cometadata/datacite-rtg-text-other-reclassification-records huggingface dataset:
Microphysical Plasma Relations from Special-relativistic Turbulence
Creators: name: Meringolo, Claudio
name: Cruz-Osorio, Alejandro
name: Rezzolla, Luciano
name: Servidio, Sergio
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
subject: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
subject: Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The microphysical, kinetic properties of astrophysical plasmas near accreting compact objects are still poorly understood. For instance, in modern general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations, the relation between the temperature of electrons $T_{e}$ and protons $T_{p}$ is prescribed in terms of simplified phenomenological models where the electron temperature is related to the proton temperature in terms of the ratio between the gas and magnetic pressures, or $β$ parameter. We here present a very comprehensive campaign of {two-dimensional} kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations of special-relativistic turbulence to investigate systematically the microphysical properties of the plasma in the trans-relativistic regime. Using a realistic mass ratio between electrons and protons, we analyze how the index of the electron energy distributions $κ$, the efficiency of nonthermal particle production $\mathcal{E}$, and the temperature ratio $\mathcal{T}:=T_{e}/T_{p}$, vary over a wide range of values of $β$ and $σ$. For each of these quantities, we provide two-dimensional fitting functions that describe their behaviour in the relevant space of parameters, thus connecting the microphysical properties of the plasma, $κ$, $\mathcal{E}$, and $\mathcal{T}$, with the macrophysical ones $β$ and $σ$. In this way, our results can find application in wide range of astrophysical scenarios, including the accretion and the jet emission onto supermassive black holes, such as M87* and Sgr A*.
description: 13 pages, 8 figures. Accepted to be published in ApJ
title: Hospice and pain management in nursing home residents with cancer
Creators: name: Hunnicutt, Jacob N.
name: Tjia, Jennifer
name: Lapane, Kate L.
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Background: The prevalence of untreated pain in nursing home residents with cancer is unacceptably high. Hospice may increase the likelihood of receiving pain management at the end of life.

Objectives: To estimate whether receipt of hospice in nursing homes increases the receipt of pain management for nursing home residents with cancer at the end of life.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study on a national sample of Medicare decedents who had cancer and were nursing home residents during the last 90 days of life in 2011–2012. We used the last Minimum Data Set (MDS) 3.0 assessment before death and the Medicare Beneficiary Summary File to measure hospice use, pain, and pain management at the last MDS assessment. We matched residents with cancer and in pain who received hospice care to residents in pain not receiving hospice care on nursing home facility and time from last MDS assessment to death. The primary outcomes were receipt of pharmacologic pain management including scheduled and PRN analgesics and non-pharmacologic pain management. Conditional logistic models were used to estimate the association between hospice use and pain management.

Results: In matched analyses, untreated pain was uncommon (2.9% in hospice users and 5.6 in non-hospice users), though there was an absolute difference of 15.4% in scheduled analgesics use between hospice and non-hospice users (71.5% vs. 56.1%, respectively). Hospice use was associated with receipt of scheduled analgesics (adjusted Odds Ratio(aOR): 1.85, 95% Confidence Interval(CI):1.73–1.97), PRN medication (aOR: 1.31, 95% CI:1.20–1.43), and non-pharmacologic pain management (aOR: 1.18, 95% CI:1.11–1.26).

Conclusions: Untreated pain at the end of life among nursing home residents with cancer was unusual. Hospice use was associated with increased pain management in nursing home residents with documented pain. Further work to examine the type and effectiveness of pain management strategies used is warranted.
Changes in Statement of Qualifications for a Public Project (adapted from NSPE Case No. 78-5)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Ethics and Society
Law and Public Policy
Bidding Process

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review.It describes possible methods of making amends for a firm's deficit in a particular area of expertise that a client needs to complete his project.
Dynamic Tags for Security Protocols
Creators: name: Arapinis, Myrto
name: Delaune, Stéphanie
name: Kremer, Steve
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: The design and verification of cryptographic protocols is a notoriously difficult task, even in symbolic models which take an abstract view of cryptography. This is mainly due to the fact that protocols may interact with an arbitrary attacker which yields a verification problem that has several sources of unboundedness (size of messages, number of sessions, etc. In this paper, we characterize a class of protocols for which deciding security for an unbounded number of sessions is decidable. More precisely, we present a simple transformation which maps a protocol that is secure for a bounded number of protocol sessions (a decidable problem) to a protocol that is secure for an unbounded number of sessions. The precise number of sessions that need to be considered is a function of the security property and we show that for several classical security properties a single session is sufficient. Therefore, in many cases our results yields a design strategy for security protocols: (i) design a protocol intended to be secure for a {single session}; and (ii) apply our transformation to obtain a protocol which is secure for an unbounded number of sessions.
description: 50 pages with 30 references
Commission Payment Under a Marketing Agreement (adapted from NSPE Case No. 78-7)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Conflict of Interest
Research and Practice

description: An engineer, experienced in providing services to the international community, wants to draw on that experience to provide international marketing services to U.S. engineering firms in return for a commission on the services those firms gain as a result of his marketing help. This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review.
Advertising: Calendars & Pencils (adapted from NSPE Case No. 78-8)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Bribery and Extortion
Corruption
Ethics and Society
Research and Practice
Workplace Ethics

