julilili42/papers huggingface dataset:
Role of PDK1 in Regulation of Gastric Acid Secretion
2008-01-01

Pharmacological inhibition of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) has previously been shown to enhance basal gastric acid secretion. Signaling of PI-3-kinase includes activation of the phosphoinositide dependent kinase PDK1. We thus hypothesized that PDK1 may influence gastric acid secretion. In the present study gastric acid secretion in mice expressing ñ20 % of PDK1 (pdk1(hm)) was compared to gastric acid secretion in their wild type littermates (pdk1(wt)). According to BCECF-fluorescence cytosolic pH in isolated gastric glands was similar in pdk1(hm) and in pdk1(wt) mice. Na(+)-independent pH recovery (DeltapH/min) following an ammonium pulse, which reflects K(+)/H(+)-ATPase activity, was however, significantly faster in pdk1(hm) than in pdk1(wt) mice. In both genotypes, DeltapH/min was abolished in the presence of K(+)/H(+)-ATPase inhibitor omeprazole (100 microM). Increase of local K(+)-concentrations to 35 mM (replacing Na(+)/NMDG) significantly increased DeltapH/min in both, pdk1(hm) and pdk1(wt) mice, and abrogated the differences between genotypes. Similarly, treatment with 5 microM forskolin as well as stimulation of protein kinase C with phorbolester phorbol 12 myristate 13 acetate (100 nM) enhanced DeltapH/min to almost identical values in pdk1(hm) and in pdk1(wt)mice. Protein kinase A inhibitor H89 (50 nM) decreased DeltapH/min in pdk1(hm) to values similar to those in pdk1(wt). In conclusion, deficient activity of PDK1 leads to a marked increase of gastric acid secretion. The present observations thus disclose a novel element in the regulation of gastric H(+) secretion.
Induction of Gliosarcoma and Atypical Meningeoma 13 Years after Radiotherapy of Residual Pilocytic Astrocytoma in Childhood
2008-01-01

&lt;i&gt;Background:&lt;/i&gt; Malignant transformation of pilocytic astrocytomas in children is rare and often linked to previous radiotherapy. &lt;i&gt;Methods and Results:&lt;/i&gt; We report a patient who underwent subtotal resection of a right temporal and insular pilocytic astrocytoma at age 8 in 1988 followed by high-dose radiation therapy. A local recurrence, grade WHO III, with signs of focal sarcomatous transformation, was subtotally resected 13 years later in 2001. A new and fast growing right frontal meningeoma, grade WHO II, was removed in 2003. In 2004 a second glioma recurrence was partially resected, this time graded gliosarcoma WHO IV. The patient was treated thereafter with repeated courses of temozolamide. Another tumor mass reduction in 2005 was followed by stereotactic radiotherapy. Nevertheless, he deceased 3 months later. &lt;i&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/i&gt; Most of the reported cases of malignant transformation of pilocytic astrocytomas received radiation therapy beforehand. Irradiation-induced meningeomas in children are known to occur, however not following radiotherapy of low-grade hemispheric gliomas. The presented case illustrates why adjuvant radiotherapy of residual pilocytic astrocytoma in children is not recommended anymore. For children who underwent radiotherapy in the past, we recommend MRI surveillance on a yearly basis far beyond 10 years, even in those who seem to have achieved total remission.
Activity- and taxonomy-based knowledge representation framework
2008-01-01

Elaborations of Competence-based Knowledge Space Theory (CbKST) incorporate skills that refer to the conceptual information of the domain as well as to the activities learners are expected to perform in this context. Thus, they are suggested as a formal knowledge representation framework that is able to take into account current activity-oriented pedagogical trends in designing effective Units of Learning (UoL). The broad array of required behaviour to be achieved by learners demands a search for instruments like taxonomies that allow for conceptualising activities, and consequently, skills and learning objectives. It is shown that the availability of such a taxonomy-based framework may be utilised in order to enhance the access and interface functionalities of learning systems. In particular, the selection of proper learning units and the delivery of effective feedback mechanisms on the teaching and learning progress are facilitated.
Inclusive Global Institutions for a Global Political Economy
2008-01-01

