bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Transdifferentiation of smooth muscle cells into chondrocytes in atherosclerotic arteries in situ: implications for diffuse intimal calcification
Authors: Bobryshev Yuri V 
Published: March 2005

AbstractSeveral hypotheses have been offered to explain the occurrence of arteriosclerotic calcification but the mechanisms involved are still not well understood. Using a combination of electron microscopy and immunohistochemistry, atherosclerotic plaques from human arteries as well as atherosclerotic‐like lesions from aortas of apo‐E‐deficient mice were examined to identify cell type(s) associated with calcification. Electron microscopic analysis showed that, in human atherosclerotic plaques, chondrocyte‐like cells were present in areas surrounding the necrotic cores. In these areas, some smooth muscle cells displayed features of their transdifferentiation into chondrocyte‐like cells. Immunohistochemical analysis confirmed that smooth muscle cells with a reduced content of α‐smooth muscle actin expressed Sox‐9. Destruction of chondrocytes resulted in the accumulation of numerous membrane‐bound vesicles in the extracellular space. Membrane‐bound vesicles originating from chondrocytes were found to undergo calcification. Similar processes were found to occur in atherosclerotic‐like lesions in apo‐E‐deficient mice. These observations suggest that transdifferentiation of smooth muscle cells into chondrocytes contributes to atherosclerotic calcification. Copyright © 2005 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Six Sigma Applied Throughout the Lifecycle of an Automated Decision System
Authors: Patterson Angie , Bonissone Piero , Pavese Marc 
Published: March 2005

AbstractAutomated decision‐making systems have been deployed in many industrial, commercial, and financial applications. The needs for such systems are usually motivated by requirements for variation reduction, capacity increase, cost and cycle time reduction, and end‐to‐end traceability of the transaction or product. Before we can use any automated decision‐making system in a production environment we must develop a strategy to insure high quality throughout its entire lifecycle. We need to guarantee its performance through a rigorous Design for Six Sigma process (DFSS). This process includes validation, tuning, and production testing of the system. Once the system is in production we must monitor and maintain its performance over its lifecycle. In this paper we will outline the Six Sigma process that led to the deployment of an automated decision‐making system in one of the General Electric Financial Assurance businesses. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Six Sigma: is it Really Different?
Authors: Walters Larry 
Published: March 2005

AbstractThis article explores the similarities and differences between Six Sigma and other ‘Quality Improvement’ programs. The overwhelming success of Six Sigma is attributable to something, but what is it? The ‘tools’ of Six Sigma have been used for generations by educators and practitioners. Why does Six Sigma work better for some companies than others? What pitfalls should be avoided? What can I really expect to achieve from a Six Sigma initiative? Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Six Sigma and Business Excellence: Strategic and Tactical Examination of IT Service Level Management at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer of Washington, DC
Authors: Edgeman Rick L. , Bigio David , Ferleman Thomas 
Published: March 2005

AbstractDuring the period January through May 2003 ten teams of student consultants from the Quality Enhancement Systems & Teams (QUEST) Interdisciplinary Honors Program, the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland conducted a quality analysis of Information Technology Service Level Management (ITSLM) for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) of the Government of the District of Columbia. OCTO is largely funded by the United States Congress and is the key IT provider for various public sector agencies in Washington, DC including Metropolitan Police, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Fire and Rescue, Public Works, and DC Public Schools. Five areas of ITSLM were examined through two lenses with a student consulting team assigned to each area and lens. These areas of ITSLM were Availability Management, Capacity Management, Financial Management, Service Continuity, and Service Level Management with Service Continuity essentially referring to ‘disaster recovery’. The two lenses were Six Sigma Strategies and Methods and Business Excellence. Six Sigma is a highly structured approach to process improvement and design while Business Excellence holds to the principles and criteria that are foundational to various international quality awards such as America's Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award or the European Quality Award. In either case, at its most fundamental level, the goal is to advance a public or private sector entity on the path to excellence. While analysis indicated that OCTO is on the path towards making Washington, DC the ‘City of Access’, a number of strategic and tactical improvement suggestions were identified that will further enable OCTO in this endeavor. Presented herein are selected results from applying the two approaches to performance improvement. In all, the results are synergistic, suggesting that the two lenses can be coordinated to accomplish more in conjunction than can either employed in isolation. Projections by OCTO of potential cost‐savings resulting from application of selected suggestions range from $2 million to $3 million. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Derivatisation of carboxylic acid groups in pharmaceuticals for enhanced detection using liquid chromatography with electrospray ionisation tandem mass spectrometry
Authors: Cartwright Andrew J. , Jones Phil , Wolff Jean‐Claude , Evans E. Hywel 
Published: March 2005