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. It questions the ethics of offering advertising or gifts to potential and current clients.
Improving Reflexive Surfaces Efficiency with Genetic Algorithms
Creators: name: Steklain, A.
name: Adames, M.
name: Ganacim, F.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det)
subject: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: We propose using a Genetic Algorithm to improve the efficiency of reflexive surfaces in devices where the receiver's position is different from the classic parabolic antenna. With this technique, we show that we can improve the efficiency of the ARAPUCA photodetector.
description: 9 pages, 8 figures
title: Which is the primary factor influencing running stride parameters: age or lower limb strength?
Creators: name: Jewell, Carl
name: Rohr, Eric
name: Hamill, J.
name: Boyer, Katherine A.
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Much still remains unknown about the impact of age, and age-related changes in muscle function, on gait parameters. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of strength on running gait parameters across the adult lifespan. We tested the hypothesis that a greater amount of the variance in peak hip, knee and ankle sagittal plane moments would be explained by peak isometric joint torques as compared to age. Twenty-four healthy adults, ages 20-66 years, completed 5 trials on an overground 20-meter runway at a standardized velocity of 3.5 ms-1 (± 5%). Participants performed maximal isometric plantar flexion and knee extension for three contractions lasting three seconds each. Linear regression analysis between strength, age, and moments were performed. At the ankle, age alone explained 14.4% of the variance in the peak ankle joint moment. There was not a significant increase in the variance explained when strength was added to the model. At the knee, neither age nor strength explained a significant portion of the variance in peak knee moments. However, together age and strength explained 27.9% of the variance in the peak knee moment. No significant associations were found between the hip moments and either knee and ankle strength. These results suggest that other age-related physiological changes may drive changes in gait mechanics more so than maximal torque production. A more dynamic measure of muscle function, such as power or isokinetic torque at varying speeds may have greater predictive value for gait performance.
title: A Reduced Order Model For Efficient Physiological Flow Analysis In Aneurysms by Proper Orthogonal Decomposition
Creators: name: Han Chang, Gary
name: Modarres-Sadeghi, Yahya
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Simulating physiological flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) remains to be computationally expensive and difficult for clinical usage because of the physiological flow and geometrical complexity involved in patient specific situations. We use the reduced order modeling (ROM) of such systems with high nonlinearity and geometrical non-uniformity to replace the full, nonlinear model with a low-degrees of freedom ROM model. We construct ROM models by the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method to estimate the flow-induced wall shear stress (WSS) and pressure loading of a simplified abdominal aortic aneurysm and a bifurcation cerebral aneurysm. This method allows us to investigate a wide range of different physiological flow parameters without conducting the computationally expensive CFD simulations repetitively, which is promising for clinical usage.

We obtain a set of snapshots from a set of flow simulations with multiple variable parameters, called the training set. The training set should be simulated in a parameter space that contains all the physiological parameters of interest. We show that both the velocity and pressure distributions are well reconstructed when compared with the exact values with a small number of modes. A mesh-less shell model is used to estimate the aneurysm sidewall’s in-plane stresses. Sidewalls with non-uniform thickness are considered to study the influence of local weakness on the aneurysm’s risk of failure. We found that the sensitivity of the material’s strength to the local weakness depends on the aneurysms sidewall’s Gaussian curvatures, the curvature to thickness ratio and the distribution of the flow loading. It is therefore critical to describe the distribution of curvature and thickness accurately when estimating the in-plane stress of aneurysms.
Usage and Usefulness of N-LIST E-Resources among Postgraduate Students of Government Aided Colleges in Punjab, India
Creators: name: Panda, Subhajit
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2023
Subjects: Library studies
Library and information studies not elsewhere classified

