Esteemed educator, author, and podcaster, Barbara Taber, EdD, has delivered the highly anticipated season finale of Take It Or Leave It, against impossibly high expectations, following the landmark achievement of her previous three episodes.

The 2024 Comet Class Internationals Championship Regatta continued off the Corsica River Yacht Club in Maryland. Six Bermuda sailors and their crew took to the water for another three races, taking the series to six races. The defending champion Jack Swikart, is the overall leader with 10 points, he had another two wins, and a […]

The 2024 comet class internationals championship regatta concluded off the Corsica River Yacht Club, in Maryland. Six Bermuda sailors and their crew took to the water for the final two races, taking the series to eight races. The defending champion Jack Swikart, defended his title with 12 points, Jessica Gruskos was second with 16 points, […]

Scott Barnes concluded competing in the Xtream Rock Island Grand Prix, making a strong showing to win a class. On day two in the Briggs 206 Masters Class, Barnes finished 12th in the qualifying round clocking a time of 39.750, finished 3rd with a 10 lap time of 6:16.604 in the heat race, and then clocked […]

Michal Bassani-Sternberg
Mar 1, 2015; 14:658-673
Research

By the 1930s, the black middle class had arrived, with the purchasing power to match. Sensing an opportunity, developers established Idlewild: a summer resort aimed exclusively at African-Americans.

The OM Panama International Intensive School of Missions re-opens!

Five Delaware minority and/or veteran-owned small businesses completed Export Delaware’s new signature training program, “Selling to the World.” Export Delaware partnered with the World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia to develop this groundbreaking initiative. Participants learned how to develop an export strategy, find qualified buyers, navigate logistics and shipping, learn about export finance, international patents, […]

Secularism, Caste, and Class in Contemporary India Secularism, Caste, and Class in Contemporary India

GHX to Lead Session on 'Best-in-Class Invoicing in Healthcare' at IAPP FUSION 2010 Annual Forum and Expo in Texas

COP29 World Climate Action Summit Highlights: At the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, countries approved vital carbon credit quality standards essential for facilitating a U.N.-backed global carbon market aimed at funding greenhouse gas reduction projects. This early agreement marks a significant step forward, despite concerns about the upcoming U.S. administration under President-elect Donald Trump, who has indicated intentions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Experts suggest that the endorsement might help operationalize the market by next year, enabling countries and companies to purchase carbon credits for climate initiatives worldwide. However, while the approved standards seek to address the credibility of projects, campaigners have raised concerns about their adequacy, especially regarding human rights protections. Criticism also arose regarding the decision-making process, with some nations feeling excluded from discussions. Moving forward, negotiators aim to establish further rules to ensure the market’s integrity, which could potentially yield $250 billion annually and cut carbon emissions significantly by 2030.

NDA govt. is taking steps for planned and sustainable urban development, says Finance Minister Payyavula Keshav after presenting the Budget for 2024-25

Deepthi smashed American Breanna Clark's earlier world record of 55.12 seconds set during last year's edition of the championships in Paris

German luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz India on Thursday launched the imported version of its new generation flagship sedan S-Class with a price starting at Rs 2.17 crore while it prepares to introduce a locally-produced variety of the model in the fourth quarter this year.The new 7th generation S-Class comes in two variants -- diesel S 400d 4MATIC priced at Rs 2.17 crore and petrol S 450 4MATIC tagged at Rs 2.19 crore.

It's Hot or Not time again as Sportsmail's Riath Al-Samarrai reveals what's been making him feel warm and what's been leaving him cold this week.

The partnership will provide easier access to high quality video-based training, curricula, lesson plans, and projects for students, teachers, and schools.

Michal Bassani-Sternberg
Mar 1, 2015; 14:658-673
Research

The presentation of peptides on class I human leukocyte antigen (HLA-I) molecules plays a central role in immune recognition of infected or malignant cells. In cancer, non-self HLA-I ligands can arise from many different alterations, including non-synonymous mutations, gene fusion, cancer-specific alternative mRNA splicing or aberrant post-translational modifications. Identifying HLA-I ligands remains a challenging task that requires either heavy experimental work for in vivo identification or optimized bioinformatics tools for accurate predictions. To date, no HLA-I ligand predictor includes post-translational modifications. To fill this gap, we curated phosphorylated HLA-I ligands from several immunopeptidomics studies (including six newly measured samples) covering 72 HLA-I alleles and retrieved a total of 2,066 unique phosphorylated peptides. We then expanded our motif deconvolution tool to identify precise binding motifs of phosphorylated HLA-I ligands. Our results reveal a clear enrichment of phosphorylated peptides among HLA-C ligands and demonstrate a prevalent role of both HLA-I motifs and kinase motifs on the presentation of phosphorylated peptides. These data further enabled us to develop and validate the first predictor of interactions between HLA-I molecules and phosphorylated peptides.

For more than two decades naturally presented, human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-restricted peptides (immunopeptidome) have been eluted and sequenced using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Since, identified disease-associated HLA ligands have been characterized and evaluated as potential active substances. Treatments based on HLA-presented peptides have shown promising results in clinical application as personalized T cell-based immunotherapy. Peptide vaccination cocktails are produced as investigational medicinal products under GMP conditions. To support clinical trials based on HLA-presented tumor-associated antigens, in this study the sensitive LC-MS/MS HLA class I antigen identification pipeline was fully validated for our technical equipment according to the current US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) guidelines.