AbstractTris(2,4,6‐trimethoxyphenyl)phosphonium propylamine bromide (TMPP) has been used for the derivatisation of maleic, fumaric, sorbic and salicylic acids to facilitate determination using liquid chromatography/electrospray ionisation tandem mass spectrometry (LC/ESI‐MS/MS) in positive ion mode. Detection limits, achieved using multiple reaction monitoring mode, were 2, 4, 0.4 and 540 fmol (5 μL injection) for derivatised fumaric, sorbic, maleic and salicylic acids, respectively. In comparison, detection limits achieved in negative ion mode for the underivatised acids were 24, 51, 2, and 117 fmol, respectively. The method was successfully used for the determination of sorbic acid in a sample of Panadol™. The derivatisation of salicylic acid was not as successful, probably due to poor reaction efficiency. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Estimation of gas‐phase acidities of a series of dicarboxylic acids by the kinetic method
Authors: Ravi Kumar M. , Prabhakar S. , Nagaveni V. , Vairamani M. 
Published: March 2005

AbstractThe gas‐phase acidities (GA) of a series of dicarboxylic acids were estimated by applying the extended kinetic method. Proton‐bound heterodimeric anions [A−H+B−] of a series of dicarboxylic acids (A) and reference compounds (B) were generated under electrospray ionization conditions, and the dissociation of these cluster ions was examined using a triple‐quadrupole mass spectrometer. The mass‐selected proton‐bound heterodimeric anions were fragmented to yield individual monomer anions as the only product ions, and the abundance ratios of these anions were used to estimate the GA values of the dicarboxylic acids. The experiment was performed over a range of collision energies in order to more accurately determine GA values and to estimate the differences in the entropy of deprotonation of the dicarboxylic acids and the reference compounds. The trends in GA values obtained for the dicarboxylic acids could imply cyclization of the structures via intramolecular hydrogen bonding. The lower homologues show higher GA values than the higher homologues. The GA order for lower homologues is comparable with that of their solution‐phase pKa1 values. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Spatial distribution of bacterivorous nematodes in a Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN) site
Authors: Liang Wenju , Jiang Yong , Li Qi , Liu Yanjun , Wen Dazhong 
Published: March 2005

AbstractGeostatistics was applied to assess the spatial distribution of bacterivorous nematodes in a Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN) site in northeast China. A 42×30 m plot was divided into grids with 7×5 m spacing that included 49 sampling points. Soil samples were collected from depths of 0–10 cm and 10–20 cm. The results showed thatCephalobusandPanagrolaimuswere the most dominant bacterivores, which together represented 74 and 82% of total bacterivorous nematodes on average at depths of 0–10 cm and 10–20 cm, respectively. Within‐site variability was high for these nematode genera. Geostatistical analysis indicated that a major part of this variability was spatially dependent; variograms suggest that 55–100% of sample population variance was related to spatial autocorrelation over ranges of 9–91 m. The mean numbers of total bacterivores andPanagrolaimuspopulations were higher at 0–10 cm depth than at 10–20 cm depth. Between the two depths, different distribution patterns were found forPanagrolaimus, whereas similar patterns were found forCephalobus. The maps obtained by kriging well illustrated horizontal distribution patterns of bacterivorous nematodes at two depths at field scale.
The Behavioural Responses to Illness Questionnaire (BRIQ): a new predictive measure of medically unexplained symptoms following acute infection
Authors: SPENCE MEAGAN , MOSS-MORRIS RONA , CHALDER TRUDIE 
Published: March 2005

Background. The aim of this study was to design a self-report measure of behavioural responses during the acute phase of an illness, in order to assess the importance of these behaviours in the development of ongoing medically unexplained syndromes.Method. An initial pool of items derived from theoretical models and clinical observation, was piloted on a group of 312 university students to assess the factor structure of the scale and the best fit items. The scale was further validated in a second study of 758 patients who were experiencing Campylobacter gastroenteritis. At 3 months post-infection, patients were sent a second questionnaire assessing symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).Results. Principal components analysis of the items in the student sample yielded a four-factor solution, labelled all-or-nothing behaviour, limiting behaviour, emotional support seeking and practical support seeking. The factor structure was confirmed in the Campylobacter sample, and internal reliability was good. All-or-nothing behaviour was associated with IBS at 3 months post-infection. In contrast, limiting behaviour and practical support seeking at the time of infection appeared to be protective.Conclusion. The results suggest that this is a valid and reliable measure that can predict the development of a medically unexplained syndrome after acute infection. Overdoing things at the time of infection and then needing to rest for prolonged periods (all-or-nothing behaviour), appears to be a particular risk factor for the development of IBS. Targeted interventions at the time of infection may improve coping and prevent symptoms from becoming chronic.
Reversed diurnal variation in depression: associations with a differential antidepressant response, tryptophan:large neutral amino acid ratio and serotonin transporter polymorphisms
Authors: JOYCE PETER R. , PORTER RICHARD J. , MULDER ROGER T. , LUTY SUZANNE E. , McKENZIE JANICE M. , MILLER ALLISON L. , KENNEDY MARTIN A. 
Published: March 2005

