LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Cholesterol lowering and inhibition of sterol absorption by Lactobacillus reuteri NCIMB 30242: a randomized controlled trial

Background/Objectives:The percentage of hypercholesterolemic individuals not reaching their LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C) goal remains high and additional therapeutic strategies should be evaluated. The objective of this study was to evaluate the cholesterol-lowering efficacy and mechanism of action of bile salt hydrolase-active Lactobacillus reuteri NCIMB 30242 capsules in hypercholesterolemic adults.Subjects/Methods:A total of 127 subjects completed a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-arm, multicenter study. Subjects were randomized to consume L. reuteri NCIMB 30242 capsules or placebo capsules over a 9-week intervention period. The primary outcome was LDL-C relative to placebo at the study end point.Results:L. reuteri NCIMB 30242 capsules reduced LDL-C by 11.64% (P<0.001), total cholesterol by 9.14%, (P<0.001), non-HDL-cholesterol (non-HDL-C) by 11.30% (P<0.001) and apoB-100 by 8.41% (P=0.002) relative to placebo. The ratios of LDL-C/HDL-cholesterol (HDL-C) and apoB-100/apoA-1 were reduced by 13.39% (P=0.006) and 9.00% (P=0.026), respectively, relative to placebo. Triglycerides and HDL-C were unchanged. High-sensitivity C-reactive protein and fibrinogen were reduced by 1.05 mg/l (P=0.005) and 14.25% (P=0.004) relative to placebo, respectively. Mean plasma deconjugated bile acids were increased by 1.00 nmol/l (P=0.025) relative to placebo, whereas plasma campesterol, sitosterol and stigmasterol were decreased by 41.5%, 34.2% and 40.7%, respectively.Conclusions:The present results suggest that the deconjugation of intraluminal bile acids results in reduced absorption of non-cholesterol sterols and indicate that L. reuteri NCIMB 30242 capsules may be useful as an adjunctive therapy for treating hypercholesterolemia.
i Dynamic Pricing in the Airline Industry

Dynamic price discrimination adjusts prices based on the option value of future sales, which varies with time and units available. This paper surveys the theoretical literature on dynamic price discrimination, and confronts the theories with new data from airline pricing behavior. Correspondence to: R. Preston McAfee, 100 Baxter Hall, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, preston@mcafee.cc.
Software complexity: A statistical case study through insertion sort

The present paper makes use of factorial experiments to assess software complexity using insertion sort as a trivial example. We next propose to implement the methodology in quicksort and other advanced algorithms.
Papilla proportions in the maxillary anterior dentition.

Two hundred forty interdental papilla sites in 20 healthy patients were investigated. Interdental papilla heights of maxillary anterior teeth were measured from the gingival zenith, along with clinical crown lengths. Percentages of papilla height to crown length were computed and defined as papilla proportion, mesial papilla proportion (MPP), and distal papilla proportion (DPP). Mean interdental papilla heights of maxillary anterior teeth were 4 mm mesially and 4.1 mm distally. Mean MPP was 42% (n = 120), and mean DPP was 43% (n = 120). No significant differences were found between MPP and DPP for maxillary incisors (P >/= .5). Canines demonstrated a trend toward increased distal papilla heights. Papilla proportions were approximately 40% for all tooth groups. A more apical position of distal papilla heights from anterior to posterior teeth, mentioned in the literature, was not confirmed by the present data.
The Influence of Task Interruption on Individual Decision Making: An Information Overload Perspective

Interruptions are a common aspect of the work environment of most organizations. Yet little is known about how intemptions and their characteristics, such as frequency of occurrence, influence decision-making performance of individuals. Consequently, this paper reports the results of two experiments investigating the influence of interruptions on individual decision making. Interruptions were found to improve decision-making performance on simple tasks and to lower performance on complex tasks. For complex tasks, the frequency of interruptions and the dissimilarity of content between the primary and interruption tasks was found to exacerbate this effect. The implications of these results for future research and practice are discussed. Subject Areas: Decision Making, Information Overload, and Interruptions.
Towards a Unified Approach to Motion Planning for Dynamic Underactuated Mechanical Systems with Non-holonomic Constraints

