The enhancement of the search-ability of OCRed Texts HTR+, segmentation and meta-dating early modern ordinances

From May till November 2019, the KB National Library of the Netherlands (The Hague) hosts the Researcher-in-Residence project ‘Entangled Histories of Early Modern Ordinances’. This ‘short paper’-presentation reports on the ongoing project. The project’s hypotheses read that: when problems arose, small ‘states’ had to act swiftly; thus, governments may have adopted – parts of – successful legislation from neighbouring areas. These ‘entangled histories’ may become obvious while studying the political-institutional activities through legislation. Hence, the project uses printed books of ordinances from the Low Countries (1500-1800s) to answer this hypothesis. These sources used for this project are early modern norms (ordinances) printed in a gothic font (25%) and roman font (75%). The techniques that will be developed through ‘entangled histories’ will have a widespread positive effect. These techniques coincide with the project’s three steps: 1. Segmentation of the texts, going from sentence-recognition (Lonij, Harbers, 2016) to article-segmentation of larger texts; this requires that the computer is trained to recognise the beginning and end of texts, either as a chapter or as an individual text within a compilation of texts. We apply the P2PaLA-tool from the University of Valencia, which is integrated into Transkribus to recognise the different sections in our corpus. 2. Improving the OCR-results of digitised sources. By using machine learning techniques, such as the Handwritten Text Recognition suite Transkribus we will reprocess the files which currently have poor quality OCR. By treating the printed with hand-carved letters as very consistent handwriting we hope to obtain a higher quality of recognition (CER <5%). 3. We want to create automatic metadata by training a computer to recognise the conditions that categories were based upon. This will be based on an already developed tool called Annif (created by the Finnish National Library). After supervised training, the computer can then suggest, apply and supplement categories to other texts based on the idea of topic modelling (Leydesdorff, 2017). This is a pilot that will prove the applicability of the tool to other languages as well.' We will use NLP such as NER technologies to identify dates, titles, and persons. Due to its significance for such a broadly studied range of sources, we hope to make the output of the tagged entities available as RDF with the intention of making the output available in the Dutch national infrastructure With the data generated in this project, visualisations of the development of laws across the Netherlands – and possibly Europe - could become possible. These normative texts (laws) this data is based on, contain indications of how governments of burgeoning states dealt with unexpected threats to safety, security, and order through home-invented measures, borrowed rules, or adjustments of what was established elsewhere. While the thousands of texts become more easily accessible, it will become possible to look for entangled histories with neighbouring states, due to synchronic and diachronic comparisons. Firstly within the Low Countries (from one province to another), from which we will be using 108 books of ordinances; secondly, it will be possible to look for connections with German-speaking lands as the same metadata is applied as the Max-Planck-Institute für europäische Rechtsgeschichte has done in several projects. The connection with the German dataset will be established through (numbered) URI’s and Linked Data, as a step after the initial project. The ordinances within the books of ordinances are frequently consulted by researchers of various disciplines (e.g. history, law, political sciences, linguistics) to unravel rules for controlling complex societies. Having the possibility of a longitudinal search, based upon contents rather than the index or title, as well as having an overview based upon several states has so far been impossible due to the impenetrable amount of scanned texts. • Leydesdorff, L., and A. Nerghes. (2017) "Co-word maps and topic modelling: A comparison using small and medium-sized corpora (N< 1,000)." Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68(4): 1024-35. • Lonij, J., Harbers, F. (2016), Genre classifier. KB Lab: The Hague http://lab.kb.nl/tool/genre-classifier • Finnish National Library, Annif 2.0, https://github.com/NatLibFi/Annif

