This study was conducted to investigate effects of heat-oxidized soy protein isolate (HSPI) on growth performance, serum biochemical indices, apparent nutrient digestibility and digestive function of broiler chickens. A total of 320 1-day-old Arbor Acres chicks were randomly divided into 4 groups with 8 replicates of 10 birds, receiving diets containing soy protein isolate (SPI, control group) ...

The spectrometer SPI on board INTEGRAL is capable of high-resolution spectroscopic studies in the energy range 20 keV to 8 MeV for GRBs which occur within the fully coded field of view (16 • corner to corner). Six GRBs occurred within the SPI field of view between October 2002 and November 2003. We present results of the analysis of the first two GRBs detected by SPI after the payload performan...

Purpose: Surgical Plethysmographic Index (SPI), calculated from pulse photo-plethysmographic amplitude oscillations, has been proposed as a tool to measure nociception anti-nociception balance during general anaesthesia, but it is affected by several confounding factor that alter the autonomic nervous system (ANS) modulation. We hypotesised that SPI may be mainly affected by sympathetic stimula...

Background: Software Process Improvement (SPI) is intended to improve software engineering, but can only be effective if used. To improve SPI’s uptake, we should understand why organizations adopt SPI. CMM-based SPI approaches are widely known and studied. Objective: We investigated why organizations adopt CMM-based SPI approaches, and how these motivations relate to organizations’ size. Method...

Abstract – At the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), software process improvement (SPI) is taught in lecture format and with a 10-week implementation project in an organization by teams of students of the graduate software engineering curriculum. The SPI course is taught using a ‘problemgoal-solution’ approach where students learn that any process improvement initiative must be based on iss...

Pathogenicity islands are chromosomal clusters of pathogen-specific virulence genes often found at tRNA loci. We have determined the molecular genetic structure of SPI-3, a 17-kb pathogenicity island located at the selC tRNA locus of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium. The G+C content of SPI-3 (47.5%) differs from that of the Salmonella genome (52%), consistent with the notion that these s...

Surgical Plethysmographic Index (SPI), calculated from pulse photo-plethysmographic amplitude oscillations, has been proposed as a tool to measure nociception anti-nociception balance during general anesthesia, but it is affected by several confounding factor that alter the autonomic nervous system (ANS) modulation. We hypothesized that SPI may be mainly affected by sympathetic stimulation inde...

The free-trade agreements between developed and developing countries have created more opportunities for firms to sell high quality software products in the global market. Unfortunately, for decades the information systems (IS) community has been plagued with the delivery of low quality software products. It is widely accepted that software development firms need to adopt software process impro...

For any Software Process Improvement (SPI) initiative to succeed human factors, in particular, motivation and commitment of the people involved should be kept in mind. In fact, Organizational Change Management (OCM) has been identified as an essential knowledge area for any SPI initiative. However, enough attention is still not given to the human factors and therefore, the high degree of failur...

Dendritic cells (DCs) play a central role in the immune system as they drive activation of T lymphocytes by cognate interactions. However, as DCs express high levels of major histocompatibility complex class I, this intimate contact may also result in elimination of DCs by activated cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) and thereby limit induction of immunity. We show here that immature DCs are indeed...