LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Colesevelam hydrochloride (cholestagel): a new, potent bile acid sequestrant associated with a low incidence of gastrointestinal side effects.

OBJECTIVES
To compare colesevelam hydrochloride (Cholestagel), a nonabsorbed hydrogel with bile acid-sequestering properties, with placebo for its lipid-lowering efficacy, its effects on laboratory and clinical safety parameters, and the incidence of adverse events.


METHODS
Following diet and placebo lead-in periods, placebo or colesevelam was administered at 4 dosages (1.5, 2.25, 3.0, or 3.75 g/d) for 6 weeks with morning and evening meals to men and women with hypercholesterolemia (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol level >4.14 mmol/L [>160 mg/dL]). Patients returned to the clinic every 2 weeks throughout the treatment period for lipid parameter measurements and adverse event assessments. Samples were collected for serum chemistry profiles, hematologic studies, coagulation studies, and vitamin level assessment at baseline and after 6 weeks of treatment.


RESULTS
Among the 149 patients randomized, 137 completed the study. Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations decreased in a dosage-dependent manner by 0.11 mmol/L (4.2 mg/dL) (1.8%) in the 1.5-g/d colesevelam treatment group and up to 1.01 mmol/L (39 mg/dL) (19.1%) in the 3.75-g/d colesevelam treatment group. Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations at the end of treatment were significantly reduced from baseline levels in the 3.0- and 3.75-g/d colesevelam treatment groups (P = .01 and P<.001, respectively). Total cholesterol levels demonstrated a similar response to colesevelam treatment, with an 8. 1% decrease from baseline in the 3.75-g/d treatment group (P<.001). High-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels rose significantly in the 3.0- and 3.75-g/d colesevelam treatment groups, by 11.2% (P=.006) and 8.1% (P=.02), respectively. Median triglyceride levels did not change from baseline, nor were there any significant differences between treatment groups. The incidence of adverse events was similar among all groups.


CONCLUSIONS
Colesevelam therapy is effective for lowering low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations in persons with moderate hypercholesterolemia. It lacks the constipating effect of other bile acid sequestrants, demonstrating the potential for increased compliance.
Agents that talk and hit back: animated agents in augmented reality

AR puppet is a hierarchical animation framework for augmented reality agents, which is a research area combining augmented reality (AR), sentient computing and autonomous animated agents into a single coherent human-computer interface paradigm. While sentient computing systems use the physical environment as an input channel, AR outputs virtual information superimposed on real world objects. To enhance man-machine communication with more natural and efficient information presentation, this framework adds animated agents to AR applications that make autonomous decisions based on their perception of the real environment. These agents are able to turn physical objects into interactive, responsive entities collaborating with both anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic virtual characters, extending AR with a previously unexplored output modality. AR puppet explores the requirements for context-aware animated agents concerning visualization, appearance, behavior, in addition to associated technologies and application areas. A demo application with a virtual repairman collaborating with an augmented LEGO/spl reg/ robot illustrates our concepts.
Subcellular effects of nanosecond electrical pulses

Electrical models for biological cells predict that reducing the duration of applied electrical pulses to values below the charging time of the outer membrane causes a strong increase in the probability for electric field interactions with intracellular structures. For electric field amplitudes exceeding MV/m such pulses are expected to cause electroporation of cell organelles, with the required electric field amplitude scaling linearly with the inverse of pulse duration. Experimental studies where human cells were exposed to pulsed electric field of up to 300 kV/cm amplitude with duration as short as 10 ns, have confirmed this hypothesis. The observed effects include the breaching of intracellular granule membranes without permanent damage to the cell membrane, abrupt rises in intracellular free calcium levels, and enhanced expression of genes. At increased electric fields, the application of nanosecond pulses induces apoptosis in biological cells, an effect that has been shown to reduce the growth of tumors.
Executive functioning in children with specific language impairment.

