The Power of a Hymn

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. Growing up I attended a Roman Catholic parish that was relatively small. I knew the people that went to my parish my whole life. The comfortable atmosphere at my church was created from a lifetime of Sundays. When I came to Fisher my freshman year, I would see familiar faces at mass in Murphy Chapel. Upon graduating from Fisher in May of 2010, I decided to take an internship at Disney World in Orlando. For the first time I was in an unfamiliar place where I didn‟t know a soul. I had a difficult time finding a church because they were scarce. Orlando is a tourist area, so there are mainly attractions like malls, restaurants and amusement park and few living necessities like churches, post offices and Laundromats

STUDY OF A PARABOLIC PROBLEM IN A CONICAL DOMAIN

In this paper we consider the heat equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions in a conical domain. We look for a sufficient condition on the lateral surface of the cone in order to have the optimal regularity of the solution in an anisotropic Sobolev space when the right hand side of the equation is in a Lebesgue space

Ectosomes as immunomodulators

Considerable progress has been made in recognizing microvesicles as important mediators of intercellular communication rather than irrelevant cell debris. Microvesicles released by budding directly from the cell membrane surface (i.e., ectocytosis) either spontaneously or in response to various stimuli are called shed vesicles or ectosomes. Ectosomes are rightside-out vesicles with cytosolic content, and they expose phosphatidylserine in the outer leaflet of their membrane. Depending on their cellular origin, ectosomes have been associated with a broad spectrum of biological activities. In the light of recent findings, we now know that ectosomes derived from polymorphonuclear leukocytes, erythrocytes, platelets, and tumor cells have profound effects on the innate immune system, as well as on the induction of the adaptive immunity, globally reprogramming cells such as macrophages or dendritic cells toward an immunosuppressive and possibly tolerogenic phenotype. Although the effects observed in the circulation are mainly procoagulant and pro-inflammatory, ectosomes might be anti-inflammatory/immunosuppressive in local inflammatio

Study of a Complete Abstract Differential Equation of Elliptic Type with Variable Operator Coefficients, I

Differential Equation of Elliptic Type with Variable Operator Coefficients, I Angelo FAVINI, Rabah LABBAS, Keddour LEMRABET, and Boubaker-Khaled SADALLAH Universit` degli Studi di Bologna a Laboratoire de Math´ ematiques Appliqu´ ees Dipartimento di Matematica Universit´ du Havre e Piazza di Porta S. U.F.R Sciences et Techniques, B.P 540 Donato 5, 40126 Bologna -- Italy 76058 Le Havre -- France [email protected] [email protected] Laboratoire EDP et Hist. Maths Lab oraoire AMNEDP Ecole Normale Sup´ erieure Facult´ des Maths, USTHB e 16050 Kouba, Alger -- Algeria BP 32, El Alia, Bab Ezzouar 16111 Alger -- Algeria [email protected] [email protected] Received: May 16, 2007 Accepted: August 30, 2007The aim of this first work is the resolution of an abstract complete second order differential equation of elliptic type with variable operator coefficients set in a small length interval. We obtain existence, uniqueness and maximal regularity results under some appropriate differentiability assumptions combining those of Yagi [13] and Da Prato-Grisvard [6]. An example for the Laplacian in a regular domain of R³ will illustrate the theory. A forthcoming work (Part II) will complete the present one by the study of the Steklov-Poincaré operator related to this equation when the length δ of the interval tends to zero

Production of Specific Monoclonal Antibodies to Salmonella typhi Flagellin and Possible Application to Immunodiagnosis of Typhoid Fever

Four murine monoclonal antibodies (MAbs)to Salmonella typhi flagellin were produced. These MAbs did not react with eight other enterobacterial strains tested: Salmonella enteritidis, Salmonella typhimurium, Salmonella paratyphi A, Escherichia coli, Shigella flexneri, Shigella sonnei, Yersinia enterocolitica, and Campylobacter jejuni. Allfour MAbscross-reactedwith Salmonella muenchen flagellin indicating specificityfor d antigenic flagellar epitope. One MAb(C4) was selected to developa double antibody sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect S. typhi flagellin in serum samples. By use of this assay S. typhi flagellar antigen was detected in 95.5% of serum samples from patients with positive hemoculture for S. typhi, in 93.6% of samples from patients with positive serodiagnosis of typhoid fever, in 26% of samples collected from patients who were initially hemoculture-positive for S. typhi and who had undergone 7-8 d of chemotherapy, in 8.5% of samples from healthy persons from an endemic area, and in no samples from healthy persons from a nonendemic area. The presence of high levelsof flagellin antibody titers did not interfere with the antigen detection. The detection of S. typhi flagellar antigen in patient serum may have practical value for rapid diagnosis of typhoid feve

