Production of polyamide 6 tire cord

Translated from Khimicheskie Volokna, No. 4, pp. 64–66, July–August, 1994.     

Respiratory function in poultry workers and pharmacologic characterization of poultry dust extract

The Sj?bring system of personality dimensions measuring intellectual capacity, activity, impulsivity and sociability was used to study possible "salutogenic" (i.e. causes of health) effects. The study comprised 590 subjects investigated in 1947, 1957, 1972 and 1988-1989 in the Lundby project, an epidemiological study in Sweden. Psychiatric diagnoses were made in 1947, 1957 and 1972. Mental health was estimated in 1988-1989 using the concept "love well, work well, play well and expect well". The Sj?bring dimensions were clinically assessed in 1972. Both in the concurrent study in 1972 and in the prospective study in 1988-1989 "super capacity" (high intellectual function), "super validity" (high activity level) and "super solidity" (low impulsivity) were statistically associated with lower frequencies of certain psychiatric diagnoses and a higher frequency of positive mental health. These variables are proposed to increase coping capacity, and therefore increase stress resilience.     

Immunotherapy of cancer with "immune" RNA. A preliminary report

A phase I clinical trial of immunotherapy with "Immune" RNA was undertaken fifteen months ago. Twenty-six cancer patients were treated with RNA extracted from the lymphoid organs of sheep immunized with either autologous tumor cells or allogeneic tumor cells of the same histologic type. Eighteen patients had gross disease and eight had minimum residual disease. RNA was administered weekly, intradermally, at doses up to 9 mg/week without any significant local or systemic toxicity. Four patients improved, thirteen achieved stability of disease or possible improvement, seven were treatment failures, and two are indeterminate. Lymphocyte-mediated cytotoxicity to allogeneic tumor target cells of the same histologic type were monitored in eleven patients. In seven patients, cytotoxicity increased after "Immune" RNA therapy; no change was observed in three patients; a decrease was noted in one patient. There appeared to be a possible correlation between cytotoxicity assessed in vitro and clinical response. There is some evidence that these responses may be specific for the particular tumor used to immunize the RNA donor.     

Unsupervised document structure analysis of digital scientific articles

Text mining and information retrieval in large collections of scientific literature require automated processing systems that analyse the documents’ content. However, the layout of scientific articles is highly varying across publishers, and common digital document formats are optimised for presentation, but lack structural information. To overcome these challenges, we have developed a processing pipeline that analyses the structure a PDF document using a number of unsupervised machine learning techniques and heuristics. Apart from the meta-data extraction, which we reused from previous work, our system uses only information available from the current document and does not require any pre-trained model. First, contiguous text blocks are extracted from the raw character stream. Next, we determine geometrical relations between these blocks, which, together with geometrical and font information, are then used categorize the blocks into different classes. Based on this resulting logical structure we finally extract the body text and the table of contents of a scientific article. We separately evaluate the individual stages of our pipeline on a number of different datasets and compare it with other document structure analysis approaches. We show that it outperforms a state-of-the-art system in terms of the quality of the extracted body text and table of contents. Our unsupervised approach could provide a basis for advanced digital library scenarios that involve diverse and dynamic corpora.     

A multi-crystal wavelength dispersive x-ray spectrometer

A multi-crystal wavelength dispersive hard x-ray spectrometer with high-energy resolution and large solid angle collection is described. The instrument is specifically designed for time-resolved applications of x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and x-ray Raman scattering (XRS) at X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFEL) and synchrotron radiation facilities. It also simplifies resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) studies of the whole 2d RIXS plane. The spectrometer is based on the Von Hamos geometry. This dispersive setup enables an XES or XRS spectrum to be measured in a single-shot mode, overcoming the scanning needs of the Rowland circle spectrometers. In conjunction with the XFEL temporal profile and high-flux, it is a powerful tool for studying the dynamics of time-dependent systems. Photo-induced processes and fast catalytic reaction kinetics, ranging from femtoseconds to milliseconds, will be resolvable in a wide array of systems circumventing radiation damage.