A language L over an alphabet A is said to have a neutral letter if there is a letter e ∈ A such that inserting or deleting e’s from any word in A∗ does not change its membership or non-membership in L. The presence of a neutral letter affects the definability of a language in firstorder logic. It was conjectured that it renders all numerical predicates apart from the order predicate useless, i...

Cannabis sativa L. (cannabis) extracts, vapor produced by the Volcano vaporizer and smoke made from burning cannabis joints were analyzed by GC-flame ionization detecter (FID), GC-MS and HPLC. Three different medicinal cannabis varieties were investigated Bedrocan, Bedrobinol and Bediol. Cannabinoids plus other components such as terpenoids and pyrolytic by-products were identified and quantifi...

BACKGROUND Fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy plus the anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibody bevacizumab is standard first-line treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer. We studied the effect of adding the anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) antibody cetuximab to a combination of capecitabine, oxaliplatin, and bevacizumab for metastatic colorectal cancer. METHODS...

BACKGROUND Complete blood count (CBC) reference intervals are important to diagnose diseases, screen blood donors, and assess overall health. However, current reference intervals established by older instruments and technologies and those from American and European populations are not suitable for Chinese samples due to ethnic, dietary, and lifestyle differences. The aim of this multicenter col...

The recent release of version 2.0-8 of the BayesMendel package contains an updated BRCAPRO risk predictionmodel,which includes revisedmodelingof contralateral breast cancer (CBC)penetrance, provisions for pedigrees of mixed ethnicity and an adjustment for mastectomies among family members. We estimated penetrance functions for CBC by a combination of parametric survival modeling of literature d...

Traditionally, modes of Message Authentication Codes(MAC) such as Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) are instantiated using block ciphers or keyed Pseudo Random Permutations(PRP). However, one can also use domain preserving keyed Pseudo Random Functions(PRF) to instantiate MAC modes. The very first security proof of CBC-MAC [BKR00], essentially modeled the PRP as a PRF. Until now very little work has ...

We study the synchronization in the context of network traffic on a 2-d communication network with local clustering and geographic separations. The network consists of nodes and randomly distributed hubs where the top five hubs ranked according to their coefficient of betweenness centrality (CBC) are connected by random assortative and gradient mechanisms. For multiple message traffic, messages...

We prove (nearly) tight bounds on the concrete PRF-security of two constructions of message-authentication codes (MACs): (1) The truncated CBC-MAC construction, which operates as plain CBC-MAC (without prefix-free encoding of messages), but only returns a subset of the output bits. (2) The MAC derived from the sponge hash-function family by pre-pending a key to the message, which is the de-fact...

BACKGROUND Industrial radiography is known to be one of the most vulnerable lines of work among the range of different radiation work. According to the relevant law in Korea, every worker registered in this work should check their blood cell counts every year in addition to their thermoluminescent dosimeter (TLD) doses. Since the law was enacted, however, few follow-up studies have been carried...

The cap-binding complex (CBC) binds to the cap structure of mRNA to protect it from exonucleases as well as to regulate downstream post-transcriptional events, translational initiation and nonsense-mediated mRNA decay. However, its role in regulation of the upstream transcriptional events such as initiation or elongation remains unknown. Here, using a formaldehyde-based in vivo cross-linking an...