In this paper, we generalize our prior results in motion analysis to design gaits for a more general family of underactuated mechanical systems. In particular, we analyze and generate gaits for mixed mechanical systems which are systems whose motion is simultaneously governed by both a set of non-holonomic velocity constraints and a notion of a generalized momentum being instantaneously conserved along allowable directions of motion. Through proper recourse to geometric mechanics, we are able to show that the resulting motion from a gait has two portions: a geometric and a dynamic contribution. The main challenge in motion planning for a mixed system is understanding how to separate the geometric and dynamic contributions of motion due to a general gait, thus simplifying gait analysis. In this paper, we take the first step towards addressing this challenge in a generalized framework. Finally, we verify the generality of our approach by applying our techniques to novel mechanical systems which we introduce in this paper as well as by verifying that seemingly different prior motion planning results could actually be explained using the gait analysis presented in this paper. KEY WORDS—gait generation, motion control, underactuated robots, non-holonomic motion planning, mixed mechanical systems, generalized momentum, scaled momentum, variable inertia snakeboard, Stokes’ theorem The International Journal of Robotics Research Vol. 26, No. 10, October 2007, pp. 1075–1124 DOI: 10.1177/0278364907082098 c SAGE Publications 2007 Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore Figures 1–7, 10–11, 15–32 appear in color online: http://ijr.sagepub.com
Blockchain and Trusted Computing: Problems, Pitfalls, and a Solution for Hyperledger Fabric

A smart contract on a blockchain cannot keep a secret because its data is replicated on all nodes in a network. To remedy this problem, it has been suggested to combine blockchains with trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX, for executing applications that demand privacy. As a consequence untrusted blockchain nodes cannot get access to the data and computations inside the TEE. This paper first explores some pitfalls that arise from the combination of TEEs with blockchains. Since smart contracts executed inside TEEs are, in principle, stateless they are susceptible to rollback attacks, which should be prevented to maintain privacy for the application. However, in blockchains with non-final consensus protocols, such as the proof-of-work in Ethereum and others, the contract execution must handle rollbacks by design. This implies that TEEs for securing blockchain execution cannot be directly used for such blockchains; this approach works only when the consensus decisions are final. Second, this work introduces an architecture and a prototype for smart-contract execution within Intel SGX technology for Hyperledger Fabric, a prominent enterprise blockchain platform. Our system resolves difficulties posed by the execute-order-validate architecture of Fabric, prevents rollback attacks on TEE-based execution as far as possible, and minimizes the trusted computing base. For increasing security, our design encapsulates each application on the blockchain within its own enclave that shields it from the host system. An evaluation shows that the overhead moving execution into SGX is within 10%–20% for a sealed-bid auction application.
ULibraries Research Guides: Mechanical Engineering: Web Resources

This guide features some of the Marriott Library's resources and services for mechanical engineers.
Learning and transferring movie styles

There is currently a lot of interest in analyzing large movie databases to automatically extract film style and aesthetics [1,2]. This analysis has, however, been largely limited to identifying the duration, size, color and motion of movie shots. While these low-level details are pertinent, they do not provide a high-level understanding of cinematography, such as identifying the inherent style in a movie. Ultimately, they are unable to answer challenging questions such as, can we identify the author of a movie clip? Can we generative movie shots in the style of a given director or cinematographer ? can we generate shot sequences on the style of a given director or film editor ?
High Dynamic Range Imaging

High dynamic range (HDR) images and video contain pixels, which can represent much greater range of colors and brightness levels than that offered by existing, standard dynamic range images. Such “better pixels” greatly improve the overall quality of visual content, making it appear much more realistic and appealing to the audience. HDR is one of the key technologies of the future imaging pipeline, which will change the way the digital visual content is represented and manipulated. This article offers a broad review of the HDR methods and technologies with the introduction on fundamental concepts behind the perception of HDR imagery. It serves both as an introduction to the subject and review of the current stateof-the-art in HDR imaging. It covers the topics related capture of HDR content with cameras and its generation with computer graphics methods; encoding and compression of HDR images and video; tone-mapping for displaying HDR content on standard dynamic range displays; inverse tone-mapping for up-scaling legacy content for presentation on HDR displays; the display technologies offering HDR range; and finally image and video quality metrics suitable for HDR content.
Combining Deep Linguistics Analysis and Surface Pattern Learning: A Hybrid Approach to Chinese Definitional Question Answering

We explore a hybrid approach for Chinese definitional question answering by combining deep linguistic analysis with surface pattern learning. We answer four questions in this study: 1) How helpful are linguistic analysis and pattern learning? 2) What kind of questions can be answered by pattern matching? 3) How much annotation is required for a pattern-based system to achieve good performance? 4) What linguistic features are most useful? Extensive experiments are conducted on biographical questions and other definitional questions. Major findings include: 1) linguistic analysis and pattern learning are complementary; both are required to make a good definitional QA system; 2) pattern matching is very effective in answering biographical questions while less effective for other definitional questions; 3) only a small amount of annotation is required for a pattern learning system to achieve good performance on biographical questions; 4) the most useful linguistic features are copulas and appositives; relations also play an important role; only some propositions convey vital facts.
Phase I safety and pharmacokinetic study of CT-011, a humanized antibody interacting with PD-1, in patients with advanced hematologic malignancies.