description: With the emergence of information technology, users' information-seeking behaviour (ISB) and information preferences alter with a great space. The advancement of ICT infrastructure leads to increase demand and widespread use of e-resources. The Internet and the Web are constantly influencing the development of new modes of scholarly communication; their potential for delivering goods is quite vast, as they overcome the geographical limitations associated with print media. Now users can access e-resources on their desktops. But in India, the constraints on sufficient access to e-resources lay on the financial barrier & high subscription charges. To overcome it and prioritize the college academic community, the UGC-MHRD initiated the N-LIST consortium to provide selected e-journals and e-books to the registered colleges in India. The present study targeted the postgraduate students in Government aided colleges of Punjab to examine the awareness and use of N-LIST e-resources, its purposes of usage, level of satisfaction and problems faced while accessing N-LIST e-resources. For this purpose, a well-structured questionnaire was prepared with the help of Google form as a tool for data collection. The study findings reveal that the majority of respondents are aware of N-LIST e-resources, while its usage is not up to the mark. Based on the conclusions, it recommends that college libraries should conduct hands-on training programmes & workshops besides outreach & orientation programmes to maximize the usage of N-LIST e-resources.
Services on Same Project (adapted from NSPE Case No. 78-9)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Conflict of Interest
Research and Practice

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. It concerns the selection of an engineering firm for a city project assignment based on technical proposals and the possibility that one firm may have an unfair advantage.
Interpretation of AMS-02 electrons and positrons data
Creators: name: Di Mauro, M.
name: Donato, F.
name: Fornengo, N.
name: Lineros, R.
name: Vittino, A.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
subject: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
subject: High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: We perform a combined analysis of the recent AMS-02 data on electrons, positrons, electrons plus positrons and positron fraction, in a self-consistent framework where we realize a theoretical modeling of all the astrophysical components that can contribute to the observed fluxes in the whole energy range. The primary electron contribution is modeled through the sum of an average flux from distant sources and the fluxes from the local supernova remnants in the Green catalog. The secondary electron and positron fluxes originate from interactions on the interstellar medium of primary cosmic rays, for which we derive a novel determination by using AMS-02 proton and helium data. Primary positrons and electrons from pulsar wind nebulae in the ATNF catalog are included and studied in terms of their most significant (while loosely known) properties and under different assumptions (average contribution from the whole catalog, single dominant pulsar, a few dominant pulsars). We obtain a remarkable agreement between our various modeling and the AMS-02 data for all types of analysis, demonstrating that the whole AMS-02 leptonic data admit a self-consistent interpretation in terms of astrophysical contributions.
description: 33 pages, 26 figures and 4 tables, v2: accepted for publication in JCAP, minor changes relative to v1
title: Translating dosage compensation to trisomy 21
Creators: name: Jiang, Jun
name: Jing, Yuanchun
name: Cost, Gregory J.
name: Chiang, Jen-Chieh
name: Cotton, Allison M.
name: Carone, Dawn M.
name: Carone, Benjamin R.
name: Byron, Meg
name: Gregory, Philip D.
name: Brown, Carolyn J.
name: Urnov, Fyodor D.
name: Hall, Lisa L.
name: Lawrence, Jeanne B.
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Down syndrome is the leading genetic cause of intellectual disabilities, occurring in 1 out of 700 live births. Given that Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 that involves over-expression of 400 genes across a whole chromosome, it precludes any possibility of a genetic therapy. Our lab has long studied the natural dosage compensation mechanism for X chromosome inactivation. To “dosage compensate” X-linked genes between females and males, the X-linked XIST gene produces a large non-coding RNA that silences one of the two X chromosomes in female cells. The initial motivation of this study was to translate the natural mechanisms of X chromosome inactivation into chromosome therapy for Down syndrome. Using genome editing with zinc finger nucleases, we have successfully inserted a large XIST transgene into Chromosome 21 in Down syndrome iPS cells, which results in chromosome-wide transcriptional silencing of the extra Chromosome 21. Remarkably, deficits in proliferation and neural growth are rapidly reversed upon silencing one chromosome 21. Successful trisomy silencing in vitro surmounts the major first step towards potential development of “chromosome therapy” for Down syndrome. The human iPSC-based trisomy correction system we established opens a unique opportunity to identify therapeutic targets and study transplantation therapies for Down syndrome.
Ultrasonic Interferometer for First-Sound Measurements of Confined Liquid 4He
Creators: name: Rojas, X.
name: Hauer, B. D.
name: MacDonald, A. J. R.
name: Saberi, P.
name: Yang, Y.
name: Davis, J. P.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
subject: Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: We present a new technique for probing the properties of quantum fluids in restricted geometries. We have confined liquid 4He within microfluidic devices formed from glass wafers, in which one dimension is on the micro scale. Using an ultrasonic analog to Fabry-Perot interferometry, we have measured the first-sound of the confined liquid 4He, which can be a probe of critical behavior near the lambda point ($T_λ$). All thermodynamic properties of liquid $^4$He can be derived from first-sound and heat capacity measurements, and although quite a bit of experimental work has been done on the latter, no measurement of first-sound has been reported for a precisely confined geometry smaller than a few tens of micrometers. In this work, we report measurements of isobaric first sound in liquid $^4$He confined in cavities as small as ~ 5 $μ$m. Our experimental set-up allows us to pressurize the liquid up to ~ 25 bar without causing deformation of the confined geometry, a pressure which is about 4 times larger than previously reported with similar microfluidic devices. Our preliminary results indicate that one can possibly observe finite-size effects and verify scaling laws, by using similar devices with smaller confinement.
description: 9 pages, 11 figures
A Naive Bayes Classifier for identifying Class II YSOs
Creators: name: Wilson, Andrew J.
name: Lakeland, Ben S.
name: Wilson, Tom J.
name: Naylor, Tim
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: A naive Bayes classifier for identifying Class II YSOs has been constructed and applied to a region of the Northern Galactic Plane containing 8 million sources with good quality Gaia EDR3 parallaxes. The classifier uses the five features: Gaia $G$-band variability, WISE mid-infrared excess, UKIDSS and 2MASS near-infrared excess, IGAPS H$α$ excess and overluminosity with respect to the main sequence. A list of candidate Class II YSOs is obtained by choosing a posterior threshold appropriate to the task at hand, balancing the competing demands of completeness and purity. At a threshold posterior greater than 0.5 our classifier identifies 6504 candidate Class II YSOs. At this threshold we find a false positive rate around 0.02 per cent and a true positive rate of approximately 87 per cent for identifying Class II YSOs. The ROC curve rises rapidly to almost one with an area under the curve around 0.998 or better, indicating the classifier is efficient at identifying candidate Class II YSOs. Our map of these candidates shows what are potentially three previously undiscovered clusters or associations. When comparing our results to published catalogues from other young star classifiers, we find between one quarter and three quarters of high probability candidates are unique to each classifier, telling us no single classifier is finding all young stars.
description: 38 pages, 28 figures, 15 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Protesting a Low Fee Proposal (adapted from NSPE Case No. 80-1)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Public Health and Safety
Research and Practice
Safety
Bidding Process

