of cells similar to goblet cells in nonpigmented cysts. The ACTA2 gene, encoding vascular smooth muscle actin and the most abundant protein in smooth muscle cells (SMCs), plays an important role in actin filament assembly and SMC contractions.3 It is also reported to be expressed in SMCs of the iris, functioning as the contracting protein to move the iris. Guo et al reported a large family with autosomal dominant TAAD with iris flocculi caused by an aortic aneurysm and familial thoracic 6 (AAT6), an allelic variant of ACTA2, Arg149Cys.3 We confirmed that both of the current patients had this mutation. The reason why a mutation of ACTA2 causes cystic iris malformation with numerous gob-let cells remains to be elucidated. We specu-lated that SMC hyperplasia and disarray caused by AAT6 could result in damage to the structural integrity of the iris and forma-tion of iris flocculi. Considering the concomitant TAAD among patients with iris flocculi, recognition of the ocular manifestations can result in recognition of cardiovascular disorders.

Abstract not found

Valid predictions for the direction of nonresponse bias were obtained from subjective estimates and extrapolations in an analysis of mail survey data from published studies. For estimates of the magnitude of bias, the use of extrapolations led to substantial improvements over a strategy

to minimize misclassifications of just those particular examples. The paper presents an analysis of why TSVMs are well suited for text classification. These theoretical findings are supported by experiments on three test collections. The experiments show substantial improvements over inductive methods

to avoid overfitting, we propose a widely applicable generalization of maximum likelihood model fitting by tempered EM. Our approach yields substantial and consistent improvements over Latent Semantic Analysis in a number of experiments.

PVS is a prototype system for writing specifications and constructing proofs. Its development has been shaped by our experiences studying or using several other systems and performing a number of rather substantial formal verifications (e.g., [5,6,8]). PVS is fully implemented and freely available

on a number of test collections indicate substantial performance gains over direct term matching methodsaswell as over LSI. In particular, the combination of models with different dimensionalities has proven to be advantageous.

this paper, we provide a framework in which to study the security of key pre-distribution schemes, propose a new key pre-distribution scheme which substantially improves the resilience of the network compared to previous schemes, and give an in-depth analysis of our scheme in terms of network

is the number of bits in the database). In this work, we investigate whether by replicating the database, more efficient solutions to the private retrieval problem can be obtained. We describe schemes that enable a user to access k replicated copies of a database (k * 2) and privately retrieve information

use. In this paper we present new algorithmic techniques that substantially improve the running time of the belief propagation approach. One of our techniques reduces the complexity of the inference algorithm to be linear rather than quadratic in the number of possible labels for each pixel, which