Suppressive effect of corticosteroids on the gene expression of interleukin-5 and eosinophil activation in asthmatics

Although cortico steroids are effective anti-inflammatory agents in ameliorating asthma symptoms and bronchial hperreactivity, their mechanism of action is unknown. Interleukin (IL)-5 is known to play a key role in regulating eosinophil proliferation and activation. Therefore, we examined the changes of IL-5 mRNA expressions in PBMC semi-quantitatively with RT-PCR as well as serum ECP levels and MCH-PC20 values in asthmatics before and after being treated with corticosteroids. The results revealed that there were significant decrease in the level of IL-5 mRNA and serum ECP concentration after therapy (P < 0.05) and there was remarkable improvement in the values of MCH-PC20 and FEV1% (P < 0.05). It was also found that the changes of serum ECP levels or MCH-PC20 values were accompanied by a reduction in IL-5 mRNA expression (r = 0.5426 or 0.4857, P < 0.05). These results suggested that the therapeutic effects of corticosteroids in asthma may result from modulation of IL-5 gene expression with consequent inhibition of eosinophil activation.     

A multi-agent decision support system for stock trading

A distributed problem solving system can be characterized as a group of individual cooperating agents running to solve common problems. As dynamic application domains continue to grow in scale and complexity, it becomes more difficult to control the purposeful behavior of agents, especially when unexpected events may occur. This article presents an information and knowledge exchange framework to support distributed problem solving. From the application viewpoint the article concentrates on the stock trading domain; however, many presented solutions can be extended to other dynamic domains. It addresses two important issues: how individual agents should be interconnected so that their resources are efficiently used and their goals accomplished effectively; and how information and knowledge transfer should take place among the agents to allow them to respond successfully to user requests and unexpected external situations. The article introduces an architecture, the MASST system architecture, which supports dynamic information and knowledge exchange among the cooperating agents. The architecture uses a dynamic blackboard as an interagent communication paradigm to facilitate factual data, business rule, and command exchange between cooperating MASST agents. The critical components of the MASST architecture have been implemented and tested in the stock trading domain, and have proven to be a viable solution for distributed problem solving based on cooperating agents     

R22替代制冷剂的生产控制评价

本文详细介绍了R2 2替代制冷剂的生产过程控制和整机可靠性评价 ,并介绍了一些具体做法。     

8096/8098单片机集成开发系统

本集成开发环境集编辑、编译、调试和运行于一体,模拟了MCS-96系列单片机的指令系统,并给教学、实验、应用、科研和单片机的开发提供了强有力的手段。     

浅析2020年前美军事战略重点的转变--从装备发展看美国军事战略重点可能的变化

美国21世纪前期的军事战略重点将是争夺外空优势，夺取制天权和制信息权。分析了美国夺取外空优势的原因，及其为夺取外空优势在国家政策、航天发展和技术准备等方面采取的措施。     

提高自蔓延陶瓷内衬钢管耐蚀性研究的进展

广泛应用于石油，化工，能源等领域的钢管，除了要有高强度外，还要有良好的耐蚀性。自蔓延高温合成技术是制备耐蚀钢管的新技术，具有工艺简单，成本低和产品耐蚀性能好等特点。介绍了自蔓延高温合成陶瓷内衬钢管的原理和提高陶瓷内衬钢管耐蚀性的措施，展望了耐蚀陶瓷内衬钢管在工业生产上的应用前景。     

地源热泵——辐射地板联供试验

通过地源热泵－辐射地板系统冬夏联供试验，讨论了该系统作为新型环保节能空调方式的可行性及优越性，并对运行中出现的问题进行分析。     

Automatic conversion from lexical words to prosodic words for mandarin text-to-speech system

In real speech, not like lexical words (LWs), prosodic words (PWs) are basic rhythmic units. The naturalness of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system is directly influenced by the segmentation of the PWs. Most of the PWs are the combination of several LWs. In this paper, three Lexical Combination Models are proposed to combine LWs into PWs, including a Directed Acyclic Graph Model, a Segmentation Model and a Markov Model (MM). To cope with the situation where some long LWs should be segmented into two or more PWs, a Lexical Split Model (LSM) is applied to the long LWs. Experimental results prove that relatively constant results with various training data can be obtained from a MM. The Transformation-Based Error Driven Learning (TBED) algorithm, for its high performance of individual property, is applied in combination with the MM to improve the precision of PW segmentation. Experiments show that among the three proposed models, the MM combined with TBED and LSM, leads to the best performance, in which a precision of 93.00% and a recall of 93.23% are achieved. The perception test indicates that by using PWs as the lowest prosodic units a speech sounds more natural and acceptable than by using LWs. This paper is supported by NSFC Project (60503071); 973 Natural Basic Research Program of China (2004CB318102); Postdoctor Science Foundation of P. R. China (20070420275).     

Template-assisted synthesis of lamellar mesostructured hydroxyapatites

Novel lamellar mesostructured hydroxyapatites have firstly been synthesized by template-assisted technique. The mild and nontoxic surfactant, phosphoric acid monododecyl ester (MAP), is used to act as a structure-directing template. The structure of sample was characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, Scanning electron microscope and Transmission electron microscopy. The results indicate that the obtained sample is a well-organized lamellar mesostructured hydroxyapatite with a uniform layer spacing of 3.64 nm.