bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Shade Provision for Toddlers at Swimming Pools in Melbourne
Authors: Gies Peter , Makin Jennifer , Dobbinson Suzanne , Javorniczky John , Henderson Stuart , Guilfoyle Robert , Lock Jordan 
Published: April 2013

AbstractThis study assessed the UVR protection provided by shade structures over toddler pools at swimming pool centers in Melbourne. The UVR protection was measured using a combination of UV sensitive polysulfone film to derive an average value during the middle of the day (1–2 P.M.) and handheld UV meters to derive the time variability in UV protection between 11 A.M. and 3 P.M. The amount of UVR protection provided by the shade structures depended upon a number of factors such as location, size, and materials used, but generally ranged from a protection factor (PF) of 2 to ~ 16. The higher PFs were generally for larger structures or where the shade had other structures nearby. The handheld UV meter measurements showed the UV protection varied with position under the shade structure as well as with time of day. While provision of shade structures is becoming more widespread around Australia, improving the shade availability at the pool centers overall, the application of recommendations regarding the provision of shade has been followed to a varying degree by many of the pools visited in this study. In many cases, continued further improvements can be made to provide more adequate protection and further reduce UV exposures.
Successful Treatment for Subinvolution of Placental Sites in the Bitch with Low Oral Doses of Progestagen
Authors: Voorhorst MJ , van Brederode JC , Albers‐Wolthers CHJ , de Gier J , Schaefers‐Okkens AC 
Published: April 2013

ContentsSubinvolution of placental sites (SIPS) is the major cause of persistent sanguineous vaginal discharge after parturition in the bitch. Spontaneous remission is common but may take several months, and hence, medical therapy to end the discharge is often requested. In this retrospective study, we evaluated the effect of treatment for SIPS with low oral doses of a progestagen. Nine bitches with SIPS, but otherwise clinically healthy, were found in the computer database of the Department of Clinical Sciences of Companion Animals. Seven of these bitches were treated with low oral doses of a progestagen (megestrol acetate, 0.1 mg/kg body weight (bw) once daily for the 1st week, then 0.05 mg/kg bw once daily for the 2nd week). The other two bitches were untreated. Treatment results were evaluated by a telephone questionnaire. Progestagen treatment was successful in all of the treated dogs; sanguineous vaginal discharge stopped within the treatment period. One of the two untreated dogs remained symptomatic until the next oestrus, approximately 120 days after parturition, and the other remained symptomatic until 6 weeks before the start of the next pro‐oestrus, 270 days after parturition. No side effects of the progestagen treatment were observed. Subsequent gestations, parturitions and puerperal periods of 5 mated bitches were uneventful. One bitch did not become pregnant after mating. In conclusion, the results of this study indicate that oral administration of low doses of progestagen for 2 weeks is effective in stopping persistent sanguineous vaginal discharge in bitches with SIPS, with neither side effects nor reduced subsequent fertility.
On the feasibility of optical‐CT imaging in media of different refractive index
Authors: Rankine Leith , Oldham Mark 
Published: April 2013

