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 By: Joe Tye When the sun touched the western horizon, paused, then slowly started back up into the sky, Paul Peterson knew it was going to be a long day It had already been a long day Paul had been standing at cliff’s edge for nearly an hour, watching the sun fi nish its daily arc and listening to the surf smash against the rocks below This sunset would end a decade Ten years of struggling to build his school, a safe place where sad-faced kids could fi nd refuge from a faceless system On this tenth anniversary of the Shay’s Point School, that dream had been ended by the slash of a banker’s eighty-dollar pen Ten years ago it had just been Paul himself, fresh out of law school and determined to save young people from being crushed by the penal system for committing crimes they hardly comprehended to be criminal Now it was him and the family, the mortgages, the school, the ever-increasing critics, and the fewer-and-fartherbetween backers This morning he had cared For the three-thousandsix-hundred-fi ftieth day, he’d dragged himself out of bed after too little sleep, armored himself in a coat and tie, and set out for the fight And lost Everything Including the capacity to care Now he was leaning into a stiff shoreward breeze, waiting for the sun to disappear Then he would take his last step “It’s a beautiful evening for fl ying, isn’t it?” Paul started at the voice, which crept up from behind and slapped him on the back Losing his balance, he twisted his body sideways, arms spinning frantically like the impotent rotors of a crippled helicopter 1/6 Caring Is The Root of Courage As his feet left the ground, Paul felt the sensation of fl oating, momentarily suspended in motionless time His eyes locked onto the faint pinprick of a star trying to burn its way into the darkening evening sky as he toppled back and began to accelerate earthward Then, much too soon, he hit the ground After an agonizing moment of dark stillness, Paul drew what seemed an awfully lot like a living breath and opened his eyes to see the same star fi ghting for its spot in the twilight There had been no tunnel of light, no fl ashing autobiography, no celestial choir or old friends at the gate Just a quick fall, a sudden hard thump, and the dawning realization of pain Real, human pain “Are you okay?” It was the same voice, deep and rich Paul looked to his side and saw a man of about his own age kneeling beside him Long brown hair, thinning on the top, fl uttered like prairie grass in a summer breeze His dark, weathered skin suggested a life on the fi shing boats He wore the compassionate, bemused smile of a father trying not to laugh as he helped his child up from a spectacular tricycle wipe-out FEAR IS THE PARENT OF BOTH COURAGE AND OF COWARDICE WHICH CHILD WILL YOU CHOSE TO RAISE? “Here, let me give you a hand.” The man pulled Paul to his feet without apparent effort and brushed off the back of his coat They were standing fi fty feet back from the edge of the cliff At the spot where Paul had been standing was a tall, slender man with a brown trench coat just like his He was watching the sun, now several degrees off the horizon And rising A pair of sea gulls streaked by, fl ying tail-fi rst and emitting a bizarre squawk Paul closed his eyes and struggled to dredge up a memory of falling, of being broken on the rocks Nothing short of being dead could explain this craziness “No, Paul, you didn’t jump At least not yet Earthly time is moving in reverse You might say that the drama that played itself out today is being un-acted.” The sun was huge above the horizon, dwarfi ng the man on the cliff A jet airplane moved backward across the sky, erasing the brilliant white contrail that a moment ago had punctuated the orange fi rmament Paul saw the man in the trench coat watch the sun edge its way higher into the sky, igniting the furrowed clouds as if the world’s entire supply of fi reworks had been requisitioned for this occasion The fi gure dropped awkwardly to his knees and remained for a moment with his face in his hands, then just as awkwardly rose and started walking backward away from the cliff 2/6 Caring Is The Root of Courage The fi sherman put a hand on Paul’s shoulder and guided him toward the path They followed the fi gure in Paul’s trench coat as he trudged backward down the hill, hands in pockets, eyes to the ground At the parking lot they watched the fi gure unclose the car door, and stand there for a long while looking up the hill He looked just like Paul—tall and thin, clean shaven, brown hair just a little too long for someone otherwise dressed like a middle-aged yuppie “You’ve had a bad day, my friend, and you’re about to live it again—twice, I’m afraid.” The fi sherman smiled, not looking at all afraid “And what’s more, you’re going to watch yourself it Com on, climb in.” The fi sherman stepped through the back door of Paul’s Chevy without even opening it, and motioned for ...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 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 ... driveway They followed him as he backed his way up the walk, said 5/6 Caring Is The Root of Courage good-bye to the children, kissed his wife at the front door, and then backed into the kitchen.. .Caring Is The Root of Courage As his feet left the ground, Paul felt the sensation of fl oating, momentarily suspended in motionless time His eyes locked onto the faint pinprick of a star... 4/6 Caring Is The Root of Courage In the baroque elegance of the conference room Paul couldn’t help but laugh at the bank’s chief loan offi cer gesticulating madly while sounding like Alvin the