Our world is changing in many ways which are most commonly described as globalization. Meaning more than just a trend towards economic liberalization and integration, today's 'thick' globalization can be observed in terms of the intensification of economic as well as social and political interactions across borders such as the sharing of knowledge and opinions through new means of communication, the deepening impact that localized events have on global trends, the establishment of worldwide standards in science and technology, and the transnational production of goods and services (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton 1999: 21f.; Zürn 1998).1
Structural MR Imaging Studies of the Brain in Children: Issues and Opportunities
2008-01-01

Structural magnetic resonance imaging has gained widespread attention over the last decade, especially following the advances in automated image processing algorithms. It is an interesting approach that, among other applications, allows investigating and describing normal and disturbed human brain development. With this overview, we aim to point out special aspects that may arise when imaging children, with regard to study design, data acquisition and data processing. We conclude with shortly addressing the potential insights to be gained from such studies.
Clustering players for load balancing in virtual worlds
2008-01-01

In current Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) the distribution of load is not distributed dynamically. But players tend to concentrate in certain regions of the game world and cause overload conditions. Therefore we propose the use of structured Peer-to-Peer technology for the server infrastructure of the MMOGs to improve the reliability and scalability. Previous work segmented the game work into rectangular areas but often split a group of players to different servers. This work presents a cluster-based P2P approach, which is able to dynamically adapt to the current state of the game and handle uneven distributions of players. We show through simulation, also with traces from real online games, that the cluster-based approach performs better than the previous P2P-based system.
ResqMi - a Versatile Algorithm and Software for Resequencing Microarrays.
2008-01-01

Resequencing microarrays are a common tool for fast monitoring of individual genetic variations. Applications include diagnosis of genetic and infectious diseases and SNP prediction. Base calling is the crucial step in the analysis of resequencing data. All current base calling algorithms produce ambiguous calls on parts of the sequence. Therefore, proper data handling, editing and visualization as well as revised calling algorithms are generally necessary for successful data interpretation. We present a base calling algorithm that uses a model-based approach using intensity comparisons and region-wise conformance assessment, as well as an algorithm to revise uncalled positions. The calling algorithm is shown to have call rates comparable to ABACUS, the currently most commonly used method. Both algorithms combined however can considerably increase the calling rate. We also present a new open source software called ResqMi, short for Resequencing using Microarrays, which focuses on the efficient and user-friendly analysis, visual inspection and easy manual editing of resequencing microarray data. Both algorithms are implemented as plugins for ResqMi. ResqMi is available at http://www-ps.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/resqmi
Resistance in Malignant Tumors: Can Resistance Assays Optimize Cytostatic Chemotherapy?
2008-01-01

The frequent resistance of malignant tumors to chemotherapy documents the fact that numerous patients are uselessly traumatized by highly toxic drugs. Investigations into this resistance have shown that many different mechanisms exist which can abolish the antitumor action of chemotherapeutics. So far, no safe method has been found to counteract this resistance. To date, the only way to avoid harm by an ineffective chemotherapeutic is to refrain from its use when resistance to it is detected. The present survey reports on the available assays that diagnose resistance reliably; sensitivity tests are excluded as being unreliable. Resistance assays are still not fully recognized in hospitals, despite the fact that they are able to optimize chemotherapy by eliminating treatment that is ineffective and merely harmful. Since the number of chemotherapeutics will increase enormously in the future, pharmacological cancer treatment cannot dispense with resistance assays.
Towards SLA-based optimal workload distribution in SANs
2008-01-01

