cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
From Oxytocin to Health: exploring the relationship between OXTR rs53576, emotional stability, social support, and health

Individuals are often biologically predisposed for certain personality traits. In addition, those traits may enhance or diminish health and overall life satisfaction. One recent area of biological study has been the OXTR rs53576, which is a polymorphic site in the oxytocin receptor gene. OXTR rs53576 is reportedly related to sociality and social orientation. Specifically, homozygous G allele carriers often display more empathy and less stress reactivity, higher trust behaviors, more sensitive parenting or reactivity to infants’ cries and higher optimism and self-esteem. The current study investigates the association between OXTR rs53576 (GG genotype) and the personality trait of emotional stability. Genes may affect psychological tendencies, as well as phenotypical expressions and life outcomes related to these traits. The results of the current study suggest that the oxytocin polymorphism receptor rs53576 may be related to the personality trait emotional stability. Individuals with the G homozygous allele had higher scores in emotional stability. In addition, emotional stability was related to greater overall social support and general health. Taken together, it appears that individuals with OXTR rs53576 G homozygous alleles may have more emotional stability, increased social support and better health.
Surgery in Pediatric Crohn's Disease: Indications, Timing and Post-Operative Management

Pediatric onset Crohn's disease (CD) tends to have complicated behavior (stricture or penetration) than elderly onset CD at diagnosis. Considering the longer duration of the disease in pediatric patients, the accumulative chance of surgical treatment is higher than in adult onset CD patients. Possible operative indications include perianal CD, intestinal stricture or obstruction, abdominal abscess or fistula, intestinal hemorrhage, neoplastic changes and medically untreatable inflammation. Growth retardation is an operative indication only for pediatric patients. Surgery can affect a patient's clinical course, especially for pediatric CD patient who are growing physically and mentally, so the decision should be made by careful consideration of several factors. The complex and diverse clinical conditions hinder development of a systemized treatment algorithm. Therefore, timing of surgery in pediatric CD patients should be determined with individualized approach by an experienced and well organized multidisciplinary inflammatory bowel disease team. Best long-term outcomes will require proactive post-operative monitoring and therapeutic modifications according to the conditions.
Vascular aging: Molecular mechanisms and potential treatments for vascular rejuvenation

Aging is the main risk factor contributing to vascular dysfunction and the progression of vascular diseases. In this review, we discuss the causes and mechanisms of vascular aging at the tissue and cellular level. We focus on Endothelial Cell (EC) and Smooth Muscle Cell (SMC) aging due to their critical role in mediating the defective vascular phenotype. We elaborate on two categories that contribute to cellular dysfunction: cell extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Extrinsic factors reflect systemic or environmental changes which alter EC and SMC homeostasis compromising vascular function. Intrinsic factors induce EC and SMC transformation resulting in cellular senescence. Replenishing or rejuvenating the aged/dysfunctional vascular cells is critical to the effective repair of the vasculature. As such, this review also elaborates on recent findings which indicate that stem cell and gene therapies may restore the impaired vascular cell function, reverse vascular aging, and prolong lifespan.
Cost-Sensitive Decision Making for Online Fraud Management

Every online transaction comes with a risk and it is the merchant’s liability to detect and stop fraudulent transactions. Merchants utilize various mechanisms to prevent and manage fraud such as automated fraud detection systems and manual transaction reviews by expert fraud analysts. Many proposed solutions mostly focus on fraud detection accuracy and ignore financial considerations. Also, highly effective manual review process is overlooked. We propose Profit Optimizing Neural Risk Manager (PONRM), a decision maker that (a) constitutes optimal collaboration between machine learning models and human expertise under industrial constraints, (b) is cost and profit sensitive. We suggest directions on how to characterize fraudulent behavior and assess the risk of a transaction. We show that our framework outperforms cost-sensitive and cost-insensitive baselines on three real-world merchant datasets.
Interleukin-6 transduction of a rat T9 glioma clone results in attenuated tumorigenicity and induces glioma immunity in Fischer F344 rats