The immunopeptidomes of JY cells with or without spiked-in, isotope labeled peptides, of peripheral blood mononuclear cells of healthy volunteers as well as a chronic lymphocytic leukemia and a bladder cancer sample were reliably identified using a data-dependent acquisition method. As the LC-MS/MS pipeline is used for identification purposes, the validation parameters include accuracy, precision, specificity, limit of detection and robustness.

Multi-Class Incremental Learning (MCIL) aims to learn new concepts by incrementally updating a model trained on previous concepts. However, there is an inherent trade-off to effectively learning new concepts without catastrophic forgetting of previous ones. To alleviate this issue, it has been proposed to keep around a few examples of the previous concepts but the effectiveness of this approach heavily depends on the representativeness of these examples. This paper proposes a novel and automatic framework we call mnemonics, where we parameterize exemplars and make them optimizable in an end-to-end manner. We train the framework through bilevel optimizations, i.e., model-level and exemplar-level. We conduct extensive experiments on three MCIL benchmarks, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset and ImageNet, and show that using mnemonics exemplars can surpass the state-of-the-art by a large margin. Interestingly and quite intriguingly, the mnemonics exemplars tend to be on the boundaries between different classes.

The OM Panama International Intensive School of Missions re-opens!

Already home to a thriving ecosystem of private school choice, the state’s lawmakers want vouchers for thousands of new students.

Overwhelmed by the occasion, India crumbled to 99 all out in front of a turnout of 86174 at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground, a record in women's cricket history.

Brucella spp. are facultative intracellular bacteria notorious for their ability to induce a chronic, and often lifelong, infection known as brucellosis. To date, no licensed vaccine exists for prevention of human disease, and mechanisms underlying chronic illness and immune evasion remain elusive. We and others have observed that B cell-deficient mice challenged with Brucella display reduced bacterial burden following infection, but the underlying mechanism has not been clearly defined. Here, we show that at 1 month postinfection, B cell deficiency alone enhanced resistance to splenic infection ~100-fold; however, combined B and T cell deficiency did not impact bacterial burden, indicating that B cells only enhance susceptibility to infection when T cells are present. Therefore, we investigated whether B cells inhibit T cell-mediated protection against Brucella. Using B and T cell-deficient Rag1^–/– animals as recipients, we demonstrate that adoptive transfer of CD4⁺ T cells alone confers marked protection against Brucella melitensis that is abrogated by cotransfer of B cells. Interestingly, depletion of CD4⁺ T cells from B cell-deficient, but not wild-type, mice enhanced susceptibility to infection, further confirming that CD4⁺ T cell-mediated immunity against Brucella is inhibited by B cells. In addition, we found that the ability of B cells to suppress CD4⁺ T cell-mediated immunity and modulate CD4⁺ T cell effector responses during infection was major histocompatibility complex class II (MHCII)-dependent. Collectively, these findings indicate that B cells modulate CD4⁺ T cell function through an MHCII-dependent mechanism which enhances susceptibility to Brucella infection.

Platform sandals meet 40-denier tights as rock’n’roll goes bourgeois at Paris fashion week

At his Celine catwalk show on Friday night, the designer Hedi Slimane distilled what looks to be the most compelling trend of this season of fashion shows. Working title: rock’n’roll bourgeois.

Slim knee-length dresses were worn with slinky chain belts; towering platform sandals with sensible 40-denier semi-sheer tights; slim bootcut velvet trousers worn with Princess-line above-the-knee coats. This was a masterclass in Parisian allure: take one part Avenue Montaigne privilege, and mix with one part backstage pass. Shaken, not stirred.

The league, clubs and broadcasters found multiple ways to demonstrate they could stage the game without breaching all these cloying new societal protocols, writes Richard Hinds.

By Alice Li, MD, MSc, RAC (CAN), Regulatory Scientist, Cato Research FDA issued “The Abbreviated 510(k) Program – Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff” on 13 September 2019. The content of this guidance supersedes the content from 1998 guidance “The New 510(k) Paradigm – Alternate Approaches to Demonstrating Substantial Equivalence in Premarket …

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I have blogged before about the effects and possibilities of the Corrigendum of December 2019 for class I medical devices. I refer you to that blog for the background to this discussion, which covers the mechanics of timing. The draft corrigendum discussed in that blog was adopted as described.  The new guidance The MDCG has […]

In the early part of the 20th century, women sought and gained many legal rights, including the right to vote as part of the 19th Amendment. Their entry into the workforce, into occupations previously reserved for men, and into the social and political life of the nation should be celebrated. The biggest remaining challenge is…

In the early part of the 20th century, women sought and gained many legal rights, including the right to vote as part of the 19th Amendment. Their entry into the workforce, into occupations previously reserved for men, and into the social and political life of the nation should be celebrated. The biggest remaining challenge is…

As the coronavirus forces businesses to lay off workers or reduce hours, millions of Americans are seeing their incomes plummet. One of the most pressing concerns (besides staying healthy) is whether these households will be able to pay next month’s rent. Being able to afford decent quality, stable housing in a safe neighborhood is an…

In the early part of the 20th century, women sought and gained many legal rights, including the right to vote as part of the 19th Amendment. Their entry into the workforce, into occupations previously reserved for men, and into the social and political life of the nation should be celebrated. The biggest remaining challenge is…

For more than half a century, the term “the American middle-class,” has served as a political reference to white American upward mobility. This was less an artifact of particular calculations than one of historical experiences and demographic realities. Since at least the 1950s, Americans who were neither wealthy nor “disadvantaged” were, by default, middle class.…

In the early part of the 20th century, women sought and gained many legal rights, including the right to vote as part of the 19th Amendment. Their entry into the workforce, into occupations previously reserved for men, and into the social and political life of the nation should be celebrated. The biggest remaining challenge is…