LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
An experimental study of a Mediterranean diet intervention for patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVE
To investigate the efficacy of a Mediterranean diet (MD) versus an ordinary Western diet for suppression of disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).


METHODS
Patients with well controlled, although active RA of at least two years' duration, who were receiving stable pharmacological treatment, were invited to participate. All patients were randomly allocated to the MD or the control diet (CD). To achieve good compliance with prescribed diets all patients were for the first three weeks served the MD or the CD, respectively, for lunch and dinner at the outpatient clinic's canteen. Clinical examinations were performed at baseline, and again in the 3rd, 6th, and 12th week. A composite disease activity index (DAS28), a physical function index (Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ)), a health survey of quality of life (Short Form-36 (SF-36)), and the daily consumption of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs were used as primary efficacy variables.


RESULTS
From baseline to the end of the study the patients in the MD group (n=26) showed a decrease in DAS28 of 0.56 (p<0.001), in HAQ of 0.15 (p=0.020), and in two dimensions of the SF-36 Health Survey: an increase in "vitality" of 11.3 (p=0.018) and a decrease in "compared with one year earlier" of 0.6 (p=0.016). For the control patients (n=25) no significant change was seen at the end of the study. This difference between the two treatment groups was notable only in the second half of the trial.


CONCLUSION
The results indicate that patients with RA, by adjusting to a Mediterranean diet, did obtain a reduction in inflammatory activity, an increase in physical function, and improved vitality.
Geography and American History

Book reviewed in this article: 
 
 
 
THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE UNITED STATES. By Ralph H. Brown
The tolerability of rTMS treatment in schizophrenia with respect to cognitive function.

INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this study was to assess tolerability and safety of high-frequency rTMS with regard to cognitive performance when conducted as "add-on" treatment in chronic schizophrenia in-patients (n=32).


METHODS
Patients, who were on stable antipsychotic treatment, were randomly assigned to verum or sham condition (double-blind). In the verum group, ten sessions of 10 Hz rTMS with a total of 10 000 stimuli were applied over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) at 110% of motor threshold over a period of two weeks. The sham group received corresponding sham stimulation. RTMS effects on cognitive performance were assessed with a neuropsychological test battery consisting of the following tests: trail making test A and B (TMT), Wisconsin card sorting test (WCST), D2 attention task and the "short test of general intelligence" (KAI).


RESULTS
No statistically significant deterioration of cognitive performance was observed as a result of rTMS treatment. Moreover it was shown that in the verum group patients with a less favourable performance on the WCST at baseline tend to improve after rTMS treatment with regard to psychopathology as opposed to patients in the control group.


DISCUSSION
The stability of cognitive function suggests good tolerability of rTMS treatment in schizophrenia. The absence of evidence for cognitive deterioration could be due to low and short stimulation parameters.
A motivated definition of exploitation and exploration

This paper can be seen as an exercise in formal reasoning to provide a well-understood, unambiguous definition of the terms exploitation and exploration. It is not our aim to distill a common denominator from the current usage of the two terms in the literature — we refer to [3] for a detailed overview. Instead, we start from a simple algorithm framework and try to give a precise definition of exploitation and exploration in this context. Then we discuss these definitions in great depth. Population-based algorithms and algorithms with any sort of memory remain out of the scope of this paper, and will be considered in further contributions.
Towards a Mathematical Theory of the Delays of the Asynchronous Circuits

The inequations of the delays of the asynchronous circuits are written, by making use of pseudo-Boolean differential calculus. We consider these efforts to be a possible starting point in the semi-formalized reconstruction of the digital electrical engineering (which is a non-formalized theory).
Ancestry informative markers for fine-scale individual assignment to worldwide populations.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS
The analysis of large-scale genetic data from thousands of individuals has revealed the fact that subtle population genetic structure can be detected at levels that were previously unimaginable. Using the Human Genome Diversity Panel as reference (51 populations - 650,000 SNPs), this works describes a systematic evaluation of the resolution that can be achieved for the inference of genetic ancestry, even when small panels of genetic markers are used.


METHODS AND RESULTS
A comprehensive investigation of human population structure around the world is undertaken by leveraging the power of Principal Components Analysis (PCA). The problem is dissected into hierarchical steps and a decision tree for the prediction of individual ancestry is proposed. A complete leave-one-out validation experiment demonstrates that, using all available SNPs, assignment of individuals to their self-reported populations of origin is essentially perfect. Ancestry informative genetic markers are selected using two different metrics (In and correlation with PCA scores). A thorough cross-validation experiment indicates that, in most cases here, the number of SNPs needed for ancestry inference can be successfully reduced to less than 0.1% of the original 650,000 while retaining close to 100% accuracy. This reduction can be achieved using a novel clustering-based redundancy removal algorithm that is also introduced here. Finally, the applicability of our suggested SNP panels is tested on HapMap Phase 3 populations.


