2,430 research outputs found
Outbreak of tropical rat mite (Ornithonyssus bacoti) dermatitis in a home for disabled persons
Five mentally handicapped individuals living in a home for disabled persons in Southern Germany were seen in our outpatient department with pruritic, red papules predominantly located in groups on the upper extremities, neck, upper trunk and face. Over several weeks 40 inhabitants and 5 caretakers were affected by the same rash. Inspection of their home and the sheds nearby disclosed infestation with rat populations and mites. Finally the diagnosis of tropical rat mite dermatitis was made by the identification of the arthropod Ornithonyssus bacoti or so-called tropical rat mite. The patients were treated with topical corticosteroids and antihistamines. After elimination of the rats and disinfection of the rooms by a professional exterminator no new cases of rat mite dermatitis occurred. The tropical rat mite is an external parasite occurring on rats, mice, gerbils, hamsters and various other small mammals. When the principal animal host is not available, human beings can become the victim of mite infestation. Copyright (c) 2007 S. Karger AG, Base
GiViP: A Visual Profiler for Distributed Graph Processing Systems
Analyzing large-scale graphs provides valuable insights in different
application scenarios. While many graph processing systems working on top of
distributed infrastructures have been proposed to deal with big graphs, the
tasks of profiling and debugging their massive computations remain time
consuming and error-prone. This paper presents GiViP, a visual profiler for
distributed graph processing systems based on a Pregel-like computation model.
GiViP captures the huge amount of messages exchanged throughout a computation
and provides an interactive user interface for the visual analysis of the
collected data. We show how to take advantage of GiViP to detect anomalies
related to the computation and to the infrastructure, such as slow computing
units and anomalous message patterns.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Exploiting Polyhedral Symmetries in Social Choice
A large amount of literature in social choice theory deals with quantifying
the probability of certain election outcomes. One way of computing the
probability of a specific voting situation under the Impartial Anonymous
Culture assumption is via counting integral points in polyhedra. Here, Ehrhart
theory can help, but unfortunately the dimension and complexity of the involved
polyhedra grows rapidly with the number of candidates. However, if we exploit
available polyhedral symmetries, some computations become possible that
previously were infeasible. We show this in three well known examples:
Condorcet's paradox, Condorcet efficiency of plurality voting and in Plurality
voting vs Plurality Runoff.Comment: 14 pages; with minor improvements; to be published in Social Choice
and Welfar
Assessment of a Large-Scale Unbiased Malignant Pleural Effusion Proteomics Study of a Real-Life Cohort
Background: Pleural effusion (PE) is common in advanced-stage lung cancer patients
and is related to poor prognosis. Identification of cancer cells is the standard method for the
diagnosis of a malignant PE (MPE). However, it only has moderate sensitivity. Thus, more sensitive
diagnostic tools are urgently needed. Methods: The present study aimed to discover potential protein
targets to distinguish malignant pleural effusion (MPE) from other non-malignant pathologies. We
have collected PE from 97 patients to explore PE proteomes by applying state-of-the-art liquid
chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) to identify potential biomarkers that correlate with
immunohistochemistry assessment of tumor biopsy or with survival data. Functional analyses
were performed to elucidate functional differences in PE proteins in malignant and benign samples.
Results were integrated into a clinical risk prediction model to identify likely malignant cases.
Sensitivity, specificity, and negative predictive value were calculated. Results: In total, 1689 individual
proteins were identified by MS-based proteomics analysis of the 97 PE samples, of which 35 were
diagnosed as malignant. A comparison between MPE and benign PE (BPE) identified 58 differential
regulated proteins after correction of the p-values for multiple testing. Furthermore, functional
analysis revealed an up-regulation of matrix intermediate filaments and cellular movement-related
proteins. Additionally, gene ontology analysis identified the involvement of metabolic pathways
such as glycolysis/gluconeogenesis, pyruvate metabolism and cysteine and methionine metabolism.
