BACKGROUND The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the mainstream measure for burnout. However, its psychometric properties have been questioned, and alternative measurement models of the inventory have been suggested. AIMS Different models for the number of items and factors of the MBI-HSS, the version of the Inventory for the Human Service sector, were tested in order to identify the most ap...

Homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) is the secret sharing analogue of homomorphic encryption. An HSS scheme supports a local evaluation of functions on shares of one or more secret inputs, such that the resulting shares of the output are short. Some applications require the stronger notion of additive HSS, where the shares of the output add up to the output over some finite Abelian group. While so...

BACKGROUND We present the first case of a congenital form of silent brain syndrome (SBS) in a young patient affected by Hallermann-Streiff syndrome (HSS) and the surgical management of the associated eyelid anomalies. METHODS HSS signs were evaluated according to the Francois criteria. Orbital computed tomography (CT) and genetic analysis were performed. An upper eyelid retractor-free recessi...

PURPOSE The adoption of multichannel compressed sensing (CS) for clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) hinges on the ability to accurately reconstruct images from an undersampled dataset in a reasonable time frame. When CS is combined with SENSE parallel imaging, reconstruction can be computationally intensive. As an alternative to iterative methods that repetitively evaluate a forward CS+S...

Th2 cells and mast cells are major sources of IL4, IL5 and IL13, cytokines that mediate immunity against parasites and are also central players in the pathophysiology of asthma, allergy and atopic disease. We asked whether Th2 cells and mast cells, which belong to the lymphoid and myeloid lineages, respectively, use different cis-acting regulatory regions to transcribe the cytokine genes. Compa...

The highly conserved bacterial homospermidine synthase (HSS) is a key enzyme of the polyamine metabolism of many proteobacteria including pathogenic strains such as Legionella pneumophila and Pseudomonas aeruginosa; The unique usage of NAD(H) as a prosthetic group is a common feature of bacterial HSS, eukaryotic HSS and deoxyhypusine synthase (DHS). The structure of the bacterial enzyme does no...

We propose a superfast solver for Toeplitz linear systems based on rank structured matrix methods and randomized sampling. The solver uses displacement equations to transform a Toeplitz matrix T into a Cauchy-like matrix C, which is known to have low-numerical-rank offdiagonal blocks. Thus, we design a fast scheme for constructing a hierarchically semiseparable (HSS) matrix approximation to C, ...

Pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) are constitutive plant defense compounds with a sporadic taxonomic occurrence. The first committed step in PA biosynthesis is catalyzed by homospermidine synthase (HSS). Recent evidence confirmed that HSS evolved by gene duplication from deoxyhypusine synthase (DHS), an enzyme involved in the posttranslational activation of the eukaryotic translation initiation fac...

Pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) are typical compounds of plant secondary metabolism and are believed to be part of the plant's chemical defense. Within the monocotyledonous plants, PAs have been described in only a few genera, mainly orchids, including Phalaenopsis. Because phylogenetic analyses suggest an independent origin of PA biosynthesis within the monocot lineage, we have analyzed the deve...

INTRODUCTION This study aimed to evaluate whether a low platelet count is a good surrogate marker of hepatosplenic schistosomiasis (HSS) in a rural area of Brazil. A small district in southeastern Brazil, with a population of 1,543 individuals and a 23% prevalence of schistosomiasis, was selected for this investigation. METHODS In July 2012, 384 volunteers were subjected to clinical, ultrason...