We transduced a highly tumorigenic T9 clone (T9.F), isolated from the rat T9 glioblastoma cell line, with a retroviral expression vector containing the human IL-6 cDNA and investigated the effects of IL-6 secretion on glioma formation in the syngeneic Fischer rat. Two subclones producing high and low levels (35 and 3.5 ng/106 cells/48 h) of IL-6 were identified and were termed T9.F/IL6/hi and T9.F/IL6/lo, respectively. Subcutaneous (SC) injection of 1×106 parental T9.F cells resulted in 100% tumor formation and progression. When 1×106 IL-6 secreting T9.F cells were injected SC, a small palpable tumor formed which sometimes regressed. In this regard, no tumors were detected after 30 days in 76% (13/17) of animals injected with T9.F/IL6/hi cells, whereas only 10% (1/10) of the rats injected with T9.F/IL6/lo cells completely rejected their tumors within this time frame. The addition of an IL-6 neutralizing antibody to the T9.F/IL6/hi SC inoculum followed by an intratumoral injection of the IL-6 neutralizing antibody, seven days later, abrogated the anti-tumor effects. Animals that rejected the IL-6 secreting tumors were 100% protected from subsequent intracranial (IC) challenges with the parental T9.F glioma as well as the original T9 glioblastoma; partially protected from an IC challenge with the unrelated, syngeneic RT-2 glioma; but were not protected from an IC challenge with the syngeneic MadB106 adenocarcinoma. When 1×104 cells were injected in the brain of naive animals, survival time was significantly increased for those rats implanted with T9.F/IL6/hi cells, but not T9.F/IL6/lo cells, as compared to animals implanted with T9.F parental cells (p=0.003). This study demonstrates that IL-6 secretion attenuates SC and IC glioma growth and SC rejection of IL-6 secreting T9.F cells induces long-term glioma immunity which is effective in the brain.
Cross Validation of GPM and Ground-Based Radar in Latin America and the Caribbean

A comparison between GPM Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar and ground-based radars located in South America and the Caribbean is presented. The analysis compares radar variables from both system during overpasses of GPM over ground-based radars in the region of interest. Attenuation and bias correction is performed to ground radar data. The results show the potential of GPM to calibrate and monitor weather radars and subsequently using them for ground validation in Latin America and the Caribbean.
How to talk with dying patients and their families after disasters and humanitarian crises: a review of available tools and guides for disaster responders

In responding to those affected by sudden onset disasters and chronic humanitarian crises, disaster responders and humanitarian aid workers will face the challenge of caring for dying patients. While medical intervention may be severely limited or constrained, bearing witness by listening and being able to compassionately communicate with such victims and their families is an important skill. This review examines the current literature on communication training and palliative care-skills for disaster workers and offers a menu of communication tools including guidelines developed for administering palliative care in non-disaster settings that can be used by both disaster responders and humanitarian aid workers.
EDMOSFET Switching Device using Metal Field Plate Design

This paper explores a low-cost method to improve the Breakdown Voltage (BV) of a Switching Device without compromising on the Source-Drain Resistance (RDSON). This can be achieved by introducing a metal field plate over the Gate and the extended Drain region of the EDMOSFET. This switching device shows negligible degradation in current-voltage performance (i.e. Drain Current in the linear region and saturation region).
Geo-Grid: Interactive Visualization of Geological Datasets

As the emergent technology trends are progressing towards extreme-scale HPC coupled with data intensive analytics, the challenge of storing and analyzing data is significantly greater than we are observing currently. Given the vast volume of data generated by various simulation and experiments, the process of successfully analyzing and validating diverse sets of research phenomena mandates execution of various complex queries, the correlation of the disparate data retrieved followed by generating visualizations facilitating meaningful insights of both the simulated processes and the experimental phenomena. This process of data discovery, analysis, and visualization requires execution of several phases by the researchers. Therefore, managing and generating data visualizations is a major bottleneck in the research discovery process that degrades not only the ability to mine the data but also limits the utilization of scientific data sets. An important challenge in exploring geospatial data is visualizing different scales ranging from micrometers to kilometers. The purpose of this study is to develop and implement a framework for storing, analyzing and visualizing geological datasets at different scales, with the goal of improving the scientific discovery process and reducing the time to insight in the geological domain along with hiding the intricacies of the underlying low-level complex hardware platforms from the end-user.
Stable fitting of noisy stress relaxation data

The mechanical behavior of a viscoelastic material can often be described by a spectrum of Maxwell-Wiechert elements. The inverse problem associated with estimating the parameters of this spectrum from the results of viscoelastic relaxation (ramp-and-hold) test is in general ill-posed and unstable, with estimates highly sensitive to initial conditions and noise. Here, we demonstrate stable estimation of a continuous viscoelastic spectrum from stress relaxation experiments using Tikhonov regularization. We assess the effects of noise and sampling frequency on these estimates, and describe regularization parameter selection. We demonstate the algorithm by estimating the viscoelastic relaxation spectra of soft vinyl samples.
Reduced cellular levels of DNA polymerase delta alter replication dynamics and enzymology, and impair lagging-strand processing