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. Three competing firms submit price proposals with significant price differences. The lowest price proposal is challenged on the grounds that competent engineering services could not be provided within this budget.
Improving Image Tracing with Convolutional Autoencoders by High-Pass Filter Preprocessing
Creators: name: Bettouche, Zineddine
name: Fischer, Andreas
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: The process of transforming a raster image into a vector representation is known as image tracing. This study looks into several processing methods that include high-pass filtering, autoencoding, and vectorization to extract an abstract representation of an image. According to the findings, rebuilding an image with autoencoders, high-pass filtering it, and then vectorizing it can represent the image more abstractly while increasing the effectiveness of the vectorization process.
Dust-enshrouded star near supermassive black hole: predictions for high-eccentricity passages near low-luminosity galactic nuclei
Creators: name: Zajacek, Michal
name: Karas, Vladimir
name: Eckart, Andreas
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Supermassive black holes reside in cores of galaxies, where they are often surrounded by a nuclear cluster and a clumpy torus of gas and dust. Mutual interactions can set some stars on a plunging trajectory towards the black hole. We model the pericentre passage of a dust-enshrouded star during which the dusty envelope becomes stretched by tidal forces and is affected by the interaction with the surrounding medium. In particular, we explore under which conditions these encounters can lead to periods of enhanced accretion activity. We discuss different scenarios for such a dusty source. To this end, we employed a modification of the Swift integration package. Elements of the cloud were modelled as numerical particles that represent the dust component that interacts with the optically thin gaseous environment. We determine the fraction of the total mass of the dust component that is diverted from the original path during the passages through the pericentre at $\sim 10^3$ Schwarzschild radii and find that the main part of the dust ($\gtrsim 90\%$ of its mass) is significantly affected upon the first crossing. The fraction of mass captured at the second passage generally decreases to very low values. As an example, we show predictions for the dusty source evolution assuming the current orbital parameters of the G2 cloud (also known as Dusty S-Cluster Object, DSO) in our Galactic centre. Encounter of a core-less cloud with a supermassive black hole is, most likely, a non-repeating event: the cloud is destroyed. However, in the case of a dust-enshrouded star, part of the envelope survives the pericentre passage. We discuss an offset of $\lesssim 0.3$ arcsec between the centre of mass of the diverted part and the star along the eccentric orbit. Finally, we examine an interesting possibility of a binary star embedded within a common wind envelope that becomes dispersed at the pericentre passage.
description: 18 pages, 15 figures, Astronomy and Astrophysics accepted
title: Reducing Phlebotomy-­Induced Blood Loss in the PICU: A Quality Improvement Study
Creators: name: Johnson, Amanda
name: Hoch, Ariel
name: Bateman, Scot T.
name: Valentine, Stacey L.
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Introduction: Phlebotomy­induced blood loss contributes to development of anemia in critically ill children. Major factors contributing to this include blood overdraw from indwelling catheters and utilization of larger volume containers. We targeted these causes of excessive blood draws to decrease volumes of both the discarded blood and sample sent to the laboratory for standard tests. Methods: Pre and post quality improvement study in a 10­bed pediatric intensive care unit 2014­2015. All patients admitted to PICU during each 2­month study period were eligible for enrollment. Pre-intervention, nurses used standard pediatric tubes (3­3.5mL). A wash­out period followed. For intervention, email survey and nursing/resident education sessions were used to standardize discard volumes and introduce microtainers (500µL) for standard hematology, chemistry, and coagulation tests. All blood draws were recorded. Incomplete tests due to lack of volume or clotting were recorded. Results: 45 patients (138 blood draws) in pre­intervention phase and 32 patients (142 draws) in intervention phase were enrolled. Pre­intervention, mean total blood volume sent to the lab was 2.25 ±1.87mL and mean discard volume was 1.64 ±1.67mL. Post­intervention, mean total volume of blood sent and mean discard volume were significantly reduced, 1.52 ±1.50mL, p<0.05, and 0.89 ±0.61mL, p<0.05, demonstrating 32.4% and 45.7% reductions in blood volume respectively. There was no change in test failures due to low volume or clotting. Samples from peripheral intravenous catheters comprised the majority of the cohort. Pre­intervention, mean total blood volume from PIVs (n=116) was 2.06 ±1.51mL, and mean discard volume was 1.74 ±1.33mL. Post­ intervention (n=72), mean total volumes significantly decreased to 1.39 ±1.49mL and 1.15 ±0.53mL respectively (p<0.05). Conclusions: We demonstrated a significant reduction in phlebotomy­induced blood loss by standardizing discard volumes and using microtainers to avoid sending unnecessary blood volumes to the lab.
title: Neighborhood Differences in the Availability of Healthy Foods in the City of Worcester
Creators: name: Kane, Kevin
name: Hoffman, Maximilian
name: Cheng, Jie
name: Olendzki, Barbara C.
name: Li, Wenjun
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: INTRODUCTION. Neighborhood food environment is important to healthy eating. The availability and proximity of healthy foods has been shown to affect dietary quality, obesity, and overall health. We surveyed food stores throughout City of Worcester to assess the variability of food availability in neighborhoods and inequalities in access to fresh produce, unprocessed foods, and other healthy food options by neighborhood socioeconomic status (N-SES).

