A preliminary analysis of the oral shamanistic songs of the Manchus

Shamanistic oral traditions in the form of primitive religion have come down to the present from ancient societies in the remote past, and have already become standardized as folk religions and beliefs among various ethnic groups. In this article I address Manchu shamanistic songs in Northeastern China, with an analytical eye to their oral form and content, looking at how they are represented.Issue title "Chinese Oral Traditions.

Strichartz Inequalities for the Wave Equation with the Full Laplacian on H-Type Groups

We generalize the dispersive estimates and Strichartz inequalities for the solution of the wave equation related to the full Laplacian on H-type groups, by means of Besov spaces defined by a Littlewood-Paley decomposition related to the spectral of the full Laplacian. The dimension of the center on those groups is p and we assume that p>1. A key point consists in estimating the decay in time of the L∞ norm of the free solution. This requires a careful analysis due also to the nonhomogeneous nature of the full Laplacian

Variational Learning for the Inverted Beta-Liouville Mixture Model and Its Application to Text Categorization

he finite invert Beta-Liouville mixture model (IBLMM) has recently gained some attention due to its positive data modeling capability. Under the conventional variational inference (VI) framework, the analytically tractable solution to the optimization of the variational posterior distribution cannot be obtained, since the variational object function involves evaluation of intractable moments. With the recently proposed extended variational inference (EVI) framework, a new function is proposed to replace the original variational object function in order to avoid intractable moment computation, so that the analytically tractable solution of the IBLMM can be derived in an effective way. The good performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated by experiments with both synthesized data and a real-world application namely text categorization

Induction of CCL8/MCP-2 by mycobacteria through the activation of TLR2/PI3K/Akt signaling pathway.

Pleural tuberculosis (TB), together with lymphatic TB, constitutes more than half of all extrapulmonary cases. Pleural effusions (PEs) in TB are representative of lymphocytic PEs which are dominated by T cells. However, the mechanism underlying T lymphocytes homing and accumulation in PEs is still incompletely understood. Here we performed a comparative analysis of cytokine abundance in PEs from TB patients and non-TB patients by protein array analysis and observed that MCP-2/CCL8 is highly expressed in the TB-PEs as compared to peripheral blood. Meanwhile, we observed that CCR5, the primary receptor used by MCP-2/CCL8, is mostly expressed on pleural CD4(+) T lymphocytes. Furthermore, we found that infection with either Mycobacterium bovis Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) or Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv induced production of MCP-2/CCL8 at both transcriptional and protein level in Raw264.7 and THP-1 macrophage cells, mouse peritoneal macrophages as well as human PBMC monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs). The induction of MCP-2/CCL8 by mycobacteria is dependent on the activation of TLR2/PI3K/Akt and p38 signaling pathway. We conclude that accumulation of MCP-2/CCL8 in TB-PEs may function as a biomarker for TB diagnosis