LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Effects of pioglitazone versus diet and exercise on metabolic health and fat distribution in upper body obesity.

OBJECTIVE
Insulin resistance is associated with visceral adiposity, and interventions that reduce this depot, e.g., diet and exercise, improve insulin resistance. Thiazolidinediones (TZDs) also improve insulin action but paradoxically increase total fat mass, perhaps through remodeling (recruitment of smaller fat cells) and redistribution of adipose tissue. We assessed the effects of pioglitazone versus diet and exercise on fat distribution and the relationship between fat distribution and insulin sensitivity in upper body obesity.


RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
Thirty-nine upper body obese, insulin-resistant, nondiabetic men and premenopausal women were randomly assigned to receive either 30 mg/day pioglitazone or a diet and exercise program for 20 weeks. Before and after the intervention, insulin sensitivity, body composition, body fat distribution (waist-to-hip ratio [WHR], computed tomography abdomen, and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry), and abdominal and femoral fat cell size were assessed.


RESULTS
Diet and exercise resulted in an 11.8 +/- 1.1 kg weight loss. Both diet and exercise and pioglitazone improved insulin sensitivity, but only the former was associated with loss of intra-abdominal fat. Pioglitazone increased total body fat, which preferentially accumulated in the lower body depot in both men and women. WHRs decreased in both groups. Abdominal fat cell size decreased (P = 0.06) after diet and exercise. No statistically significant changes in fat cell size were observed in pioglitazone-treated volunteers.


CONCLUSIONS
In nondiabetic upper body obese subjects, increasing insulin sensitivity via diet and exercise accompanies reductions in visceral fat. Pioglitazone treatment also improves insulin sensitivity and lowers WHR, but this is due to a selective increase in lower body fat. This confirms a site-specific responsiveness of adipose tissue to TZD and suggests that improvements in insulin sensitivity by pioglitazone are achieved independent of changes in intra-abdominal fat.
The potential environmental impact of engineered nanomaterials

With the increased presence of nanomaterials in commercial products, a growing public debate is emerging on whether the environmental and social costs of nanotechnology outweigh its many benefits. To date, few studies have investigated the toxicological and environmental effects of direct and indirect exposure to nanomaterials and no clear guidelines exist to quantify these effects.
Einstein’s Investigations of Galilean Covariant Electrodynamics Prior to 1905

Abstract.Einstein learned from the magnet and conductor thought experiment how to use field transformation laws to extend the covariance of Maxwell’s electrodynamics. If he persisted in his use of this device, he would have found that the theory cleaves into two Galilean covariant parts, each with different field transformation laws. The tension between the two parts reflects a failure not mentioned by Einstein: that the relativity of motion manifested by observables in the magnet and conductor thought experiment does not extend to all observables in electrodynamics. An examination of Ritz’s work shows that Einstein’s early view could not have coincided with Ritz’s on an emission theory of light, but only with that of a conveniently reconstructed Ritz. One Ritz-like emission theory, attributed by Pauli to Ritz, proves to be a natural extension of the Galilean covariant part of Maxwell’s theory that happens also to accommodate the magnet and conductor thought experiment. Einstein’s famous chasing a light beam thought experiment fails as an objection to an ether-based, electrodynamical theory of light. However it would allow Einstein to formulate his general objections to all emission theories of light in a very sharp form. Einstein found two well known experimental results of 18th and 19th century optics compelling (Fizeau’s experiment, stellar aberration), while the accomplished Michelson-Morley experiment played no memorable role. I suggest they owe their importance to their providing a direct experimental grounding for Lorentz‘ local time, the precursor of Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity, and doing it essentially independently of electrodynamical theory. I attribute Einstein’s success to his determination to implement a principle of relativity in electrodynamics, but I urge that we not invest this stubbornness with any mystical prescience.
Predicting particle deposition on HVAC heat exchangers

Particles in indoor environments may deposit on the surfaces of heat exchangers that are used in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Such deposits can lead to performance degradation and indoor air quality problems. We present a model of fin-and-tube heat exchanger fouling that deterministically simulates particle impaction, gravitational settling, and Brownian diffusion and uses a Monte Carlo simulation to account for impaction due to air turbulence. The model predicts that less than 2% of submicron particles will deposit on heat exchangers with air flows and fin spacings that are typical of HVAC systems. For supermicron particles, deposition increases with particle size. The dominant deposition mechanism for 1 – 10 μm particles is impaction on fin edges. Gravitational settling, impaction, and air turbulence contribute to deposition for particles larger than 10 μm. Gravitational settling is the dominant deposition mechanism for lower air velocities, and impaction on refrigerant tubes is dominant for higher velocities. We measured deposition fractions for 1 – 16 μm particles at three characteristic air velocities. On average, the measured results show more deposition than the model predicts for an air speed of 1.5 m s. The amount that the model underpredicts the measured data increases at higher velocities and especially for larger particles, although the JA Siegel and WW Nazaroff Predicting Particle Deposition on Heat Exchangers 2 model shows good qualitative agreement with the measured deposition fractions. Discontinuities in the heat-exchanger fins are hypothesized to be responsible for the increase in measured deposition. The model and experiments reported here are for isothermal conditions and do not address the potentially important effects of heat transfer and water phase change on deposition.
Characterizing and profiling scientific workflows

