Caring is the root of courage

Int. J. Med. Sci. 2006, 3 1 International Journal of Medical Sciences ISSN 1449-1907 www.medsci.org 2006 3(1):1-6 ©2006 Ivyspring International Publisher. All rights reserved Research paper Polysaccharides from the root of Angelica sinensis protect bone marrow and gastrointestinal tissues against the cytotoxicity of cyclophosphamide in mice Marco K. C. Hui, William K. K. Wu, Vivian Y. Shin, Wallace H. L. So and Chi Hin Cho Centre of Infection and Immunology and Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China Corresponding address: Prof. C.H. Cho, Department of Pharmacology, The University of Hong Kong, 21 Sassoon Road, Hong Kong, China. Email: chcho@hkusua.hku.hk Telephone: 852-2819-9250 Fax: 852-2817-0859 Received: 2005.09.08; Accepted: 2005.12.15; Published: 2006.01.01 Cyclophosphamide (CY) is a cytostatic agent that produces systemic toxicity especially on cells with high proliferative capacity, while polysaccharides from Angelica sinensis (AP) have been shown to increase the turnover of gastrointestinal mucosal and hemopoietic stem cells. It is not known whether AP has an effect on CY-induced cytotoxicity on bone marrow and gastrointestinal tract. In this study, we assessed the protective actions of AP on CY-induced leukopenia and proliferative arrest in the gastroduodenal mucosa in mice. Subcutaneous injection of CY (200 mg/kg) provoked dramatic decrease in white blood cell (WBC) count and number of blood vessels and proliferating cells in both the gastric and duodenal mucosae. Subcutaneous injection of AP significantly promoted the recovery from leukopenia and increased number of blood vessels and proliferating cells in both the gastric and duodenal tissues. Western blotting revealed that CY significantly down-regulated the protein expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), c-Myc and ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) in gastric mucosae but had no effect on epidermal growth factor (EGF) expression. AP also reversed the dampening effect of CY on VEGF expression in the gastric mucosa. These data suggest that AP is a cytoprotective agent which can protect against the cytotoxicity of CY on hematopoietic and gastrointestinal tissues when the polysaccharide is co-administered with CY in cancer patients during treatment regimen. Key words: Angelica sinensis, polysaccharides, cyclophosphamide, leukopenia, gastrointestinal tract, angiogenesis 1. Introduction The major side effect of anticancer drugs, e.g. cyclophosphamide, is the non-specific cytostatic action on normal healthy cells, especially those with high proliferating capacity like the hematopoietic and GI tissues [1]. The extensive death of the immune cells results in leukopenia which severely weakens the immune system of cancer patients and therefore greatly increases the chance of disseminated infections which could be fetal. As a result, drug-free period is always clinically necessary in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, so as to allow their immune systems to restore function [2]. On the other hand, the death of GI cells breaks down the physical defence of GI system in the host who will become more susceptible to Caring is the root of courage Caring is the root of courage Bởi: Joe Tye “The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to it Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul That’s why we feel so much Resistance If it meant nothing to us, there’s be no Resistance.” Steven Pressfield: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles I have no idea how many times I have read The War of Art, or listened to it as a bookon-tape What Pressfield calls Resistance is a force of nature, like cancer or great white sharks He capitalizes the word, the way a historian would capitalize Black Plague or Great Depression We all face resistance, and it all has one and only one purpose: to prevent you from taking risks, from being creative, from becoming your authentic best self One of the greatest blessings of having your world turned upside down is that it can be enormously liberating You can finally give yourself permission to ask life-changing questions like the one I posed earlier: “what would you if every job paid the same and had the same social status?” But as soon as you answer that question and begin to work toward that dream, Resistance will rear its hideous head The bigger and more