Anti-β₂-glycoprotein-I (anti-β₂GPI) were demonstrated to be pathogenic in the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). However, they can be detected in patients with no features of APS, especially those ...affected by systemic autoimmune diseases (SAD), and so in healthy children. It has been suggested that anti-β₂GPI against domain 1 (D1) associate with thrombosis, while those recognising domain 4/5 (D4/5) are present in non-thrombotic conditions.
To evaluate the fine specificity of anti-β₂GPI in adults and infants.
Three groups were examined-group A: 57 1-year-old healthy children born to mothers with SAD; group B: 33 children with atopic dermatitis; group C: 64 patients with APS.
were selected based on positive anti-β₂GPI IgG results. Serum samples were tested for anti-β₂GPI IgG D1 and D4/5 using research ELISAs containing recombinant β₂GPI domain antigens.
Children (A and B) displayed preferential IgG reactivity for D4/5, whereas patients with APS were mainly positive for D1. No thrombotic events were recorded in groups A and B.
The specificity for D4/5 suggests that anti-β₂GPI IgG production in children born to mothers with SAD is a process neither linked to systemic autoimmunity nor related to the maternal autoantibody status. This unusual fine specificity might, at least partially, account for the 'innocent' profile of such antibodies.
Currently, 3 antiphospholipid assays are widely used clinically lupus anticoagulant (LAC), anticardiolipin (aCL), and anti-ß2-glycoprotein I (anti-ß2-GPI). LAC is the most specific assay, conferring ...the highest risk of thrombosis and pregnancy loss, but it cannot be validly performed in an anticoagulated patient. We investigated the usefulness of antiphosphatidylserine/prothrombin (anti-PS/PT) and its association with thrombosis. Anti-PS/PT is strongly associated with the presence of LAC. We also studied the association of IgA antiphospholipid isotypes and specific domains of ß2-GPI with thrombosis in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).
Stored samples from patients with SLE, with and without past thrombosis, were assayed for antibodies to the whole ß2-GPI protein (IgG/IgM/IgA), to ß2-GPI domain 1 (IgG), to ß2-GPI domain 4/5 (IgA), aCL (IgG/IgM/IgA), and anti-PS/PT (IgG, IgM, and IgG/M). LAC was detected using the dilute Russell's viper venom time (dRVVT) with confirmatory testing.
Anti-PS/PT IgG and IgG/M and anti-ß2-GPI IgG, IgM, and IgA were highly associated with a history of LAC by dRVVT (p < 0.0001). For all thrombosis, of the traditional ELISA assays, anti-ß2-GPI IgA, IgG, and aCL IgA were most associated. Anti-PS/PT IgG and IgG/M had a similar magnitude of association to the traditional ELISA. For venous thrombosis, of the traditional ELISA, anti-ß2-GPI (IgG and IgA), anti-PS/PT (IgG and IgG/M), and aCL IgA were associated. Again, anti-PS/PT (IgG and IgG/M) had the same magnitude of association as the traditional ELISA. For stroke, significant association was seen with anti-ß2-GPI IgA D4/5.
In anticoagulated patients, where LAC testing is not valid, anti-PS/PT, either IgG or IgG/IgM, might serve as useful alternative tests to predict a higher risk of thrombosis. Anti-PS/PT antibodies were associated with all thrombosis and with venous thrombosis. IgA isotypes in secondary antiphospholipid syndrome are associated with thrombosis. Anti-ß2-glycoprotein domain 1 was not shown to be associated with thrombosis in SLE.
Modern IDEs such as Eclipse offer static views of the source code, but such views ignore information about the runtime behavior of software systems. Since typical object-oriented systems make heavy ...use of polymorphism and dynamic binding, static views will miss key information about the runtime architecture. In this paper, we present an approach to gather and integrate dynamic information in the Eclipse IDE with the goal of better supporting typical software maintenance activities. By means of a controlled experiment with 30 professional developers, we show that for typical software maintenance tasks, integrating dynamic information into the Eclipse IDE yields a significant 17.5 percent decrease of time spent while significantly increasing the correctness of the solutions by 33.5 percent. We also provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of our approach.
Autoantibodies to the non-collagen region (NC1) of the alpha-3 subunit of collagen IV represent a serological hallmark in the diagnosis of Goodpasture's syndrome (GPS). The objective of our study was ...to carefully analyze the performance characteristics of a novel anti-glomerular basement membrane (GBM) chemiluminescence immunoassay (CIA).