Purpose:Achieving accurate optical‐CT 3D dosimetry without the use of viscous refractive index (RI) matching fluids would greatly increase convenience.Methods:Software has been developed to simulate optical‐CT 3D dosimetry for a range of scanning configurations including parallel‐beam, point, and converging light sources. For each configuration the efficacy of three refractive media was investigated: air, water, a fluid closely matched to PRESAGE®, and perfect matching (RI = 1.00, 1.33, 1.49, and 1.501 respectively). Reconstructions were performed using both filtered backprojection (FBP) and algebraic reconstruction technique (ART). The efficacy of the three configurations and the two algorithms was evaluated by calculating the usable radius (i.e., the outermost radius where data were accurate to within 2%), and gamma (Γ) analysis. This definition recognizes that for optical‐CT imaging, errors are greatest near the edge of the dosimeter, where refraction can be most pronounced. Simulations were performed on three types of dose distribution: uniform, volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT), and brachytherapy (Cs‐137).Results:For a uniformly irradiated dosimeter the usable radius achieved with filtered backprojection was 68% for water‐matching and 31% for dry‐scanning in air. Algebraic reconstruction gave usable radii of 99% for both water and air (dry‐scanning), indicating greater recovery of useful data for the uniform distribution. FBP and ART performed equally well for a VMAT dose distribution where less dose is delivered near the edge of the dosimeter. In this case, the usable radius was 86% and 53% for scanning in water and air, respectively. For brachytherapy, the usable radius was 99% and 98% for scanning in water and air, respectively using FBP, and a major decrease was seen with ART. Point source geometry provided 1%–2% larger usable radii than parallel geometry. Converging geometry recovered less usable dosimetry data (up to 10% reduced usable radii) than point and parallel geometries. A further disadvantage of converging geometry was an increased requirement on detector size by up to 18°.Conclusions:For applications where dose information is not required in the periphery of the dosimeter, some dry and low‐viscous matching configurations may be feasible. For all three dose distributions (uniform, VMAT, brachytherapy) the point source geometry produced slightly more favorable results (an extra 1%–2% usable radii) than parallel and converging. When dosimetry is required on the periphery, best results were obtained using close refractive matching and ART. A concern for water or dry‐scanning is the increase in required detector size, introducing potential cost penalties for manufacturing.
The Streptococcal Cysteine Protease SpeB Is Not a Natural Immunoglobulin-Cleaving Enzyme
Authors: Persson Helena , Vindebro Reine , von Pawel-Rammingen Ulrich 
Published: April 2013

ABSTRACT

The human bacterial pathogen
Streptococcus pyogenes
has developed a broad variety of virulence mechanisms to evade the actions of the host immune defense. One of the best-characterized factors is the streptococcal cysteine protease SpeB, an important multifunctional protease that contributes to group A streptococcal pathogenesis
in vivo
. Among many suggested activities, SpeB has been described to degrade various human plasma proteins, including immunoglobulins (Igs). In this study, we show that SpeB has no Ig-cleaving activity under physiological conditions and that only Igs in a reduced state, i.e., semimonomeric molecules, are cleaved and degraded by SpeB. Since reducing conditions outside eukaryotic cells have to be considered nonphysiological and IgG in a reduced state lacks biological effector functions, we conclude that SpeB does not contribute to
S. pyogenes
virulence through the proteolytic degradation of Igs.
Characterization of the Pneumocystis carinii Histone Acetyltransferase Chaperone Proteins PcAsf1 and PcVps75
Authors: Pupaibool Jakrapun , Kottom Theodore J. , Bouchonville Kelly , Limper Andrew H. 
Published: April 2013

ABSTRACT

Rtt109 is a lysine acetyltransferase that acetylates histone H3 at lysine 56 (H3K56) in fungi. This acetylation event is important for proper DNA replication and repair to occur. Efficient Rtt109 acetyltransferase activity also requires a histone chaperone, vacuolar protein sorting 75 (Vps75), as well as the major chaperone of the H3-H4 dimer, anti-silencing factor 1 (Asf1). Little is known about the role of these proteins in the opportunistic fungal pathogen
Pneumocystis carinii
. To investigate the functions of Asf1 and Vps75 in
Pneumocystis carinii
, we cloned and characterized both of these genes. Here, we demonstrate that both genes,
P. carinii asf1
(
Pcasf1
) and
Pcvps75
, function in a fashion analogous to their
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
counterparts. We demonstrate that both
P. carinii
Asf1 (PcAsf1) and PcVps75 can bind histones. Furthermore, when
Pcasf1
is expressed heterologously in
S. cerevisiae asf1
Δ cells, PcAsf1 can restore full H3 lysine acetylation. We further demonstrated that the
Pcasf1
cDNA expressed in
asf1
Δ
S. cerevisiae
cells can restore growth to wild-type levels in the presence of genotoxic agents that block DNA replication. Lastly, we observed that purified PcAsf1 and PcVps75 proteins enhance the ability of PcRtt109 to acetylate histone H3-H4 tetramers. Together, our results indicate that the functions of the Rtt109-Asf1-Vps75 complex in the acetylation of histone H3 lysine 56 and in DNA damage response are present in
P. carinii
DNA and cell cycle progression.
Key Role for the Alternative Sigma Factor, SigH, in the Intracellular Life of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis during Macrophage Stress
Authors: Ghosh Pallab , Wu Chia-wei , Talaat Adel M. 
Published: April 2013