wonderful the dream, the greater the Resistance It is often manifested as fear The fear won’t go away In fact, as you become more serious in your pursuit of the dream, Resistance will become more insistent that you quit and go back to doing something that feels more safe and comfortable When this happens, remember what Pressfield said: “You’re scared because you care.” Then remind yourself that caring is the root of courage 1/1 The Zen of Blogging Hunter Nuttall © 2008 Hunter Nuttall . com 1 What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? If you're into Zen and you're into blogging, read and share this ebook. If you're into Zen but you're not into blogging, share this ebook. If you're not into Zen but you're into blogging, read this ebook. If you're not into Zen and you're not into blogging, read it twice. © 2008 Hunter Nuttall . com 2 Table of Contents The Zen of Blogging 1 What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? 2 Table of Contents 3 Up the Mountain 4 Day 1: Getting Started 6 Day 2: Choosing a Niche 7 Day 3: Domain Names 8 Day 4: Blogging Platforms 9 Day 5: Themes 10 Day 6: Plugins 11 Day 7: Blogging Voices 12 Day 8: Posting Frequency 13 Day 9: Post Length 14 Day 10: Images 15 Day 11: Monetization 16 Day 12: Comment Management 17 Day 13: Guest Posting 18 Day 14: Social Media 19 The Last Day 20 Down the Mountain 22 Acknowledgements 23 About the Author 23 © 2008 Hunter Nuttall . com 3 Up the Mountain They say that when the student is ready, the master will appear. One day I felt ready, and I began the long climb to the top of Mount Blogmore. Was the legend true? Did the old man really exist? No one knew for sure, but we knew that every aspiring blogger had felt compelled to seek him out when their time had come. We also knew they were never seen again. And so I climbed Mount Blogmore, with a strange force pulling me to the summit even though my knees quivered with fear. It wasn't my choice, it was my destiny. I had to know if I had it in me. I had to know if my inner blogger was ready to be awakened. As I got closer, I was greeted with heavy snow and bitter cold winds. I was stopped in my tracks several times, unable to breath the freezing air. I pressed forward but didn't know if my body could take it. The old man, if he was real, sure didn't make it easy to be found. But when I reached the top, everything changed. The snow melted away in a brilliant flash of sunlight. The clean mountain air was filled with the sounds of chirping birds and a babbling brook. My aching joints and muscles felt the pain slip away. But wait—was this real? While my mind was here, did my body lie motionless on the side of the mountain? Was I in heaven? No, this was real. I still had my wits about me, and I knew I had not left the earthly plane. But this was a very special place. I felt a strange sense of euphoria spreading through my body. And somehow I was not surprised when I turned around to see the old man standing before me. He pulled down the hood of his robe to reveal himself. He was easily a hundred years old, yet seemed to have astounding physical strength and mental clarity. He had a long white beard, and a solemn look on his face. I tried my best to stammer out an introduction. "I I " "Yes, I know who you are, fool," said the old man. "You came here because you want to be a great blogger. I can help you. I can reveal all the secrets of blogging. I can teach you to write posts that pierce the souls of the toughest warriors, or make angels drown in tears. Yours can be the blog that launched a thousand ships, all full of people dying to subscribe." The old man paced back and forth, touching his bearded chin. "And yet," he said, "I sense great doubt within you. You're not sure if you can really do it. You're not even sure if you really want to. This will not Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pages 400–407, Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. c 2007 Association for Computational Linguistics Is the End of Supervised Parsing in Sight? Rens Bod School of Computer Science University of St Andrews, ILLC, University of Amsterdam rb@cs.st-and.ac.uk Abstract How far can we get with unsupervised parsing if we make our training corpus several orders of magnitude larger than has hitherto be attempted? We present a new algorithm for unsupervised parsing using an all-subtrees model, termed U-DOP*, which parses directly with packed forests of all binary trees. We train both on Penn’s WSJ data and on the (much larger) NANC corpus, showing that U-DOP* outperforms a treebank-PCFG on the standard WSJ test set. While U-DOP* performs worse than state-of-the-art supervised parsers on hand- annotated sentences, we show that the model outperforms supervised parsers when evaluated as a language model in syntax-based machine translation on Europarl. We argue that supervised parsers miss the fluidity between constituents and non-constituents and that in the field of syntax-based language modeling the end of supervised parsing has come in sight. 