PURPOSE
CT-011 is a humanized IgG1 monoclonal antibody that modulates the immune response through interaction with PD-1, a protein belonging to the B7 receptor family present on lymphocytes. The objectives of this phase I study were to assess the dose-limiting toxicities, to determine the maximum tolerated dose, and to study the pharmacokinetics of CT-011 administered once to patients with advanced hematologic malignancies.


EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
Seventeen patients were treated with escalating doses of CT-011 ranging from 0.2 to 6 mg/kg. For pharmacokinetic analysis, blood samples were withdrawn from the patients before and immediately after treatment and at 24 hours, 48 hours, and on days 7, 14, and 21. CT-011 blood levels were assessed with a specific ELISA and derived concentrations were used to calculate pharmacokinetic parameters. Activation of the immune system was assessed by measuring peripheral blood CD4+, CD8+, and CD69+ lymphocytes.


RESULTS
The study showed the antibody to be safe and well tolerated in this patient population. No single maximum tolerated dose was defined in this study. Clinical benefit was observed in 33% of the patients with one complete remission. Pharmacokinetic analyses show that serum Cmax and the AUC of CT-011 increased proportionally with dose. The median t1/2 of CT-011 ranged from 217 to 410 hours. Sustained elevation in the percentage of peripheral blood CD4+ lymphocytes was observed up to 21 days following CT-011 treatment.


CONCLUSIONS
A single administration of 0.2 to 6.0 mg/kg of CT-011 is safe and well tolerated in patients with advanced hematologic malignancies.
Wide-Area Image Geolocalization with Aerial Reference Imagery

We propose to use deep convolutional neural networks to address the problem of cross-view image geolocalization, in which the geolocation of a ground-level query image is estimated by matching to georeferenced aerial images. We use state-of-the-art feature representations for ground-level images and introduce a cross-view training approach for learning a joint semantic feature representation for aerial images. We also propose a network architecture that fuses features extracted from aerial images at multiple spatial scales. To support training these networks, we introduce a massive database that contains pairs of aerial and ground-level images from across the United States. Our methods significantly out-perform the state of the art on two benchmark datasets. We also show, qualitatively, that the proposed feature representations are discriminative at both local and continental spatial scales.
A Low Cost Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) for Pulmonary Disease Modelling and Diagnosis.

This paper reports the design, development and implementation of a low cost electrical impedance tomography system. A 16 electrode EIT system was designed around a phantom tank. A 60 kHz constant sinusoidal current of up to 1 mA is induced in the first and second electrode and the root-mean-square potential on all the adjacent pairs of electrodes placed clockwise is measured directly by the analogue pins of an Arduino Mega microcontroller. This data is fed and then executed in MATLAB which is interfaced with EIDORS software to reconstruct the image based on the acquired data. This is the most economical EIT system designed and tested so far as compared to other EIT systems.
Students' Attitudes and Perceptions towards using m-learning for French Language Learning: A case study on Princess Nora University.

This research aims at understanding students’ attitudes and perceptions towards using mobile phones as a learning tool for additional reading practices within a course. The study is conducted to address how mobile phones are used in grammar and vocabulary learning, inside/outside French language classrooms, for undergraduate students at Princess Nora University. This can be achieved by answering the questions: what is the appropriate method that achieves best students' interaction and understanding; and is there a difference between students' performance before and after using mobile phones. Hence, a mixed methodology (quantitative-qualitative) was used. The data was collected via a questionnaire for students' attitudes to use m-learning and their perceptions about it. The study examined the use of mobile phones as a(n): repository of assignments/exercises; tool for reading via multimedia features; and emailbased learning/instant messaging voice-over-Internet protocol applications. The analysis focused on examining the attitudes and perceptions of students towards m-learning by conducting pre-test and posttest experiment. The quantitative data analysis showed that students' attitudes are high, while students' perceptions are moderate. Results indicated that the utilization of m-learning improves students' learning performance inside and outside the classroom. The main advantage of m-learning is it can be used anywhere-anytime; and it can be adopted to enhance students' interaction and learning experiences.
Cervical Spinal Cord Injury without Computed Tomography Evidence of Trauma in Adults: Magnetic Resonance Imaging Prognostic Factors.

BACKGROUND
Spinal cord injury (SCI) without computed tomography evidence of trauma is underreported in adults and is considered a subtype of SCI with relatively good outcome. Despite this, few studies have been performed to determine specific imaging-related prognostic factors. Our objective is to describe the imaging characteristics of patients experiencing blunt cervical spine trauma with neurologic deficits, but without radiologic abnormalities and associated prognostic factors.


METHODS
A retrospective review of all adult patients with cervical SCI admitted to the emergency room of 2 university hospitals from January 2004 to December 2013 was performed. Only patients with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) performed within 72 hours after trauma were included for further analysis. All patients with bony injury or traumatic malalignment were excluded. Data gathered on the remaining patients included demographics, mechanism of injury, severity of SCI, long-term patient outcome, improvement in neurologic condition, and MRI results.