Background. Although diurnal variation of mood is a widely recognized symptom of depression, the clinical, neurobiological and psychopharmacological significance of this symptom has not previously been reported.Method. A total of 195 depressed out-patients underwent a detailed clinical and neurobiological assessment, and were then randomized to treatment with either fluoxetine or nortriptyline.Results. Of the 195 depressed patients, 62 had a pattern of reversed diurnal variation (i.e. worse in the evening). Those with reversed diurnal variation had a poorer response to a serotonergic antidepressant, were less likely to have bipolar II disorder, had a higher tryptophan:large neutral amino acid ratio and had different allele frequencies of the polymorphisms in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter.Conclusions. These findings raise the possibility of serotonergic influence on diurnal variation, and that the symptom of reversed diurnal variation is of relevance to antidepressant prescribing.
Morphological brain changes associated with Schneider's first-rank symptoms in schizophrenia: an MRI study
Authors: SUZUKI M. , ZHOU S.-Y. , HAGINO H. , NIU L. , TAKAHASHI T. , KAWASAKI Y. , MATSUI M. , SETO H. , ONO T. , KURACHI M. 
Published: March 2005

Background. Schneider's first-rank symptoms involve an alienated feature of the sense of one's own mental or physical activity. To clarify the brain morphological basis for the production of these symptoms, volumes of the frontal and medial temporal regions and their clinical correlates were examined in patients with schizophrenia.Method. Twenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 44 age- and gender-matched healthy control subjects were included. All patients were in their psychotic episodes with definite Schneiderian symptoms, rated by using the Scale for Assessment of Positive Symptoms. Volumetric measurements of high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging were performed in the prefrontal area, cingulate gyrus, and precentral gyrus, and the medial temporal structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus.Results. Patients had significantly decreased volumes in the cingulate gray matter and the amygdala compared to controls. In the patient group, Schneiderian symptom severity showed significant inverse correlations with volumes of the right posterior cingulate gray matter and of the left anterior parahippocampal gyrus.Conclusions. Schneiderian symptoms may be associated with morphological abnormalities in the limbic-paralimbic regions such as the cingulate gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus, which possibly serve the self-monitoring function and the coherent storage and reactivation of information.
Active Control and Causation
Authors: Clarke Randolph 
Published: March 2005

AbstractNoncausal libertarian accounts allow that a basic free action may be uncaused and have no internal causal structure. Views of this type advanced by Carl Ginet and Hugh McCann are evaluated here. These views fail to provide adequate accounts of the active control that is exercised when one acts freely and of the reason-explanation of free actions. Any satisfactory account of these phenomena must invoke causation.
The Problem of Diminished Control
Authors: Clarke Randolph 
Published: March 2005

AbstractThis chapter examines the charge that the indeterminism required by standard event-causal libertarian accounts would diminish the control that is exercised in acting. The objection has been advanced with an ensurance argument and an argument from luck. Both arguments are rejected; nondeterministic causation of an action by its immediate causal antecedents need not diminish at all the type of control relevant to free action. This chapter further assesses the account of free will advanced by Robert Kane, which imposes certain special requirements meant to address the problem of diminished control. These special requirements provide no help; but, in any case, none is needed.
Agent Causation and Control
Authors: Clarke Randolph 
Published: March 2005

AbstractAgent-causal accounts aim to secure greater control than can be secured by any event-causal libertarian account. Assuming that all it requires is possible, an integrated agent-causal view succeeds at this goal and adequately characterizes free will. Such a view captures well the common idea that free agents are originators of their free actions. Responses are offered to Peter van Inwagen’s challenge to agent-causal views and to Galen Strawson’s argument that free will is impossible. A claim that free will requires downward causation—of a sort involving the supersession of microlevel laws—is rejected.
Substance and Cause
Authors: Clarke Randolph 
Published: March 2005

AbstractThe chief difficulty for agent-causal accounts lies in defending the notion of agent causation. Either of two types of realist account of causation can be drawn on to explicate the claim that enduring substances are among the causes of things. But there remains the objection that, although this claim is intelligible, it is necessarily false. Several objections to the possibility of substance causation are considered, and it is concluded that there are, on balance, good reasons to reject this possibility.
Nietzsche on Resentment, Love, and Pity
Authors: Solomon Robert C. 
Published: March 2005

Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss why resentment (ressentiment) is so important to Nietzsche’s theory and what is wrong with it. I also discuss Nietzsche on love and pity and his several metaphors of strength and weakness, masters and slaves, eagles and lambs, health and illness.
Nietzsche's Existentialism
Authors: Solomon Robert C. 
Published: March 2005

Abstract
Is Nietzsche an existentialist? He is often included in existentialism courses and collections. But Nietzsche’s views on freedom are by no means so clear (as, say, those of Kierkegaard and Sartre), and his celebration of fatalism (amor fati) seems to go against the existentialist celebration of freedom. In this chapter, I examine Nietzsche’s views on freedom and fatalism, and I argue that Nietzsche’s classic slogan, “Become Who You Are,” suggests a strong stance on responsibility as well as an intelligible acceptance of fatalism, largely based on the ancient philosopher Heraclitus.
Meditating on the Creatures in Early American Life and Letters
Authors: Gatta John 
Published: March 2005

Abstract
The longstanding European tradition of meditating on creatures of the phenomenal world carried both religious and ecological significance for New England Puritans, who were peculiarly disposed to ponder the relation between earth’s visible and invisible domains. This disposition is exemplified by the poetry of meditation composed by colonial writers such as Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet’s meditative poem “Contemplations” is interpreted ecocritically, so as to probe not only the spirituality of the world that the poet sets forth, but also the discretely material spirit of place that helped inspire her reflections. Outside the Puritan colonies, other forms of ecospirituality can be discerned in the Quaker-inspired prose writings of naturalist William Bartram and social reformer John Woolman. Both exponents of Middle Atlantic Quaker piety envisioned a divine love that encompasses animals as well as humans, and that thereby extends humanity’s ethical responsibility beyond social boundaries to the “brute creatures.”
Intimations of an Environmental Ethic in the Writings of Jonathan Edwards
Authors: Gatta John 
Published: March 2005

Abstract
Although the renowned Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards scarcely fits the conventional image of a nature writer, his work embodies a theology of Creation that has important implications for environmental ethics. As such, his ethical philosophy anticipates--in several surprising but instructive ways—the twentieth-century “land ethic” set forth by Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac. Edwards’s notion of “benevolence to Being in general,” as articulated in The Nature of True Virtue, is a theocentric ideal that resists the anthropocentric assumption that nature exists solely to fulfill human needs and desires. Edwards’s vision of Creation as an all-encompassing and sacred beauty thus anticipates the modern sense of “ecology” that likewise affirms the interactive unity of all living and nonliving things.
Variations on Nature
Authors: Gatta John 
Published: March 2005

Abstract
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace and incarnation. The holiness of gardening likewise informs writing of this period by women such as Celia Thaxter and Margaret Fuller. The religious intensity of Walt Whitman’s ecopoetic worldview, epitomized by “Song of Myself,” ranges from the astronomical heights to the lowly plants mentioned in section 5 of this poem. Unlike Whitman’s oceanic poems, Herman Melville’s portrayal of the sea in Moby-Dick exposes nature’s underlying savagery and vulturism—but also raises deep questions about the divinely inscrutable freedom of Creation embodied by the great white whale.
“Rare and Delectable Places”
Authors: Gatta John 
Published: March 2005

Abstract
Walden Pond, the obvious focal point of Thoreau’s worship and spiritual discovery, qualifies thereby as a sacred place in the author’s celebrated account of “where he lived.” Thoreau’s place-centered spirituality is both active and contemplative, with the contemplative dimension vividly conveyed through his description of morning meditation in the chapter “Sounds.” Thoreau, despite his elusive and inconsistent theology, sometimes confirms belief in a personal Deity and typically envisions nature as a divine Creation. In the famous sandbank cosmogony that appears at the climax of the chapter “Spring,” Thoreau combines a numinous vision of continuous creation with an evolutionary dynamic informed by recent scientific discoveries in biology, geography, and geology. Thoreau imagined nature’s wildness, which enables us to “witness our own limits transgressed,” as wedded thereby to our sense of the sacred.
Post-Darwinian Visions of Divine Creation
Authors: Gatta John 
Published: March 2005

Abstract
Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Darwinism had a varied impact on American sensibilities. John Muir, for example, studied science and accepted the transmutative premise of evolutionary theory--but retained a biblically colored piety that saw God’s presence inscribed “in magnificent capitals” at places like Yosemite. During this extended period, writings by Mary Austin and Black Elk reflect their encounters with versions of naturalistic piety lying outside Euro-American ethnic traditions. Still, the written form in which Black Elk expressed his ecological vision of holiness, as imaged in the great hoop of the Lakota nation, was decidedly influenced by his contact with non-Indian culture. Although Rachel Carson was a committed scientist whose work presupposed belief in organic evolution, her writing also reflects a robust spirituality founded upon reverence for life and for the mystery of things unseen.