1 Introduction A major challenge in natural language parsing is the unsupervised induction of syntactic structure. While most parsing methods are currently supervised or semi-supervised (McClosky et al. 2006; Henderson 2004; Steedman et al. 2003), they depend on hand-annotated data which are difficult to come by and which exist only for a few languages. Unsupervised parsing methods are becoming increasingly important since they operate with raw, unlabeled data of which unlimited quantities are available. There has been a resurgence of interest in unsupervised parsing during the last few years. Where van Zaanen (2000) and Clark (2001) induced unlabeled phrase structure for small domains like the ATIS, obtaining around 40% unlabeled f-score, Klein and Manning (2002) report 71.1% f-score on Penn WSJ part-of-speech strings ≤ 10 words (WSJ10) using a constituent- context model called CCM. Klein and Manning (2004) further show that a hybrid approach which combines constituency and dependency models, yields 77.6% f-score on WSJ10. While Klein and Manning’s approach may be described as an “all-substrings” approach to unsupervised parsing, an even richer model consists of an “all-subtrees” approach to unsupervised parsing, called U-DOP (Bod 2006). U-DOP initially assigns all unlabeled binary trees to a training set, efficiently stored in a packed forest, and next trains subtrees thereof on a held- out corpus, either by taking their relative frequencies, or by iteratively training the subtree parameters using the EM algorithm (referred to as “UML-DOP”). The main advantage of an all- subtrees approach seems to be the direct inclusion of discontiguous context that is not captured by (linear) substrings. Discontiguous context is important not only for learning structural dependencies but What is the price of a mousetrap? The assessment of value from cloud services. By Ernie Zibert Copyright 2012 Ernie Zibert Smashwords Edition Smashwords Edition, License Notes Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non- commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. Discover other titles by Ernie Zibert at Smashwords.com. Table of Contents Value from your Cloud provider? The price of a Mousetrap If it were only as simple as a mousetrap IT Infrastructure is a tumour of the modern corporation Conclusion In this ebook, I discuss one functional transformation that has taken placed as a result of cloud services, namely; the impact on the assessment of value. This is a timely discourse as the vast majority of customers are using cloud services. In fact, numerous recent surveys confirm that more than 80% of customers are using cloud services (http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/03/cloud-here- to-stay/, http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/10/cloud-services-data/). Moreover, several surveys have replicated the finding that four out of every five customers believe that cloud services met their flexible infrastructure needs. The bottom line is cloud services are here to stay and customers must be able to articulate the value of their cloud investment. How do you know if you are getting value from your cloud services provider? In the traditional model, most customers would simply compare their existing IT costs against their cloud services costs. This is best seen as a ‘generation one’ performance measure. This measure is no longer suitable for the assessment of value from cloud services. It is akin to undertaking a Return on Investment (ROI) without taking into consideration the time value of money, or where applicable, foreign currency exposure. The title of this ebook hints at the error in this traditional performance measure. Why would you want to know the price of a mousetrap? Customers no longer need to know the price