DNA polymerase delta (Pol δ) plays several essential roles in eukaryotic DNA replication and repair. At the replication fork, Pol δ is responsible for the synthesis and processing of the lagging strand; this role requires Pol δ to extend Okazaki fragment primers synthesized by Pol α-primase, and to carry out strand-displacement synthesis coupled to nuclease cleavage during Okazaki fragment termination. Destabilizing mutations in human Pol δ subunits cause replication stress and syndromic immunodeficiency. Analogously, reduced levels of Pol δ in Saccharomyces cerevisiae lead to pervasive genome instability. Here, we analyze the how the depletion of Pol δ impacts replication initiation and elongation in vivo in S. cerevisiae. We determine that Pol δ depletion leads to a dependence on checkpoint signaling and recombination-mediated repair for cellular viability. By analyzing nascent lagging-strand products, we observe both a genome-wide change in the establishment and progression of replication forks and a global defect in Pol δ-mediated Okazaki fragment processing. Additionally, we detect significant lagging-strand synthesis by the leading-strand polymerase (Pol ϵ) in late-replicating regions of the genome when Pol δ is depleted. Together, our results are consistent with the presence of least two Pol δ complexes in the eukaryotic replisome under normal conditions. We propose that replisomes with sub-stoichiometric Pol δ are defective due to competition between nascent lagging-strand primers and terminating Okazaki fragments, and that this competition underlies both the replication and genome stability defects observed when cellular levels of Pol δ fall below a critical threshold.
Identifying Predictors of Response to Vitamin E for the Treatment of Pediatric Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis

BACKGROUND A subset of patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) respond to treatment with vitamin E. The characteristics of responders are not known. The objective of this study was to investigate the outcomes of vitamin E use in clinical practice and to determine factors associated with response to treatment. METHODS A pediatric cohort with NASH treated with vitamin E for 6-24 months was studied retrospectively. Vitamin E response was defined as alanine aminotransferase (ALT) normalization or >50% ALT reduction from baseline. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression was used to determine the predictors of response to vitamin E. Available paired liver biopsy data were analyzed to determine histologic response. RESULTS Of the 151 children prescribed vitamin E, 73 met inclusion/exclusion criteria. Of those, 28 (38%) were vitamin E responders. Higher baseline serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP) levels, steatosis grade, and Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Activity Score (NAS) were associated with response to vitamin E (ALP: odds ratio [OR], 14.1; 95% CI, 1.7-118.6; steatosis: OR 2.5; 95% CI, 1.2-5.0; NAS: OR 1.6; 95% CI, 1.1-2.4). In a multivariate logistic regression model, ALP and steatosis grade rendered an area under the curve of 0.75 (P < .001) for the prediction of response to treatment. Ballooning, NAS, and portal inflammation improved significantly with vitamin E in the subcohort (n = 15) with paired liver biopsies. CONCLUSIONS Vitamin E treatment was associated with significant ALT response in 38% of children. Baseline serum ALP levels and steatosis grade were associated with response to treatment.
Streamlining Hospital Treatment of Prosthetic Joint Infection.

Abstract Background Prosthetic joint infection (PJI) is associated with significant morbidity, mortality, and costs. We developed a fast-track PJI care system using an infectious disease physician to work directly with the TJA service and coordinate in the treatment of PJI patients. We hypothesized that streamlined care of patients with hip and knee PJI decreases the length of the acute hospital stay without increasing the risk of complication or incorrect antibiotic selection. Methods A single-center retrospective chart review was performed for all patients treated operatively for PJI. A cohort of 78 fast-track patients was compared to 68 control patients treated before the implementation of the program. Hospital length of stay (LOS) and cases of antibiotic mismatch were primary outcomes. Secondary outcomes, including 90-day readmissions, reoperations, mortality, rate of reimplantation, and 12-month reimplant survival, were compared. Cox regressions were analyzed to assess the effects on LOS of patient demographics and the type of surgery performed. Results Average hospital LOS from infection surgery to discharge was significantly lower in the fast-track cohort (3.8 vs 5.7 days; P = .012). There were no episodes of antibiotic mismatch in the fast-track group vs 1 recorded episode in the control group. No significant differences were noted comparing 90-day complications, reimplantation rate, or 12-month reimplant survival rates. Conclusion Through the utilization of an orthopedic-specific infectious disease physician, a fast-track PJI protocol can significantly shorten hospital LOS while remaining safe. Streamlining care pathways may help decrease the overall healthcare costs associated with treating PJI.
The Impact of Work-Related Factors on Risk of Resident Burnout: A Global Neurosurgery Pilot Study

Objective To examine the risk for burnout in neurosurgery trainees across the globe to compare work-related factors that may contribute to burnout and to determine if there are international differences. Methods A 16-question survey was designed and broadcasted through social media networks of global neurosurgeons. The first half of the survey examined work-related factors that may contribute to burnout. The second half studied the respondents' attitudes and emotional responses toward their training, patients, and work environment. Results There were 797 responses to the survey from 93 countries, and 243 of those were from countries designated as low- to middle-income countries. Of respondents, 20.7% scored in the range designated at risk for burnout. Logistic regression analysis showed that frequency of on-call duty and total work hours were drivers for burnout in the global cohort, but operative caseload may have a protective effect. Intercontinental comparisons revealed that the United States and Canada had the lowest proportion of trainees at risk for burnout (11.2%), whereas Europe had the highest (26.9%). Trainees from low- to middle-income countries worked more hours and on-call shifts than their global colleagues, but their average total burnout score (15.8) and proportion at risk for burnout (20.7%) were identical by global comparison. Conclusions Risk for burnout in neurosurgery residents and fellows is driven by multiple factors, including personal, demographic, programmatic, and institutional. Among work-related factors, long and frequent shifts were found to contribute to the risk of burnout in the global cohort. The regional variabilities in the impact of these factors are discussed.
Design, Modeling and Control of a Biologically-Inspired Bat Robot: Plenary Talk

