Justifying public advocacy by charities: when does political activity become charitable?

Conference Theme: Democratization, Marketization, and the Third SectorIn common law jurisdictions, it has been a well-entrenched rule that charitable organizations must not substantially engage in political activities. Apart from party politics, these include, in American law, “attempt[s] to influence legislation” and in English law, the even broader formulation of “advocacy to change law or policy” ...postprin

16-µJ pulse energy, picosecond, narrow-linewidth master oscillator power amplifier using direct amplification

We present a gain-switched-diode-seeded 1034.5nm master oscillator power amplifier, employing direct amplification through standard commercial Yb3+-doped fibres to generate 15.6µJ-pulse-energy, 126kW-peak-power, picosecond pulses with 3dB spectral bandwidth of 0.87nm

A targeted gene panel that covers coding, non-coding and short tandem repeat regions improves the diagnosis of patients with neurodegenerative diseases

Genetic testing for neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) is highly challenging because of genetic heterogeneity and overlapping manifestations. Targeted-gene panels (TGPs), coupled with next-generation sequencing (NGS), can facilitate the profiling of a large repertoire of ND-related genes. Due to the technical limitations inherent in NGS and TGPs, short tandem repeat (STR) variations are often ignored. However, STR expansions are known to cause such NDs as Huntington\u27s disease and spinocerebellar ataxias type 3 (SCA3). Here, we studied the clinical utility of a custom-made TGP that targets 199 NDs and 311 ND-associated genes on 118 undiagnosed patients. At least one known or likely pathogenic variation was found in 54 patients; 27 patients demonstrated clinical profiles that matched the variants; and 16 patients whose original diagnosis were refined. A high concordance of variant calling were observed when comparing the results from TGP and whole-exome sequencing of four patients. Our in-house STR detection algorithm has reached a specificity of 0.88 and a sensitivity of 0.82 in our SCA3 cohort. This study also uncovered a trove of novel and recurrent variants that may enrich the repertoire of ND-related genetic markers. We propose that a combined comprehensive TGPs-bioinformatics pipeline can improve the clinical diagnosis of NDs

Effect modifications of smoking on risk of mortality associated with influenza

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Influenza is well known to cause heavy disease burden in both temperate and tropical/subtropical regions. Although smoking has been found to increase susceptibility to influenza infection, its role in modifying the mortality risk associated with influenza remains unexplored. This study examined the effect modifications of cigarette smoking on influenza-associated mortality in a cohort of older …postprin

Plasma amyloid beta peptides and oligomers antibodies in Alzheimer's disease

INTRODUCTION: Various forms of amyloid beta (Aβ) including Aβ peptides, oligomers, protofibrils and fibrils are thought to be pathogenic in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The exact pathophysiological role of endogenous Aβ autoantibodies (Ab) in healthy subjects and AD patients are uncertain. Potential protective role ...published_or_final_versio

Carbon monoxide and stroke: A time series study of ambient air pollution and emergency hospitalizations

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Effect of lifestyle factors on risk of mortality associated with influenza in elderly people

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Modeling Spatial Relations of Human Body Parts for Indexing and Retrieving Close Character Interactions

Retrieving pre-captured human motion for analyzing and synthesizing virtual character movement have been widely used in Virtual Reality (VR) and interactive computer graphics applications. In this paper, we propose a new human pose representation, called Spatial Relations of Human Body Parts (SRBP), to represent spatial relations between body parts of the subject(s), which intuitively describes how much the body parts are interacting with each other. Since SRBP is computed from the local structure (i.e. multiple body parts in proximity) of the pose instead of the information from individual or pairwise joints as in previous approaches, the new representation is robust to minor variations of individual joint location. Experimental results show that SRBP outperforms the existing skeleton-based motion retrieval and classification approaches on benchmark databases

Syntactic skills in sentence reading comprehension among Chinese elementary school children

The present study examined the role of syntactic skills for reading comprehension in Chinese. Two hundred and seventy-two Chinese children were tested on their phonological processing, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and literacy skills at Grades 1 and 2. Hierarchical multiple regression results showed that syntactic skills, in terms of word order, connective usage, and knowledge of morphosyntactic structure (measured by an oral cloze task) in Grade 1, significantly predicted sentence reading comprehension in Grade 2 after controlling for the children's age, IQ, and word level reading-related cognitive skills in Grade 1, and word reading in Grade 2. As in alphabetic languages, syntactic skills are essential for reading comprehension in Chinese. The unique roles of individual syntactic skills for understanding sentences in Chinese are discussed. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.postprin

Ambient carbon monoxide and the risk of hospitalization due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Data from recent experimental and clinical studies have indicated that lower concentrations of inhaled carbon monoxide might have beneficial antiinflammatory effects. Inhaled carbon monoxide has the potential to be a therapeutic agent for chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD). However, population-based epidemiologic studies of environmentally relevant carbon monoxide exposure have generated mixed findings. We conducted a time-series study in Hong Kong to estimate the association of short-term exposure to ambient carbon monoxide with emergency hospitalizations for COPD. We collected daily emergency hospital admission data and air pollution data from January 2001 to December 2007. We used log-linear Poisson models to estimate the associations between daily hospital admissions for COPD and the average daily concentrations of carbon monoxide while controlling for the traffic-related copollutants nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μm. Results showed that ambient carbon monoxide was negatively associated with the risk of hospitalizations for COPD. After adjustment for levels nitrogen dioxide or particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μm, the negative associations of carbon monoxide with COPD hospitalizations became stronger. The risk estimates were similar for female and male subjects. In conclusion, short-term exposure to ambient carbon monoxide was associated with a decreased risk of hospitalization for COPD, which suggests that carbon monoxide exposure provides some acute protection of against exacerbation of COPD.postprin