The community-centered board model of managed care for people with developmental disabilities

An asymmetric triazine derivative, HOE 092 V,2-[3,5-alpha-dichloro-4-(4-methyl-sulfonylphenoxy)-phenyl]- 1-methyl-hexahydro-1,2,4-triazine-3,5-dion, was tested in vivo against Glugea anomala parasitizing the connective tissue of sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus). Naturally infected sticklebacks were incubated in 10-1 plastic aquaria in water containing 0, 2.5, 5, and 10 micrograms HOE 092 V/ml for 2, 3, and 4 h at 22 degrees C. As seen at the ultrastructural level, the drug caused severe damage to all developmental stages of G. anomala except the mature spores. Starting with a dose of 2.5 micrograms/ml, the drug caused significant damage on uni- and multinucleate meronts, sporogonial plasmodia, and sporoblasts. The damage mainly consisted in a decrease in the number of ribosomes, an enlargement of the smooth endoplasmic reticulum and a vacuolization of the cytoplasma. When treatment was done with 5 micrograms for 2 h, multinucleate meronts and sporogonial plasmodia were no longer detectable, and the sporoblasts and the prespore stages except the mature spores had shrunk. After incubation of the infected fish with 10 micrograms HOE 092 V/ml and 4 h exposure, uninucleate meronts were no longer detectable by means of transmission electron microscopy. In the sporoblast mother cells, vacuolization of the cytoplasma and lysis of the nuclei occurred. However, mature spores were not affected. It seems likely that HOE 092 V can be successfully applied in medicinal baths against Microsporidia in fish. The infected fish should be incubated in separate, aerated containers.     

Cytogenetic abnormalities and clonal evolution in an adult hepatoblastoma

Hepatoblastomas usually occur in children < 3 years of age, and only occasional adult cases have been described. To date, 20 cytogenetically abnormal childhood hepatoblastomas have been reported. Karyotypic investigations have shown that most hepatoblastomas are diploid or hyperdiploid, often displaying trisomies for chromosomes 2 and 20. We have cytogenetically investigated an adult hepatoblastoma for which no previous karyotypic data exist. A hypertriploid stemline with multiple numerical and structural chromosomal aberrations, including +2 and +20, was found. In addition, the tumor displayed extensive clonal evolution with 11 subclones. Although the tumor thus displayed some chromosomal abnormalities commonly observed in childhood tumors, providing further support for the importance of these abnormalities in the development of hepatoblastoma, the level of genomic complexity seen in the present case has never been described in childhood hepatoblastomas and may suggest a different etiology or pathogenesis.     

Elastic-viscoplastic differential equations on a manifold modelling of in-plane stretching of sheet metal

The computational method for large deformation plasticity called differential equations on a manifold (DEM) has previously been shown to be effective for axisymmetric and plane strain sheet metal forming problems. The method has now been formulated for in-plane stretching problems, incorporated into a computer code, and applied to several problems. The code's performance is robust and accurate, as evidenced by a comparison with other published results. Incorporation of an automatic mesh generator significantly reduces data preparation time.     

Phlebotomus papatasi sand fly salivary gland lysate down-regulates a Th1, but up-regulates a Th2, response in mice infected with Leishmania major

A vertebrate host becomes infected with Leishmania major when the sand fly vector injects parasites into skin along with saliva. Previous studies showed that salivary gland lysate of the New World sand fly Lutzomyia longipalpis markedly enhanced L. major infection in CBA mice. However, L. major is an Old World parasite transmitted in nature by the Old World sand fly Phlebotomus papatasi. Here we examine the ability of P. papatasi salivary gland lysate to enhance infection (lesion size and parasite burden) by L. major. In addition, we examine the effects of salivary gland lysate on the immune response to L. major by monitoring the levels of cytokine mRNA from the lymph nodes draining cutaneous lesions. We found that P. papatasi salivary gland lysate dramatically exacerbated lesion development in disease-resistant CBA mice. This exacerbation of disease correlated with inhibition of the production of Thl cytokines and associated factors (IFN-gamma, IL-12, and inducible nitric oxide synthase), but with enhancement of the Th2 cytokine IL-4, whereas no changes in the levels of IL-10 and TGF-beta were noted. Importantly, salivary gland lysate directly up-regulated expression of IL-4 mRNA in mice in the absence of infection with L. major.     

Detection of sudden pedestrian crossings for driving assistance systems

In this paper, we study the problem of detecting sudden pedestrian crossings to assist drivers in avoiding accidents. This application has two major requirements: to detect crossing pedestrians as early as possible just as they enter the view of the car-mounted camera and to maintain a false alarm rate as low as possible for practical purposes. Although many current sliding-window-based approaches using various features and classification algorithms have been proposed for image-/video-based pedestrian detection, their performance in terms of accuracy and processing speed falls far short of practical application requirements. To address this problem, we propose a three-level coarse-to-fine video-based framework that detects partially visible pedestrians just as they enter the camera view, with low false alarm rate and high speed. The framework is tested on a new collection of high-resolution videos captured from a moving vehicle and yields a performance better than that of state-of-the-art pedestrian detection while running at a frame rate of 55 fps.     

Stock trading strategy creation using GP on GPU

This paper investigates the speed improvements available when using a graphics processing unit (GPU) for evaluation of individuals in a genetic programming (GP) environment. An existing GP system is modified to enable parallel evaluation of individuals on a GPU device. Several issues related to implementing GP on GPU are discussed, including how to perform tree-based GP on a device without recursion support, as well as the effect that proper memory layout can have on speed increases when using CUDA-enabled nVidia GPU devices. The specific GP implementation is designed to evolve stock trading strategies using technical analysis indicators. The second goal of this research is to investigate the possible improvement in performance when training individuals on a larger number of stocks and training days. This increased training size (nearly 100,000 training points) is enabled due to the speedups realized by GPU evaluation. Several different scenarios were used to test various speed optimizations of GP evaluation on the GPU device, with a peak speedup factor of over 600 (when compared to sequential evaluation on a 2.4 GHz CPU). Also, it is found that increasing the number of stocks and the length of the training period can result in higher out-of-training testing profitability.     

Texture and hydrodynamics of a thin slab of superfluid3He-A in a torsional oscillator. II. Experiment

Experiments on a torsional oscillator containing a slab of liquid³He of thickness 105 µm and diameter 8.38 mm are described. Normal phase experiments confirm the theory of the oscillator dynamics but an apparent descrase in the measured value of T ² at lowT casts doubt on the existing slip theory. Measurements for the uniform texture for the A phase give values of _s and ₄₄. The _s measurements suggest that the A-phase energy gap is enhanced by a factor 1.24 over the BCS value. Distortion of the uniform texture by a magnetic field perpendicular to the slab occurs at a threshold field slightly smaller than predicted. Measurements for fields at different angles to the slab enable accurate values to be deduced for the superfluid density anisotropy and two other viscosity coefficients. The remaining two viscosity coefficients are only poorly determined. Flow alignment of the orbital texture was achieved by increasing the oscillator amplitude. A different texture obtained on some occasions after warming from the B phase was investigated but is not understood.