In this talk, I will describe our recent progress building a biologically-inspired bat robot. Bats have a complex skeletal morphology, with both ball-and-socket and revolute joints that interconnect the bones and muscles to create a musculoskeletal system with over 40 degrees of freedom, some of which are passive. Replicating this biological system in a small, lightweight, low-power air vehicle is not only infeasible, but also undesirable; trajectory planning and control for such a system would be intractable, precluding any possibility for synthesizing complex agile maneuvers, or for real-time control. Thus, our goal is to design a robot whose kinematic structure is topologically much simpler than a bat's, while still providing the ability to mimic the bat-wing morphology during flapping flight, and to find optimal trajectories that exploit the natural system dynamics, enabling effective controller design.
Using Deep Learning to Identify Security Risks of Personal Mobile Devices in Enterprise Networks

In bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and guest wireless networks, the use of mobile devices within industry, government, and academic enterprise networks represents a difficult security challenge for system administrators. Devices not owned by the enterprise can pose additional risk. Our prior research demonstrated a dynamic anomaly detection method that used side-channel analysis of ping responses to infer whether devices were compromised. Initial results showed promise for a limited dataset. Our extension of this prior work now uses deep learning, twice as many features, and analyzes ten times more malware. Additional experiments demonstrate that our deep learning model generalizes to the detection of unseen threats across multiple families of malware.
The But-For Theory of Anti-Discrimination Law

Discrimination law has long been in theoretical crisis. Its central theory—disparate treatment law—has no agreed-upon core principles. Because prevailing theories of discrimination once treated “disparate treatment” and “discriminatory intent” as coextensive—something we now know not to be true—it is unclear whether all “disparate treatment” is truly proscribed. In the absence of a clear commitment to proscribing all disparate treatment, judicial law-making has run amok. The result has been the development of a network of technical rules that that have all but eclipsed the factual question of whether discrimination took place—and that have been devastating to discrimination plaintiffs’ success. This Article contends that the time has come to resolve the theoretical crisis in anti-discrimination law. In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has situated the question of whether an individual or group would have fared differently “but for” their protected class status as the central defining question of anti-discrimination law. Moreover, the Court has suggested that this inquiry flows from anti-discrimination law’s plain text. As such, there are compelling arguments to be made that a true disparate treatment principle—the but-for principle—is the textually mandated inquiry in anti-discrimination law, and that judicial deviations from this standard are illegitimate. This idea—that our anti-discrimination laws must reach all contexts where the outcome would be different “but for” the sex, race, or other protected class status of those affected—is simultaneously conservative in its aspirations, and potentially radical in its legal effects. Such an approach comports with our often-stated commitment that all individuals in our society be given equal opportunities, and not be judged on the basis of their race, sex, religion, or other protected class status. But anti-discrimination law has strayed far from these anti-disparate treatment principles—and thus taking such a commitment seriously would have radical effects. This Article thus suggests that reorienting our inquiry around the factual question of whether the outcome would be different “but for” protected class status is important to ensuring that anti-discrimination law can achieve its basic promises.
PFsuper: Simulation-Based Prognostics to Monitor and Predict Sparse Time Series

Commercial systems for predicting remaining useful life (RUL) of serviceable parts like engine oil tend to use either generic regression models (practical, e.g., widely deployed in the automotive industry), or dynamic models for which software lags behind theory (impractical, e.g., ‘one-trick’hardcodings). We describe an arguably more realistic framework using both generic and vehicle-specific dynamic models of time-series for simulation-based condition monitoring and RUL forecasting, suitable in situations where: (a) measured time-series are sparse or slowly sampled, and (b) health condition signals tend to follow relatively simple paths (low-degree polynomial stationary trends, unit-root stochastic trends, exponential growths, quasiperiodic oscillations). This combination unlocks affordability of PFsuper, a prognostics algorithm that implements online Bayesian learning with particle filters to jointly estimate hidden condition state and optionally a handful of unknown parameters, coupled withsubsimulations characterizing failure progression and RUL probability density function. The overall method converts a generic static time-as-a-regressor model into a stochastic differential equation, then has PFsuper adapt the initially generic model into a vehicle-specific one as datameasurements arrive.
The New Whole State System: State-led Financialization, State-Private Fusion, and China’s Innovation Policies after 2008