METHODS. Where permitted by the store manager, the Community Nutrition Environment Evaluation Data Systems (C-NEEDS) survey was completed inside the store by trained staff. Healthy Food Availability Index (HFAI; range 0-56) and Unhealthy Food Availability Index (UFAI; range 0-39) were calculated for each store. Higher HFAI indicates higher availability of healthy food items, and higher UFAI indicates high availability of unhealthy foods. Median household income and car ownership data were derived at the census tract level as measures of N-SES using the 2013 US Census American Community Surveys 5-Year estimates.

RESULTS. Convenience stores (mean HFAI 7.9, UFAI 21.1) had lower availability of both healthy and unhealthy foods than grocery stores (HFAI 32.4, UFAI 29.8). However, convenience stores had a higher proportion of unhealthy foods to healthy foods. Neighborhoods with lower median income and car ownership had a greater density of convenience stores. Neighborhoods with higher SES and car ownership had less access to convenience stores. Grocery stores in higher SES neighborhoods had more healthy food options.

DISCUSSION. These results demonstrate that residents in lower SES neighborhoods may be disadvantaged when it comes to availability of healthy foods. These neighborhoods have higher density of convenience stores that may promote an unhealthy eating environment. Residents in these neighborhoods may wish to make healthy choices, but without access to a car may be unable or unwilling to walk to the nearest store where healthy alternatives are available.
Learning Natural Coding Conventions
Creators: name: Allamanis, Miltiadis
name: Barr, Earl T.
name: Bird, Christian
name: Sutton, Charles
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Software Engineering (cs.SE)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Every programmer has a characteristic style, ranging from preferences about identifier naming to preferences about object relationships and design patterns. Coding conventions define a consistent syntactic style, fostering readability and hence maintainability. When collaborating, programmers strive to obey a project's coding conventions. However, one third of reviews of changes contain feedback about coding conventions, indicating that programmers do not always follow them and that project members care deeply about adherence. Unfortunately, programmers are often unaware of coding conventions because inferring them requires a global view, one that aggregates the many local decisions programmers make and identifies emergent consensus on style. We present NATURALIZE, a framework that learns the style of a codebase, and suggests revisions to improve stylistic consistency. NATURALIZE builds on recent work in applying statistical natural language processing to source code. We apply NATURALIZE to suggest natural identifier names and formatting conventions. We present four tools focused on ensuring natural code during development and release management, including code review. NATURALIZE achieves 94% accuracy in its top suggestions for identifier names and can even transfer knowledge about conventions across projects, leveraging a corpus of 10,968 open source projects. We used NATURALIZE to generate 18 patches for 5 open source projects: 14 were accepted.
An Engineer's Agreement with Two Firms Competing for the Same Contract (adapted from NSPE Case No. 80-4)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Bidding Process
Collaboration
Conflict of Interest
Research and Practice
Workplace Ethics

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. An engineer is requested to participate in a joint venture for the same project with two competing firms. Students are asked to consider how this situation should be handled professionally and ethically.
Do Engineers Have a Right to Protest Shoddy Work and Cost Overruns? (adapted from NSPE Case No. 82-5)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Employer/Employee Relationships
Whistleblowing
Research and Practice

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. It describes a situation in which an engineer employed by a government contractor objects to a subcontractor's poor performance and is ignored and silenced by management.
Eisenstein Series in Kohnen Plus Space for Hilbert Modular Forms
Creators: name: Su, Ren He