BACKGROUND
A limited range of evidence suggests that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulties with higher order thinking and reasoning skills (executive functioning, EF). This study involved a comprehensive investigation of EF in this population taking into account the contributions of age, nonverbal IQ and verbal ability.


METHODS
Ten separate measures of EF were assessed in 160 children: 41 had SLI; 31 had low language/cognitive functioning but did not fulfil the criteria for SLI (low language functioning or LLF); and 88 were typically developing with no language difficulties. Group differences in performance were assessed after controlling for age, nonverbal IQ and verbal ability in a series of regression analyses.


RESULTS
Children with SLI and LLF had significantly lower performance than typical children on 6 of the 10 EF tasks once age and nonverbal IQ had been controlled (verbal and nonverbal executive-loaded working memory, verbal and nonverbal fluency, nonverbal inhibition and nonverbal planning). Performance on these EF tasks remained lower for those in the SLI group even when verbal IQ was entered in the regressions.


CONCLUSIONS
Children with language impairments showed marked difficulties on a range of EF tasks. These difficulties were present even when adjustments were made for their verbal abilities.
Using a SCIP-PLUS perspective to reduce the risk of SSI

Methods Four risk reduction initiatives were studied, A: Impact of BMI on antimicrobial prophylactic dosing in general, OB and CT surgical patients; B: Development of standardized regimen of CHG preadmission cleansing to improve outcome in surgical patients; C: Efficacy of antimicrobial sutures to reduce the risk of suture contamination at wound closure and D: The impact of an innovative antimicrobial surgical glove to reduce the risk of microbial contamination following glove microperforation.
Mode of term singleton breech delivery.

There is a trend in the United States to perform cesarean delivery for term singleton fetuses in a breech presentation. The number of practitioners with the skills and experience to perform vaginal breech delivery has decreased. The decision regarding the mode of delivery should consider patient wishes and the experience of the health care provider. Obstetrician–gynecologists and other obstetric care providers should offer external cephalic version as an alternative to planned cesarean for a woman who has a term singleton breech fetus, desires a planned vaginal delivery of a vertex-presenting fetus, and has no contraindications. External cephalic version should be attempted only in settings in which cesarean delivery services are readily available. Planned vaginal delivery of a term singleton breech fetus may be reasonable under hospital-specific protocol guidelines for eligibility and labor management. If a vaginal breech delivery is planned, a detailed informed consent should be documented—including risks that perinatal or neonatal mortality or short-term serious neonatal morbidity may be higher than if a cesarean delivery is planned.
Reliability and Validity of the Korean Version of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale

OBJECTIVE
The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) measures various aspects of psychological resilience in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychiatric ailments. This study sought to assess the reliability and validity of the Korean version of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (K-CD-RISC).


METHODS
In total, 576 participants were enrolled (497 females and 79 males), including hospital nurses, university students, and firefighters. Subjects were evaluated using the K-CD-RISC, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Test-retest reliability and internal consistency were examined as a measure of reliability, and convergent validity and factor analysis were also performed to evaluate validity.


RESULTS
Cronbach's alpha coefficient and test-retest reliability were 0.93 and 0.93, respectively. The total score on the K-CD-RISC was positively correlated with the RSES (r=0.56, p<0.01). Conversely, BDI (r=-0.46, p<0.01), PSS (r=-0.32, p<0.01), and IES-R scores (r=-0.26, p<0.01) were negatively correlated with the K-CD-RISC. The K-CD-RISC showed a five-factor structure that explained 57.2% of the variance.