This article joins ongoing efforts to reconceptualize the role of the state in capitalism through the experiences of China. Using tech companies owned by Tsinghua University as a case study, we offer a novel perspective on China’s post-2008 innovation system and the renewed significance of the state in economic restructuring. Drawing on existing research about the history of capitalism and China, we contextualize China’s innovation system within its own history of interacting with global capitalism and identify five distinct new features at the conjuncture of post-2008 macroeconomic and geopolitical transformation: mixed-ownership reform, Government Guided Investment Funds, local government financing platforms, transnational investments, and (re)consolidation of party-state leadership. These new features, we argue, are defining elements of the “new whole state system” (NWSS), an emerging innovation system that deploys new market-driven financial tools to reinvent China’s socialist “whole state system”. Through historically informed multilevel empirical research, this article problematizes the state-market dichotomy to show how the Chinese state has proactively cultivated, restructured, and participated in the market to promote indigenous innovation (i.e. innovation that depends on domestic research capacity). It also situates China’s post-2008 economic reform within the global financialization trend and presents the NWSS as a spatiotemporally specific response to the shared problems of technological dependency and slowing economic growth. China’s response offers important policy lessons for other countries about the possibilities and limitations of using financial tools to restructure market institutions and direct excess liquidity to promote indigenous innovation.
Natural Language and Spatial Rules

We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence are assigned spatial roles and the relations among these roles are represented with spatial relations. We combine our system with the shape grammar formalism that uses shape rules to generate languages (sets) of two-dimensional shapes. Our proposed system consists of pairs of shape rules and verbal rules where the verbal rules describe in English the action of the associated shape rule. We present various types of natural language descriptions of shapes that are successfully parsed by our system and we discuss open questions and challenges we see at the interface of language and perception.
Finite Element Method: Applications in Solids, Structures, and Heat Transfer

INTRODUCTION MATHEMATICAL PRELIMINARIES Matrix Algebra Vectors Second-Order Tensors Calculus Newton's Method Kinematics of Motion Problems ONE-DIMENSIONAL PROBLEMS The Weak Form Finite Element Approximations Plugging in the Trial and Test Functions Algorithm for Matrix Assembly One-Dimensional Elasticity Problems LINEARIZED THEORY OF ELASTICITY Cauchy's Law Principal Stresses Equilibrium Equation Small-Strain Tensor Hooke's Law Axisymmetric Problems Weak Form of the Equilibrium Equation Problems STEADY-STATE HEAT CONDUCTION Derivation of the Steady-State Heat Equation Fourier's Law Boundary Conditions Weak Form of the Steady-State Heat Equation Problems CONTINUUM FINITE ELEMENTS Three-Node Triangle Development of an Arbitrary Quadrilateral Four-Node Tetrahedron Eight-Node Brick Element Matrices and Vectors Gauss Quadrature Bending of a Cantilever Beam Analysis of a Plate with Hole Thermal Stress Analysis of a Composite Cylinder Problems STRUCTURAL FINITE ELEMENTS Space Truss Euler-Bernoulli Beams Mindlin-Reissner Plate Theory Deflection of a Clamped Plate Problems LINEAR TRANSIENT ANALYSIS Derivation of the Equation of Motion Semi-Discrete Equations of Motion Central Difference Method Trapezoidal Rule Unsteady Heat Conduction Problems SMALL-STRAIN PLASTICITY Basic Concepts Yield Condition Flow and Hardening Rules Derivation of the Elastoplastic Tangent Finite Element Implementation One-Dimensional Elastoplastic Deformation of a Bar Elastoplastic Analysis of a Thick-Walled Cylinder Problems TREATMENT OF GEOMETRIC NONLINEARITIES Large-Deformation Kinematics Weak Form in the Original Configuration Linearization of the Weak Form Snap-Through Buckling of a Truss Structure Uniaxial Tensile Test of a Rubber Dog-Bone Specimen Problems BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
Hepatic Carboxylesterase 1 is Essential for Both Normal and Farnesoid X Receptor-Controlled Lipid Homeostasis

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the major health concerns worldwide. Farnesoid X receptor (FXR) is considered a therapeutic target for treatment of NAFLD. However, the mechanism...
Measurement of micro‐polar effects in granular materials

Experiments have shown that the thickness of shear bands depends upon the mean particle size. These observations suggest that a proper continuum representation of granular behavior must be augmented in a manner that introduces a characteristic length scale. Such generalized continua include micro‐polar continua (which involve couple‐stress or higher‐order stress) and strain‐gradient material models. The paper presents the results of DEM simulations that test whether such micro‐polar or strain‐gradient effects are present in granular materials. The 2D simulation experiments were conducted as “flexure tests” of roughly square assemblies of circular particles. The platens along two opposite sides were rotated to produce a fiexural curvature of the assembly between these sides. Particles along the rotating sides were constrained to translate and rotate in conformity with the sides; whereas, interior particles were free to adjust their movements so that their local equilibrium was maintained. The constraining ...
School mental health early interventions and academic outcomes for at-risk high school students: a meta-analysis

