In vivo experience can occlude subsequent induction of long-term potentiation and enhance long-term depression of synaptic responses. Although a reduced capacity for synaptic strengthening may function to prevent excessive excitation, such an effect paradoxically implies that continued experience or training should not improve and may even degrade neural representations. In mice, we examined th...

OBJECTIVES To conduct a feasibility study to compare concentric and eccentric rotator cuff strengthening exercises for rotator cuff tendinopathy. METHODS A total of 11 patients with rotator cuff tendinopathy who were on the waiting list for arthroscopic subacromial decompression surgery were randomised to perform eccentric rotator cuff strengthening exercises, concentric strengthening exercis...

In this paper, we describe an approach to scheduling under uncertainty that achieves scalability through a coupling of deterministic and probabilistic reasoning. Our specific focus is a class of oversubscribed scheduling problems where the goal is to maximize the reward earned by a team of agents in a distributed execution environment. There is uncertainty in both the duration and outcomes of e...

The paper will give an overview of developments in Estonia in the field of Human Language Technologies. Despite of the fact that Estonian is one of the smallest official languages in EU and therefore in less favourable position in the HLT-market, the national initiatives are undertaken in order to promote HLT development in Estonia. The paper will introduce recent activities in Estonia, includi...

The paper discusses some ways to strengthen (nonasymptotically) the Gilbert–Varshamov bound for linear codes. The unifying idea is to study a certain graph constructed on vectors of low weight in the cosets of the code, which we call the Varshamov graph. Various simple estimates of the number of its connected components account for better lower bounds on the minimum distance of codes, some of t...

OAEP is one of the few standardized and widely deployed public-key encryption schemes. It was designed by Bellare and Rogaway as a scheme based on a trapdoor permutation such as RSA. RSA-OAEP is standardized in RSA’s PKCS #1 v2.1 and is part of several standards. RSA-OAEP was shown to be IND-CCA secure in the random oracle model under the standard RSA assumption. However, the reduction is not t...

This report outlines findings and recommendations of a national pharmacovigilance workshop held in August 2012 in South Africa (SA). A survey of current pharmacovigilance activities, conducted in preparation for the meeting, identified multiple programmes collecting drug safety data in SA, with limited co-ordination at national level. The meeting resolved that existing pharmacovigilance program...

The current limited focus on management in global health activities is highly problematic given the amounts of financial and human resources that are pouring into health system strengthening interventions and the complexity of clinical operations across settings. By ensuring that public health and healthcare practitioners in domestic and international settings receive management training in the...

The rapid scale-up of HIV care and treatment in resource-limited settings has overwhelmed many public health laboratory services already burdened with human resource shortages, an aging and inadequate infrastructure, and a lack of quality systems. There is, however, a growing appreciation of the opportunity to use HIV-related laboratory strengthening as means to strengthen health systems in gen...