RESULTS
There were 48 patients who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria, and 40 who demonstrated improvement in the neurologic examination at follow-up. Disruption of either the anterior longitudinal ligament or ligamentum flavum and larger lesions in the MRI were predictors of lack of neurologic improvement.


CONCLUSIONS
Early MRI has prognostic value in patients suffering SCI without computed tomography evidence of trauma. Lesion length is a powerful predictor of outcome in this subgroup of patients. Soft tissue injury plays a role in the severity of injury and the ability to recover in this subgroups of patients.
Predicting adult obesity from childhood obesity: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

A systematic review and meta-analysis was performed to investigate the ability of simple measures of childhood obesity such as body mass index (BMI) to predict future obesity in adolescence and adulthood. Large cohort studies, which measured obesity both in childhood and in later adolescence or adulthood, using any recognized measure of obesity were sought. Study quality was assessed. Studies were pooled using diagnostic meta-analysis methods. Fifteen prospective cohort studies were included in the meta-analysis. BMI was the only measure of obesity reported in any study, with 200,777 participants followed up. Obese children and adolescents were around five times more likely to be obese in adulthood than those who were not obese. Around 55% of obese children go on to be obese in adolescence, around 80% of obese adolescents will still be obese in adulthood and around 70% will be obese over age 30. Therefore, action to reduce and prevent obesity in these adolescents is needed. However, 70% of obese adults were not obese in childhood or adolescence, so targeting obesity reduction solely at obese or overweight children needs to be considered carefully as this may not substantially reduce the overall burden of adult obesity.
Spontaneous reports of vasculitis as an adverse event following immunization: A descriptive analysis across three international databases.

BACKGROUND
Vasculitides have been reported as adverse events following immunization (AEFI) following various vaccines. We describe reports of vasculitis to three international spontaneous reporting systems.


METHODS
All spontaneous reports of vasculitis following immunization between January 2003 and June 2014 were retrieved from Eudravigilance (EV), the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), and VigiBase®. A Standard MedDRA Query (SMQ) for vasculitis was used and vaccine types were categorized using the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical classification system. We performed a descriptive analysis by source, sex, age, country, time to onset, vaccine, and type of vasculitis.


RESULTS
We retrieved 1797 reports of vasculitis in EV, 1171 in VAERS, and 2606 in VigiBase®. Vasculitis was predominantly reported in children aged 1-17 years, and less frequently in the elderly (>65 years). The generic term "vasculitis" was the most frequently reported AEFI in this category across the three databases (range 21.9% to 27.5% of all reported vasculitis for vaccines). For the more specific terms, Henoch-Schoenlein Purpura (HSP) was most frequently reported, (19.1% on average), followed by Kawasaki disease (KD) (16.1% on average) and polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) (9.2% on average). Less frequently reported subtypes were cutaneous vasculitis (CuV), vasculitis of the central nervous system (CNS-V), and Behcet's syndrome (BS). HSP, PMR and CuV were more frequently reported with influenza vaccines: on average in 29.3% for HSP reports, 61.5% for PMR reports and in 39.2% for CuV reports. KD was reported with pneumococcal vaccines in 32.0% of KD reports and with rotavirus vaccines in more than 20% of KD reports. BS was most frequently reported after hepatitis and HPV vaccines and CNS-V after HPV vaccines.


CONCLUSION
Similar reporting patterns of vasculitides were observed in different databases. Implementation of standardized case definitions for specific vasculitides could improve overall data quality and comparability of reports.
Kalman filtering for relative spacecraft attitude and position estimation

In this paper a novel approach is developed for relative state estimation of spacecraft flying in formation. The approach uses information from an optical sensor to provide multiple line-of-sight vectors from one spacecraft to another. The line-of-sight measurements are coupled with gyro measurements and dynamical models in an extended Kalman filter to determine relative attitude, position and gyro biases. The quaternion is used to describe the relative kinematics, while general relative orbital equations are used to describe the positional dynamics. Three different attitude formulations are Graduate Student, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Currently Researcher, Attitude and Orbit Control Team, Satellite Division, SaTReC, KAIST, 373-1 Kusong-dong, Yusong-gu, Taejon 305701, Republic Korea. Email: songoo@satrec.kaist.ac.kr. Member AIAA. Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Email: johnc@eng.buffalo.edu. Associate Fellow AIAA. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Email: cheng3@eng.buffalo.edu. Member AIAA. Graduate Student, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Email: fosbury@eng.buffalo.edu. Student Member AIAA. George J. Eppright Chair Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering. Email: junkins@tamu.edu. Fellow AIAA.