Abstract The existing literature shows that transparency and monitoring reduce trade costs, improve regulatory practices build sustain trust. In this paper, using 555 specific concerns (STCs) raised by the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) committee in period 1995–2018, we develop a novel classification of STCs. We distinguish between STCs aiming exchange information (transparency STCs) those m...

Prospective cohort studies significantly contribute to answering specific research questions in a defined population. Since 2008, the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STCS) systematically enrolled >95 % of all transplant recipients in Switzerland, collecting predefined data at determined time points. Designed as an open cohort, the STCS has included >3900 patients to date, with a median follow-up...

This paper investigates several approaches to bootstrapping a new spoken language understanding (SLU) component in a target language given a large dataset of semantically-annotated utterances in some other source language. The aim is to reduce the cost associated with porting a spoken dialogue system from one language to another by minimising the amount of data required in the target language. ...

In this article, distributed interleave-division multiplexing space-time codes (dIDM-STCs) are applied for multi-user two-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks. In case of decoding errors at the relays which propagate to the destination, severe performance degradations can occur as the original detection scheme for common IDM-STCs does not take any reliability information about the first h...

Sterigmatocystin (ST) and aflatoxin are carcinogenic end point metabolites derived from the same biochemical pathway, which is found in several Aspergillus spp. Recently, an ST gene cluster, containing approximately 25 distinct genes that are each proposed to function specifically in ST biosynthesis, has been identified in Aspergillus nidulans. Each of these structural genes is named stc (steri...

Chronic exposure to opiates leads to maladaptive changes in various functions of the mammalian brain, including properties of neuronal response in the visual pathway. In the present study, we used multibarreled microelectrodes to study the effects of electrophoretic application of GABA or the GABAA receptor antagonist bicuculline on the properties of individual V1 neurons in cats which were chr...

Glial cells of the nervous system directly influence neuronal and synaptic activities by releasing transmitters. However, the physiological consequences of this glial transmitter release on brain information processing remain poorly understood. We demonstrate here in hippocampal slices of 2- to 5-week-old rats that glutamate released from glial cells generates slow transient currents (STCs) med...

CONTEXT Daytime sleepiness in kidney transplant recipients has emerged as a potential predictor of impaired adherence to the immunosuppressive medication regimen. Thus there is a need to assess daytime sleepiness in clinical practice and transplant registries. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the validity of a single-item measure of daytime sleepiness integrated in the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STC...

Since the Japanese Building Standards Act was revised in 2000, installation of steel timber connectors (STCs) to reinforce frame (TF) connections has been mandated for new-build TF houses Japan. However, built before then, more than 40% do not have sufficient STCs and are considered earthquake-prone. This study proposed a simple easy seismic retrofit technique such earthquake-prone existing hou...

Although Semantic Web technology is increasingly becoming more and more important, tagging remains a popular method to describe Web resources. Therefore it is important to address the issues that are found in current tagging search engines, such as Flickr. We find that the free nature of tagging results in many issues for tag search engines, such as synonyms, homonyms, syntactic variations, etc...