SIRIS-Lab/unlabelled-sti-corpus huggingface dataset:
ANALYSIS OF GENETIC POLYMORPHISMS AND GENE COPY NUMBER

The invention provides methods for detecting variations in polymorphic sites and/or variations in gene copy number. The methods are particularly useful for analysis of biotransformation genes, such as cytochromes P450.
Good eggs? Evaluating consent forms for egg donation

Beyond gaps in the provision of information, the informed consent process for egg donation is complicated by conflicts of interest, payment and a lack of longitudinal data about physiological and psychological risks. Recent scholarship has suggested that egg donation programmes could improve the informed consent process by revising consent documents. At a minimum, these documents should include information about eight key criteria: the nature and objectives of treatment; the benefits, risks and inconveniences of egg donation; the privacy of donors and their anonymity (where applicable); disclosure that participation is voluntary (withdrawal); the availability of counselling; financial considerations; the possibility of an unsuccessful cycle and potential uses of the eggs retrieved. This study evaluates the incorporation of these minimum criteria in consent forms for egg donation, obtained through requests to Canadian fertility clinics. Even when clinics were considered to have met criteria simply by mentioning them, among the eight consent forms assessed, none met the minimum standards. Only half of clinics addressed privacy/anonymity concerns, financial issues and the possibility of a future cycle. Improving the quality of consent documentation to meet the minimum standards established by this study may not be an onerous task. For some, this will include re-evaluating how they include one or two elements of disclosure, and for others, this will require a substantial overhaul. Using the criteria provided by this study as the minimum standard for consent could ensure that donors have the basic information they need to make informed decisions.
Tuning topological materials by hydrostatic pressure and uniaxial stress

The discovery of topological phases of matter has driven the attention of great part of the solid-state science community due to its high for future applications, led by the presence of unusual electronic properties, such as extreme large magnetoresistance and anomalous Hall effect. However, topological phases on Ce-based nonsymmorphic materials are rather unexplored. The nonsymmorphic crystalline structure may create band crossings, which are needed for the existence of non-trivial topological phases, while the presence of magnetic Ce ions gives rise to many complex effects, such as magnetism and the Kondo effect. These correlated phenomena result in a promising route to pin the band crossings of nonsymmorphic compounds close to the Fermi level, favoring non-trivial topological effects in transport properties, which may lead to the realization of new spintronic devices. This proposal aims to understand the interplay between strong electronic correlations and non-trivial topological phases in Ce-based compounds. To achieve that hydrostatic pressure and/or uniaxial stress will be used to tune the electronic bands, i.e. moving the band crossings towards the Fermi energy and/or modify the bandstructure, and the magnetic correlations in Ce-based nonsymmorphic compounds, such as CeAlGe and CeSbTe. By performing electrical transport experiments under applied pressure/stress and in magnetic fields, the evolution and interrelation between non-trivial topological phases and strong electronic correlations will be investigated. As part of the experimental work, a new technique will be developed, which combines micro-structured samples with Bridgman or diamond anvil cells. This method will enable the simultaneous realization of magnetoresistance and Hall measurements up to more than 30 GPa. Our findings will significantly enhance the knowledge in strongly correlated electrons systems and topological materials, two fundamental areas of condensed matter physics.
Synthesis of protac-antibody conjugate for application in acute myeloid leukemia therapy

The field of immunotherapy has become one of the most promising strategies in fighting cancer. By using the incredible features our very own immune system already possesses, like the powerful tool of specific antibody-antigen recognition, a new generation of drugs can be generated.  The idea of linking cytotoxic drugs to monoclonal antibodies with high affinities to specific tumor cells will tremendously improve drug delivery, as tumor-associated antigens can be found by antibodies and the high cytotoxicity of the conjugated drug is used to achieve efficient cancer treatment with less side effects. In this research proposal, we establish a new therapeutic platform that uniquely combines the advantages of two rapidly developing areas – immunotherapy and targeted protein degradation – by developing first class of PROTAC-Antibody Conjugates (PAC). The resulting novel therapeutic agents will help to overcome the limitations arising from lack of cell specificity of PROTACs by exploiting tissue-specificity of the antibody component. Several studies reported encouraging data for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with antibody drug conjugates (ADC) that target the myeloid antigen CD33. In addition, a functionalisable BET inhibitor will be employed in protein degrader construct, generating a new class of small-molecule BET protein degraders. Besides, the proposed self-immolative linker chemistry will allow the traceless realease of the PROTAC once the PAC is internalized into the target cell. Moreover, we will use novel site-selective cysteine bioconjugation approach to build homogenous conjugates that, unlike current examples built using maleimide chemistry, are fully stable in the blood. Overall, this approach will be applicable to any protein of interest and therefore has the potential to advance not only the AML treatment but also the whole field of cancer therapy.
The potential of occupancy modelling as a tool for monitoring wild primate populations

