This paper introduces corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a quantity‐setting duopoly with cross‐participation at ownership level. One firm is fully owned by its shareholder, who also owns a ...minority participation in the rival firm (controlling shareholder). We analyze the shareholders’ strategic choice of whether to engage their firms in CSR or not. We find that high levels of cross‐ownership discourage the controlling shareholder from engaging his/her firm in CSR. When the level of cross‐ownership is low enough, in equilibrium both firms care about CSR, but the controlling shareholder makes his/her firm less concerned with CSR than the shareholder who runs the rival firm. We also find that, contrary to the usual result, when firms are concerned with social issues the controlling shareholder obtains a lower income than the other shareholder.
It is unknown whether Torque Teno virus (TTV) DNA load monitoring could anticipate the development of infectious events in hematological patients undergoing treatment with small molecular targeting ...agents. We characterized the kinetics of plasma TTV DNA in patients treated with ibrutinib or ruxolitinib and assessed whether TTV DNA load monitoring could predict the occurrence of Cytomegalovirus (CMV) DNAemia or the magnitude of CMV‐specific T‐cell responses. Multicenter, retrospective, observational study, recruiting 20 patients treated with ibrutinib and 21 with ruxolitinib. Plasma TTV and CMV DNA loads were quantified by real‐time PCR at baseline and days +15, +30, +45, +60, +75, +90, +120, +150, and +180 after treatment inception. Enumeration of CMV‐specific interferon‐γ (IFN‐γ)‐producing CD8+ and CD4+ T‐cells in whole blood was performed by flow cytometry. Median TTV DNA load in ibrutinib‐treated patients increased significantly (p = 0.025) from baseline (median: 5.76 log10 copies/mL) to day +120 (median: 7.83 log10 copies/mL). A moderate inverse correlation (Rho = −0.46; p < 0.001) was found between TTV DNA load and absolute lymphocyte count. In ruxolitinib‐treated patients, TTV DNA load quantified at baseline was not significantly different from that measured after treatment inception (p ≥ 0.12). TTV DNA load was not predictive of the subsequent occurrence of CMV DNAemia in either patient group. No correlation was observed between TTV DNA loads and CMV‐specific IFN‐γ‐producing CD8+ and CD4+ T‐cell counts in either patient group. The data did not support the hypothesis that TTV DNA load monitoring in hematological patients treated with ibrutinib or ruxolitinib could be useful to predict either the occurrence of CMV DNAemia or the level of CMV‐specific T‐cell reconstitution; nevertheless, due to the small sample size, further studies involving larger cohorts are warranted to elucidate this issue.
Workface assessment – the process of determining the overall activity rates of onsite construction workers throughout a day – typically involves manual visual observations which are time-consuming ...and labor-intensive. To minimize subjectivity and the time required for conducting detailed assessments, and allowing managers to spend their time on the more important task of assessing and implementing improvements, we propose a new inexpensive vision-based method using RGB-D sensors that is applicable to interior construction operations. This is a particularly challenging task as construction activities have a large range of intra-class variability including varying sequences of body posture and time-spent on each individual activity. The skeleton extraction algorithms from RGB-D sequences produce noisy outputs when workers interact with tools or when there is a significant body occlusion within the camera's field-of-view. Existing vision-based methods are also limited as they can primarily classify “atomic” activities from RGB-D sequences involving one worker conducting a single activity. To address these limitations, our method includes three components: 1) an algorithm for detecting, tracking, and extracting body skeleton features from depth images; 2) a discriminative bag-of-poses activity classifier for classifying single visual activities from a given body skeleton sequence; and 3) a Hidden Markov Model to represent emission probabilities in the form of a statistical distribution of single activity classifiers. For training and testing purposes, we introduce a new dataset of eleven RGB-D sequences for interior drywall construction operations involving three actual construction workers conducting eight different activities in various interior locations. Our results with an average accuracy of 76% on the testing dataset show the promise of vision-based methods using RGB-D sequences for facilitating the activity analysis workface assessment.
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•A method to predict worker activities from long sequences of depth images.•The method provides activity crew-balance charts for up to six workers per sensor.•A new RGB-D dataset of drywall activities with ground truth is introduced.•An Average accuracy of 76% is reported for worker activity recognition.
Rodent models of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have been used over decades to study the immunopathogenesis of the disease and to explore intervention strategies. Nevertheless, mouse models of RA reach ...their limit when it comes to testing of new therapeutic approaches such as cell-based therapies. Differences between the human and the murine immune system make it difficult to draw reliable conclusions about the success of immunotherapies. To overcome this issue, humanized mouse models have been established that mimic components of the human immune system in mice. Two main strategies have been pursued for humanization: the introduction of human transgenes such as human leukocyte antigen molecules or specific T cell receptors, and the generation of mouse/human chimera by transferring human cells or tissues into immunodeficient mice. Recently, both approaches have been combined to achieve more sophisticated humanized models of autoimmune diseases. This review discusses limitations of conventional mouse models of RA-like disease and provides a closer look into studies in humanized mice exploring their usefulness and necessity as preclinical models for testing of cell-based therapies in autoimmune diseases such as RA.