ABSTRACT

Mycobacterium avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
causes Johne's disease, an enteric infection in cattle and other ruminants, greatly afflicting the dairy industry worldwide. Once inside the cell,
M. avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
is known to survive harsh microenvironments, especially those inside activated macrophages. To improve our understanding of
M. avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
pathogenesis, we examined phagosome maturation associated with transcriptional responses of
M. avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
during macrophage infection. Monitoring cellular markers, only live
M. avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
bacilli were able to prevent phagosome maturation and reduce its acidification. On the transcriptional level, over 300
M. avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
genes were significantly and differentially regulated in both naive and IFN-γ-activated macrophages. These genes include the sigma factor H (
sigH
) that was shown to be important for
M. avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
survival inside gamma interferon (IFN-γ)-activated bovine macrophages. Interestingly, an
sigH
-knockout mutant showed increased sensitivity to a sustained level of thiol-specific oxidative stress. Large-scale RNA sequence analysis revealed that a large number of genes belong to the
sigH
regulon, especially following diamide stress. Genes involved in oxidative stress and virulence were among the induced genes in the
sigH
regulon with a putative consensus sequence for SigH binding that was recognized in a subset of these genes (
n
= 30), suggesting direct regulation by SigH. Finally, mice infections showed a significant attenuation of the Δ
sigH
mutant compared to its parental strain, suggesting a role for
sigH
in
M. avium
subsp.
paratuberculosis
virulence. Such analysis could identify potential targets for further testing as vaccine candidates against Johne's disease.
Role Mining with Probabilistic Models
Authors: Frank Mario , Buhman Joachim M. , Basin David 
Published: April 2013

Role mining tackles the problem of finding a role-based access control (RBAC) configuration, given an access-control matrix assigning users to access permissions as input. Most role-mining approaches work by constructing a large set of candidate roles and use a greedy selection strategy to iteratively pick a small subset such that the differences between the resulting RBAC configuration and the access control matrix are minimized. In this article, we advocate an alternative approach that recasts role mining as an inference problem rather than a lossy compression problem. Instead of using combinatorial algorithms to minimize the number of roles needed to represent the access-control matrix, we derive probabilistic models to learn the RBAC configuration that most likely underlies the given matrix.
Our models are generative in that they reflect the way that permissions are assigned to users in a given RBAC configuration. We additionally model how user-permission assignments that conflict with an RBAC configuration emerge and we investigate the influence of constraints on role hierarchies and on the number of assignments. In experiments with access-control matrices from real-world enterprises, we compare our proposed models with other role-mining methods. Our results show that our probabilistic models infer roles that generalize well to new system users for a wide variety of data, while other models’ generalization abilities depend on the dataset given.
Fragmentation Considered Vulnerable
Authors: Gilad Yossi , Herzberg Amir 
Published: April 2013

We show that fragmented IPv4 and IPv6 traffic is vulnerable to effective interception and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by an
off-path
attacker. Specifically, we demonstrate a weak attacker intercepting more than 80% of the data between peers and causing over 94% loss rate.