CONCLUSION
The K-CD-RISC showed good reliability and validity for measurement of resilience among Korean subjects.
BiGS: BioTac Grasp Stability Dataset

Autonomous grasping of unknown objects is a fundamental requirement for robots performing manipulation tasks in real world environments. Even though there has been a lot of progress in the area of grasping, it is still considered an open challenge and even the state-of-the-art grasping methods may result in failures [1]. A reliable prediction of grasp stability helps to avoid such failures and provides an option to re-grasp the object safely. Since the majority of grasping failures happen at the contact points, which are occluded for vision systems, tactile feedback plays a major role for predicting grasp stability. The human-inspired biomimmetic tactile sensor (BioTac) [2] is equipped with a 19-electrode array and a hydroacoustic sensor surrounded by silicon skin inflated with incompressible and conductive liquid. This design provides rich tactile feedback similar to the slowly-adapting and fastadapting afferents present in the human skin [3]. Latest developments in classification algorithms [4] allow us to explore the potential of large amounts of data from these sensors. Our goal is to provide a publicly accessible grasp-stability dataset collected using the BioTacs and, thus, enable further development of algorithms capable of reliable grasp stability prediction.
Five-year follow-up of patients receiving imatinib for chronic myeloid leukemia.

BACKGROUND
The cause of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a constitutively active BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase. Imatinib inhibits this kinase, and in a short-term study was superior to interferon alfa plus cytarabine for newly diagnosed CML in the chronic phase. For 5 years, we followed patients with CML who received imatinib as initial therapy.


METHODS
We randomly assigned 553 patients to receive imatinib and 553 to receive interferon alfa plus cytarabine and then evaluated them for overall and event-free survival; progression to accelerated-phase CML or blast crisis; hematologic, cytogenetic, and molecular responses; and adverse events.


RESULTS
The median follow-up was 60 months. Kaplan-Meier estimates of cumulative best rates of complete cytogenetic response among patients receiving imatinib were 69% by 12 months and 87% by 60 months. An estimated 7% of patients progressed to accelerated-phase CML or blast crisis, and the estimated overall survival of patients who received imatinib as initial therapy was 89% at 60 months. Patients who had a complete cytogenetic response or in whom levels of BCR-ABL transcripts had fallen by at least 3 log had a significantly lower risk of disease progression than did patients without a complete cytogenetic response (P<0.001). Grade 3 or 4 adverse events diminished over time, and there was no clinically significant change in the profile of adverse events.


CONCLUSIONS
After 5 years of follow-up, continuous treatment of chronic-phase CML with imatinib as initial therapy was found to induce durable responses in a high proportion of patients. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00006343 [ClinicalTrials.gov].)
CRISPR/Cas9: an advanced tool for editing plant genomes

To meet current challenges in agriculture, genome editing using sequence-specific nucleases (SSNs) is a powerful tool for basic and applied plant biology research. Here, we describe the principle and application of available genome editing tools, including zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat associated CRISPR/Cas9 system. Among these SSNs, CRISPR/Cas9 is the most recently characterized and rapidly developing genome editing technology, and has been successfully utilized in a wide variety of organisms. This review specifically illustrates the power of CRISPR/Cas9 as a tool for plant genome engineering, and describes the strengths and weaknesses of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology compared to two well-established genome editing tools, ZFNs and TALENs.
Distributed representation learning for knowledge graphs with entity descriptions

Recent studies of knowledge representation attempt to project both entities and relations, which originally compose a high-dimensional and sparse knowledge graph, into a continuous low-dimensional space. One canonical approach TransE (Bordes et al., 2013) which represents entities and relations with vectors (embeddings), achieves leading performances solely with triplets, i.e. (head entity, relation, tail entity), in a knowledge base. The cutting-edge method DKRL (Xie et al., 2016) extends TransE via enhancing the embeddings with entity descriptions by means of deep neural network models. However, DKRL requires extra space to store parameters of inner layers, and relies on more hyperparameters to be tuned. Therefore, we create a single-layer model which requests much fewer parameters. The model measures the probability of each triplet along with corresponding entity descriptions, and learns contextual embeddings of entities, relations and words in descriptions simultaneously, via maximizing the loglikelihood of the observed knowledge. We evaluate our model in the tasks of knowledge graph completion and entity type classification with two benchmark datasets: FB500K and EN15K, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms both TransE and DKRL, indicating that it is both efficient and effective in learning better distributed representations for knowledge bases. c © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Autonomous vehicle social behavior for highway entrance ramp management