Researchers working on the planning, scheduling, and execution of scientific workflows need access to a wide variety of scientific workflows to evaluate the performance of their implementations. This paper provides a characterization of workflows from six diverse scientific applications, including astronomy, bioinformatics, earthquake science, and gravitational-wave physics. The characterization is based on novel workflow profiling tools that provide detailed information about the various computational tasks that are present in the workflow. This information includes I/O, memory and computational characteristics. Although the workflows are diverse, there is evidence that each workflow has a job type that consumes the most amount of runtime. The study also uncovered inefficiency in a workflow component implementation, where the component was re-reading the same data multiple times. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Preanalytical variables affecting the integrity of human biospecimens in biobanking.

BACKGROUND
Most errors in a clinical chemistry laboratory are due to preanalytical errors. Preanalytical variability of biospecimens can have significant effects on downstream analyses, and controlling such variables is therefore fundamental for the future use of biospecimens in personalized medicine for diagnostic or prognostic purposes.


CONTENT
The focus of this review is to examine the preanalytical variables that affect human biospecimen integrity in biobanking, with a special focus on blood, saliva, and urine. Cost efficiency is discussed in relation to these issues.


SUMMARY
The quality of a study will depend on the integrity of the biospecimens. Preanalytical preparations should be planned with consideration of the effect on downstream analyses. Currently such preanalytical variables are not routinely documented in the biospecimen research literature. Future studies using biobanked biospecimens should describe in detail the preanalytical handling of biospecimens and analyze and interpret the results with regard to the effects of these variables.
Developing Water and Soil Conservation Work Practically and Realistically

The water and soil conservation is important component part of environmental protection and the ecology building, is the foundation of control and preventing natural calamities and sustainable development, is one of fundamental national policy. This paper introduces function and responsibility, points out that control of water and soil conservation should proceed from practice, launch comprehensive control with local conditions, puts forward the measures to do well job of water and soil conservation.
IoT based SCADA integrated with Fog for power distribution automation

Electrical Grid we have is more than 50 years old. The integration of information technology to the electric grid system is expected to address many shortcomings of the current and traditional electrical grids that have resulted in Smart Grid which is gaining lot of interest and momentum. In Smart Grid, Power Distribution is one part which requires monitoring and control. Lot of technologies and have been applied in Smart grid towards sensing and action. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is very well proven within the substation region. There has been very less monitoring done on the distribution side due to the geographical distribution. Currently, Internet of Things has paved way for connecting huge number of devices to the Internet which would be very much effective and beneficial for power distribution and Automation. So accordingly, an IoT based SCADA integrated with Fog for Distribution Automation system has been proposed which takes care of the consumer utilization, outage management, power quality control and pole transformer health. This is supported by fog computing which does real-time streaming analytics. This helps in reducing the internet bandwidth and latency for immediate control action.
The association between chronic pain and prescription drug abuse in Veterans.

OBJECTIVE
We sought to investigate the association between chronic pain and self-reported prescription drug abuse in a large cohort of patients referred from primary care for a behavioral health assessment.


DESIGN
We performed a cross-sectional analysis of responses to a telephone assessment administered to patients referred for a behavioral health evaluation between April 25, 2005 and October 31, 2007. We conducted descriptive statistics and investigated multivariable associations. Multivariable analyses included age, gender, race, financial status, employment, current smoking, drinking problem, past-year illicit drug use, depression, and chronic pain.


PATIENTS
Veterans referred from primary care (N = 6,377).


RESULTS
Mean age of the sample was 56.5 years with a range of 19-97. The majority of respondents was white, unmarried, and was unemployed. Nearly 5% of the sample reported past 6-month prescription drug abuse. On multivariable analysis, younger age, possible depression (odds ratio [OR] 1.9; 1.3-2.8), probable depression (OR 2.4; 1.6-3.4), smoking (OR 1.4; 1.1-1.8), illicit drug use (OR 2.8; 2.2-3.7), and chronic pain (OR 1.9; 1.4-2.5) were associated with prescription drug abuse.