We show that our attacks are practical through experimental validation on popular industrial and open-source products, with realistic network setups that involve NAT or tunneling and include concurrent legitimate traffic as well as packet losses. The interception attack requires a zombie agent behind the same NAT or tunnel-gateway as the victim destination; the DoS attack only requires a puppet agent, that is, a sandboxed applet or script running in web-browser context.
The complexity of our attacks depends on the predictability of the IP Identification (ID) field which is typically implemented as one or multiple counters, as allowed and recommended by the IP specifications. The attacks are much simpler and more efficient for implementations, such as Windows, which use one ID counter for all destinations. Therefore, much of our focus is on presenting effective attacks for implementations, such as Linux, which use per-destination ID counters.
We present practical defenses for the attacks presented in this article, the defenses can be deployed on network firewalls without changes to hosts or operating system kernel.
Deterministic Replay Using Global Clock
Authors: Chen Yunji , Chen Tianshi , Li Ling , Wu Ruiyang , Liu Daofu , Hu Weiwu 
Published: April 2013

Debugging parallel programs is a well-known difficult problem. A promising method to facilitate debugging parallel programs is using hardware support to achieve deterministic replay on a Chip Multi-Processor (CMP). As a Design-For-Debug (DFD) feature, a practical hardware-assisted deterministic replay scheme should have low design and verification costs, as well as a small log size.
To achieve these goals, we propose a novel and succinct hardware-assisted deterministic replay scheme named LReplay. The key innovation of LReplay is that instead of recording the logical time orders between instructions or instruction blocks as previous investigations, LReplay is built upon recording the pending period information infused by the global clock. By the recorded pending period information, about 99% execution orders are inferrable, implying that LReplay only needs to record directly the residual 1% noninferrable execution orders in production run. The 1% noninferrable orders can be addressed by a simple yet cost-effective direction prediction technique, which further reduces the log size of LReplay.
Benefiting from the preceding innovations, the overall log size of LReplay over SPLASH-2 benchmarks is about 0.17B/K-Inst (byte per k-instruction) for the sequential consistency, and 0.57B/K-Inst for the Godson-3 consistency. Such log sizes are smaller in an order of magnitude than previous deterministic replay schemes incurring no performance loss. Furthermore, LReplay only consumes about 0.5% area of the Godson-3 CMP, since it requires only trivial modifications to existing components of Godson-3. The features of LReplay demonstrate the potential of integrating hardware support for deterministic replay into future industrial processors.
Concerning Asymptotic Behavior for Extremal Polynomials Associated to Nondiagonal Sobolev Norms
Authors: Portilla Ana , Quintana Yamilet , Rodríguez José M. , Tourís Eva 
Published: April 2013

Let ℙ be the space of polynomials with complex coefficients endowed with a nondiagonal Sobolev norm∥ · ∥W1,p(Vμ), where the matrixVand the measureμconstitute ap-admissible pair for1≤p≤∞. In this paper we establish the zero location and asymptotic behavior of extremal polynomials associated to∥ · ∥W1,p(Vμ), stating hypothesis on the matrixVrather than on the diagonal matrix appearing in its unitary factorization.
A retrospective quasi-experimental study of a community crisis house for patients with severe and persistent mental illness
Authors: Siskind Dan , Harris Meredith , Kisely Steve , Brogan James , Pirkis Jane , Crompton David , Whiteford Harvey 
Published: April 2013

