1,805 research outputs found
The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author-function
No full textThis thesis is situated within the comparatively recent developments of Web 2.0 and the emergence of interactive WikiMedia, and explores the mode of authorship within a Read/Write culture compared to that of a Read/Only tradition. The hypothesis of this study is that the role of the audience has become merged with the author, and as such, represents new functions and attributes, distinct from a more conventional concept of authorship, in which the roles of audience and author are more separate. Read/Write and participatory culture, as defined by this study, is focused on collaboration, and includes the influences of D.I.Y. culture, Open-Source practices and the production of text by multiple authors. Multi-authorship presents a re-thinking of several concepts which support the notion of the individual author, since the focus of multi-authorship is not on attribution and ownership of a finished text, but on the continued malleability of a text. Modes of multi-authorship, demonstrated in the use of the pseudonyms Alan Smithee and Karen Eliot, represent declarative authors whose names signify multiple origins, whilst concurrently indicating a distinct body of work. The function of these names form an important context to this study, since primary research involves the construction of an experimental mode of multi-authorship utilising WikiMedia technology and the interaction of thirty nine participants, who are invited to create a body of work under the collective pseudonym Karen Karnak. The data generated by this experiment is analysed using aspects of Michel Foucault's author-function to identify and determine power structures inherent in the WikiMedia context. The interplay of power structures, including concepts such as identity, ownership and the body of work, affect the resulting mode of authorship and contribute to the construction of Karen Karnak, suggesting further areas of research into the emerging multi-author
FSD-FS
No full textFSD-FS is a publicly-available database of human labelled sound events for few-shot learning. It spans across 143 classes obtained from the AudioSet Ontology and contains 43805 raw audio files collected from the FSD50K. FSD-FS is curated at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London.
Citation
If you use the FSD-FS dataset, please cite our paper and FSD50K.
@article{liang2022learning,
title={Learning from Taxonomy: Multi-label Few-Shot Classification for Everyday Sound Recognition},
author={Liang, Jinhua and Phan, Huy and Benetos, Emmanouil},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.08952},
year={2022}
}
@ARTICLE{9645159, author={Fonseca, Eduardo and Favory, Xavier and Pons, Jordi and Font, Frederic and Serra, Xavier}, journal={IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing}, title={FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events}, year={2022}, volume={30}, number={}, pages={829-852}, doi={10.1109/TASLP.2021.3133208}}
About FSD-FS
FSD-FS is an open database for multi-label few-shot audio classification containing 143 classes drawn from the FSD50K. It also inherits the AudioSet Ontology. FSD-FS follows the ratio 7:2:1 to split classes into base, validation, and evaluation sets, so there are 98 classes in the base set, 30 classes in the validation set, and 15 classes in the evaluation set (More details can be found in our paper).
LICENSE
FSD-FS are released in Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Same as FSD50K, each clip has its own license as defined by the clip uploader in Freesound, some of them requiring attribution to their original authors and some forbidding further commercial reuse. For more details, ones can refer to the link.
FILES
FSD-FS are organised in the structure:
root
|
└─── dev_base
|
└─── dev_val
|
└─── eval
REFERENCES AND LINKS
[1] Gemmeke, Jort F., et al. "Audio set: An ontology and human-labeled dataset for audio events." 2017 IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 2017. [paper] [link]
[2] Fonseca, Eduardo, et al. "Fsd50k: an open dataset of human-labeled sound events." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 30 (2021): 829-852. [paper] [code
Tissue architecture of the anterior pituitary showing the epithelial cell cords with hormonal cells and folliculo-stellate (FS) cells, the capillaries (C) with fenestrated endothelial cells (EC) and connective tissue (CT)
No full text<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "Paracrinicity: The Story of 30 Years of Cellular Pituitary Crosstalk"</p><p></p><p>Journal of Neuroendocrinology 2008;20(1):1-70.</p><p>Published online Jan 2008</p><p>PMCID:PMC2229370.</p><p>© 2008 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd</p> The cell cords are a cluster of endocrine cells surrounding an aggregate of FS cells that make a follicle (F). FS cells also make a meshwork between the hormonal cells, making junctions among each other (thick lines) and extending foot processes (f) ending on the basal membrane (BM) in the periphery of the cord. The cords are surrounded by BM, which may have extensions between some cells. A second BM surrounds the capillary vessels and between these two some connective tissue resides. Small and larger lacunae are present between hormonal cells. Paracrine substances may circulate from cell-to-cell but also could be released in these lacunae and reach more remote places. FS cells make gap junctions mostly among each other, but occasionally also with some hormonal cells. Hormonal cells can make interdigitations with FS cells (small arrows) to favour cell-to-cell communication. Adapted from Vila-Porcile ()
Mycolactone Diffuses into the Peripheral Blood of Buruli Ulcer Patients - Implications for Diagnosis and Disease Monitoring.