Sera from patients with GPS (n = 90) were collected from four clinical centers. Samples from different disease groups (n = 397) and healthy individuals (n = 400) were used as controls. All samples were tested for anti-GBM antibodies by a rapid, random access CIA (QUANTA Flash™ GBM). Most of the samples were also tested using other methods including different commercial anti-GBM IgG assays and research assays for anti-GBM IgA and IgM.
The sensitivity and specificity of the novel CIA was 95.6% 95% confidence interval (CI) 89.0-98.8% and 99.6% (95% CI 98.9-99.9%), respectively. Receiver operating characteristic analysis showed good discrimination between GPS patients and controls. The area under the curve was 0.98 (CI 0.96-1.0). The three anti-GBM antibody-positive samples from the control group were from two healthy individuals and one human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patient. All three individuals had low levels of anti-GBM antibodies 20, 24 and 25 chemiluminescent unit (CU), cutoff 20 CU. When the results of the new CIA were compared to other methods, good agreement was observed: 95.8% (kappa = 0.92) versus EliA™ GBM, 97.4% (kappa = 0.95) versus both BINDAZYME™ Anti-GBM and QUANTA Lite® GBM. Anti-GBM IgA was detectable in low concentrations in patients with GPS and was associated with anti-GBM IgG but was less useful in discriminating GPS patients and controls. No discrimination was found for anti-GBM IgM.
The novel QUANTA Flash™ GBM CIA demonstrated good sensitivity and specificity and had good agreement with other methods. Our data confirm that ∼5% of patients with GPS do not have detectable levels of anti-GBM antibodies.
From 2009 until 2012 the project “Watershed Management of Forest Land in Beijing, Restoration of Small Water Bodies (SWBR)” was implemented, combining Close to Nature Forest Management and ...Restoration of Small Water Bodies. The targets were to improve flood control, to enhance the ecological conditions by copying nature and to support the recreational value of small water bodies, all in cooperation with people living there. The efficiency of each project was proofed by comparison of biological and hydro-morphological assessment before the projects started and 2–3 years after they were finished. The results confirmed the ecological improvements of the restored river sections and showed the achievements. Guidelines to assess the biological and hydro-morphological status of rivers were developed and there are plans to introduce them as Beijing Standards. Planning and implementation of measures, based on experiences in Central Europe, will be documented in a handbook.
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Language-integrated query (LINQ) frameworks offer a convenient programming abstraction for processing in-memory collections of data, allowing developers to concisely express declarative queries using ...general-purpose programming languages. Existing LINQ frameworks rely on the well-defined type system of statically-typed languages such as C
#
or Java to perform query compilation and execution. As a consequence of this design, they do not support dynamic languages such as Python, R, or JavaScript. Such languages are however very popular among data scientists, who would certainly benefit from LINQ frameworks in data analytics applications.
In this work we bridge the gap between dynamic languages and LINQ frameworks. We introduce DynQ, a novel query engine designed for dynamic languages. DynQ is language-agnostic, since it is able to execute SQL queries in a polyglot language runtime. Moreover, DynQ can execute queries combining data from multiple sources, namely in-memory object collections as well as on-file data and external database systems. Our evaluation of DynQ shows performance comparable with equivalent hand-optimized code, and in line with common data-processing libraries and embedded databases, making DynQ an appealing query engine for standalone analytics applications and for data-intensive server-side workloads.
El jesuita Oswald von Nell Breuning (1890 1991) fue uno de los pensadores que contribuyeron al origen del sistema de Economía social de mercado en Alemania. Este estudio analiza la aportación de Nell ...Breuning a la justicia social y a los derechos de los trabajadores en el periodo que abarca de 1948 a 1965, una etapa clave en la historia europea y especialmente en la de la República federal alemana. Nell Breuning formó parte del Consejo científico asesor del Ministerio federal alemán de Economía en la posguerra. Su aportación durante los años 1948 a 1965, centrada en la coparticipación de los trabajadores en los beneficios empresariales y en la cogestión para la toma de decisiones en la empresa fue esencial para la configuración de la Economía social de mercado. El estudio ahora posible de las actas del consejo científico asesor del Ministerio de Economía, cuya inspiración se debe directamente a Nell Breuning, permite una comprensión y un análisis más profundos de sus aportaciones teórico prácticas. La principal de éstas fue un modelo de distribución de la renta, hasta hoy uno de los temas más presentes en el debate económico. Como es conocido, existen tres formas de acceso a la renta: a través del trabajo, del capital o del suelo. La propiedad de los medios de producción en Alemania estaba concentrada en pocas manos. El hecho de que grandes capas de la sociedad fuesen ajenas a la institución de la propiedad, junto con el triunfo de las ideas comunistas en la Rusia soviética, ponía en cuestión la concepción de la propiedad privada así como la paz social. Ante esta situación y ante la propuesta comunista de repartición de la propiedad de los bienes de producción, Nell Breuning propuso el modelo que partía de una concepción iusnaturalista de la propiedad privada basada en la participación de los trabajadores en los beneficios con el fin de generar una capacidad de ahorro y así reinvertir como copropietarios dichos ahorros en la propiedad de la empresa. Finalmente las aportaciones del modelo Nell Breuning se ponen en relación con el pensamiento social cristiano.