CONCLUSIONS
We have identified specific variables associated with self-reported prescription drug abuse in primary care patients. Chronic pain is associated both with an indication for prescribing opioids and with abuse of prescription medications. Clinicians are encouraged to follow treatment algorithms when managing patients with chronic pain as a method for reducing misuse.
Delivering Oxidation Resistance-1 (OXR1) to Mouse Kidney by Genetic Modified Mesenchymal Stem Cells Exhibited Enhanced Protection against Nephrotoxic Serum Induced Renal Injury and Lupus Nephritis

OBJECTIVE
To elucidate the role of oxidation resistance 1 (OXR1) gene. Oxidative stress plays a pivotal role in pathogenesis of immune-mediated nephritis. Recently we identified oxidation resistance 1 (OXR1) is conventionally expressed in eukaryotes and has an ability to prevent oxidative damage caused by various oxidative stresses. However the protective effect of OXR1 in immune-associated inflammatory response and oxidative damage is not clear and will be investigated in this study.


METHODS
We utilized mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) as vehicles to carry OXR1 into the injured kidneys of nephritis model mice and investigated the influence of OXR1 on glomerulonephritis. Human OXR1 gene was integrated into genome of MSCs via lentiviral vector, and established hOXR1-MSC cell line which still maintains the differentiation property. 129/svj mice with anti-glomerular basement membrane (GBM) challenge and spontaneous lupus mice B6.Sle1.Sle2.Sle3 were injected with hOXR1-MSCs (i.v. injection) to evaluate the function of hOXR1. Immunohistochemistry was used to appraise the renal pathology and Tunel staining was applied to detect cell apoptosis.


RESULTS
Compared with control mice, hOXR1-MSCs administration showed significantly decreased blood urea nitrogen (BUN), proteinuria and ameliorated renal pathological damage. hOXR1-MSCs transplantation significantly reduced macrophage and T lymphocyte infiltration by inhibiting the expression of CCL2, CCL7, IL-1β, IL-6 and NFκB in mouse kidney. Moreover, hOXR1-MSCs prevented hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)-induced oxidative stress and its implantation reduced nitric oxide (NO) in mouse serum and urine to inhibit tubular cell apoptosis.


CONCLUSION
OXR1-MSCs transplantation may exert a certain protective effect on nephritis by suppressing inflammation and oxidative stress.
Privacy-preserving RFID authentication based on cryptographical encoding

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology has been adopted in many applications, such as inventory control, object tracking, theft prevention, and supply chain management. Privacy-preserving authentication in RFID systems is a very important problem. Existing protocols employ tree structures to achieve fast authentication. We observe that these protocols require a tag to transmit a large amount of data in each authentication, which costs significant bandwidth and energy overhead. Current protocols also impose heavy computational demand on the RFID reader. To address these issues, we design two privacy-preserving protocols based on a new technique called cryptographical encoding, which significantly reduces both authentication data transmitted by each tag and computation overhead incurred at the reader. Our analysis shows that the new protocols are able to reduce authentication data by more than an order of magnitude and reduce computational demand by about an order of magnitude, when comparing with the best existing protocol.
An efficient offline signature identification method based on Fourier Descriptor and chain codes

Ismail A. Ismail , Mohamed A. Ramadan , Talaat S. El-Danaf 3 And Ahmed H. Samak 4 Professor, Dean, College of Computers and informatics , Misr international University, Egypt Professor, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Menofia University , Egypt, Ass. Professor, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Menofia University , Egypt 4 Ass. Lecturer , Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Menofia University, Egypt
Small but important errors in cardiovascular risk calculation by practice nurses: a cross-sectional study in randomised trial setting.

BACKGROUND
Practice nurses play an increasingly important role in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases but we do not have evidence about the accuracy of their cardiovascular risk assessments during real practice consultations.


OBJECTIVES
To examine how nurses perform with regard to absolute 10-year cardiovascular risk assessment in actual practice.


DESIGN
Cross-sectional study.


SETTING
This study was nested in the IMPALA study, a clustered randomised controlled trial involving 24 general practices in The Netherlands.


PARTICIPANTS
24 practice nurses, trained in 10-year cardiovascular risk assessment, calculated the risk of a total of 421 patients without established cardiovascular diseases but eligible for cardiovascular risk assessment.


METHODS
The main outcome measure was the accuracy of risk assessments, defined as (1) the difference between the 10-year cardiovascular risk percentage calculated by nurses and an independent assessor, and (2) the agreement between the treatment categories assigned by the nurses (low, moderate or high risk) and those assigned by the independent assessor.


RESULTS
Thirty-one (7.4%) of the calculated risk percentages differed by more than our preset limits, 25 (81%) being underestimations. Elderly patients (OR 1.1, 95% CI 1.0-1.1), male patients (vs. female OR 3.1, 95% CI 1.2-7.3), and smoking patients (vs. non-smoking OR 3.8, 95% CI 1.7-8.9) were more likely to have their cardiovascular risk miscalculated. Ten (28%) of the 36 patients who should be assigned to the high-risk treatment category according to the independent calculation, were missed as high-risk patients by the practice nurses.