CONCLUSION
The proposed methods and ancestry informative marker panels, in combination with the increasingly more comprehensive databases of human genetic variation, open new horizons in a variety of fields, ranging from the study of human evolution and population history, to medical genetics and forensics.
Self-nonself discrimination in a computer

Current commercial virus detectors are based on The problem of protecting computer systems can be viewed generally as the problem of learning to distinguish relf from other. We describe a method for change detection which is based on the generation of T cella in the immune syetem. Mathematical analysis reveals computational costs of the system, and preliminary experiments illustrate how the method might be applied to the problem of computer viruses.
Long-term results (three to five years) of the Restenosis Intrastent: Balloon angioplasty versus elective Stenting (RIBS) randomized study.

OBJECTIVES
We sought to analyze the very late outcomes of patients treated for in-stent restenosis (ISR) according to treatment allocation and 10 prespecified variables.


BACKGROUND
Long-term results (>2 years) of patients with ISR undergoing repeat coronary interventions are not well established.


METHODS
The Restenosis Intrastent: Balloon angioplasty versus elective Stenting (RIBS) randomized study compared these two strategies in 450 patients with ISR. A detailed systematic protocol was used for late clinical follow-up.


RESULTS
At one-year follow-up (100% of patients), the event-free survival was similar in the two groups (77% stent implantation [ST] arm, 71% balloon angioplasty [BA] arm, log-rank p = 0.19). Additional long-term clinical follow-up (median 4.3 years, range 3 to 5 years) was obtained in 98.6% of patients. During this time 22 additional patients died (9 ST arm, 13 BA arm), 7 suffered a myocardial infarction (3 ST arm, 4 BA arm), 23 required coronary surgery (11 ST arm, 12 BA arm), and 9 underwent repeat coronary interventions (4 ST arm, 5 BA arm) (nonexclusive events). At four years the event-free survival was 69% in the ST arm and 64% in the BA arm (log-rank p = 0.21). Among the 10 prespecified variables, vessel size > or = 3 mm had a major influence on the clinical outcome at four years, with better results in the ST group (hazard ratio 0.51, 95% confidence interval 0.3 to 0.89, p = 0.016).


CONCLUSIONS
Patients with ISR undergoing repeat interventions have a significant event rate at late follow-up. Continued medical surveillance should be continued after one year. Patients with large vessels have a better outcome after repeat stenting.
Ashamed and Afraid: A Scoping Review of the Role of Shame in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

BACKGROUND
Despite considerable progress in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a large percentage of individuals remain symptomatic following gold-standard therapies. One route to improving care is examining affective disturbances that involve other emotions beyond fear and threat. A growing body of research has implicated shame in PTSD's development and course, although to date no review of this specific literature exists. This scoping review investigated the link between shame and PTSD and sought to identify research gaps.


METHODS
A systematic database search of PubMed, PsycInfo, Embase, Cochrane, and CINAHL was conducted to find original quantitative research related to shame and PTSD.


RESULTS
Forty-seven studies met inclusion criteria. Review found substantial support for an association between shame and PTSD as well as preliminary evidence suggesting its utility as a treatment target. Several design limitations and under-investigated areas were recognized, including the need for a multimodal assessment of shame and more longitudinal and treatment-focused research.


CONCLUSION
This review provides crucial synthesis of research to date, highlighting the prominence of shame in PTSD, and its likely relevance in successful treatment outcomes. The present review serves as a guide to future work into this critical area of study.
The Skindex instruments to measure the effects of skin disease on quality of life.

Skindex-29 and Skindex-16 are validated measures of the effects of skin diseases on patients' quality of life. This article reviews the development of both versions of Skindex, discusses their measurement properties and interpretability, and gives examples of how they have been used and adapted for dermatologic research internationally. Studies of quality of life in patients with nonmelanoma skin cancer are described to illustrate the use of Skindex to understand quality of life and to compare effectiveness of different treatments for this highly prevalent condition.
Building a Large-scale Software Programming Taxonomy from Stackoverflow

