INTRODUCTION.............................................................. 205 SMOKING, AIR POLLUTION AND IMMUNE FUNCTION-ANIMAL MODELS .. 205 In Vitro Effects on Leukocytes ................. ............... 205 In Vivo Effects on Leukocytes ................................ 206 Resistance to Challenge In Vivo ................... ............. 205 Humoral and Cellular Immune Responses .............

A hstruct -The concept of a super value node is developed to estend the theor? of influence diagrams to allow dynamic programming to be performed within this graphical modeling framework. The operations necessa? to exploit the presence of these nodes and efficiently analyze the models are developed. The key result is that by reprewnting value function separability in the structure of the graph ...

Popular (re)use of third-party open-source software (OSS) is evidence of the impact of hosting repositories like maven on software development today. Updating libraries is crucial, with recent studies highlighting the associated vulnerabilities with aging OSS libraries. The decision to migrate to a newer library can range from trivial (security threat) to complex (assessment of work required to...

OBJECTIVE Abnormal vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) proliferation is involved in the development of vascular diseases. However, the mechanisms by which insulin exerts this effect are not completely known. We hypothesize that microRNAs might be involved in insulin-induced VSMC proliferation. METHODS VSMC proliferation was determined by [H]-thymidine incorporation; microRNAs were determined b...

Weighted voting games (WVGs) are a class of cooperative games that capture settings of group decision making in various domains, such as parliaments or committees. Earlier work has revealed that the effective decision making power, or influence of agents in WVGs is not necessarily proportional to their weight. This gave rise to measures of influence for WVGs. However, recent work in the algorit...

We read the article by Prado-Uribe et al. (1) ‘‘Role of Thyroid Hormones and mir-208 in Myocardial Remodeling in 5/6 Nephrectomized Rats’’ with great interest. The authors demonstrated that myocardial miR-208 expression was dramatically decreased but cardiac fibrosis was markedly increased in 5/6 nephrectomized rats when compared to sham rats. In thyroidectomized group, myocardial TGF-b express...