Conclusion: This study demonstrated a partial least squares regression model with an area under the
curve of 98 and an accuracy of 0.92 when evaluated on the holdout test data set. Furthermore, highly
significant survival markers were identified (e.g., PSME1 with a log-rank of 1.68 × 10−6
).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Banal nationalism and the imagining of politics
Banal nationalism and the imagining of politic
Evidence against global attention filters selective for absolute bar-orientation in human vision
The finding that an item of type A pops out from an array of distractors of type B typically is taken to support the inference that human vision contains a neural mechanism that is activated by items of type A but not by items of type B. Such a mechanism might be expected to yield a neural image in which items of type A produce high activation and items of type B low (or zero) activation. Access to such a neural image might further be expected to enable accurate estimation of the centroid of an ensemble of items of type A intermixed with to-be-ignored items of type B. Here, it is shown that as the number of items in stimulus displays is increased, performance in estimating the centroids of horizontal (vertical) items amid vertical (horizontal) distractors degrades much more quickly and dramatically than does performance in estimating the centroids of white (black) items among black (white) distractors. Together with previous findings, these results suggest that, although human vision does possess bottom-up neural mechanisms sensitive to abrupt local changes in bar-orientation, and although human vision does possess and utilize top-down global attention filters capable of selecting multiple items of one brightness or of one color from among others, it cannot use a top-down global attention filter capable of selecting multiple bars of a given absolute orientation and filtering bars of the opposite orientation in a centroid task
Dimensionality and dynamics in the behavior of C. elegans
A major challenge in analyzing animal behavior is to discover some underlying
simplicity in complex motor actions. Here we show that the space of shapes
adopted by the nematode C. elegans is surprisingly low dimensional, with just
four dimensions accounting for 95% of the shape variance, and we partially
reconstruct "equations of motion" for the dynamics in this space. These
dynamics have multiple attractors, and we find that the worm visits these in a
rapid and almost completely deterministic response to weak thermal stimuli.
Stimulus-dependent correlations among the different modes suggest that one can
generate more reliable behaviors by synchronizing stimuli to the state of the
worm in shape space. We confirm this prediction, effectively "steering" the
worm in real time.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, minor correction
Theoretical Models of Sunspot Structure and Dynamics
Recent progress in theoretical modeling of a sunspot is reviewed. The
observed properties of umbral dots are well reproduced by realistic simulations
of magnetoconvection in a vertical, monolithic magnetic field. To understand
the penumbra, it is useful to distinguish between the inner penumbra, dominated
by bright filaments containing slender dark cores, and the outer penumbra, made
up of dark and bright filaments of comparable width with corresponding magnetic
fields differing in inclination by some 30 degrees and strong Evershed flows in
the dark filaments along nearly horizontal or downward-plunging magnetic
fields. The role of magnetic flux pumping in submerging magnetic flux in the
outer penumbra is examined through numerical experiments, and different
geometric models of the penumbral magnetic field are discussed in the light of
high-resolution observations. Recent, realistic numerical MHD simulations of an
entire sunspot have succeeded in reproducing the salient features of the
convective pattern in the umbra and the inner penumbra. The siphon-flow
mechanism still provides the best explanation of the Evershed flow,
particularly in the outer penumbra where it often consists of cool, supersonic
downflows.Comment: To appear in "Magnetic Coupling between the Interior and the
Atmosphere of the Sun", eds. S.S. Hasan and R.J. Rutten, Astrophysics and
Space Science Proceedings, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Berlin, 200
Prediction of Depression in Individuals at High Familial Risk of Mood Disorders Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Objective Bipolar disorder is a highly heritable condition. First-degree relatives of affected individuals have a more than a ten-fold increased risk of developing bipolar disorder (BD), and a three-fold risk of developing major depressive disorder (MDD) than the general population. It is unclear however whether differences in brain activation reported in BD and MDD are present before the onset of illness. Methods We studied 98 young unaffected individuals at high familial risk of BD and 58 healthy controls using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans and a task involving executive and language processing. Twenty of the high-risk subjects subsequently developed MDD after the baseline fMRI scan. Results At baseline the high-risk subjects who later developed MDD demonstrated relatively increased activation in the insula cortex, compared to controls and high risk subjects who remained well. In the healthy controls and high-risk group who remained well, this region demonstrated reduced engagement with increasing task difficulty. The high risk subjects who subsequently developed MDD did not demonstrate this normal disengagement. Activation in this region correlated positively with measures of cyclothymia and neuroticism at baseline, but not with measures of depression. Conclusions These results suggest that increased activation of the insula can differentiate individuals at high-risk of bipolar disorder who later develop MDD from healthy controls and those at familial risk who remain well. These findings offer the potential of future risk stratification in individuals at risk of mood disorder for familial reasons
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