Phosphatidylserine-dependent antiprothrombin antibodies (aPS/PT) were strongly correlated with the presence of lupus anticoagulant showing a high specificity for the diagnosis of antiphospholipid ...syndrome. However, the main criticism for the clinical applicability of aPS/PT testing is the lack of reproducibility of the results among laboratories. In this study, we measured IgG and IgM aPS/PT using our original in-house enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) and commercial ELISA kits to assess the assay performance and to evaluate the accuracy of aPS/PT results. The study included 111 plasma samples collected from patients and stored at our laboratory for aPS/PT assessment. Sixty-one samples were tested for IgG aPS/PT using two assays: (1) aPS/PT in-house ELISA and (2) QUANTA Lite™ aPS/PT IgG ELISA kit (INOVA Diagnostics, Inc., USA). Fifty samples were evaluated for IgM aPS/PT using two assays: (1) aPS/PT in-house ELISA and (2) QUANTA Lite™ aPS/PT IgM ELISA kit (INOVA Diagnostics). Ninety-eight percent of samples yielded concordant results for IgG aPS/PT and 82 % for IgM aPS/PT. There was an excellent agreement between the IgG aPS/PT assays (Cohen
κ
= 0.962) and moderate agreement between the IgM aPS/PT assays (
κ
= 0.597). Statistically significant correlations in the aPS/PT results were obtained from both IgG and IgM aPS/PT assays (
r
= 0.749,
r
= 0.622,
p
< 0.001, respectively). In conclusion, IgG and IgM detection by ELISA is accurate. The performance of aPS/PT is reliable, and concordant results can be obtained using different ELISA methods.
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Big-data systems have gained significant momentum, and Apache Spark is becoming a de-facto standard for modern data analytics. Spark relies on SQL query compilation to optimize the execution ...performance of analytical workloads on a variety of data sources. Despite its scalable architecture, Spark's SQL code generation suffers from significant runtime overheads related to data access and de-serialization. Such performance penalty can be significant, especially when applications operate on human-readable data formats such as CSV or JSON.
In this paper we present a new approach to query compilation that overcomes these limitations by relying on run-time profiling and dynamic code generation. Our new SQL compiler for Spark produces highly-efficient machine code, leading to speedups of up to 4.4x on the TPC-H benchmark with textual-form data formats such as CSV or JSON.
Language-integrated query (LINQ) frameworks offer a convenient programming abstraction for processing in-memory collections of data, allowing developers to concisely express declarative queries using ...popular programming languages. Existing LINQ frameworks rely on the type system of statically typed languages such as C
♯
or Java to perform query compilation and execution. As a consequence of this design, they do not support dynamic languages such as Python, R, or JavaScript. Such languages are however very popular among data scientists, who would certainly benefit from LINQ frameworks in data-analytics applications. The gap between dynamic languages and LINQ frameworks has been partially bridged by the recent work DynQ, a novel query engine designed for dynamic languages. DynQ is language-agnostic, since it is able to execute SQL queries on all languages supported by the GraalVM platform. Moreover, DynQ can execute queries combining data from multiple sources, namely in-memory object collections as well as on-file data and external database systems. The evaluation of DynQ shows performance comparable with equivalent hand-optimized code, and in line with common data-processing libraries and embedded databases, making DynQ an appealing query engine for standalone analytics applications and for data-intensive server-side workloads. In this work, we extend DynQ addressing the problem of optimizing high-throughput workloads in the context of fluent APIs. In particular, we focus on applications which make use of data-processing libraries mostly for executing many queries on small batches of datasets, e.g., in micro-services, as well as applications which make use of data-processing libraries within recursive functions. For this purpose, we present
reusable compiled queries
, a novel approach to query execution which allows reusing the same dynamically compiled code for different queries. As we show in our evaluation, thanks to reusable compiled queries, DynQ can also speed up applications that heavily use data-processing libraries on small datasets using a typical fluent API.
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