High prevalence of anti-C1q antibodies in biopsy-proven active lupus nephritis

Background. Anti-C1q antibodies (anti-C1q) have been shown to correlate positively with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) nephritis. Several clinical studies indicated a high negative predictive value, suggesting that active lupus nephritis is rarely seen in patients with no anti-C1q. However, the true prevalence of anti-C1q at the time of active lupus nephritis has not been well established. The aim of this study was to determine prospectively the prevalence of anti-C1q in proven active lupus nephritis at the time of the renal biopsy. Methods. In this prospective multi-centre study, we investigated adult SLE patients undergoing renal biopsy for suspected active lupus nephritis. Serum samples were taken at the time of the biopsy and analysed for the presence of anti-C1q in a standardized way. The activity of lupus nephritis was classified according to the renal histology. Biopsies were also analysed for the presence of glomerular IgG, C1q and C3 deposition. Results. A total of 38 patients fulfilling at least 4/11 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria for the diagnosis of SLE were included. Out of this, 36 patients had proliferative (class II, III or IV) and two had class V lupus nephritis. All but one patient with proliferative lupus nephritis were positive for anti-C1q (97.2%) compared with the 35% of control SLE patients with inactive lupus nephritis and 25% of SLE patients without lupus nephritis ever. All patients were positive for glomerular C1q (36/36) and 37/38 patients had glomerular IgG deposits. Anti-C1q strongly decreased during successful treatment. Conclusions. Anti-C1q have a very high prevalence in biopsy-proven active lupus nephritis, thus a negative test result almost excludes active nephritis. The data support the hypothesis of a pathogenic role of anti-C1q in lupus nephriti

Business zakat compliance behaviour in Algeria and its determinants

Throughout Islamic history, zakat has eradicated poverty. However, several Islamic nations, including Algeria, still experience high rates of poverty alongside modest zakat collection statistics. In Algeria, neither the amount of zakat collected from zakat payers nor the level of compliance among business owners is satisfactory. Thus, this study aims to investigate the determinants of business zakat compliance behaviour among Algerian business owners. The research framework of this study incorporated Social Cognitive Theory into the Theory of Planned Behaviour as well as examining the effect of political instability and the moderating effect of knowledge as Algeria faces an unstable political environment. The study utilized a survey questionnaire of 575 active business owners from seven Algerian governorates, out of which 344 were suitable for analysis. The hypotheses were tested using the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings indicated that attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, religiosity, past behaviour, and political instability had a significant direct influence on intention, as well as a mediation influence of intention on zakat compliance. Additionally, the findings indicated that knowledge moderated the relationship between attitude and political instability with zakat intention. Overall, the novelty of this study is a pioneer in providing empirical evidence to the scanty literature, especially on the applicability of the Social Cognitive Theory and the Theory of Planned Behaviour in zakat field, as a viable framework for a better understanding of zakat compliance. The findings are crucial for policymaking by the zakat authority, government and future researchers’ efforts to comprehend the zakat compliance behaviour of business owners

Are LLMs Good Cryptic Crossword Solvers?

Cryptic crosswords are puzzles that rely not only on general knowledge but also on the solver's ability to manipulate language on different levels and deal with various types of wordplay. Previous research suggests that solving such puzzles is a challenge even for modern NLP models. However, the abilities of large language models (LLMs) have not yet been tested on this task. In this paper, we establish the benchmark results for three popular LLMs -- LLaMA2, Mistral, and ChatGPT -- showing that their performance on this task is still far from that of humans

Smiles, Bananas, and Love

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph: English is the only language I can speak fluently. So one might ask how I spent the last year of my life greeting my students with “Wallagay.