LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Endoscopic endonasal skull base approach for parasellar lesions: Initial experiences, results, efficacy, and complications

BACKGROUND
Endoscopic surgery is suitable for the transsphenoidal approach; it is minimally invasive and provides a well-lit operative field. The endoscopic skull base approach through the large opening of the sphenoid sinus through both nostrils has extended the surgical indication for various skull base lesions. In this study, we describe the efficacy and complications associated with the endoscopic skull base approach for extra- or intradural parasellar lesions based on our experiences.


METHODS
Seventy-four cases were treated by an endoscopic skull base approach. The indications for these procedures included 55 anterior extended approaches, 10 clival approaches, and 9 cavernous approaches. The operations were performed through both the nostrils using a rigid endoscope. After tumor removal, the skull base was reconstructed by a multilayered method using a polyglactin acid (PGA) sheet.


RESULTS
Gross total resection was achieved in 82% of pituitary adenomas, 68.8% of meningiomas, and 60% of craniopharyngiomas in anterior extended approach and in 83.3% of chordomas in clival approach, but only in 50% of the tumors in cavernous approach. Tumor consistency, adhesion, and/or extension were significant limitations. Visual function improvements were achieved in 37 of 41 (90.2%) cases. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leakage (9.5%), infections (5.4%), neural injuries (4.1%), and vascular injuries (2.7%) were the major complications.


CONCLUSIONS
Our experiences show that the endoscopic skull base approach is a safe and effective procedure for various parasellar lesions. Selection of patients who are unlikely to develop complications seems to be an important factor for procedure efficacy and good outcome.
: A Group Theoretic Model for Symmetric Interconnection Networks

The authors develop a formal group-theoretic model, called the Cayley graph model, for designing, analyzing, and improving such networks. They show that this model is universal and demonstrate how interconnection networks can be concisely represented in this model. It is shown that this model enables the authors to design networks based on representations of finite groups. They can then analyze these networks by interpreting the group-theoretic structure graph theoretically, Using these ideas, and motivated by certain well-known combinatorial problems, they develop two classes of networks called star graphs and pancake graphs. These networks are shown to have better performance than previous networks. >
Authentic learning of mobile security with case studies

This work-in-progress paper presents an approach to authentic learning of mobile security through real-world-scenario case studies. Five sets of case studies are being developed to cover the state-of-the-art of mobile security knowledge and practices. Some of the developed case studies are being implemented in related courses and the preliminary feedback is positive.
A data preprocessing framework for students' outcome prediction by data mining techniques

Data mining applied on educational data aims to find useful patterns in large volumes of data in order to transform and optimize educational paths. It involves many steps. This paper presents a case study for a data preprocessing framework for students' outcome prediction using data collected by Moodle system.
Review of glucosamine-containing oral joint supplements: are they effective in the horse?

While glucosamine supplementation is very common and a multitude of commercial products are available, there is currently limited information available to assist the equine practitioner in deciding when and how to use these products. Low bioavailability of orally administered glucosamine, poor product quality, low recommended doses, and a lack of scientific evidence showing efficacy of popular oral joint supplements are major concerns. Authors’ addresses: Rolling Thunder Veterinary Services, 225 Roxbury Road, Garden City, NY 11530 (Oke); Ontario Veterinary College, Department of Clinical Studies, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1 (Weese); e-mail: rollingthunder@optonline.net (Oke). © 2006 AAEP.
Knowledge-based conversational agents and virtual storytelling

We describe an architecture for building speech-enabled conversational agents, deployed as self-contained Web services, with ability to provide inference processing on very large knowledge bases and its application to voice enabled chatbots in a virtual storytelling environment. The architecture integrates inference engines, natural language pattern matching components and story-specific information extraction from RDF/XML files. Our Web interface is dynamically generated by server side agents supporting multi-modal interface components (speech and animation). Prolog refactorings of the WordNet lexical knowledge base, FrameNet and the Open Mind common sense knowledge repository are combined with internet meta-search to provide high-quality knowledge sources to our conversational agents. An example of conversational agent with speech capabilities is deployed on the Web at http://logic.csci.unt.edu:8080/wordnet_agent/frame.html. The agent is also accessible for live multi-user text-based chat, through a Yahoo Instant Messenger protocol adaptor, from wired or wireless devices, as the jinni_agent Yahoo IM "handle".
A photovoltaic module thermal model using observed insolation and meteorological data to support a long life, highly reliable module-integrated inverter design by predicting expected operating temperature

