FAME, A Polyglot Library for Metamodeling at Runtime

Tomorrow's eternal software system will co-evolve with their context: their metamodels must adapt at runtime to ever-changing external requirements. In this paper we present FAME, a polyglot library that keeps metamodels accessible and adaptable at runtime. Special care is taken to establish causal connection between fame-classes and host-classes. As some host-languages offer limited reflection features only, not all implementations feature the same degree of causal connection. We present and discuss three scenarios: 1) full causal connection, 2) no causal connection, and 3) emulated causal connection. Of which, both Scenario 1 and 3 are suitable to deploy fully metamodel-driven applications.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide in selected European countries and US states: systematic literature review

BACKGROUND Legal in some European countries and US states, physician-assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia remain under debate in these and other countries. OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to examine numbers, characteristics, and trends over time for assisted dying in regions where these practices are legal: Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Oregon, Washington, and Montana. DESIGN This was a systematic review of journal articles and official reports. Medline and Embase databases were searched for relevant studies, from inception to end of 2012. We searched the websites of the health authorities of all eligible countries and states for reports on physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia and included publications that reported on cases of physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. We extracted information on the total number of assisted deaths, its proportion in relation to all deaths, and socio-demographic and clinical characteristics of individuals assisted to die. RESULTS A total of 1043 publications were identified; 25 articles and reports were retained, including series of reported cases, physician surveys, and reviews of death certificates. The percentage of physician-assisted deaths among all deaths ranged from 0.1%-0.2% in the US states and Luxembourg to 1.8%-2.9% in the Netherlands. Percentages of cases reported to the authorities increased in most countries over time. The typical person who died with assistance was a well-educated male cancer patient, aged 60-85 years. CONCLUSIONS Despite some common characteristics between countries, we found wide variation in the extent and specific characteristics of those who died an assisted death.

Building a soil spectral library for Tajikistan comparing local and global modeling approaches

Over the last ~20 years, soil spectral libraries storing near-infrared reflectance (NIR) spectra from diverse soil samples have been built for many places, since almost 10 years also for Tajikistan. Many calibration approaches have been reported and used for prediction from large and heterogeneous libraries, but most are hampered by the high diversity of the soils, where the mineral background is heavily influencing spectral features. In such cases, local learning strategies have the advantage of building locally adapted calibrations, which can deal better with nonlinearities. Therefore, it was our major aim to identify the most efficient approach to develop an accurate and stable locally weigthed calibration model using a spectral library compiled over the past years. Keywords: Tajikistan, Near-Infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), soil organic carbon, locally weighted regression, regional and local spectral library.

SUSYFLAVOR library for rare decays in the MSSM

SUSY_FLAVOR is a FORTRAN code calculating over 30 low-energy flavour- and CP-related bservables in the R-parity conserving MSSM. The code admits for the most general flavour structure of the SUSY breaking terms and complex flavour-diagonal couplings. It includes the numerically important resummation of chirally enhanced effects and it is fast enough for scanning over a large SUSY-parameter space. The program can be obtained from http://www.fuw.edu.pl/susy_flavor.

Fluorescence-encoded gold nanoparticles: library design and modulation of cellular uptake into dendritic cells.

In order to harness the unique properties of nanoparticles for novel clinical applications and to modulate their uptake into specific immune cells we designed a new library of homo- and hetero-functional fluorescence-encoded gold nanoparticles (Au-NPs) using different poly(vinyl alcohol) and poly(ethylene glycol)-based polymers for particle coating and stabilization. The encoded particles were fully characterized by UV-Vis and fluorescence spectroscopy, zeta potential and dynamic light scattering. The uptake by human monocyte derived dendritic cells in vitro was studied by confocal laser scanning microscopy and quantified by fluorescence-activated cell sorting and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy. We show how the chemical modification of particle surfaces, for instance by attaching fluorescent dyes, can conceal fundamental particle properties and modulate cellular uptake. In order to mask the influence of fluorescent dyes on cellular uptake while still exploiting its fluorescence for detection, we have created hetero-functionalized Au-NPs, which again show typical particle dependent cellular interactions. Our study clearly prove that the thorough characterization of nanoparticles at each modification step in the engineering process is absolutely essential and that it can be necessary to make substantial adjustments of the particles in order to obtain reliable cellular uptake data, which truly reflects particle properties.

cDNA Library Generation for the Analysis of Small RNAs by High-Throughput Sequencing

The RNome of a cell is highly diverse and consists besides messenger RNAs (mRNAs), transfer RNAs (tRNAs), and ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs) also of other small and long transcript entities without apparent coding potential. This class of molecules, commonly referred to as non-protein-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), is involved in regulating numerous biological processes and thought to contribute to cellular complexity. Therefore, much effort is put into their identification and further functional characterization. Here we provide a cost-effective and reliable method for cDNA library construction of small RNAs in the size range of 20-500 residues. The effectiveness of the described method is demonstrated by the analysis of ribosome-associated small RNAs in the eukaryotic model organism Trypanosoma brucei.