Primates are a global conservation priority, with half of known species considered threatened with extinction. Monitoring trends in primate populations is important for identifying species in particular need of conservation action, and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions. Most existing primate survey methods aim to measure abundance. However, obtaining estimates of abundance with acceptable precision to detect changes in population is often expensive and time consuming. Evidence from other taxa suggests that estimating occupancy (the proportion of the area used by the species) may be less resource-intensive, yet still provide useful information for monitoring population trends. We investigate the potential of occupancy modelling for monitoring forest primates using a case study of three species of diurnal lemurs in the eastern rainforest of Madagascar. We estimated detectability and occupancy from a survey with three visits to 30 sites. Our estimates suggest that precision in occupancy estimates would be maximized by visiting a larger number of sites (therefore with limited repeat visits) for Indri indri, whereas the optimal monitoring design for Eulemur fulvus and Propithecus diadema, which showed very low detectability in our surveys, involves more frequent visits to fewer sites. Power analyses suggested that a meaningful reduction in occupancy could be detected with reasonable effort for easily detected species, but the method may prove impractical for more cryptic species. Primates pose a number of practical challenges for occupancy modelling, including choosing appropriate survey designs to satisfy closure assumptions. We suggest that if these issues can be overcome, occupancy modelling has the potential to become a valuable addition to the monitoring toolbox for the study of forest primates.
Birdwatchers’ wonderland? Prospects for the development of birdwatching tourism in Poland

Prominent books on birdwatching and ornithology refer to Poland as one of the best places for birdwatching. This study looks more specifically into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOTs) of developing birdwatching tourism (avitourism) in Poland. These are identified and ranked based on a survey of three expert groups involved in birdwatching and birdwatching tourism in Poland – international tour operators, international researchers, and Polish researchers. The analysis of these stakeholders’ views complements the more frequently offered analyses of birdwatchers’ motivations, in that it allows us to depict the broader context of birdwatching tourism. Based on the present study, Poland's most important strengths include its abundance of bird species and natural unspoilt ecosystems, while the main weaknesses refer to underdeveloped tourist infrastructure and insufficient information about Polish birdwatching sites. Consequently, improving the tourist infrastructure and information on ...
Nachhaltiges Wirtschaften in Lateinamerika: Der Fall Miskito Taucher gegen Honduras (Miskito Divers v Honduras) vor dem Interamerikanischen Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte

Die in der Amerikanischen Menschenrechtskonvention (AMRK) verankerte Pflicht eines Staates zur Achtung und Gewährleistung der Menschenrechte umfasst auch einen Grundsatz der nachhaltigen Unternehmensführung im Einklang mit den Leitprinzipien der Vereinten Nationen für Wirtschaft und Menschenrechte (UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, kurz UNGP). <bold>Abstract</bold> Nachdem eine Gruppe von durch gefährliche Fischereipraktiken geschädigten Miskito-Tauchern und deren Familien eine Beschwerde gegen Honduras eingebracht und mit dem Staat einen Vergleich erzielt hatten, erläuterte der Interamerikanische Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte in seinem Urteil die Verantwortung von Unternehmen und die Pflichten von Staaten im Zusammenhang mit von Unternehmen begangenen Menschenrechtsverletzungen. Darin führt der Gerichtshof aus, welche Verpflichtungen sich aus der Amerikanischen Menschenrechtskonvention (AMRK) und den Leitprinzipien der Vereinten Nationen für Wirtschaft und Menschenrechte (UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, kurz UNGP) ergeben, womit er eine Weiterentwicklung seiner Rechtsprechung im Bereich der sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Rechte bewirkte.
"The Diseases Peculiar to Women:" Gender & Curative Space in Britain and British India, 1860-1914

This dissertation examines the gynecological construction of medicalized both as an imagined ideal and a material reality in Britain and British India, from the mid-Victorian period to the advent of the First World War. Throughout this dissertation I employ two different definitions of curative space. The first, a geographer's definition, refers to the spaces of types of sites that the medical community deems to be salubrious or inducing of good health. The second is a psychologists definition and refers to the space between the patient and the therapist where healing is allowed to occur. As the long nineteenth-century progressed, women experienced many different types of curative space in their quest for better physical, mental, and moral health. This thesis interrogates the medical rationale underpinning these different kinds of medically mandated curative spaces, with particular emphasis on the home, the asylum, and the hill station sanatorium, in order to further our understanding of how medical discourse and practice shaped ideas about the female body and influenced the formation of women's subjectivities during this time period. To provide an analytical framework for this thesis, several different historiographical approaches are discussed in the Introduction. This thesis engages with a robust body of literature across several disciplines, including new imperial history, the history of medicine, and feminist philosophy to argue that the citational practices which comprised the symptom pool of gynecological 'disease' were constructed in part by the idea, concept, and availability of specific spaces.
Personal Genomes: A New Frontier in Database Research