“Socially cooperative driving” is an integral part of our everyday driving, hence requiring special attention to imbue the autonomous driving with a more natural driving behavior. In this paper, an intention-integrated Prediction- and Cost function-Based algorithm (iPCB) framework is proposed to enable an autonomous vehicle to perform cooperative social behavior. An intention estimator is developed to extract the probability of surrounding agents' intentions in real time. Then for each candidate strategy, a prediction engine considering the interaction between host and surrounding agents is used to predict future scenarios. A cost function-based evaluation is applied to compute the cost for each scenario and select the decision corresponding to the lowest cost. The algorithm was tested in simulation on an autonomous vehicle cooperating with vehicles merging from freeway entrance ramps with 10,000 randomly generated scenarios. Compared with approaches that do not take social behavior into account, the iPCB algorithm shows a 41.7% performance improvement based on the chosen cost functions.
Opinion mining of movie reviews at document level

The whole world is changed rapidly and using the current technologies Internet becomes an essential need for everyone. Web is used in every field. Most of the people use web for a common purpose like online shopping, chatting etc. During an online shopping large number of reviews/opinions are given by the users that reflect whether the product is good or bad. These reviews need to be explored, analyse and organized for better decision making. Opinion Mining is a natural language processing task that deals with finding orientation of opinion in a piece of text with respect to a topic. In this paper a document based opinion mining system is proposed that classify the documents as positive, negative and neutral. Negation is also handled in the proposed system. Experimental results using reviews of movies show the effectiveness of the system.
Perceiving and Reasoning about a Changing World

A rational agent (artificial or otherwise) residing in a complex changing environment must gather information perceptually, update that information as the world changes, and combine that information with causal information to reason about the changing world. Using the system of defeasible reasoning that is incorporated into the OSCAR architecture for rational agents, a set of reason-schemas is proposed for enabling an agent to perform some of the requisite reasoning. Along the way, solutions are proposed for the Frame Problem, the Qualification Problem, and the Ramification Problem. The principles and reasoning described have all been implemented in OSCAR. keywords: defeasible reasoning, nonmonotonic logic, perception, causes, causation, time, temporal This work was supported in part by NSF grant no. IRI-9634106. An early version of some of this material appears in Pollock (1996), but it has undergone substantial change in the present paper. projection, frame problem, qualification problem, ramification problem, OSCAR.
Dual band Koch antenna for RF energy harvesting

Nowadays, our living environment is rich in radio-frequency energy suitable for harvesting. This energy can be used for supplying low-power consumption devices. In this paper, we analyze a new type of a Koch-like antenna which was designed for energy harvesting specifically. The designed antenna covers two different frequency bands (GSM 900 and Wi-Fi). Functionality of the antenna is verified by simulations and measurements.
Relationship of HIV reservoir characteristics with immune status and viral rebound kinetics in an HIV therapeutic vaccine study.

OBJECTIVES
The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of therapeutic HIV vaccination on the HIV reservoir and assess the relationship of the viral reservoir with HIV-specific immune status and viral rebound kinetics.


DESIGN
A retrospective analysis of ACTG A5197, a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of a therapeutic rAd5 HIV-1 gag vaccine.


METHODS
Participants received vaccine/placebo at weeks 0, 4 and 26 prior to a 16-week analytic treatment interruption (ATI) at week 38. Cell-associated HIV-1 RNA and DNA (CA-RNA and CA-DNA) and HIV-1 residual viremia were quantified at weeks 0, 8 and 38. HIV-specific CD4(+)/CD8(+) activity was assessed by an intracellular cytokine staining assay.


