INTRODUCTION During vaginal delivery, the risk of obstetric anal sphincter injuries (OASIS) is well-known. Despite sufficient repair, 30-50% of women will experience anal incontinence. Recent studies from Norway have shown a reduction in the incidence of OASIS when the perineum is supported manually. In Denmark, the frequency of OASIS is the highest in Scandinavia and it is increasing. The aim ...

A common query against large protein and gene sequence data sets is to locate targets that are similar to an input query sequence. The current set of popular search tools, such as BLAST, employ heuristics to improve the speed of such searches. However, such heuristics can sometimes miss targets, which in many cases is undesirable. The alternative to BLAST is to use an accurate algorithm, such a...

Theoretical research in international trade increasingly focuses on …rm heterogeneity in di¤erentiated product markets following Melitz (2003). A key implication of this line of research is that …rms are unevenly affected by trade liberalization: low productivity …rms exit, intermediate-productivity domestic …rms contract, and high-productivity exporting …rms expand. More recent theoretical res...

The OASIS TOSCA specification [OAS13b] aims at enhancing the portability and interoperability of cloud-based applications by providing a language to describe and manage them across heterogeneous clouds. A cloud-based application is modelled by a service template, an orchestration of typed nodes which can be in turn instantiated by matching [BS13] other service templates. In this paper we presen...

AIM To assess whether the introduction of episiotomy scissors specially designed to achieve a cutting angle of 60°, EPISCISSORS-60(®), in two hospitals in the UK would result in a reduction in obstetric anal sphincter injuries (OASIS) in nulliparous women. METHODS A structured training program for all doctors and midwives provided a theoretical framework around OASIS including risk factors an...

Computing with large kernel or similarity matrices is essential to many state-ofthe-art machine learning techniques in classification, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. The cost of forming and factoring these kernel matrices can become intractable for large datasets. We introduce an an adaptive column sampling technique called Accelerated Sequential Incoherence Selection (oASIS) that sa...

One of the master regulators of placental cell fusion in mammals leading to multi-nucleated syncytiotrophoblasts is the transcription factor GCMa. Recently, we proved that the cAMP-driven protein kinase A signaling pathway is fundamental for up-regulation of GCMa transcript levels and protein stability. Here, we show that Transducer of Regulated CREB activity (TORC1), the human co-activator of ...

How to deploy and manage, in an efficient and adaptive way, complex applications across multiple heterogeneous cloud platforms is one of the problems that have emerged with the cloud revolution. In this paper we present context, motivations and objectives of the EU research project SeaClouds, which aims at enabling a seamless adaptive multi-cloud management of complex applications by supporting...

Entity resolution (ER) presents unique challenges for evaluation methodology. While crowd sourcing provides a platform to acquire ground truth, sound approaches to sampling must drive labelling efforts. In ER, extreme class imbalance between matching and non-matching records can lead to enormous labelling requirements when seeking statistically consistent estimates of population parameters. Thi...

INTRODUCTION Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a chronic rheumatic disease associated with spinal inflammation that subsequently leads to progression of structural damage and loss of function. The fully human anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) antibody adalimumab reduces the signs and symptoms and improves overall quality of life in patients with active AS; these benefits have been maintained t...