BACKGROUND Lead is a highly toxic and pervasive metal. Chronic exposure to low levels is responsible for significant health effects, particularly in children. Prevention remains the best option for reducing childhood lead exposure, however the knowledge, attitudes and practices to lead exposure in many developing countries is not known. METHODS We conducted four focus group discussions (FGD) ...

We propose a complex rule-based system for generating Czech sentences out of tectogrammatical trees, as introduced in Functional Generative Description (FGD) and implemented in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 (PDT 2.0). Linguistically relevant phenomena including valency, diathesis, condensation, agreement, word order, punctuation and vocalization have been studied and implemented in Perl us...

We study the minimization of a convex function f(X) over the set of n × n positive semi-definite matrices, but when the problem is recast as minU g(U) := f(UU >), with U ∈ Rn×r and r ≤ n. We study the performance of gradient descent on g—which we refer to as Factored Gradient Descent (Fgd)—under standard assumptions on the original function f . We provide a rule for selecting the step size and,...

Functional Generative Description (FGD) is a dependency based descriptive system, which has been in development since the 1960s, see esp. Sgall et al. (1969). FGD was originally implemented as a generative procedure, but lately we have been interested in a declarative representation. e object of the present paper concerns the foundations of a reduction system which is more complex than a reduc...

Glucose 6-phosphate (G6P) is a metabolic intermediate with many possible cellular fates. In mycobacteria, G6P is a substrate for an enzyme, F(420)-dependent glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (Fgd), found in few bacterial genera. Intracellular G6P levels in six Mycobacterium sp. were remarkably higher ( approximately 17-130-fold) than Escherichia coli and Bacillus megaterium. The high G6P level ...