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Number Theory (math.NT)
subject: FOS: Mathematics

description: In 1975, Cohen constructed a kind of one-variable modular forms of half-integral weight, says $r+(1/2),$ whose $n$-th Fourier coefficient $H(n)$ only occurs when $(-1)^r n$ is congruent to 0 or 1 modulo 4. The space of modular forms whose Fourier coefficients have the above property is called Kohnen plus space, initially introduced by Kohnen in 1980. Recently, Hiraga and Ikeda generalized the Kohnen plus space to the spaces for half-integral weight Hilbert modular forms with respect to general totally real number fields. If one such Hilbert modular form $f$ of parallel weight $κ+(1/2)$ lying in a generalized Kohnen plus space has $ξ$-th Fourier coefficients $c(ξ)$, then $c(ξ)$ does not vanish only if $(-1)^κξ$ is congruent to a square modulo 4. In this paper, we use an adelic way to construct Eisenstein series of parallel half-integral weight belonging to the generalized Kohnen plus spaces and give an explicit form for their Fourier coefficients. These Eisenstein series give a generalization of the modular forms introduced by Cohen. Moreover, we show that the Kohnen plus space is generated by the cusp forms and the Eisenstein series we constructed as a vector space over $\mathbb{C}.$
Weak Limit of the 3-State Quantum Walk on the Line
Creators: name: Falkner, Stefan
name: Boettcher, Stefan
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
subject: Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: We revisit the one dimensional discrete time quantum walk with 3 states and the Grover coin. We derive analytic expressions for observed the localization, an long time approximation for the probability density function (PDF). We also connect the time averaged approximation to the PDF found by Inui et. al. to a spatial average of the walk. We show that this smooth approximation constitutes a proper PDF that predicts moments of the real PDF accurately.
description: 8 pages, revtex, for related information see http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/boettcher/ v2: minor changes, references added
title: Towards Pharmacovigilance Using Machine Learning To Identify Unknown Adverse Reactions Triggered By Drug-Drug Interaction
Creators: name: Kakar, Tabassum
name: Qin, Xiao
name: Wunnava, Susmitha
name: Rundensteiner, Elke A.
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are a major cause of morbidity and mortality in world. There is thus a growing need of methods facilitating the automated detection of drugs-related ADR; especially ADRs that were not known from clinical trials but later arise due to drug-drug interactions. In this research our goal is to discover the severe unknown Adverse Drug Reactions caused by a combination of drugs, also known as Drug-Drug-Interaction. We propose to use Association Rule Mining to find the ADRs caused by using a combination of drugs yet not known to be caused if these drugs were taken individually. For evaluation, we will test out the proposed strategies on real-world medical data extracted from the spontaneous adverse drug reaction reporting system called FAERS. The results mined by our tool will be checked both manually by literature review and then verified by domain experts for interestingness and accuracy.
title: Characterization of Respiratory Phenotype in Very Long-chain Acyl-CoA Dehydrogenase Deficient Mice.
Creators: name: Keeler, Allison M.
name: Desrochers, Kaitlyn
name: Elmallah, Mai K.
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Rationale: Very Long-chain Acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (VLCAD) deficiency the most common inherited long-chain fatty acid disorder. The VLCAD enzyme catalyzes the first step of mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation and loss of the enzyme results in energy deficiency as well as accumulation of long chain fatty acids. Recently, a related enzyme, Long-chain Acyl-CoA dehydrogensase (LCAD), which unlike VLCAD is not highly expressed in metabolic tissues like liver, heart and skeletal muscle, was found to be expressed in the lung and surfactant and lung dysfunction were observed in LCAD deficient mice. Respiratory distress syndrome has been described in other fatty acid oxidation disorders. VLCAD is expressed in lung, and likely plays an important role in lung compliance.

