The neutralizing capacity of antivenom prepared against Thai cobra (Naja kaouthia) venom was compared in mice using the homologous venom and that of spitting cobra (Naja siamensis). The amounts of antivenoms neutralizing a dose of 4 LD50 of the test venom were determined. Four antivenom preparations were used: three purified antivenoms and a crude antivenom, which were made using N. kaouthia ve...

Initial reports about the new COBRA premium subsidy program for recently laid-off workers indicate that enrollment in COBRA continuation coverage has increased substantially, with a healthier mix of individuals enrolling than before. Moreover, implementation has gone smoothly, and most eligible people have heard about the subsidy. Still, many of those who are eligible cannot afford to purchase ...

Building smart meeting rooms requires the support of a computing system architecture. In this paper, we describe the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA), a broker-centric agent architecture for pervasive contextaware systems. CoBrA exploits the Web Ontology Language OWL for supporting knowledge sharing and data fusion, uses logic inferences for resolving and detecting inconsistent context knowl...

Modern real-world optimization problems are often high dimensional and subject to many constraints. These problems are typically expensive in terms of cost and computational time. In order to optimize such problems, conventional constraintbased solvers require a high number of function evaluations which are not affordable in practice. Employment of fast surrogate models to approximate objective...

The enzyme L-Amino Acid Oxidase (LAAO) is widely distributed in snake venoms, contributes a reasonable toxicity to the venoms. However LAAO from Indian cobra (Naja naja ) snake venom has not yet isolated previously. In the present study LAAO from Indian cobra (Naja naja ) snake venom was purified by sequential steps of cation exchange chromatography (CM-Sephadex C-25; CM-52 cellulose), followed...

Characterizing and monitoring biodiversity and assessing its drivers require accurate and comparable data on species assemblages, which, in turn, should rely on efficient and standardized field collection. Unfortunately, protocols that follow such criteria remain scarce and it is unclear whether they can be applied to megadiverse communities, whose study can be particularly challenging. Here, w...

En la presente indagación rizomática transmetódica, con el transparadigma complejo, se analizan re-ligajes en bioética compleja como aportes decolonialidad planetaria; ese objetivo de investigación. Ubicada las líneas investigación: educación-transepistemologías transcomplejas y transepistemologías los conocimientos-saberes transmetodologías transcomplejas. La realiza hermenéutica comprensiva, ...

This paper describes SOUPA (Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications) and the use of this ontology in building the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA). CoBrA is a new agent architecture for supporting pervasive context-aware systems in a smart space environment. The SOUPA ontology is expressed using the Web Ontology Language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to ...

As the U.S. economic downturn continues and job losses mount, more working Americans are likely to lose access to affordable health benefits subsidized by their employers. Analysis of the 2007 Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey finds that two of three working adults would be eligible to extend job-based coverage, under the 1985 Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COB...