Storage area networks (SANs) connect storage devices to servers over fast network interconnects. We consider the problem of optimal SAN configuration with the goal of meeting service level agreements (SLAs) for server processes while retaining flexibility for future changes. Our approach proceeds in two stages, by setting up pseudo-Boolean constraint problems and solving them with an off-the-shelf solver. First, we give an algorithm for assigning storage devices to applications running on the SANpsilas hosts. This algorithm tries to balance the workload as evenly as possible over all storage devices. Our second algorithm takes these assignments and computes the interconnections (data paths) that are necessary to achieve the desired configuration while respecting redundancy (safety)requirements in the SLAs. Again, this algorithm tries to balance the workload of all connections and devices in proportion to their capacity. Thus, our network configurations respect all SLAs and provide flexibility for future changes by avoiding bottlenecks on storage devices or switches.
Conspiracy of Silence: How the "Old Boys" of American Intelligence Shielded SS General Karl Wolff from Prosecution
2008-01-01

This article examines the circumstances surrounding the escape from prosecution of SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, one of the central SS figures in the Mediterranean Theater during World War II. Key to his evasion of justice was his role in “Operation Sunrise”—negotiations conducted by high-ranking American, Swiss, and British officials in violation of the Western Allies' agreements with the Soviet Union—for the surrender of German forces in Italy. After 1945, these officials, including most notably Allen W. Dulles, shielded Wolff from prosecution in order to prevent information about the negotiations from coming out. The details had to be kept secret, they believed, in order to avoid a confrontation with Stalin as the Cold War took shape. New evidence suggests that the Western Allies not only failed to ensure cooperation between their respective national war crimes prosecution organizations, but in certain cases even obstructed justice by withholding evidence.
Real versus Financial Barriers to Multinational Activity
2008-01-01

Recent literature on multinational firms has stressed the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. However, firms typically also need external finance to finance the costs of market entry. In addition to productivity-related real barriers, financial constraints may thus restrict market entry. Building on a model of multinational firms facing real and financial barriers to exporting and FDI, we provide empirical evidence on the importance of these barriers. We find that, in addition to productivity, financial factors at the affiliate and at the parent level affect firms’ foreign activities, both along the intensive and the extensive margin.
Delaunay ends of constant mean curvature surfaces
2008-01-01

Abstract The generalized Weierstrass representation is used to analyze the asymptotic behavior of a constant mean curvature surface that arises locally from an ordinary differential equation (ODE) with a regular singularity. We prove that a holomorphic perturbation of an ODE that represents a Delaunay surface generates a constant mean curvature surface which has a properly immersed end that is asymptotically Delaunay. Furthermore, that end is embedded if the Delaunay surface is unduloidal.
Collective Atomic Recoil Lasing and Superradiant Rayleigh Scattering in a high-Q ring cavity
2008-01-01

Cold atoms in optical high-Q cavities are an ideal model system for long-range interacting particles. The position of two arbitrary atoms is, independent on their distance, coupled by the back-scattering of photons within the cavity. This mutual coupling can lead to collective instability and self-organization of a cloud of cold atoms interacting with the cavity fields. This phenomenon (CARL, i.e. Collective Atomic Recoil Lasing) has been discussed theoretically for years, but was observed only recently in our lab. The CARL-effect is closely linked to superradiant Rayleigh Scattering, which has been intensely studied with Bose-Einstein condensates in free space. By adding a resonator the coherence time of the system, in which the instability occurs, can be strongly enhanced. This enables us to observe cavity-enhanced superradiance with both Bose-Eisntein condensed and thermal clouds and allows us to close the discussion about the role of quantum statistics in superradiant scattering.
Facile Synthesis of Model Indazolo[2,1-c][1,3,4]benzotriazepine-5,13-diones
2008-01-01