Taxonomy is becoming indispensable to a growing number of applications in software engineering such as software repository mining and defect prediction. However, the existing related taxonomies are always manually constructed. The sizes of these taxonomies are small and their depths are limited. In order to show the full potential of taxonomies in software engineering applications, in this paper, we present the first large-scale software programming taxonomy which is more comprehensive than any existing ones. It contains 38,205 concepts and 68,098 subsumption relations. Instead of learning from a open domain, we focus on taxonomy construction from Stackoverflow which is one of the largest QA websites about software programming. We propose a machine learning based method with novel features to create a taxonomy that captures the hierarchical semantic structure of tags in Stackoverflow. This method executes iteratively to find as many relations as possible. Experimental results show that our approach achieves much better accuracy than baselines. Compared with taxonomies related to software programming which are extracted from the general-purpose taxonomies such as WikiTaxonomy, Yago Taxonomy and Schema.org, our taxonomy has the widest coverage of concepts, contains the largest number of subsumption relations, and runs up to the deepest semantic hierarchy. Keywords—Taxonomy Construction, Stackoverflow, Software Engineering
Reliable intersection protocols using vehicular networks

Autonomous driving will play an important role in the future of transportation. Various autonomous vehicles have been demonstrated at the DARPA Urban Challenge [3]. General Motors has recently unveiled their Electrical-Networked Vehicles (EN-V) in Shanghai, China [5]. One of the main challenges of autonomous driving in urban areas is transition through cross-roads and intersections. In addition to safety concerns, current intersection management technologies such as stop signs and traffic lights can introduce significant traffic delays even under light traffic conditions.
 Our goal is to design and develop efficient and reliable intersection protocols to avoid vehicle collisions at intersections and increase the traffic throughput. The focus of this paper is investigating vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications as a part of co-operative driving in the context of autonomous vehicles. We study how our proposed V2V intersection protocols can be beneficial for autonomous driving, and show significant improvements in throughput. We also prove that our protocols avoid deadlock situations inside the intersection area. The simulation results show that our new proposed V2V intersection protocols provide both safe passage through the intersection and significantly decrease the delay at the intersection and our latest V2V intersection protocol yields over 85% overall performance improvement over the common traffic light models.
Understanding Those at the Forefront of Globalization

On the Cutting Edge of Globalization: An Inquiry into American Elites. By James N. Rosenau, David C. Earnest, Yale H. Ferguson, Ole R. Holsti Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 216 pp., $72.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-3975-X), $32.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-3976-8).

To understand the sources and future of globalization, it is essential to understand the individuals who are at the forefront of this movement. Yet, considering how vibrant and varied the literature on globalization is, systematic examinations of the people who are on the front lines of it are surprisingly rare. They are often presumed to have certain traits, and some of these presumed characteristics have received a fair amount of scrutiny—as exemplified by Peter Furia's (2005) examination of cosmopolitanism. But a large-scale systematic study of who these individuals are, what they do, and what they believe has heretofore been lacking in the literature. Just such an analysis is the great contribution of On the Cutting Edge of Globalization , by James Rosenau, David Earnest, Yale Ferguson, and Ole Holsti. The book illuminates who these people are. It tells us about their behaviors and their priorities. It shows us how they differ from other elite decision makers and what these characteristics mean for the future of globalization.

The centerpiece of the research reported in this book is a massive survey of elites. Rosenau and his colleagues surveyed this population twice, conducting one survey in 1999 and another in 2003. These surveys are used to examine the differences between elites who are at the forefront of globalization (dubbed “Cutting-Edgers”) and those who are not (“Other Leaders”) and to explore variations in the views of the two groups over time. Rosenau and his colleagues adopt a broad view of the types of …
Establishing Trust in Hybrid Cloud Computing Environments

Establishing trust for resource sharing and collaboration has become an important issue in distributed computing environment. In this paper, we investigate the problem of establishing trust in hybrid cloud computing environments. As the scope of federated cloud computing enlarges to ubiquitous and pervasive computing, there will be a need to assess and maintain the trustworthiness of the cloud computing entities. We present a fully distributed framework that enable trust-based cloud customer and cloud service provider interactions. The framework aids a service consumer in assigning an appropriate weight to the feedback of different raters regarding a prospective service provider. Based on the framework, we developed a mechanism for controlling falsified feedback ratings from iteratively exerting trust level contamination due to falsified feedback ratings. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed framework successfully dilutes the effects of falsified feedback ratings, thereby facilitating accurate and fair assessment of the service reputations.
The Behavior Modes of Multiple Agents in Knowledge Management System Based on Complexity Theory

Agent is not only the core concept of complexity theory, but the most elementary component in implementing knowledge management systems. This article, based on the theory of complexity and combined the obtained research results, discusses the definition, structure, composition of different agents. It also concerns the relationship among agents in knowledge management and the action mode of multiple agents.
Altered Sense of Humor in Dementia