Objective: There is increasing international evidence that crisis houses can reduce the time spent in acute psychiatric inpatient units for patients with severe and persistent mental illness, at a lower cost and in an environment preferable to patients. We evaluated the Alternatives to Hospitalisation (AtH) program, a crisis house operating in outer suburban Brisbane. Methods: One hundred and ninety-three AtH patients were compared to 371 matched controls admitted to a peer hospital district acute psychiatric unit. Hospitalisations, demographics and illness acuity were compared one year before and after an acute index episode of residential care involving hospital and/or AtH. Hospital bed-days during the index episode were compared between AtH participants and controls. The cost of bed-days averted was compared to the cost of providing the AtH program. Results: AtH participants spent 5.35 fewer days in hospital during the index episode than controls, after adjustment for illness acuity, living conditions, marital status and emergency department (ED) presentations. Per patient cost of averted psychiatric inpatient bed-days, $5948.22, was higher than the per patient cost of providing AtH, $3071.44. AtH participants had higher levels of illness acuity, ED presentations and acute psychiatric admissions than controls in the year after the index episode. Conclusions: For acutely unwell, stably housed patients, able to be managed outside of a secure facility, a crisis house program can reduce acute psychiatric bed-days, providing a cost saving for mental health services.
Poractant alfa (Curosurf®) increases phagocytosis of apoptotic neutrophils by alveolar macrophages in vivo
Authors: Willems Coen HMP , Urlichs Florian , Seidenspinner Silvia , Kunzmann Steffen , Speer Christian P , Kramer Boris W 
Published: April 2013

Abstract

Background
Clearance of apoptotic neutrophils in the lung is an essential process to limit inflammation, since they could become a pro-inflammatory stimulus themselves. The clearance is partially mediated by alveolar macrophages, which phagocytose these apoptotic cells. The phagocytosis of apoptotic immune cells by monocytes in vitro has been shown to be augmented by several constituents of pulmonary surfactant, e.g. phospholipids and hydrophobic surfactant proteins. In this study, we assessed the influence of exogenous poractant alfa (Curosurf®) instillation on the in vivo phagocytosis of apoptotic neutrophils by alveolar macrophages.

Methods
Poractant alfa (200 mg/kg) was instilled intratracheally in the lungs of three months old adult male C57/Black 6 mice, followed by apoptotic neutrophil instillation. Bronchoalveloar lavage was performed and alveolar macrophages and neutrophils were counted. Phagocytosis of apoptotic neutrophils was quantified by determining the number of apoptotic neutrophils per alveolar macrophages.

Results
Exogenous surfactant increased the number of alveolar macrophages engulfing apoptotic neutrophils 2.6 fold. The phagocytosis of apoptotic neutrophils was increased in the presence of exogenous surfactant by a 4.7 fold increase in phagocytosed apoptotic neutrophils per alveolar macrophage.

Conclusions
We conclude that the anti-inflammatory properties of surfactant therapy may be mediated in part by increased numbers of alveolar macrophages and increased phagocytosis of apoptotic neutrophils by alveolar macrophages.
Predicting protein-ATP binding sites from primary sequence through fusing bi-profile sampling of multi-view features
Authors: Zhang Ya-Nan , Yu Dong-Jun , Li Shu-Sen , Fan Yong-Xian , Huang Yan , Shen Hong-Bin 
Published: April 2013

Abstract

Background
Adenosine-5′-triphosphate (ATP) is one of multifunctional nucleotides and plays an important role in cell biology as a coenzyme interacting with proteins. Revealing the binding sites between protein and ATP is significantly important to understand the functionality of the proteins and the mechanisms of protein-ATP complex.

Results
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for predicting the proteins’ functional residues, through which they can bind with ATP molecules. The new prediction protocol is achieved by combination of sequence evolutional information and bi-profile sampling of multi-view sequential features and the sequence derived structural features. The hypothesis for this strategy is single-view feature can only represent partial target’s knowledge and multiple sources of descriptors can be complementary.

Conclusions
Prediction performances evaluated by both 5-fold and leave-one-out jackknife cross-validation tests on two benchmark datasets consisting of 168 and 227 non-homologous ATP binding proteins respectively demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed protocol. Our experimental results also reveal that the residue structural characteristics of real protein-ATP binding sites are significant different from those normal ones, for example the binding residues do not show high solvent accessibility propensities, and the bindings prefer to occur at the conjoint points between different secondary structure segments. Furthermore, results also show that performance is affected by the imbalanced training datasets by testing multiple ratios between positive and negative samples in the experiments. Increasing the dataset scale is also demonstrated useful for improving the prediction performances.