The health benefits attributed to pomegranate have been associated with its high content in polyphenols, particularly ellagitannins. This is also the case for other ellagitannin-containing fruits and ...nuts including strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, walnuts, and muscadine grapes. The bioavailability of ellagitannins and ellagic acid is however very low. These molecules suffer extensive metabolism by the gut microbiota to produce urolithins that are much better absorbed. Urolithins circulate in plasma as glucuronide and sulfate conjugates at concentrations in the range of 0.2–20 μM. It is therefore conceivable that the health effects of ellagitannin-containing products can be associated with these gut-produced urolithins, and thus the evaluation of the biological effects of these metabolites is essential. Recent research, mostly based on in vitro testing, has shown preliminary evidence of the anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic, antiglycative, antioxidant, and antimicrobial effects of urolithins, supporting their potential contribution to the health effects attributed to pomegranate and ellagitannin-rich foods. The number of in vivo studies is still limited, but they show preventive effects of urolithins on gut and systemic inflammation that encourage further research. Both in vivo and mechanistic studies are necessary to clarify the health effects of these metabolites. Attention should be paid when designing these mechanistic studies in order to use the physiologically relevant metabolites (urolithins in gut models and their conjugated derivatives in systemic models) at concentrations that can be reached in vivo.
We investigated the role of regulatory focus on individuals' reactions to feedback on leadership skills in the context of small learning teams. A total of 285 students participated in a peer-feedback ...assessment process twice during their MBA program. Results show that promotion-focused individuals evaluate themselves at higher levels and receive higher peer ratings of team leadership than do prevention-focused individuals. Interestingly, we also found that regulatory focus has a moderating effect on satisfaction with the feedback process and on leadership improvement. Promotion-focused individuals were equally satisfied with positive and negative feedback but improved their leadership ratings after receiving positive feedback (high peer ratings). In contrast, prevention-focused individuals showed satisfaction only with positive feedback and showed no improvement in their leadership skills regardless of the type of feedback. We include implications of results for research on regulatory focus and feedback, as well as their practical implications for leadership development.
Intentional bacterial infections can produce efficacious antitumor responses in mice, rats, dogs, and humans. However, low overall success rates and intense side effects prevent such approaches from ...being employed clinically. In this work, we titered bacteria and/or the proinflammatory cytokine TNFα in a set of established murine models of cancer. To interpret the experiments conducted, we considered and calibrated a tumor-effector cell recruitment model under the influence of functional tumor-associated vasculature. In this model, bacterial infections and TNFα enhanced immune activity and altered vascularization in the tumor bed. Information to predict bacterial therapy outcomes was provided by pretreatment tumor size and the underlying immune recruitment dynamics. Notably, increasing bacterial loads did not necessarily produce better long-term tumor control, suggesting that tumor sizes affected optimal bacterial loads. Short-term treatment responses were favored by high concentrations of effector cells postinjection, such as induced by higher bacterial loads, but in the longer term did not correlate with an effective restoration of immune surveillance. Overall, our findings suggested that a combination of intermediate bacterial loads with low levels TNFα administration could enable more favorable outcomes elicited by bacterial infections in tumor-bearing subjects.
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Ecoepidemiological scenarios for Chagas disease transmission are complex, so vector control measures to decrease human-vector contact and prevent infection transmission are difficult to implement in ...all geographic contexts. This study assessed the geographic abundance patterns of two vector species of Chagas disease: Triatoma maculata (Erichson, 1848) and Rhodnius pallescens (Barber, 1932) in Latin America. We modeled their potential distribution using the maximum entropy algorithm implemented in Maxent and calculated distances to their niche centroid by fitting a minimum-volume ellipsoid. In addition, to determine which method would accurately explain geographic abundance patterns, we compared the correlation between population abundance and the distance to the ecological niche centroid (DNC) and between population abundance and Maxent environmental suitability. The potential distribution estimated for T. maculata showed that environmental suitability covers a large area, from Panama to Northern Brazil. R. pallescens showed a more restricted potential distribution, with environmental suitability covering mostly the coastal zone of Costa Rica and some areas in Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize and the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, northern Colombia, Acre, and Rondônia states in Brazil, as well as a small region of the western Brazilian Amazon. We found a negative slope in the relationship between population abundance and the DNC in both species. R. pallecens has a more extensive potential latitudinal range than previously reported, and the distribution model for T. maculata corroborates previous studies. In addition, population abundance increases according to the niche centroid proximity, indicating that population abundance is limited by the set of scenopoetic variables at coarser scales (non-interactive variables) used to determine the ecological niche. These findings might be used by public health agencies in Latin America to implement actions and support programs for disease prevention and vector control, identifying areas in which to expand entomological surveillance and maintain chemical control, in order to decrease human-vector contact.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Background
Ellis‐van Creveld syndrome (EvCS) is a chondroectodermal dysplasia caused by germline pathogenic variants in ciliary complex subunit 1 and 2 genes (EVC, EVC2) on chromosome 4p16.2. This ...disease has a broad phenotype, and there are few described phenotype–genotype correlations.
Methods
Ethical Compliance: Written informed consent was obtained from the parents. Here, we report a genetically confirmed Mexican patient with EvCS having two inherited pathogenic variants in trans in EVC2: c.1195C>T;2161delC.
Results
This patient allowed a genotypic–phenotypic comparison with another Mexican subject who presented a more attenuated phenotype; furthermore, our patient also presented cleft palate, a rarely reported feature.
Conclusion
Our case shows the importance of comparing functional hemizygosity between patient's phenotypes when they share a variant, and our case also supports the association of alterations in the palate as part of the EvCS phenotype.
We report a genetically confirmed Mexican patient with Ellis‐van Creveld syndrome (EvCS) having two inherited pathogenic variants in trans in EVC2: c.1195C>T;2161delC. This patient allowed a genotypic–phenotypic comparison with another Mexican patient who presented a more attenuated phenotype; furthermore, our patient also presented cleft palate, so our case also supports the association of alterations in the palate as part of the EvCS phenotype.
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