of servers, software and the rest of the parts making up the IT service stack. This knowledge is as useful as knowing the price of a mousetrap. Customers, however, must know the price of the equivalent services from other cloud providers. This is the crucial performance measure. It is only this performance measure that constitutes a true apples- to-apples comparison for the assessment of cloud service value. In addition, the traditional performance measure is not relevant because it doesn’t factor in agility/flexibility. Attempts to incorporate this into the traditional performance measure are absurd. It is pure guesswork to forecast IT demand over a multi-year period and translate that back to IT costs. How many and what types of servers are needed, together with all the other pieces, to manage current demand, new projects, forecasted growth, end-of-life IT services, mobility moves, etc? Who Virut gamma-herpes gây ung th (Gamma Herpes is the cause of cancer) M. A. Epstein (Biên dịch theo bài giảng mở đầu hội thảo quốc tế về bệnh ung th vòm mũi họng, tổ chức tại Hồng Kông tháng 2/2003). Phan Thị Phi Phi Giới thiệu về GS M. A Epstein: Giáo s Anthony Epstein giảng dạy Y học ở Trờng Đại học Y Cambridge và Trờng Đại học Y của Bệnh viện Middlesex ở Luân đôn. Sau nghĩa vụ quân sự, Ông về lại Bệnh viện Middlesexx và đợc đào tạo về mô bệnh học tại Viện Bland Sutton. ở đây Ông trở thành ngời đi đầu xây dựng chuyên ngành của mình thành một khoa học thực nghiệm. Một thời gian đợc làm việc bên cạnh GS George Palade ở Viện Rockefeller tại New York về kỹ thuật kính hiển vi điện tử là kỹ thuật chủ chốt đã giúp Ông thực hiện nghề nghiệp nghiên cứu y học của mình. Vào năm 1961 Anthony Epstein gặp Denis Burkitt và bắt đầu một loạt các nghiên cứu về u limphô Burkitt và 3 năm sau đó đã có các thành tựu tột đỉnh về tế bào dòng do EBV tạo ra, phát hiện nhờ vào kính hiển vi điện tử. Phát hiện đầu tiên này đã mở ra một lĩnh vực nghiên cứu về virut học và ung th ở ngời. Bắt đầu làm việc ở Bệnh viện Middlesexx và từ 1968-1985 ở trờng Đại học Tổng hợp Bristol với cơng vị Chủ nhiệm Bộ môn Mô bệnh học. Anthony Epstein đã dẫn đầu trong việc phát triển lĩnh vực nghiên cứu này thông qua các công trình của cá nhân mình và qua các công trình hợp tác nghiên cứu với Werner và Gertrude Henle ở Philadelphia và George và Eva Klein ở Stockholm. Các cố gắng của các tác giả này trong vài thập kỷ đ xác nhận vai trò gây ung th ở ngời của EBV, có vai trò gắn với nguyên nhân gây ra nhiều bệnh lý ác tính, trong đó ung th vòm mũi họng đợc xem là quan trọng nhất đối với sức khoẻ con ngời. Anthony Epstein đã đợc nhiều giải thởng y hoc: Giải Quốc tế Gairdner (Canada, 1988), giải Paul Ehrlich và Ludwig Darmstaedter (Đức, 1973), Giải thởng của Bristol Myers trong nghiên cứu ung th (USA, 1982), giải Grifuel (Pháp, 1980) Mề đay Royal (Hội Royal ở Luân Đôn, 1992) và đợc ban Tớc Hiệp sĩ của Hoàng hậu Anh năm 1991. Nhập đề: Nhận thức và sự chấp nhận về vai trò gây ung th của một vài gia đình virut khác nhau đã phát triển rất nhiều trong 40 năm qua và ít nhất là trong vòng các thập kỷ vừa qua. Đáng ngạc nhên là vai trò gây ung th của nhóm virut -herpes. Mặc dù đa số các chứng cứ đều liên quan đến virut herpes gây ung th ở súc vật nhng cũng đã cho ta các hiểu biết quan trọng về các mối tơng tác của virut -herpes với ung th của ngời. Tất cả các thành viên của gia đình virut - herpes lan truyền ngang và gây nhiễm túc chủ ở tuổi rất bé và thờng là không triệu chứng. Do vậy về sau chúng gây nhiễm tiềm ẩn kéo dài cả đời ngời trong tế bào limphô và trong một số trờng hợp cả các tế bào khác nữa, có khả năng gây tăng sinh các tế bào nhiễm virut tiềm tàng trong điều kiện in vivo, tạo ra các nguy cơ gây ung th qua các virut oncogen hay qua các cơ chế khác. EBV là virut đầu tiên và đôi khi là virut độc nhất đã biết đại diện cho gia đình virut này trớc khi nó liên kết với nhóm virut herpes hớng tế bào limphô B của loài khỉ của thế giới cũ (Old world monkeys- khỉ ở các châu á, Âu, Phi) và của loài linh trởng (apes) và với các virut herpes có liên quan ít với tế bào limphô T của loài khỉ thế giới Mới (New world monkeys- khỉ ở châu Mỹ, có đuôi dài). Về sau này nhiều tác giả đã chứng minh rằng các virut herpes ở chuột nhắt giống với EBV về di truyền, có thể gây ung th và chỉ sau đó ít năm đã chứng 103 minh đó là virut herpes gây bệnh Kaposi sarcoma ở ngời (KSHV hay đôi khi đợc gọi là HHV-8) và đã bổ sung thêm virut gây ung th ở ngời