Accurate prediction of photovoltaic (PV) module temperature is needed to understand the expected electrical performance, lifetime, and reliability of photovoltaic cells. A photovoltaic AC module (PVAC) integrated the inverter directly with the PV module which exposes the power electronic circuitry to the thermal environment of the PV module. This has been reported to impose additional requirements on component selection and circuit design. However, a worst-case stack up analysis can lead to the conclusion that module-integrated inverters require industrial grade components or expensive thermal management. This paper presents a detailed thermal model for the PV module that uses real-world operating conditions, based on observed data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to calculate PV module temperature. Results from the model confirm that the peak PV module temperature can reach over 80°C, which was expected from other techniques, but that these peak temperatures occur on average for only 8 minutes per year in locations similar to Tucson, Az. Since the PV module temperature is found to be less than 70°C for 99% of the operation hours, thermal management is not onerous and that the use of lower cost, commercial grade components will provide a mean time between failure (MTBF) to support an inverter warranty equivalent to that of the PV module itself.
Abiraterone acetate plus prednisone versus placebo plus prednisone in chemotherapy-naive men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (COU-AA-302): final overall survival analysis of a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 3 study.

BACKGROUND
Abiraterone acetate plus prednisone significantly improved radiographic progression-free survival compared with placebo plus prednisone in men with chemotherapy-naive castration-resistant prostate cancer at the interim analyses of the COU-AA-302 trial. Here, we present the prespecified final analysis of the trial, assessing the effect of abiraterone acetate plus prednisone on overall survival, time to opiate use, and use of other subsequent therapies.


METHODS
In this placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomised phase 3 study, 1088 asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic patients with chemotherapy-naive prostate cancer stratified by Eastern Cooperative Oncology performance status (0 vs 1) were randomly assigned with a permuted block allocation scheme via a web response system in a 1:1 ratio to receive either abiraterone acetate (1000 mg once daily) plus prednisone (5 mg twice daily; abiraterone acetate group) or placebo plus prednisone (placebo group). Coprimary endpoints were radiographic progression-free survival and overall survival analysed in the intention-to-treat population. The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT00887198.


FINDINGS
At a median follow-up of 49.2 months (IQR 47.0-51.8), 741 (96%) of the prespecified 773 death events for the final analysis had been observed: 354 (65%) of 546 patients in the abiraterone acetate group and 387 (71%) of 542 in the placebo group. 238 (44%) patients initially receiving prednisone alone subsequently received abiraterone acetate plus prednisone as crossover per protocol (93 patients) or as subsequent therapy (145 patients). Overall, 365 (67%) patients in the abiraterone acetate group and 435 (80%) in the placebo group received subsequent treatment with one or more approved agents. Median overall survival was significantly longer in the abiraterone acetate group than in the placebo group (34.7 months [95% CI 32.7-36.8] vs 30.3 months [28.7-33.3]; hazard ratio 0.81 [95% CI 0.70-0.93]; p=0.0033). The most common grade 3-4 adverse events of special interest were cardiac disorders (41 [8%] of 542 patients in the abiraterone acetate group vs 20 [4%] of 540 patients in the placebo group), increased alanine aminotransferase (32 [6%] vs four [<1%]), and hypertension (25 [5%] vs 17 [3%]).


INTERPRETATION
In this randomised phase 3 trial with a median follow-up of more than 4 years, treatment with abiraterone acetate prolonged overall survival compared with prednisone alone by a margin that was both clinically and statistically significant. These results further support the favourable safety profile of abiraterone acetate in patients with chemotherapy-naive metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.


FUNDING
Janssen Research & Development.
Long term video segmentation through pixel level spectral clustering on GPUs

We introduce a new technique for performing video segmentation combining the state-of-the-art image segmentation and optical flow algorithms on GPUs. We avoid pre-clustering into superpixels and probabilistic reasoning, and instead view the problem as a generalization of image segmentation techniques. Utilizing spectral clustering techniques at the pixel level (as opposed to 2D/3D superpixels), we demonstrate video segmentation over hundreds of frames - far beyond what has been achieved through pixel level spectral segmentation techniques before. Our algorithm achieves comparable accuracy as other sparse motion clustering techniques while still maintaining 100% density in segmentation over long time periods. We achieve better accuracy with lower oversegmentation compared to dense video segmentation techniques. We exploit increased computational power made available through parallelism in GPUs and efficient numerical algorithms to achieve these results. We show our results on the motion segmentation dataset [4]. Our technique can also be used to provide good quality 3D superpixels and extended to tasks where the ability to track 3D volumes over time is useful.
Feasibility, Acceptability, and Preliminary Effects of the COPE Online Cognitive-Behavioral Skill-Building Program on Mental Health Outcomes and Academic Performance in Freshmen College Students: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study.