Sense of humor is potentially relevant to social functioning in dementias, but has been little studied in these diseases. We designed a semi-structured informant questionnaire to assess humor behavior and preferences in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n = 15), semantic dementia (SD; n = 7), progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA; n = 10), and Alzheimer's disease (AD; n = 16) versus healthy age-matched individuals (n = 21). Altered (including frankly inappropriate) humor responses were significantly more frequent in bvFTD and SD (all patients) than PNFA or AD (around 40% of patients). All patient groups liked satirical and absurdist comedy significantly less than did healthy controls. This pattern was reported premorbidly for satirical comedy in bvFTD, PNFA, and AD. Liking for slapstick comedy did not differ between groups. Altered sense of humor is particularly salient in bvFTD and SD, but also frequent in AD and PNFA. Humor may be a sensitive probe of social cognitive impairment in dementia, with diagnostic, biomarker and social implications.
e-GovQual: A multiple-item scale for assessing e-government service quality

Available online 25 September 2011
A Portable , Extensible and Efficient Implementation of Proactor Pattern

The Proactor pattern [1] describes how to structure applications and systems that effectively utilize asynchronous mechanisms supported by operating systems. When an application invokes an asynchronous operation, the OS performs the operation on behalf of the application. This allows the application to have multiple operations running simultaneously without requiring the application to have a corresponding number of threads. Therefore, the Proactor pattern simplifies concurrent programming and improves performance by requiring fewer threads and leveraging OS support for asynchronous operations. The Adaptive Communications Environment (ACE) [2] has implemented a Proactor framework that encapsulates I/O Completion Ports of Windows NT operating system. This ACE Proactor abstraction provides an OO interface to the standard C APIs supported by Windows NT. We ported this Proactor framework to Unix platforms that support POSIX4 asynchronous I/O calls and real-time signals. This paper describes the design and implementation of this new Portable Proactor framework and explains how the design and the implementation have been made so that the framework can be extensible, scalable and efficient. We explain how our design took care of keeping the old interfaces of the framework intact, still making the design highly extensible and efficient. The source code for this implementation can be acquired from the ACE website at www.cs.wustl.edu/ schmidt/ACE.html . 1 The Proactor Pattern
Metabolic and physiologic effects from consuming a hunter-gatherer (Paleolithic)-type diet in type 2 diabetes

Background/Objectives:The contemporary American diet figures centrally in the pathogenesis of numerous chronic diseases– 'diseases of civilization'–such as obesity and diabetes. We investigated in type 2 diabetes whether a diet similar to that consumed by our pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer ancestors ('Paleolithic' type diet) confers health benefits.Subjects/Methods:We performed an outpatient, metabolically controlled diet study in type 2 diabetes patients. We compared the findings in 14 participants consuming a Paleo diet comprising lean meat, fruits, vegetables and nuts, and excluding added salt, and non-Paleolithic-type foods comprising cereal grains, dairy or legumes, with 10 participants on a diet based on recommendations by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) containing moderate salt intake, low-fat dairy, whole grains and legumes. There were three ramp-up diets for 7 days, then 14 days of the test diet. Outcomes included the following: mean arterial blood pressure; 24-h urine electrolytes; hemoglobin A1c and fructosamine levels; insulin resistance by euglycemic hyperinsulinemic clamp and lipid levels.Results:Both groups had improvements in metabolic measures, but the Paleo diet group had greater benefits on glucose control and lipid profiles. Also, on the Paleo diet, the most insulin-resistant subjects had a significant improvement in insulin sensitivity (r=0.40, P=0.02), but no such effect was seen in the most insulin-resistant subjects on the ADA diet (r= 0.39, P=0.3).Conclusions:Even short-term consumption of a Paleolithic-type diet improved glucose control and lipid profiles in people with type 2 diabetes compared with a conventional diet containing moderate salt intake, low-fat dairy, whole grains and legumes.
The GN Model of Non-Linear Propagation in Uncompensated Coherent Optical Systems

This paper is devoted to an in-depth discussion of the Gaussian Noise (GN) model which describes non-linear propagation in uncompensated coherent transmission systems. Similar models and validation efforts are reviewed. Then, the main equations of the GN model are introduced. An intuitive physical interpretation of the equations and their features is proposed. The main characteristics of the non-linear interference (NLI) noise spectra that the GN model produces are discussed. To ease model exploitation, a new formulation in hyperbolic coordinates is proposed, which makes numerical integration faster. New approximate closed-form solutions are also provided. An extension of the GN model to distributed-amplification scenarios is introduced. NLI noise accumulation versus distance and bandwidth are studied in depth. Finally, the GN model implications as to system and networks design and optimization are discussed.
The Culture of Catholic Schools

This article explores the elusive but important role culture plays in making Catholic schools distinctive. It examines the connection between ritual, especially the Eucharist, and the everyday practices and habits of those who constitute the school community. It further examines the relationship between dogma and dialogues, affirming that both are necessary for Christian life and community.