BACKGROUND Persons being treated with IFNalpha-2b for advanced cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM) have been reported to have a greatly improved prognosis if they develop autoantibodies or clinical signs of autoimmunity during therapy. Consequently, we examined whether autoimmune diseases might also be associated with lower CMM incidence and better prognosis. METHODS We established a study coh...

Maintenance plays an important role in the life cycle of a software product. It is estimated that there are more than 100 billion lines of code in production in the world. As much as 80% of it is unstructured, patched and not well documented. Maintenance can alleviate these problems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to improve the quality of...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using serum miR-221 as a noninvasive prognostic biomarker for cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM). MATERIAL/METHODS We measured the expression levels of miR-221 in serum samples from 72 CMM patients and 54 healthy controls by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). The overall survival (OS) and disease-fr...

for an invited paper at the December, 1996 Conference of the International Software Consulting Network Brighton, U.K. From the time the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was developed (late ‘80s, early ‘90s), it was a matter of speculation whether software organizations existed or would be assessed at the higher maturity levels, levels 4 and 5. In the last two years, a few organizations with proc...

Many organizations fail in implementing software process improvement by use of Capability Maturity Model (CMM) frameworks. Ciborra has argued that frameworks of this kind make managers confuse the real with the ideal, suggesting an alternative path towards improvement based on phenomenology, emphasising values like care, hospitality and cultivation. The hypothesis in this research is that there...

An understanding of the effects of sunlight on human skin begins with the effects on DNA and extends to cells, animals and humans. The major DNA photoproducts arising from UVB (280-320 nm) exposures are cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers. If unrepaired, they may kill or mutate cells and result in basal and squamous cell carcinomas. Although UVA (320-400 nm) and visible wavelengths are poorly absorbe...

The presentations of primary and metastatic cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM) are very diverse. Evidence increasingly indicates that single CMM cells spread to distant sites quite early during cancer progression and are soon eliminated before they become clinically detectable. However bulky metastases which appear at a later stage might derive from some of these early neoplastic cells. It seem...

If it is to qualify as knowledge, a learner's output should be accurate, stable and comprehensible. Learning multiple models can improve signiicantly on the accuracy and stability of single models, but at the cost of losing their comprehensibility (when they possess it, as do, for example, simple decision trees and rule sets). This article proposes and evaluates CMM, a meta-learner that seeks t...

If it is to qualify as knowledge, a learner's output should be accurate, stable and com-prehensible. Learning multiple models can improve signiicantly on the accuracy and stability of single models, but at the cost of losing their comprehensibility (when they possess it, as do, for example, simple decision trees and rule sets). This paper proposes and evaluates CMM, a meta-learner that seeks to...