinizing hormone action

The luteinizing hormone receptor (LHR), mainly expressed in gonads, is essential for normal reproduction. However, numerous recent studies have also demonstrated LHR expression in multiple extragonadal reproductive and nonreproductive tissues. Although some effects of luteinizing hormone (LH) or its agonist, human chorionic gonadotropin, have been shown in extragonadal sites, their physiological significance remains open. In the present study, we have addressed the function of the extragonadal LHR using LHR-KO mice (LuRKO mice), in which the ovaries of prepubertal mice were orthotopically replaced with pieces of WT ovary using similarly transplanted WT mice as controls. Most ovarian transplants attained normal endocrine function in both groups of mice, as demonstrated by normal age at vaginal opening, estrous cycles, and sexual behavior. Both the LuRKO and WT mice repeatedly became pregnant (9/16 vs. 16/20 after first mating; difference not significant) and delivered similarly sized litters, which grew normally after birth, indicating normal lactation. In conclusion, fertility is restored in LuRKO mice by transplantation of WT ovarian tissue. This is achieved in the absence of extragonadal LHR expression, which indicates physiological redundancy for such receptor sites

SIMD parallelization of applications that traverse irregular data structures

Fine-grained data parallelism is increasingly common in mainstream processors in the form of longer vectors and onchip GPUs. This paper develops support for exploiting such data parallelism for a class of non-numeric, non-graphic applications, which perform computations while traversing many independent, irregular data structures. While the traversal of any one irregular data structure does not give opportunity for parallelization, traversing a set of these does. However, mapping such parallelism to SIMD units is nontrivial and not addressed in prior work. We address this problem by developing an intermediate language for specifying such traversals, followed by a runtime scheduler that maps traversals to SIMD units. A key idea in our run-time scheme is converting branches to arithmetic operations, which then allows us to use SIMD hardware. In order to make our approach fast, we demonstrate several optimizations including a stream compaction method that aids with control flow in SIMD, a set of layouts that reduce memory latency, and a tiling approach that enables more effective prefetching. Using our approach, we demonstrate significant increases in single-core performance over optimized baselines for two applications

Fine-grained Parallel Traversals of Irregular Data Structures

Fine-grain data parallelism is increasingly common in mainstream processors in the form of long vectors and on-chip GPUs. This paper develops compiler and runtime support to exploit such data parallelism for non-numeric, non-graphic, irregular parallel tasks that perform simple computations while traversing many independent, irregular data structures, like trees and graphs. We vectorize the traversal of trees and graphs by treating a set of irregular data structures as a parallel control-flow graph and compiling the traversal into a domain-specific bytecodes. We produce a SIMD interpreter for these bytecodes, so each lane of a SIMD unit traverses one irregular data structure. Despite the overhead of interpretation, we demonstrate significant increases in single-core performance over optimized baselines