The current educational policy context in the United States necessitates that school-based programs prioritize students' academic outcomes. This review examined the quantitative research on school mental health (SMH) early interventions and academic outcomes for at-risk high school students. Seven articles met the inclusion criteria for this review. All articles were examined according to study design and demographics, early intervention characteristics, and outcomes. Of the studies included, most were conducted in urban settings, involved the implementation of group-based early intervention strategies, and monitored GPA as a distal academic outcome. Counselors were frequent implementers of these early interventions. A meta-analysis found no statistically significant effect on the academic outcomes most commonly assessed in the studies (i.e., GPA, attendance, and discipline). Findings suggest the need for more rigorous research in this area. Implications for SMH early intervention research and practice ar...
Evaluation in Context: Reflections on How to Measure Success of Your 'WNM' Program

Evaluation is the systematic investigation of the effects that your program has on the lives of people touched by your program. The process of designing an evaluation system benefits your program by clarifying your goals and identifying indicators of progress towards your goals. The results of evaluation provide program staff with important evidence that can shape a reflective process of iteration and improvement. The products of evaluation are also vital for demonstrating to philanthropists and grant-makers the value of their charitable investments. For many non-profit programs, evaluation is foreign and scary. We plunge into public service out of a passion for serving people, not because we want to gin up data for analysis. For those whose work depends upon the charity of others, evaluations run the risk of revealing weaknesses and limitations. Many people can be intimidated by the quantitative aspects of evaluation or feel that numerical summaries of work can obscure the transformative impact of programs on individual lives. But the best non-profit agencies are learning organizations, committed to a constant cycle of experiment, inquiry, reflection, and refinement. By studying our programs, testing our assumptions, and gathering evidence of our impact and shortcomings, we have the opportunity to do our work even better. We can use evaluation to engage a growing audience of philanthropists and grant-makers who want to invest in programs committed to gathering evidence of their effectiveness.
Automatic functional test program generation for pipelined processors using model checking

Formal techniques offer an opportunity to significantly reduce the cost of microprocessor verification. We propose a model checking based approach to automatically generate functional test programs for pipelined processors. We specify the processor architecture in an Architecture Description Language (ADL). The processor model is extracted from the ADL specification. Specific properties are applied to the processor model using SMV model checker to generate test programs. We applied this methodology on a single-issue DLX processor to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.
NODding off in acute kidney injury with progranulin

Zhou et al. identify progranulin (PGRN) as a protective mediator that limits inflammation in murine models of acute kidney injury (AKI) and reduces its severity. Deficiency of PGRN was associated with increased inflammation and increased injury in ischemic and nephrotoxic models of AKI. Exogenous PGRN reduced AKI even when administered after AKI was established. Interference in NOD2 pathways is suggested as a possible mechanism for protection. PGRN-based therapeutics might have application in the treatment or prevention of AKI.
Fulfilling Global Maternal Health Obligations: A Rights-Based Approach

The crisis in maternal mortality rates is an acute reminder of the insufficient and unsustainable nature of many current global development strategies. While the Millennium Development Goals represent a global, institutional commitment to improve development outcomes by 2015, a majority of the eight goals will not be achieved. Goal Five, created to address maternal mortality rates, is the least likely Millennium Development Goal to be reached. This paper asks why and hypothesizes that a meaningful reduction in maternal mortality rates will not be achieved without a shift in the fundamental justification for women’s health care. I argue that a human rights–based approach will most likely achieve the necessary commitment from national governments to extend health care benefits to poor and rural populations typically left out of health initiatives. In order to rely less on intermittent international aid programs, national governments must include in their constitutions an attack on maternal mortality through gender-inclusive, universal health care.
Interaction of Arsenate with Phosphate-Transport Systems in Wild-Type and Mutant Streptococcus faecalis

Harold, F. M. (National Jewish Hospital, Denver, Colo.), and J. R. Baarda. Interaction of arsenate with phosphate-transport systems in wild-type and mutant Streptococcus faecalis. J. Bacteriol. 91:2257–2262. 1966.—Arsenate competitively inhibits the growth of Streptococcus faecalis, primarily by competition with phosphate for a common transport system. Arsenate is itself accumulated by the cells; the uptake requires metabolic energy, and the intracellular arsenate level may reach 0.01 m. Cells loaded with arsenate have lost the capacity to take up radioactive glutamate, rubidium, phosphate, or arsenate itself, apparently by the uncoupling of adenosine triphosphate generation. The pH dependence of arsenate uptake is complex. At low concentrations of extracellular arsenate, uptake by the wild-type strain 9790 exhibits a single maximum about pH 8; mutant PT-1, previously shown to be defective in phosphate uptake, takes up essentially no arsenate. At high concentrations of arsenate, uptake by the wild type is bimodal with maxima at pH 5.5 and 9; the uptake curve for mutant PT-1 corresponds to the shoulder in the curve for the wild type. The apparent dissociation constant for arsenate uptake by the wild type is approximately 10−5m from pH 5 to 9, whereas that for mutant PT-1 is about 5 × 10−5 M at pH 5 and rises rapidly with increasing pH. The results confirm the earlier conclusion that the lesion in mutant PT-1 resides in the transport of phosphate and arsenate. It is proposed that the wild type has two distinct transport systems, whereas the mutant has lost the one with alkaline pH optimum.
Home Treatment Devices—Microbiology of Point of Use and Point of Entry Devices

