BACKGROUND Acute intervertebral disk herniation (IVDH) is a common cause of spinal cord injury in dogs and currently there is no proven medical treatment to counter secondary injury effects. Use of methylprednisolone sodium succinate (MPSS) or polyethylene glycol (PEG) as neuroprotectants is advocated but controversial because neither treatment has been tested in placebo-controlled, randomized,...

Feature Product family engineering permits soft ware component reuse, which saves both time and money. To succeed, the process must suppor t variabilit y among the family's systems. The authors developed a simple method that uses patterns to model variabilit y and applied it to development of spacecraft mission-planning systems. or each of its spacecraft, the European Space Operations Centre (E...

We present the results of a simple, statistical assay that measures the G+C content sensitivity bias of gene expression experiments without the requirement of a duplicate experiment. We analyse five gene expression profiling methods: Affymetrix GeneChip, Long Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (LongSAGE), LongSAGELite, 'Classic' Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) and 'Signature' MPS...

In recent years, probabilistic model building genetic programming (PMBGP) for program optimization has attracted considerable interest. PMBGPs generally use probabilistic logic sampling (PLS) to generate new individuals. However, the generation of the most probable solutions (MPSs), i.e., solutions with the highest probability, is not guaranteed. In the present paper, we introduce loopy belief ...

We have developed a public Web-based resource to facilitate access to global expression data for Arabidopsis, available at http://mpss.udel.edu/at. Developing an understanding of patterns and levels of transcriptional activity is the starting point for analyzing individual genes or gene families. Genome-wide transcriptional analyses are also revealing the relationship between the structure and ...

To investigate the effect of micro and macro stressors in the work environment on the subjective health status and productive behavior of computer professionals, we conducted a web-based investigation with Japanese IT-related company employees in 53 company unions. The questionnaire consisted of individual attributes, employment characteristics, working hour characteristics, company size and pr...

This paper proposes the application of a hierarchical fuzzy system (HFS) based on multi-input power system stabilizer (MPSS) in multi-machine environment. The number of rules increases exponentially with the number of variables in a standard fuzzy system. This problem is solved in the proposed HFS method. In this method, the total number of rules increases only linearly with the number of input...

The processing of woody biomass waste piles for use as fuel instead of burning them was 11 investigated. At each landing slash pile location, a 132 kW grapple excavator was used to transfer 12 the waste piles into a 522 kW horizontal grinder. Economies of scale could be expected when 13 grinding a larger pile, although the efficiency of the loading operation might be diminished. Here, 14 three ...

Massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS) was used to analyze the transcriptome of the intracellular protozoan Theileria parva. In total 1,095,000, 20 bp sequences representing 4371 different signatures were generated from T.parva schizonts. Reproducible signatures were identified within 73% of potentially detectable predicted genes and 83% had signatures in at least one MPSS cycle. A pred...