RESULTS
At study entry, CA-RNA and CA-DNA levels were correlated inversely with the numbers of HIV-specific CD4(+) interferon-γ producing cells (CA-RNA: r = -0.23, P = 0.03 and CA-DNA: r = -0.28, P < 0.01, N = 93). Therapeutic HIV vaccination induced HIV-specific CD4(+) activity, but did not significantly affect levels of CA-RNA or CA-DNA. Vaccine recipients with undetectable residual viremia at week 8 had higher frequencies of HIV-specific CD4(+) and CD8(+) interferon-γ producing cells (undetectable versus detectable residual viremia: 277 versus 161 CD4(+) cells/10(6) lymphocytes, P = 0.03 and 1326 versus 669 CD8(+) cells/10 lymphocytes, P = 0.04). Pre-ATI CA-RNA and CA-DNA were associated with post-ATI plasma HIV set point (CA-RNA: r = 0.51, P < 0.01 and CA-DNA: r = 0.47, P < 0.01).


CONCLUSION
Vaccine-induced T-cell responses were associated with a modest transient effect on residual viremia, but more potent immune responses and/or combination treatment with latency-reversing agents are needed to reduce the HIV reservoir. HIV reservoir measures may act as biomarkers of post-ATI viral rebound kinetics.


CLINICAL TRIALS REGISTRATION
NCT00080106.
Parallel CRC Computation in FPGAs

This paper presents how to compute n-bit CRO checksums on FPGAs in parallel. For this task, a specialized logic minimization strategy is outlined. It achieves significantly better results than standard logic optimizers. For n > 96, CRC designs with an n-bit I/O interface are poorly routable. However, for smaller I/O interfaces even a 126-bit CRC can be implemented. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Using CRC style checksums (cyclic redundancy check) [4] is a simple and powerful method for detecting transmission errors in data communication systems. It is well suited for high speed serial transmission equipment, because it can be implemented on chip with a shift register and some XOR gates at nearly no cost. However, for some purposes it is necessary to implement a CRC calculation off the serial transmission chip, e.g., if additional error detection is required [2, 3]. Then, chip-to-chip delay and achievable clock rates prohibit a bit-serial CRC implementation, and a parallel calculation has to be used. Technically speaking, the core of calculating an n bit checksum is to compute n boolean functions fi : IB" ~ 113, where 113 = {0, 1} and i = 1 , . . . , n. Although it is possible to put these fbrmulae into an FPGA directly, it is worthwhile trying to minimize the number of used gates or cells by looking for common subterms in the set of formulae. Since the sole operator in the formulae is XOR, specialized techniques for optimizing combinatorial logic can be employed. The optimization problem itself remains XP-ha rd still [5], so heuristics have to be used. A heuristic that we have chosen can roughly reduce the number of XORs by half, while standard optimizers like MIS, SIS or MulOp [6, 1, 7] perform significantly worse. We have used both Actel and Xilinx FPGAs to implement parallel CRC computation. For the Actel architecture mainly the number of XORs had to be minimized due to the fine granularity of logic components. The Xilinx architecture with its function generators organized in CLBs (configurable logic block) has a higher granularity, because a two-input XOR, gate has the same cost as a four-input XOR. Here, a different optimization strategy should be used. * work partly funded by DFG SFB 124
Single-band PIFA MIMO antenna system design for future 5G wireless communication applications

A three-element single-band printed inverted F-antenna (PIFA) system operating in the 28 GHz band for the future millimeter-wave (mmWave) fifth generation (5G) wireless communications is presented. The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system consists of three single-band PIFA antenna elements. The size of a single PIFA antenna element is 0.85 × 0.85 at 28 GHz. The antenna array shows good isolation characteristics between closely spaced antenna elements. A minimum isolation of 13 dB is found between its antenna elements. Results show that the proposed antenna has a bandwidth of 807 MHz (27.73 GHz-28.54 GHz). Other important parameters in any wireless communication system such as envelop correlation coefficient (ECC), diversity gain (DG), mean effective gain (MEG), and multiplexing efficiency (ME), have been calculated and discussed. Results show that the proposed antenna array is a good candidate for the future 5G MIMO communication applications.