No full textBACKGROUND: Mycobacterium ulcerans, the causative agent of Buruli ulcer (BU), is unique among human pathogens in its capacity to produce a polyketide-derived macrolide called mycolactone, making this molecule an attractive candidate target for diagnosis and disease monitoring. Whether mycolactone diffuses from ulcerated lesions in clinically accessible samples and is modulated by antibiotic therapy remained to be established.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDING: Peripheral blood and ulcer exudates were sampled from patients at various stages of antibiotic therapy in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Total lipids were extracted from serum, white cell pellets and ulcer exudates with organic solvents. The presence of mycolactone in these extracts was then analyzed by a recently published, field-friendly method using thin layer chromatography and fluorescence detection. This approach did not allow us to detect mycolactone accurately, because of a high background due to co-extracted human lipids. We thus used a previously established approach based on high performance liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. By this means, we could identify structurally intact mycolactone in ulcer exudates and serum of patients, and evaluate the impact of antibiotic treatment on the concentration of mycolactone.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our study provides the proof of concept that assays based on mycolactone detection in serum and ulcer exudates can form the basis of BU diagnostic tests. However, the identification of mycolactone required a technology that is not compatible with field conditions and point-of-care assays for mycolactone detection remain to be worked out. Notably, we found mycolactone in ulcer exudates harvested at the end of antibiotic therapy, suggesting that the toxin is eliminated by BU patients at a slow rate. Our results also indicated that mycolactone titres in the serum may reflect a positive response to antibiotics, a possibility that it will be interesting to examine further through longitudinal studies
Adaptive pulse compression for transform-limited 15-fs high-energy pulse generation
No full textWe demonstrate the use of a deformable-mirror pulse shaper, combined with an evolutionary optimization algorithm, to correct high-order residual phase aberrations in a 1-mJ, 1-kHz, 15-fs laser amplifier. Frequency resolved optical gating measurements reveal that the output pulse duration of 15.2 fs is within our measurement error of the theoretical transform limit. This technique significantly reduces the pulse duration and the temporal prepulse energy of the pulse while increasing the peak intensity by 26%. It is demonstrated, for what is believed to be the first time, that the problem of pedestals in laser amplifiers can be addressed by spectral-domain correction
Combined Inflammatory and Metabolic Defects Reflected by Reduced Serum Protein Levels in Patients with Buruli Ulcer Disease
No full textBuruli ulcer is a skin disease caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans that is spreading in tropical countries, with major public health and economic implications in West Africa. Multi-analyte profiling of serum proteins in patients and endemic controls revealed that Buruli ulcer disease down-regulates the circulating levels of a large array of inflammatory mediators, without impacting on the leukocyte composition of peripheral blood. Notably, several proteins contributing to acute phase reaction, lipid metabolism, coagulation and tissue remodelling were also impacted. Their down-regulation was selective and
persisted after the elimination of bacteria with antibiotic therapy. It involved proteins with various functions and origins, suggesting that M. ulcerans infection causes global and chronic defects in the host’s protein metabolism. Accordingly, patients had reduced levels of total serum proteins and blood urea, in the absence of signs of malnutrition, or functional failure of liver or kidney. Interestingly, slow healers had deeper metabolic and coagulation defects at the start of antibiotic therapy. In addition to providing novel insight into Buruli ulcer pathogenesis, our study therefore identifies a unique
proteomic signature for this disease
Self-compression of 4.9 µm pulses to sub-40 fs with 2 mJ energy in Zinc Sulfide
No full textNonlinear self-compression of few-cycle multi-mJ pulses at 4.9 µm in ZnS is presented. 80 fs input pulses are compressed to 37 fs with 2.1 mJ energy at a 1 kHz repetition rate. © 2024 The Author(s
The long-term effectiveness of efavirenz-based combination antiretroviral therapy, the impact of pharmacogenomics and pharmacokinetic interaction of artemisinin-based antimalarial therapy on efavirenz exposure among Ghanaian HIV-infected patients
No full textDr. Fred Stephen Sarfo, The long-term effectiveness of efavirenz-based combination antiretroviral therapy, the impact of pharmacogenomics and pharmacokinetic interaction of artemisinin-based antimalarial therapy on efavirenz exposure among Ghanaian HIV-infected patients. PhD dissertation, Durham University, January 2013.
Introduction: In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV treatment is initiated with combination of antiretroviral medications comprising of a backbone of either stavudine or zidovudine plus lamivudine with a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor of either efavirenz or nevirapine. Efavirenz is highly efficacious, durable and well tolerated. The risk for toxicity of efavirenz is determined by several factors including single nucleotide polymorphisms in the hepatic enzymes responsible for its metabolism and concurrently administered medications such as antimalarials, which share common metabolic pathways. The aims of this dissertation are to assess the long-term effectiveness of efavirenz-based antiretroviral therapy and the impact of pharmogenomics and pharmacokinetic interactions of artemisinin-based antimalarial therapy on efavirenz exposure among Ghanaian HIV-infected patients.
Methods: The effectiveness of efavirenz- compared with nevirapine-based antiretroviral therapy was assessed retrospectively in nearly 4000 patients starting treatment between 2004 and 2010. The main outcome measure was a composite of toxicity, disease progression and attrition, and CD4 count changes. A prospective pharmacokinetic study of artesunate and efavirenz was conducted among 22 HIV-infected and 21 controls. Plasma efavirenz and artesunate/ dihydroartemisinin concentrations were measured using validated and standardised methods. Genotyping for single nucleotide polymorphisms in CYP2B6 G516T, T983C; CYP2A6*9B, UGT2B7*735 and *802 as well as CAR rs2307424 were performed for 800 patients with real-time polymerase chain reaction with allelic discrimination.
Results: Antiretroviral therapy was associated with robust CD4 increases. Efavirenz was comparable with nevirapine in composite outcomes but better tolerated. Artesunate was well tolerated when administered to HIV-infected patients on efavirenz. Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the CYP2B6 G516T and T983C were associated with increased plasma efavirenz concentrations.
Conclusions/Recommendation: Among this Ghanaian cohort, both efavirenz and nevirapine-based antiretroviral therapy were effective. The better tolerability of efavirenz compared with nevirapine means it can be safely used as the preferred first line non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor in sub-Saharan Africa
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