Due to the recent technological improvement of the next-generation sequencers, reading genome sequence of individual DNA becomes popular in biology and medical study. The amount of data produced by next generation sequencers is enormous. Today, more than 10,000 people's DNAs are sequenced in the world and tera-bytes of data are being produced in a daily basis. The types of genome information also vary according to the biological experiments used for preparing DNA samples. Biologists and medical scientists are now facing to manage these huge volumes of data with variety of types. Existing DBMS, whose major targets are business applications, is not suited to managing these biological data because storing such large data to DBMS is time-consuming, and also current database queries cannot accommodate various types of bioinformatics tools written in various programming languages. Processing bioinformatics workflows in parallel and distributed manner is also a challenging problem. In this paper, in hope of recruiting database researchers into this rapidly progressing biology and medical research area, we introduce several challenges in genome informatics from the viewpoint of using existing DBMS for processing next-generation sequencer data.
Wireless Sensor Network Applications for the Combat Air Forces

Abstract : The main objective of this research is to examine the capabilities and limitations of wireless sensor networks with a focus on applications in an operational Air Force setting. The topography of such networks can be varied to suit applications across the spectrum of military operations. Sensor networks have certain inherent advantages, such as scalability, inconspicuousness, self-healing capability, and deployability. Possible uses include perimeter monitoring, mine field detection, aircraft health, search and rescue, target location, and others. Despite such potential capabilities, much study is needed to ensure their feasibility and utility. There are issues relating to network structure, data flow, power supplies, and methods of deployment. This paper covers some likely USAF applications and the unique problems which must be overcome. Implemented smartly, these devices can provide a new source of information in the ever-changing realm of information warfare, and can significantly improve the real-time battlespace picture.
The Strange Case of Dr White and Mr De Quincey: Manchester, Medicine and Romantic Theories of Biological Racism

This essay concerns the encounter between two extraordinary people, one an eighteenth-century surgeon, anatomist, obstetrician (or man-midwife), and collector, the other one of the most powerful of Romantic prose writers. In the essays collected as his ‘Autobiographic Sketches’ (1853–54), Thomas De Quincey describes how as a six-year-old he witnessed the traumatic death of his sister Elizabeth, then nine years of age. Manchester’s two leading physicians, Drs Thomas Percival and Charles White, attended Elizabeth’s death at the De Quincey family home at Greenhay. Percival was a major figure in Manchester’s cultural and scientific life; a dissenter, he was a founder and President of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society from 1782 until his death in 1804. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-five, Percival was the author of what has been described as ‘one of the greatest books on medical ethics’. Oddly, De Quincey writes very little about the presence of this important and fascinating figure in this account of the primal scene of his childhood, but is, instead, almost fixated with White. He records how White, perusing the body of his dead sister, ‘pronounced her head to be the finest in its development of any he had ever seen – an assertion which, to my own knowledge he repeated in after years, and with enthusiasm’. White’s repeated ‘enthusiasm’ for this deceased child’s skull might appear slightly troubling to contemporary readers. The nine-year-old Elizabeth De Quincey, as Grevel Lindop speculates, probably died of bacterial Meningitis, but her brother became absolutely convinced that the cause of her death was Hydrocephalus, a condition which leads to the expansion of the forehead in those who suffer from it, and which White would associate elsewhere in his work with the ideal beauty of the heads of Greek statuary. De Quincey comments that the ‘ample brow’ of his sister’s forehead gave Elizabeth an air of ‘intellectual grandeur’ and that her head ‘for its superb developments, was the astonishment of science’ (AutobiographicSketches, Volume 1 (1853), WTDQ, xix. 8). White was Manchester’s leading surgeon for almost sixty years. He was a highly accomplished surgeon and a pioneer obstetrician whose work greatly improved the conditions in which pregnant women gave birth, yet this aspect of his work, a most important legacy, is not mentioned by De Quincey. Rather he refers to White as ‘the most distinguished surgeon at that time in the
The History of Mills in Russia in the Context of Architectural Traditions

Abstract Interdependence of the architectural form with function is one of permanently open questions in the architectural theory. The paper describes the history of development mills in Russia in the context of architectural traditions. The use of wind and water engine was a real engineering breakthrough and by the end of the XIX century had been determining the nature of many types of industries. Architectural principles of the mills construction determined common European technological advances and development. The choice of the mill type depended only on the conditions of the building. Mills were built around by a project or likeness. Mill buildings were utilitarian and functional. Changing the architectural appearance of mills associated with the process and its improvement. The peculiar features of the mill buildings appeared only in connection with the characteristic of particular region general construction technologies, traditional building materials and the level of construction equipment.
Port iot for environmental leverage

Ports are a great example of heterogeneous information hubs. Multiple stakeholders operate inside and outside them with different motivations and businesses. Although document and data interchange is already in place through Port Community Systems (PCS), the interchange is limited to official documentation and services of the Port Authority, such as custom declarations, import/export of cargo, and other formal documents. However, an effective integration of operational data is far from optimal in most ports, and especially so in medium or small ports, where budget is limited and IT services usually is outsourced.

