The recent finding of cases of silicosis among jade workers in Hong Kong points to this disease being an occupational hazard. The source was found to be the silica flour that was added in a polishing process. Five cases are described together with the results of environmental investigation in a workplace. In three cases the disease was of early onset, rapidly progressive, and presented the feat...

A new algorithm is developed for independent component analysis (ICA) with or without constraints on the mixing matrix. The algorithm is based on the criterion of Joint Approximate Diagonalization of Eigen-matrices (JADE). We propose a column-wise processing approach to perform joint diagonalization of the cumulant (eigen-) matrices. Instead of successively selecting paired columns of the unita...

Verifying that agent interactions in a multiagent system (MAS) are compliant to a given global protocol is of paramount importance for most systems, and is mandatory for safety-critical applications. Runtime verification requires a proper formalism to express such a protocol, a possibly non intrusive mechanism for capturing agent interactions, and a method for verifying that captured interactio...

Numerous studies have pointed to interactions between the tumor suppressor von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) and the oncogenic Wnt-beta-catenin signaling cascade; however, the mechanism of this crosstalk has remained elusive. Among other roles, VHL can promote the stabilization of Jade-1. Now, recent findings provide compelling evidence that Jade-1 ubiquitylates beta-catenin, leading to its degradation. ...

This paper proposes an agent-based control framework in JADE which allows the construction of control extensions tailored to the application needs. The approach is based on a minimal actor model which simplifies JADE agent programming. A catalog of reusable control forms, both concurrent/parallel and time-dependent (real time or simulation time are supported) was achieved. The paper introduces ...

Two anionic fluorescein derivatives can be used for the simple and definitive localization of neuronal degeneration in brain tissue sections. Initial work on the first generation fluorochrome, Fluoro-Jade, demonstrated the utility of this compound for the detection of neuronal degeneration induced by a variety of well-characterized neurotoxicants, including kainic acid, 3-nitropropionic acid, i...

Since a number of years agent technology is considered one of the most innovative technologies for the development of distributed software systems. While not yet a mainstream approach in software engineering at large, a lot of work on agent technology has been done, many research results and applications have been presented, and some software products exists which have moved from the research c...

The Cancuen dataset is unique in its large size. Fully 3,538 jade artifacts, with a combined mass of 91.6 kilograms, were recovered from residential excavations at the site. Of The manufacture of jade goods was a long and arduous process that required numerous technological stages and a variety of tools. Unfortunately, the archaeological record is often too fragmentary to allow for the identifi...

We describe the usage of the Multi-agent system in the data preprocessing stage of an on-going project, called eWedding. The aim of this project is to utilize MAS and various approaches, like Web services, Ontology, and Data mining techniques, in e-Business that want to improve responsiveness and efficiency of systems so as to extract customer behavior model on Wedding Businesses. However, in t...