The starry sky has been a source of inspiration throughout human history. Astronomy has been a common element in all cultures and civilizations, being used to establish calendars, navigate and ...discover new lands, and drive numerous scientific and technical breakthroughs. This Review discusses how it is becoming increasingly difficult for professional and amateur astronomers to observe the night sky because of light pollution. Artificial light at night, radio interference, and the deployment of satellite constellations are all rapidly increasing and are having adverse impacts on astronomical observations, limiting scientific discoveries, cultural connections to the night sky, and opportunities presented by astrotourism. Potential mitigation strategies to preserve the night sky are discussed.
A domain-specific language for the specification of UCON policies Reina Quintero, Antonia M.; Pérez, Salvador Martínez; Varela-Vaca, Ángel Jesús ...
Journal of information security and applications,
February 2022, 2022-02-00, 2022-02, Letnik:
64
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Security policies constrain the behavior of all users of an information system. In any non-trivial system, these security policies go beyond simple access control rules and must cover more complex ...and dynamic scenarios while providing, at the same time, a fine-grained level decision-making ability. The Usage Control model (UCON) was created for this purpose but so far integration of UCON in mainstream software engineering processes has been very limited, hampering its usefulness and popularity among the software and information systems communities. In this sense, this paper proposes a Domain-Specific Language to facilitate the modeling of UCON policies and their integration in (model-based) development processes. Together with the language, an exploratory approach for policy evaluation and enforcement of the modeled policies via model transformations has been introduced. These contributions have been defined on top of the Eclipse Modeling Framework, the de-facto standard MDE (Model-Driven Engineering) framework making them freely available and ready-to-use for any software designer interested in using UCON for the definition of security policies in their new development projects.
•A domain-specific language for UCON policies is defined.•The domain-specific language is validated with a complex, running example.•Policy evaluation and enforcement are introduced by means of a model transformation framework.
Pneumocystis jirovecii in general population Medrano, Francisco J; Montes-Cano, Marco; Conde, Manuel ...
Emerging infectious diseases,
02/2005, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The possible presence of Pneumocystis among healthy adults was examined by detecting Pneumocystis jirovecii-specific DNA in prospectively obtained oropharyngeal wash samples from 50 persons without ...underlying lung disease or immunosuppression. Pneumocystis carriage, defined by detecting Pneumocystis DNA by nested polymerase chain reaction in 2 independent analyses plus successful mitochondrial large subunit ribosomal RNA typing by direct sequencing, was found in 20% of cases. All carriers were asymptomatic, anti-HIV negative, and had normal total lymphocyte and CD4+ cell counts. A second sample obtained in the 6-month follow-up was positive in 2 of 9 available carriers. Genotype analysis showed different polymorphisms; 85A/248C (40%) and 85C/248C (30%) were most frequently observed. This study provides the first evidence that P. jirovecii DNA can be frequently detected in the respiratory tract of immunocompetent adults, which agrees with the hypothesis that the general population could be a reservoir and source of this infection.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
Background
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients show an increased burden of atherosclerosis and high risk of cardiovascular events (CVEs). There are several biomarkers described as being ...associated with CVEs, but their combined effectiveness in cardiovascular risk stratification in CKD has not been tested. The objective of this work is to analyse the combined ability of 19 biomarkers associated with atheromatous disease in predicting CVEs after 4 years of follow-up in a subcohort of the NEFRONA study in individuals with different stages of CKD without previous CVEs.
Methods
Nineteen putative biomarkers were quantified in 1366 patients (73 CVEs) and their ability to predict CVEs was ranked by random survival forest (RSF) analysis. The factors associated with CVEs were tested in Fine and Gray (FG) regression models, with non-cardiovascular death and kidney transplant as competing events.
Results
RSF analysis detected several biomarkers as relevant for predicting CVEs. Inclusion of those biomarkers in an FG model showed that high levels of osteopontin, osteoprotegerin, matrix metalloproteinase-9 and vascular endothelial growth factor increased the risk for CVEs, but only marginally improved the discrimination obtained with classical clinical parameters: concordance index 0.744 (95% confidence interval 0.609–0.878) versus 0.723 (0.592–0.854), respectively. However, in individuals with diabetes treated with antihypertensives and lipid-lowering drugs, the determination of these biomarkers could help to improve cardiovascular risk estimates.
Conclusions
We conclude that the determination of four biomarkers in the serum of CKD patients could improve cardiovascular risk prediction in high-risk individuals.
Hearing loss in Ménière's disease (MD) is associated with loss of spiral ganglion neurons and hair cells. In a guinea pig model of endolymphatic hydrops, nitric oxide synthases (NOS) and oxidative ...stress mediate loss of spiral ganglion neurons. To test the hypothesis that functional variants of NOS1 and NOS2A are associated with MD, we genotyped three functional variants of NOS1 (rs41279104, rs2682826, and a cytosine-adenosine microsatellite repeat in exon 1f) and the CCTTT repeat in the promoter of NOS2A gene (rs3833912) in two independent MD sets (273 patients in total) and 550 controls. A third cohort of American patients was genotyped as replication cohort for the CCTTT repeat. Neither allele nor genotype frequencies of rs41279104 and rs2682826 were associated with MD, although longer alleles of the cytosine-adenosine microsatellite repeat were marginally significant (corrected p = 0.05) in the Mediterranean cohort but not in a second Galicia cohort. Shorter numbers of the CCTTT repeat in NOS2A were significantly more frequent in Galicia controls (OR = 0.37 CI, 0.18-0.76, corrected p = 0.04), but this finding could not be replicated in Mediterranean or American case-control populations. Meta-analysis did not support an association between CCTTT repeats and risk for MD. Severe hearing loss (>75 dB) was also not associated with any functional variants studied. Functional variants of NOS1 and NOS2A do not confer susceptibility for MD.
PDF