Methods: VLCAD deficient mice and litter-mate controls were fasted for 18 hours, then exercised on a treadmill for 2 hours. Breathing was immediately assessed using whole body plethysmography in unanaesthetized spontaneously breathing mice. After a stable baseline was achieved, mice were given a “respiratory” challenge with 7% hypercapnia. In a subgroup of animals, pulmonary mechanics were assessed using Flexivent (Scireq).

Results: Following exercise, VLCAD deficient mice had a decreased tidal volume and minute ventilation compared to their wild type controls. However, post-exercise VLCAD deficient mice were able to stabilize to similar levels as wild-type during baseline. The VLCAD deficient mice had a decreased response to a respiratory challenge with 7% hypercapnia. Early preliminary results suggest that VLCAD deficient animals have lower airway resistance.

Conclusions: Respiratory insufficiency was demonstrated in a fasted and exercise challenged VLCAD deficient mice.
Raising an Issue of Participation in a Professional Society (adapted from NSPE Case No. 82-7)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Employer/Employee Relationships
Research and Practice
Workplace Ethics

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. An engineer actively participates in professional and technical societies. This participation accords with the policy of the engineer's employer, but the engineer's immediate supervisor tries to block or prevent some of these activities.
Same Same, But Different: Conditional Multi-Task Learning for Demographic-Specific Toxicity Detection
Creators: name: Gupta, Soumyajit
name: Lee, Sooyong
name: De-Arteaga, Maria
name: Lease, Matthew
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: Machine Learning (stat.ML)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Algorithmic bias often arises as a result of differential subgroup validity, in which predictive relationships vary across groups. For example, in toxic language detection, comments targeting different demographic groups can vary markedly across groups. In such settings, trained models can be dominated by the relationships that best fit the majority group, leading to disparate performance. We propose framing toxicity detection as multi-task learning (MTL), allowing a model to specialize on the relationships that are relevant to each demographic group while also leveraging shared properties across groups. With toxicity detection, each task corresponds to identifying toxicity against a particular demographic group. However, traditional MTL requires labels for all tasks to be present for every data point. To address this, we propose Conditional MTL (CondMTL), wherein only training examples relevant to the given demographic group are considered by the loss function. This lets us learn group specific representations in each branch which are not cross contaminated by irrelevant labels. Results on synthetic and real data show that using CondMTL improves predictive recall over various baselines in general and for the minority demographic group in particular, while having similar overall accuracy.
Sleep, Neuroengineering and Dynamics
Creators: name: Claussen, Jens Christian
name: Hofmann, Ulrich G.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2013
Subjects: subject: Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC)
subject: FOS: Biological sciences

description: Modeling of consciousness-related phenomena and neuroengineering are fields that are rapidly growing together. We review recent approaches and developments and point out some promising directions of future research: Understanding the dynamics of consciousness states and associated oscillations, pathological oscillations as well as their treatment by stimulation, neuroprosthetics and brain-computer-interface approaches, and stimulation approaches that probe, influence and strengthen memory consolidation. In all these fields, computational models connect theory, neurophysiology and neuroengineering research and pave a way towards medical applications.
Accurate one-dimensional effective description of realistic matter-wave gap solitons
Creators: name: Mateo, A. Muñoz
name: Delgado, V.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas)
subject: Pattern Formation and Solitons (nlin.PS)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: We consider stationary matter-wave gap solitons realized in Bose--Einstein condensates loaded in one-dimensional (1D) optical lattices and investigate whether the effective 1D equation proposed in [Phys. Rev. A \textbf{77}, 013617 (2008)] can be a reliable alternative to the three-dimensional treatment of this kind of system in terms of the Gross--Pitaevskii equation (GPE). Our results demonstrate that, unlike the standard 1D GPE (which is not applicable in most realistic situations), the above effective model is able to correctly predict the distinctive trajectories characterizing the different gap soliton families as well as the corresponding axial wavefunctions along the entire band gaps. It can also predict the stability properties of the different gap soliton families as follows from both a linear stability analysis and a representative set of numerical computations. In particular, by numerically solving the corresponding Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations we show that the effective 1D model gives the correct spectrum of complex eigenfrequencies responsible for the dynamical stability of the system, thus providing us with a useful tool for the physical description of stationary matter-wave gap solitons in 1D optical lattices.
description: 10 pages, 8 figures. Matches published version
title: Long-lasting Effects of Perinatal Exposure to Brominated Flame Retardant on Male Reproductive Outcomes in Rat Model
Creators: name: Khalil, Ahmed
name: Portman, Daneal
name: Jensen, Jake
name: Panchenko, Michael
name: Suvorov, Alexander
Publisher: name: eScholarship@UMMS
Year: 2016