PROBLEM
Despite the increasing prevalence of mental health disorders in university students, few receive needed evidence-based treatment.


OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility and preliminary effects of a seven-session online cognitive-behavioral skill-building intervention (i.e., COPE, Creating Opportunities for Personal Empowerment) versus a comparison group on their anxiety, depressive symptoms, and grade performance.


METHODS
A randomized controlled pilot study was conducted from September 2012 to May 2013 with 121 college freshmen enrolled in a required one credit survey course.


FINDINGS
Although there were no significant differences in anxiety and depressive symptoms between the groups, only COPE students with an elevated level of anxiety at baseline had a significant decline in symptoms. Grade point average was higher in COPE versus comparison students. Evaluations indicated that COPE was a positive experience for students.


CONCLUSIONS
COPE is a promising brief intervention that can be integrated effectively into a required freshman course.
On the Helmholtz Principle for Data Mining

Unusual behaviour detection and information extraction in streams of short documents and files (emails, news, tweets, log files, messages, etc.) are important problems in security applications. In [1], [2], a new approach to rapid change detection and automatic summarization of large documents was introduced. This approach is based on a theory of social networks and ideas from image processing and especially on the Helmholtz Principle from the Gestalt Theory of human perception. In this article we modify, optimize and verify the approach from [1], [2] to unusual behaviour detection and information extraction from small documents.
Resilience of and through urban ecosystem services

Cities and urban areas are critical components of global sustainability as loci of sustainability progress and drivers of global transformation, especially in terms of energy efficiency, climate change adaptation, and social innovation. However, urban ecosystems have not been incorporated adequately into urban governance and planning for resilience despite mounting evidence that urban resident health and wellbeing is closely tied to the quality, quantity, and diversity of urban ecosystem services. We suggest that urban ecosystem services provide key links for bridging planning, management and governance practices seeking transitions to more sustainable cities, and serve an important role in building resilience in urban systems. Emerging city goals for resilience should explicitly incorporate the value of urban ES in city planning and governance. We argue that cities need to prioritize safeguarding of a resilient supply of ecosystem services to ensure livable, sustainable cities, especially given the dynamic nature of urban systems continually responding to global environmental change. Building urban resilience of and through ecosystem services, both in research and in practice, will require dealing with the dynamic nature of urban social–ecological systems and incorporating multiple ways of knowing into governance approaches to resilience including from scientists, practitioners, designers and planners. & 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Hypocretin (orexin) deficiency in human narcolepsy

Alterations in the hypocretin receptor 2 and preprohypocretin genes produce narcolepsy in animal models. Hypocretin was undetectable in seven out of nine people with narcolepsy, indicating abnormal hypocretin transmission.
Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture's contradictions

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programs, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalization. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, California, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organization of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalization. By focusing on one interpretation or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agriculture’s transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help better position urban agriculture within a coordinated efforts for structural change, rather than promoting farming in cities as an end unto itself, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself.
Diamond-like amorphous carbon films prepared by r.f. sputtering in argon : electron-assisted investigations

Abstract We reliably verified by various electron-assisted methods (electron probe microanalysis, scanning electron microscopy, cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (XTEM), high resolution XTEM, TEM, radial distribution function, electron energy loss spectroscopy) the impurities, morphology and atomic structure which are important for the macroscopic film behaviour of diamond-like carbon films r.f. sputtered in argon at different target voltages, cooled and uncooled. The relatively smooth surface morphology of our low nitrogen-1 and argon-contaminated films depends on target voltage and substrate temperature. Until now, the influence of up to 4.2 at.% oxygen impurities on our resulting solid state has not been clear. We find in comparison with earlier investigations of the physical film properties for our low hydrogen, hard, IR-transparent amorphous carbon films a dominating film structure of irregular cross-linked regions of sp 2 -hybridized carbon predominantly arranged in six-membered rings.
Efficient large-scale sequence comparison by locality-sensitive hashing

MOTIVATION
Comparison of multimegabase genomic DNA sequences is a popular technique for finding and annotating conserved genome features. Performing such comparisons entails finding many short local alignments between sequences up to tens of megabases in length. To process such long sequences efficiently, existing algorithms find alignments by expanding around short runs of matching bases with no substitutions or other differences. Unfortunately, exact matches that are short enough to occur often in significant alignments also occur frequently by chance in the background sequence. Thus, these algorithms must trade off between efficiency and sensitivity to features without long exact matches.