In basic media, 2-aminobenzoic acids (5) react with 2-[N-(1-carboxyphenyl)]hydrazonoyl chlorides (6, 7) (precursors of the reactive nitrile imine 1,3-dipolar species) to afford good yields of the corresponding 2-[N'-(1-carboxyphenyl-2-amino)hydrazino]benzoic acids (8a-d, 9a).The latter acyclic adducts, in the presence of 1,1'-carbonyldiimidazole (CDI), undergo two consecutive lactamizations involving both activated carboxyl groups and the suitably located hydrazino-NH partners, to deliver the respective indazolo[2,1-c]-[1,3,4]benzotriazepin-5,13-diones (10a-d, 11a).Structural assignments for these novel tetracyclic products are based on analytical and spectral (IR, MS, NMR) data, and confirmed by single crystal X-ray structure determination for 10a.
A New Water Mite (Acari, Hydrachnidia, Sperchontidae) From The Himalaya Mountains (Nothern India)
2008-01-01

A New Water Mite (Acari, Hydrachnidia, Sperchontidae) From The Himalaya Mountains (Nothern India) A water mite Sperchon ivonae Pesic et Gerecke, sp. n. (Acari, Hydrachnidia, Sperchontidae) from a stream in the Himalaya Mountains (Himachal Pradesh State, Northern India) is described. Type material is deposited in the collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum Basel.
Visualization of Auxin Gradients in Embryogenesis
2008-01-01

Embryogenesis in Arabidopsis thaliana depends on the proper establishment and maintenance of local auxin accumulation. In the course of elucidating the connections between developmental progress and auxin distribution, several techniques have been developed to investigate spatial and temporal distribution of auxin response or accumulation in Arabidopsis embryos. This chapter reviews and describes two independent methods, the detection of the activity of auxin responsive transgenes and immunolocalization of auxin itself.
Phosphatidylinositol-3-Kinase Regulates Mast Cell Ion Channel Activity
2008-01-01

Stimulation of the mast cell IgE-receptor (FcepsilonRI) by antigen leads to stimulation of Ca(2+) entry with subsequent mast cell degranulation and release of inflammatory mediators. Ca(2+) further activates Ca(2+)-activated K(+) channels, which in turn provide the electrical driving force for Ca(2+) entry. Since phosphatidylinositol (PI)-3-kinase has previously been shown to be required for mast cell activation and degranulation, we explored, whether mast cell Ca(2+) and Ca(2+)-activated K(+) channels may be sensitive to PI3-kinase activity. Whole-cell patch clamp experiments and Fura-2 fluorescence measurements for determination of cytosolic Ca(2+) concentration were performed in mouse bone marrow-derived mast cells either treated or untreated with the PI3-kinase inhibitors LY-294002 (10 muM) and wortmannin (100 nM). Antigen-stimulated Ca(2+) entry but not Ca(2+) release from the intracellular stores was dramatically reduced upon PI3-kinase inhibition. Ca(2+) entry was further inhibited by TRPV blocker ruthenium red (10 muM). Ca(2+) entry following readdition after Ca(+)-store depletion with thapsigargin was again decreased by LY-294002, pointing to inhibition of store-operated channels (SOCs). Moreover, inhibition of PI3-kinase abrogated IgE-stimulated, but not ionomycin-induced stimulation of Ca(2+)-activated K(+) channels. These observations disclose PI3-kinase-dependent regulation of Ca(2+) entry and Ca(2+)-activated K(+)-channels, which in turn participate in triggering mast cell degranulation.
Revisiting the impact of different annotation schemes on PCFG parsing
2008-01-01

Recent parsing research has started addressing the questions a) how parsers trained on different syntactic resources differ in their performance and b) how to conduct a meaningful evaluation of the parsing results across such a range of syntactic representations. Two German treebanks, Negra and TüBa-D/Z, constitute an interesting testing ground for such research given that the two treebanks make very different representational choices for this language, which also is of general interest given that German is situated between the extremes of fixed and free word order. We show that previous work comparing PCFG parsing with these two treebanks employed PARSEVAL and grammatical function comparisons which were skewed by differences between the two corpus annotation schemes. Focusing on the grammatical dependency triples as an essential dimension of comparison, we show that the two very distinct corpora result in comparable parsing performance.
Surgical approach in patients with T4 bladder cancer as primary treatment: Disaster or option with improved quality of life
2008-01-01