description: Meta-analysis of 101 studies published between 1934 and 1996 indicates that mean sperm concentration decreased around 50% during this period. More recent studies have found alarmingly poor semen quality in the general population of Northern Europe. Additional adverse trends include increased incidence of testicular cancer, and congenital malformations such as cryptorchidism and hypospadias. Testicular germ cell cancers increased by about 400% over the period of 50 years in industrialized countries. Decreased quality of male reproductive health has been linked to environmental endocrine disruptors exposure. However, the ability of xenobiotics to produce long-lasting effects and mechanisms of perturbation of the male reproductive system following developmental exposures are not well understood. Both animal experiments and human studies show male reproductive toxicity to polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), a group of ubiquitous, persistent, and bioaccumulative environmental xenobiotics. Here we report the result of experiment in which pregnant Wistar rats were fed 0.2 mg/kg body weight BDE-47 (the most ubiquitous PBDE congener) daily starting from the eighth day of pregnancy until weaning. Multiple endpoints of male reproductive health were assessed in offspring on postnatal week 20: testis size, sperm production, morphology, motility, circulating testosterone, select gene expression in prostate (qRT-PCR) and all-genome gene expression in testis (RNA-seq). Seventeen weeks after exposure was abolished testis size was significantly smaller in adult rats and genes of inflammatory response were significantly upregulated in testis tissue among other results. Our findings confirm male-reproductive toxicity of PBDE and identify inflammatory response as a long lasting mechanism of repro-toxicity triggered by perinatal exposure.
Intellectual Property of Engineers in Private Practice (adapted from NSPE Case No. 83-3)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Intellectual Property and Patents
Plagiarism

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. An engineer submits a proposal to a county council, a member of which makes this proposal available to another engineer developing a proposal for a different county project. The second engineer uses the first engineer's information and data without the first engineer's consent.
Engineer's Dispute With Client Over Design (adapted from NSPE Case No. 84-4)
Publisher: name: Online Ethics Center
Year: 2006
Subjects: Ethics and Society
Public Health and Safety
Public Well-being
Research and Practice
Safety

description: This is an open-ended scenario for discussion based on a case from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review. A client believes an engineer's designs are too costly, but the engineer fears that anything less may endanger the public.
Homogeneous states in driven granular mixtures: Enskog kinetic theory versus molecular dynamics simulations
Creators: name: Khalil, Nagi
name: Garzó, Vicente
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The homogeneous state of a binary mixture of smooth inelastic hard disks or spheres is analyzed. The mixture is driven by a thermostat composed by two terms: a stochastic force and a drag force proportional to the particle velocity. The combined action of both forces attempts to model the interaction of the mixture with a bath or surrounding fluid. The problem is studied by means of two independent and complementary routes. First, the Enskog kinetic equation with a Fokker-Planck term describing interactions of particles with thermostat is derived. The ratio of kinetic temperatures $T_1/T_2$ and the fourth-degree velocity moments $λ_1$ and $λ_2$ (which measure non-Gaussian properties of $φ_i$) are explicitly determined as a function of the mass ratio, size ratio, composition, density and coefficients of restitution. Secondly, to assess the reliability of the theoretical results, molecular dynamics simulations of a binary granular mixture of spheres are performed for two values of the coefficient of restitution ($α=0.9$ and 0.8) and three different solid volume fractions ($ϕ=0.00785$, 0.1 and 0.2). Comparison between kinetic theory and computer simulations for the temperature ratio shows excellent agreement, even for moderate densities and strong dissipation. In the case of the cumulants $λ_1$ and $λ_2$, good agreement is found for the lower densities although significant discrepancies between theory and simulation are observed with increasing density.
description: 11 pages, 5 figures, to be published in J. Chem. Phys