Search results for "C [POLY I]"
showing 10 items of 30703 documents
The value of synthetic linear epitope analogues of La/SSB for the detection of autoantibodies to La/SSB; specificity, sensitivity and comparison of m…
1998
SUMMARY In a previous study it was shown that La/SSB contains four linear epitopes, p147–154, p291–302, p301–318 and p349–364. The aim of the present study was to investigate the value of the synthetic epitope analogues of the La/SSB autoantigen for the detection of antibodies to La/SSB, in comparison with recombinant La and fragments of this protein. A total of 122 sera with anti-La/SSB activity, from patients with primary Sjögren's syndrome (pSS) or systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), were tested in various peptide-based assays. In addition, 62 sera from pSS or SLE patients with other autoantibody specificities and 95 sera from healthy individuals were used as controls. The autoantibody s…
Contributions of mean and shape of blood pressure distribution to worldwide trends and variations in raised blood pressure: A pooled analysis of 1018…
2018
Background: Change in the prevalence of raised blood pressure could be due to both shifts in the entire distribution of blood pressure (representing the combined effects of public health interventions and secular trends) and changes in its high-blood-pressure tail (representing successful clinical interventions to control blood pressure in the hypertensive population). Our aim was to quantify the contributions of these two phenomena to the worldwide trends in the prevalence of raised blood pressure. Methods: We pooled 1018 population-based studies with blood pressure measurements on 88.6 million participants from 1985 to 2016. We first calculated mean systolic blood pressure (SBP), mean dia…
Information Integration, Coordination Failures, and Quality of Prescribing
2020
Poor information flows hamper coordination, potentially leading to suboptimal decisions in health care. We examine the effects of a nationwide policy of information integration on the quality of prescribing. We use the rollout of an electronic prescribing system in Finland and prescription-level administrative data. We find no effect on the probability of co-prescribing harmful drug combinations in urban regions. In rural regions, this probability reduces substantially, by 35 percent. The effect is driven by prescriptions from unspecialized physicians and from multiple physicians. Improving the local information environment thus enhances coordination and narrows differences in the quality o…
Coexistence of hidden attractors and multistability in counterexamples to the Kalman conjecture
2019
The Aizerman and Kalman conjectures played an important role in the theory of global stability for control systems and set two directions for its further development – the search and formulation of sufficient stability conditions, as well as the construction of counterexamples for these conjectures. From the computational perspective the latter problem is nontrivial, since the oscillations in counterexamples are hidden, i.e. their basin of attraction does not intersect with a small neighborhood of an equilibrium. Numerical calculation of initial data of such oscillations for their visualization is a challenging problem. Up to now all known counterexamples to the Kalman conjecture were const…
Simultaneous optimization of harvest schedule and measurement strategy
2013
In many recent studies, the value of forest inventory information in the harvest scheduling has been examined. Usually only the profitability of measuring simultaneously all the stands in the area is examined. Yet, it may be more profitable to concentrate the measurement efforts to some subset of them. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that stochastic optimization can be used for defining the optimal measurement strategy simultaneously with the harvest decisions. The results show that without end-inventory constraints, it was most profitable to measure the stands that were just below the medium age. Measuring the oldest stands was not profitable at all. It turned out to be profitable t…
Generalizability and Simplicity as Criteria in Feature Selection: Application to Mood Classification in Music
2011
Classification of musical audio signals according to expressed mood or emotion has evident applications to content-based music retrieval in large databases. Wrapper selection is a dimension reduction method that has been proposed for improving classification performance. However, the technique is prone to lead to overfitting of the training data, which decreases the generalizability of the obtained results. We claim that previous attempts to apply wrapper selection in the field of music information retrieval (MIR) have led to disputable conclusions about the used methods due to inadequate analysis frameworks, indicative of overfitting, and biased results. This paper presents a framework bas…
Citizens' Communication Habits and Use of ICTs During Crises and Emergencies
2014
In this article, citizens’ communication habits and use of information and communication technologies during crises and emergencies are discussed from the perspective of community resilience. The topic is approached qualitatively by exploring citizens’ perceptions, and the data were gathered by means of focus groups in storm-prone and flood-prone areas in Finland. The results indicate that citizens consider emergency communication to be mostly unidirectional: from authorities to the public. However, because crises are often complex and fast developing, cooperation among response organizations and citizen groups is needed to coproduce safety and in adapting to changing situations. Organizati…
An easy approach to epistemology and ontology in computing theses
2013
In many research fields---notably social sciences but also in those fields where design, experiment-based science, and social sciences are mixed---researchers must often describe their epistemological and ontological commitments in research reports. The research literature describes those commitments in various ways, often grouped under research paradigms such as positivism, post-positivism, and constructivism, and described as "world views." This paper presents the bare bones of the ontological and epistemological questions in scientific practice. Ontologically speaking, subject matters can be mind-dependent or mind-independent. Epistemologically speaking, elements of research may be more …
A Cooperative Coevolution Framework for Parallel Learning to Rank
2015
We propose CCRank, the first parallel framework for learning to rank based on evolutionary algorithms (EA), aiming to significantly improve learning efficiency while maintaining accuracy. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed sub-problems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. We implement CCRank with three EA-based learning to rank algorithms for demonstration. E…
Anomaly Detection Algorithms for the Sleeping Cell Detection in LTE Networks
2015
The Sleeping Cell problem is a particular type of cell degradation in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks. In practice such cell outage leads to the lack of network service and sometimes it can be revealed only after multiple user complains by an operator. In this study a cell becomes sleeping because of a Random Access Channel (RACH) failure, which may happen due to software or hardware problems. For the detection of malfunctioning cells, we introduce a data mining based framework. In its core is the analysis of event sequences reported by a User Equipment (UE) to a serving Base Station (BS). The crucial element of the developed framework is an anomaly detection algorithm. We compare perfor…