In contrast, the available operational data (resources tracking, container status, vessel operations, surface or berth available, air/water quality measurements,...) is constantly increasing and technology is getting inexpensive and widely available. However, the application of such systems is still single-entity centric, since the information is not shared, keeping the real potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 hidden. The same holds for geographic areas surrounding ports, where Smart Cities  integrate various data systems and provide valuable services to citizens and  authorities.

PIXEL will enable a two-way collaboration of ports, multimodal transport agents and cities for optimal use of internal and external resources, sustainable economic growth and environmental impact mitigation, towards the Ports of the Future. PIXEL will leverage technological enablers to voluntary exchange data among ports and stakeholders, thus ensuring a measurable benefit in this process. The main outcome of this technology will be efficient use of resources in ports, sustainable development and green growth of ports and surrounding cities/regions.

Built on top of the state-of-the art interoperability technologies, PIXEL will centralise data from the different information silos where internal and external stakeholders store their operational information.
Charter Boat Skipper 

The Italian, Slovenian and Croatian coasts in the Eastern part of the Upper Adriatic are becoming more and popular as tourist destinations for yachting, sailing and nautical activities in all sizes and forms. On the one hand there is mass tourism, possessing little or no specific knowledge but an eagerness to experiment nautical tourism. On the other there are large cruise ships and mega-yachts requiring a qualified workforce. It is here that the professional figure of the charter boat skipper finds its collocation, with specific technical skills related to each type of boat (of various sizes, length and type - motorboats and sailing boats) and perfectly able to drive, dock, and service a boat. The charter service also requires a cultural background, when the person is in charge of a trip, a long holiday or a cruise where this figure participates as a tourist leader or guide for those on board, based on the agreements reached with the clients. The course, open to high school graduates with nautical knowledge, aims at providing full training for the charter boat skipper, as the person in charge of the boat and of ensuring the full safety of the people on board. The course consists of various didactic modules (Information society, driving a boat, safety on board, pleasure boats, engineering, maintenance, commercial and administrative management), as well as a period of apprenticeship.
Step-and-Shoot versus Compensator-based IMRT: Calculation and Comparison of Integral Dose in Non-tumoral and Target Organs in Prostate Cancer

Introduction Intensity-Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT) is becoming an increasingly routine treatment method. IMRT can be delivered by use of conventional Multileaf Collimators (MLCs) and/or physical compensators. One of the most important factors in selecting an appropriate IMRT technique is integral dose. Integral dose is equal to the mean energy deposited in the total irradiated volume of the patient. The aim of the present study was to calculate and compare the integral dose in normal and target organs in two different procedures of IMRT: Step-and-Shoot (SAS) and compensator-based IMRT. Materials and Methods In this comparative study, five patients with prostate cancer were selected. Module Integrated Radiotherapy System was applied, using three energy ranges. In both treatment planning methods, the integral dose dramatically decreased by increasing energy. Results Comparison of two treatment methods showed that on average, the integral dose of body in SAS radiation therapy was about 1.62% lower than that reported in compensator-based IMRT. In planning target volume, rectum, bladder, and left and right femoral heads, the integral doses for SAS method were 1.01%, 1.02%, 1.11%, 1.47%, and 1.40% lower than compensator-based IMRT, respectively. Conclusion Considering the treatment conditions, the definition of dose volume constraints for healthy tissues, and the equal volume of organs in both treatment methods, SAS radiation therapy by providing a lower integral dose seems to be more advantageous and efficient for prostate cancer treatment, compared to compensator-based IMRT.
Practice and Reflection on the Management Credit System Teaching Model

Credit system is a kind of teaching management system measured in units of credit. It is different from scholastic year system with its openness,democracy,flexibility and diversity. In the implementation of the credit system,we should change the concept of education and teaching,improve the credit management system of teaching,develop the credit system personnel training programs,undertake the task of students' elective courses management,build credit teaching management system and implement the reform of credit fees and charges. To further improve the credit system of teaching management pattern in the future,we should develop a flexible training program,construct a elastic teaching system,implement an individualized education management and a tutor system for a whole course and carry out a normal teaching-oriented quality monitoring system.