CONCLUSIONS
The overall standard of accuracy of cardiovascular risk assessment by trained practice nurses in actual practice is high. However, a significant number of high-risk patients were misclassified, with the probability that it led to missed opportunities for risk-reducing interventions. As cardiovascular risk assessments are frequently done by nurses in general practice, further specific training should be considered to prevent undertreatment.
WebGT: An Interactive Web-Based System for Historical Document Ground Truth Generation

We present WebGT, the first web-based system to help users produce ground truth data for document images. This user-friendly software system helps historians and computer scientists collectively annotate historical documents. It supports real time collaboration among remote sites independent of the local operating system and also provides several novel semi-automatic tools that have proven effective for annotating degraded documents.
Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing ( WDM ) Network Simulator ( OWns ) : Architecture and Performance Studies

Optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networking technology has been identified as a suitable candidate for future wide area network (WAN) environments, due to its potential ability to meet rising demands of high bandwidth and low latency communication. Networking protocols and algorithms are being developed to meet the changing operational requirements in future optical WANs (OWAN). Simulation is used in the study and evaluation of such new protocols, and is considered a critical component of protocol design. In this paper, we present an optical WDM network simulation tool called the optical WDM network simulator (OWns), that facilitates the study of switching and routing schemes in WDM networks. OWns is designed as an extension to the network simulator ns2, a multi-protocol network simulator that is widely-used for networking research and available in the public domain. Our goal is to incorporate the key characteristics of WDM networks in the simulator, such as optical switching nodes, multi-wavelength links, virtual topology constructions, related switching schemes and routing algorithms. This paper presents the architecture and design of the simulator, and a representative performance analysis to demonstrate how the simulator can be used. The software is available at [1].
The association between subcultures and resistance to change - in a Swedish hospital clinic.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the different subcultures and the employees' preparedness for change at an orthopaedic clinic in a university hospital in Sweden. Design/methodology/approach - Surveys were sent out to 179 nurses and physicians. The survey included the two instruments Organisational Values Questionnaire and resistance to change (RTC) Scale. Findings - The results suggest a dominance of a human relations culture, i.e. flexibility, cohesion and trust, in the orthopaedic clinic. These characteristics seemed to decrease RTC. Opposite to this, planning, routines and goal setting appeared to increase change-resistant behaviour. Practical implications - By predicting potential obstacles in a certain context prior to a change process, resources can be used in a more optimal way. An instrument that pinpoints the culture of a particular healthcare setting may be a useful tool in order to anticipate the possible outcome of change. Originality/value - The rational goal/internal processes dimension exerted a stronger association with RTC than in earlier studies. Deeply rooted standards and routinised care models, governed by work schedules, could be an obstacle to introducing a care model based on the individual needs of the patient. There was, however, a surprisingly low RTC. The results are contrary to the accepted understanding of public organisations known to be slow to change.
Side constraints and non-price attributes in markets

In most real-world (electronic) marketplaces, there are additional considerations besides maximizing immediate economic value. We present a sound way of taking such considerations into account via side constraints and non-price attributes, and show that side constraints (such as budget, limit on the number of winners, and exclusive-or) have a significant impact on the complexity of market clearing.
How infants perceive the toy robot Pleo. An exploratory case study on infant-robot-interaction

In order to develop robot systems that can interact with untrained, naïve human users, it is important to understand how people – from different age groups – perceive a given robot system and which features might be relevant for this. While existing studies generally use questionnaires/interviews and/or coding schemes rendering either abstract categories or single features of individual behaviour towards a robot, we suggest to use a different methodological approach: to use the concepts and methodological tools from Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EM/CA). Investigating video data from a study in which users – here: infants 3 to 8 years old – play with the toy robot Pleo, we show that and how (1) a user’s perception, categorization and re-interpretation of a robot system emerges step by step during and from the interaction with the system, and (2) how the user’s attempts to establish coordinated ‘sequences of action’ play a central role in this. The results of our initial exploratory case analysis are discussed in the light of studies which suggest that, in infants, robotic pets seem to blur foundational ontological categories, such as animate vs. inanimate. 12
Eclipse Process Framework Composer Part 1 : Key Concepts

by Peter Haumer, phaumer@us.ibm.com Solution architect, IBM Rational Software This two-part article offers an introduction to the process engineering approach and tool support provided by the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF). It presents a process management tool platform and conceptual framework for authoring, tailoring, and deploying development processes. Part One, presented here, offers a high-level understanding of the key capabilities of the Eclipse Process Framework Composer tool and it provides an overview of key concepts and typical usage scenarios.