Primary cystectomy for T4 bladder cancer is a technically feasible approach that is associated with a tolerable therapy-related morbidity/mortality. Additionally, a satisfactory clinical outcome is observed even in a substantial number of elderly patients.
An update on the medical therapy of advanced metastatic renal cell carcinoma
2008-01-01

The effectiveness of multikinase inhibitors in first- and second-line therapy of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) has been evaluated in various clinical studies. Initial results indicate an increased response rate and a prolonged progression-free survival compared with cytokine-containing therapeutic approaches. The new multitargeted kinase inhibitors sorafenib (Nexavar/BAY 43-9006) and sunitinib (Sutent/SUO 11248) interfere mainly with vascular endothelial growth factor and platelet-derived growth factor pathways. Recently, temsirolimus, a specific inhibitor of mammalian target of rapamycin, demonstrated activity in RCC patients with poor prognosis. This review discusses the effectiveness of the most frequently used substances for systemically progressive RCC in consideration of the currently available clinical data.
Knowledge Communication with Shared Databases
2008-01-01

Addressing knowledge communication with shared databases, this chapter focuses on an asynchronous, many-to-many type of computer-mediated communication (CMC). After an introduction, which characterizes this kind of CMC and provides definitions, various aspects are discussed that influence people’s behavior in knowledge communication with shared databases. This presentation focuses on psychological rather than on technological factors. The first aspect presented is the influence of anonymity and identifiability, followed by the impact of metaknowledge. Next, costs and bonus systems, and then feedback and guidelines are discussed. Other aspects which are considered are group size and participant personality. For each of these influencing factors, underlying theoretical approaches as well as empirical results are presented. Subsequently, these considerations and findings are examined with respect to their practical applications. In conclusion, future trends in database-oriented knowledge communication are discussed.
Secondary Hormonal Manipulation
2008-01-01

Patients with advanced prostate cancer under primary androgen deprivation therapy will practically all develop progression, often associated with an asymptomatic increase in prostate-specific antigen. Recent reports are demonstrating an increased use of androgen deprivation therapy as primary or neoadjuvant treatment; however, meager clinical evidence supports the use of such treatment regimens for localized prostate cancer, except in patients with high-risk or locally advanced prostatic disease. Fortunately, the latter tumors might still be prone to some kind of secondary treatment to block androgen receptors in a primary, secondary or tertiary fashion. Secondary hormonal manipulations for affected patients include antiandrogen withdrawal, second-line antiandrogens, direct adrenal androgen inhibitors, estrogens and progestins. We discuss the emerging concept of secondary hormonal manipulation on the basis of the current literature and demonstrate prospective alternative treatment modalities.
A note on the ballistic limit of random motion in a random potential
2008-01-01

It has been shown that certain types of random walks in random potentials and Brownian motion in Poissonian potentials undergo a phase transition from sub-ballistic to ballistic behavior when the strength of the underlying drift is increased. The ballistic behavior has been manifested by indicating a limiting area for the normalized motion. In the present article, we provide a refined description of this limiting area with a further development for the case of rotation invariant Poissonian potentials.
Selforganization of character behavior by mixing of learned movement primitives.
2008-01-01

The real-time synthesis of natural looking human movements is a challenging task in computer graph-ics and robotics. While dynamical systems provide the possibility to parameterize behavior in a flexi-ble and adaptive way, the reconstruction of details of human movements with such systems is a chal-lenge due to the large number of involved degrees of freedom. We present an approach for the synthe-sis of realistic human full-body movements in real-time that is based on the learning of motion primi-tives, or synergies, from motion capture data apply-ing a novel blind source separation algorithm. By application of kernel methods we map such com-ponents onto low-dimensional dynamical systems that can be iterated in real-time, and which are in-tegrated in a stable overall system architecture. We demonstrate how this model can be integrated with other key elements of computer animation systems, such as style morphing, synchronization with ex-ternal rhythms or navigation. The performance of our approach was validated by self-organization of complex behaviors like dancing. 1