RESULTS
We introduce a new algorithm, LSH-ALL-PAIRS, to find ungapped local alignments in genomic sequence with up to a specified fraction of substitutions. The length and substitution rate of these alignments can be chosen so that they appear frequently in significant similarities yet still remain rare in the background sequence. The algorithm finds ungapped alignments efficiently using a randomized search technique, locality-sensitive hashing. We have found LSH-ALL-PAIRS to be both efficient and sensitive for finding local similarities with as little as 63% identity in mammalian genomic sequences up to tens of megabases in length
Teacher Leadership as Distributed Leadership: Heresy, Fantasy or Possibility?.

This article focuses on the issue of teacher leadership and explores various interpretations and definitions within the literature. It examines the relationship between teacher leadership and distributed leadership, focusing particularly upon the idea of activity theory. The article suggests that there are some important connections and overlaps between distributed leadership and teacher leadership. The article also discusses the possible sources of resistance to the idea of teachers as leaders in schools and explores how distributing leadership to teachers may contribute to building professional learning communities within and between schools.
Memristive Biosensors Under Varying Humidity Conditions

We attempt to examine the potential of silicon nanowire memristors in the field of nanobiosensing. The memristive devices are crystalline Silicon (Si) Nanowires (NWs) with Nickel Silicide (NiSi) terminals. The nanowires are fabricated on a Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) wafer by an Ebeam Lithography Technique (EBL) process that allows high resolution at the nanoscale. A Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE) technique is used to define free-standing nanowires. The close alignment between Silicon (Si) and Nickel-Silicide (NiSi) terminals forms a Schottky-barrier at their junction. The memristive effect of the fabricated devices matches well with the memristor theory. An equivalent circuit reproducing the memristive effect in current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of our silicon nanowires is presented too. The memristive silicon nanowire devices are then functionalized with anti-human VEGF (Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor) antibody and I-V characteristics are examined for the nanowires prior to and after protein functionalization. The uptake of bio-molecules linked to the surface of the memristive NWs is confirmed by the increased voltage gap in the hysteresis curve. The effects of varying humidity conditions on the conductivity of bio-modified memristive silicon nanowires are deeply investigated.
Leucine modulation of mitochondrial mass and oxygen consumption in skeletal muscle cells and adipocytes

BACKGROUND
The effects of dairy on energy metabolism appear to be mediated, in part, by leucine and calcium which regulate both adipocyte and skeletal muscle energy metabolism. We recently demonstrated that leucine and calcitriol regulate fatty acid oxidation in skeletal muscle cells in vitro, with leucine promoting and calcitriol suppressing fatty acid oxidation. Moreover, leucine coordinately regulated adipocyte lipid metabolism to promote flux of lipid to skeletal muscle and regulate metabolic flexibility. We have now investigated the role of mitochondrial biogenesis in mediating these effects.


METHODS
We tested the effect of leucine, calcitriol and calcium in regulation of mitochondrial mass using a fluorescence method and tested mitochondrial biogenesis regulatory genes as well mitochondrial component genes using real-time PCR. We also evaluated the effect of leucine on oxygen consumption with a modified perfusion system.


RESULTS
Leucine (0.5 mM) increased mitochondrial mass by 30% and 53% in C2C12 myocytes and 3T3-L1 adipocytes, respectively, while calcitriol (10 nM) decreased mitochondrial abundance by 37% and 27% (p < 0.02). Leucine also stimulated mitochondrial biogenesis genes SIRT-1, PGC-1alpha and NRF-1 as well as mitochondrial component genes UCP3, COX, and NADH expression by 3-5 fold in C2C12 cells (p < 0.003). Adipocyte-conditioned medium reduced mitochondrial abundance (p < 0.001) and decreased UCP3 but increased PGC-1alpha expression in myocytes, suggesting a feedback stimulation of mitochondrial biogenesis. Similar data were observed in C2C12 myocytes co-cultured with adipocytes, with co-culture markedly suppressing mitochondrial abundance (p < 0.02). Leucine stimulated oxygen consumption in both C2C12 cells and adipocytes compared with either control or valine-treated cells. Transfection of C2C12 myocytes with SIRT-1 siRNA resulted in parallel suppression of SIRT-1 expression and leucine-induced stimulation of PGC-1alpha and NRF-1, indicating that SIRT-1 mediates leucine induced mitochondrial biogenesis in muscle cells.


CONCLUSION
These data suggest that leucine and calcitriol modulation of muscle and adipocyte energy metabolism is mediated, in part, by mitochondrial biogenesis.