Guidelines for the use of flow cytometry

© 2017 The Authors. Immunity, Inflammation and Disease Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The editorial team of European Journal of Immunology, under the guidance of Professor Andreas Radbruch and a large international team of the immunological and flow cytometry core facilities community, have recently published the ‘‘Guidelines for the use of flow cytometry and cell sorting in immunological studies’’. At Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, published in the Wiley immunology journals programme alongside European Journal of Immunology, we would like to fully endorse the implementation of these guidelines in the use of studies and as a guide to reporting flow cytometry based results in publications.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

p/pi Ratio in Di-Hadron Correlations

Particle ratios are important observables used to constrain models of particle production in heavy-ion collisions. In this work we report on a measurement of the p/pi ratio in the transverse momentum range 2.0 < p_{T,assoc} < 4.0 GeV/c, associated with a charged trigger particle of 5.0 < p_{T,trig} < 10.0 GeV/c, in 0-10% central Pb--Pb collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76 TeV. The ratio is measured in the jet peak and in a region at large Delta eta separation from the peak (bulk region). The presented results are based on 14M minimum-bias Pb--Pb collisions, recorded by the ALICE detector. It is observed that the p/pi ratio in the bulk region is compatible with the p/pi ratio of an inclusive measurement, and is much larger than the p/pi ratio in the jet peak. The p/pi ratio in the jet peak is compatible with a PYTHIA reference, in which fragmentation in the vacuum is the dominant mechanism of particle production

Modifying T cell differentiation via protein based delivery of signalling attenuators

In recent years, evidence has accumulated that hierarchical thresholds for proliferation and differentiation may determine the generation of various effector T cell modes. It is as yet poorly understood, however, how changes in TCR-mediated signalling and its downstream signalling cascades drive the differentiation of the naive T cell into different response modes. This project aims to study whether manipulation of the signalling pathways directly downstream of the TCR/CD28 receptor can result in distinct functional differentiation of monoclonal CD4+ T cell populations with known antigenic specificity. To this end, two potential protein transfer mechanisms were tested for their suitability to act as inert delivery vehicles to deliver proteins into ex vivo naive T cells. The B subunit pentamer of enterotoxin B induced high levels apoptosis in naive T cells, which precluded its use as an inert delivery vehicle. The protein transduction domain of the HIV-1 protein Tat, however, did not influence T cell physiology and was subsequently successfully tested for its ability to transduce ex vivo T cells genetically fused to large proteins. Two fusion partners, the kinase truncated forms of ZAP-70 and Lck, were tested for their ability to interfere with TCR-mediated signalling. The kinase- truncated form of ZAP-70 showed a concentration dependent effect on calcium mobilisation, which was reliant on the strength of CD3 crosslinking. The kinase- truncated form of Lck also altered calcium mobilisation in a concentration dependent manner, but independent of TCR strength. In addition, it was shown to influence T cell activation, to be capable of altering the signal transduction cascade after T cell priming, and to dramatically change the cytokine profile

Recent developments in peptide-based nucleic acid delivery

Despite the fact that non-viral nucleic acid delivery systems are generally considered to be less efficient than viral vectors, they have gained much interest in recent years due to their superior safety profile compared to their viral counterpart. Among these synthetic vectors are cationic polymers, branched dendrimers, cationic liposomes and cellpenetrating peptides (CPPs). The latter represent an assortment of fairly unrelated sequences essentially characterised by a high content of basic amino acids and a length of 10-30 residues. CPPs are capable of mediating the cellular uptake of hydrophilic macromolecules like peptides and nucleic acids (e.g. siRNAs, aptamers and antisenseoligonucleotides), which are internalised by cells at a very low rate when applied alone. Up to now, numerous sequences have been reported to show cell-penetrating properties and many of them have been used to successfully transport a variety of different cargos into mammalian cells. In recent years, it has become apparent that endocytosis is a major route of internalisation even though the mechanisms underlying the cellular translocation of CPPs are poorly understood and still subject to controversial discussions. In this review, we will summarise the latest developments in peptide-based cellular delivery of nucleic acid cargos. We will discuss different mechanisms of entry, the intracellular fate of the cargo, correlation studies of uptake versus biological activity of the cargo as well as technical problems and pitfalls