POU Versus POE Types of Home Treatment Units Bacteriological Quality of Water from POU and POE Treatment Devices Health Effects Related to Home Treatment Units Disclaimer/Notice Keywords: drinking water; home treatment devices; point-of-use treatment devices
Preconditions for understanding (formal specification)

The author argues that advocates of a formal method have an obligation to explain the relationship between the role of proof in that method and the role of proof in others. Such comparisons are needed to (a) clarify the 'method' behind a specific notation, (b) dispel misconceptions invited by the use of similar vocabulary with different meanings, and (c) suggest improvements to existing methods. These points are illustrated by comparing the use of preconditions in Z with that in other formal methods. >
Reflections on Studying Prosody in Talk-in-Interaction

Rather than focusing on conversation as one context among many in which to study prosody, this paper approaches prosody as one set of resources and practices among many by which participants interactively produce conversation and other talk-in-interaction. Three episodes of conversation are examined, each exemplifying a different order of organization in which prosodic practices may be implicated. The first develops various lines of evidence to show that pitch peaks may be deployed and understood as projecting that a next syntactic possible completion is the designed end of the turn. In the second, the initial turns in the opening of a telephone conversation are examined as the site in which the participants work out the pitch level at which the conversation—or at least its first part—will be conducted, and thereby “negotiate” the tenor of the conversation's launching. The third episode focuses on the central part which prosody can play in the constitution of the action which an utterance is implementing....
Modified Masaoka stage and size are independent prognostic predictors in thymoma and modified Masaoka stage is superior to histopathologic classifications.

Introduction The prognostic value of histopathologic classifications of thymoma is debated. Problematic reproducibility might cause this controversy. We studied the prognostic significance of three histopathologic classifications of thymomas after three thoracic pathologists agreed upon thymoma subtype and invasion. We also compared the outcome to established prognostic parameters. Methods Patients, surgically treated for thymic epithelial neoplasm at Mayo Clinic (1942–2008), were staged according to the modified Masaoka staging and the recently proposed staging by Moran. Three thoracic pathologists independently classified all cases according to the World Health Organization, Bernatz, and proposed Suster and Moran classification. Only thymoma that all three pathologists diagnosed as the same histopathologic subtype and extent of invasion were included in outcome analysis. Results In 214 (proposed Suster and Moran classification), 145 (World Health Organization classification), and 120 cases (Bernatz classification), reviewers agreed upon subtype of thymoma and invasion and follow-up was available. Median follow-up time was 7.5–7.7 years (range between classifications). All histopathologic classifications were associated with overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival ( p ⩽ 0.0001 to p = 0.048); only Bernatz classification was independent of modified Masaoka staging associated with OS ( p = 0.04). Modified Masaoka stage predicted outcome independent of all histopathologic classifications and resection status and strongly correlated with the proposed Moran stage (correlation coefficient, 0.95). Thymoma size and age were prognostic parameters for OS independent of any histopathologic classification. Conclusions Histopathologic classifications of thymomas are associated with prognosis but are in general not independent predictors of outcome. Modified Masaoka stage and proposed Moran staging are independent prognostic parameters for thymoma and superior to histopathologic classifications.
How Inferior Temporal Cortex Became a Visual Area

The origins of contemporary work on the temporal cortex and object recognition are traced from their roots in phrenology through the search for a cortical visual area to the discovery of the Kluver-Bucy syndrome and its fractionation, finally ending with early single-neuron recording studies.
Recession slope curve analysis under human interferences

Abstract To study the base flow recession at the watershed scale, the log-scale plot of − dQ / dt ∼ Q proposed by Brutsaert and Nieber [10] has been used to estimate the recession parameters, i.e., the slope and interception of the theoretical recession slope curve. The lower envelope or the best fit in some studies is usually used to determine the recession slope curve for natural watersheds. However, human interferences exist in most watersheds around the world. This paper discusses the impact of human interferences, which include groundwater pumping, water diversion and return flow, on the determination of the recession slope curve and the cloud shape of the data points of − dQ / dt ∼ Q . First, values of − dQ / dt generated for hypothetical watersheds are analyzed. Then real data for three watersheds in Illinois is analyzed to verify the hypothetical analysis. The placement of the recession slope curve depends on the coexistence and relative amount of the evapotranspiration, groundwater pumping or even water diversion if it exists, and the return flow. When the water consumption rate is small, the recession slope curve can even be located at the upper envelope of the cloud of points representing historical data. These results suggest that the use of the lower envelope as a guideline for estimating recession parameters for watersheds subject to human interferences can result in biased estimates.
Solution-Focused Treatment of Migraine Headache

Solution-focused counseling is proposed as an adjunct to conventional medical treatment for migraine headache. A case example illustrates the application of the model to migraine headache. Implications for the theory, practice, and research of solution-focused counseling are considered.
SU-E-T-817: Comparison of a Hybrid Planning Technique with Standard IMRT Planning

Purpose: To determine if a hybrid planning technique consisting of a combination of dynamic‐conformal arcs and IMRT beams meets or exceeds dosimetric markers defined by IMRT‐only planning techniques. Method and Materials: In an IRB approved protocol for retrospective review, eleven cranial CT data sets consisting of different lesion sizes and shapes were contoured and planned for radiotherapy. Planning was to clinical guidelines and doses for each tumor. Hybrid plans used 5 non‐coplanar, MLC‐dynamic arcs (with fixed dose rate) with 2–4 IMRT beams. IMRT‐only plans used 9–14 non‐coplanar beams. Brainlab's iPlan 4.1 was used to plan all cases and generate respective DVH values. Normal tissue was defined as external contour, minus the target structure. Conformity/Gradient Index (a normalized value with 100 representing optimal), low‐to‐intermediate isodose volumes, and hotspots (D1cc=dose to 1cc) were used as dosimetric benchmarks. Results: Comparing CGI for each data set, the average score for the hybrid plans was 77, while for IMRT‐only it was 73. The radius related to the gradient component of the CGI score shows that hybrid plans gave, on average, a 0.38 mm tighter dose gradient between RX isodose to 50% of prescription. The volume of the 25% isodose line was on average 33cc smaller with the hybrid plan than the IMRT only plan. Lastly the maximum dose (D1cc) showed little difference between techniques. Conclusions: This planning analysis indicates that the standard IMRT approach to fractionated cranial treatments can be improved by creating a hybrid plan consisting of IMRT beams and dynamic‐conformal arcs. The hybrid technique reduced dose gradients, improved conformality, and reduced volumes of low‐to‐intermediate isodose lines. It should be noted that both techniques required approximately the same amount of time to plan with an estimated reduction in treatment time due to fewer couch angles.
Modeling the spread of the Argentine ant into natural areas: Habitat suitability and spread from neighboring sites

To predict a fine-scale invasion of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) into a natural area from the surrounding suburban matrix, we introduce a grid-based invasion model, similar to a cellular automaton model. Our model was based on observations of ant presence and absence but, unlike other models based on presence–absence data, it incorporated the process of invasion by spread from neighboring areas. Simulations were parameterized from a statistical analysis of a 17-year survey of ant distributions in the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in northern California. We simulated the effects of Argentine ant presence at neighboring grid squares, distance to development, presence of the native winter ant Prenolepis imparis, and other habitat and climate variables, and used these models to simulate invasion over many decades. The best predictions of the extent of Argentine ant invasion were based on the distance of each site to developed areas. Adding the effect of neighbors improved the predictions of the time at which sites would be invaded. Winter ants responded mainly to vegetation cover. Our results suggest that Argentine ants may reach their potential distribution in insular urban reserves rapidly, perhaps within 10 years, and that reserve size determines whether the reserve is likely to become fully invaded.
Radiation induced physical and chemical processes in zeolite materials

Abstract Ionic processes induced by high energy radiation in zeolites, including electron and hole trapping and related chemical reactions, are reviewed in this paper. Electronic structures of electrons localized in clusters of charge balancing cations and those solvated in zeolite confined water clusters are characterized by a combination of spectroscopic techniques such as ESR and transient UV–visible absorption. Reactivities of these trapped electron species confined in a nanometer dimension are understood in correlation with their structural characteristics. Positive charge transfer from the zeolite framework to molecular adsorbates and subsequent oxidation reactions are also examined.
Calculations for bismuth of consequences of nonlinearities in the theory of second sound

Abstract The relation τ(θ)q1 + q = −κ(θ)θ, in which q is the heat flux, θ the temperature θx = ∂θ/t6x, q1 = ∂/∂t, is often used to describe second sound in solids. Compatibility of the relation with thermodynamics requires that the internal energy density e depend not only on θ but also on q, i.e. that e = en(θ) + a(θ)q2 with 2a(θ) = −θ 2 d[τ(θ) κ(θ) −1 θ −2 ] dθ . This quadratic nonlinearity in q imply a dependence of the speed of heat pulses on heat flux and influences the growth of singularities in derivatives of θ. Available data for pure crystals of bismuth at temperatures below that at which the steady-state thermal conductivity has its maximum value are employed here to improve previous estimates of the magnitude of such effects.