cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Influence of Common Assumptions Regarding Aerosol Composition and Mixing State on Predicted CCN Concentration

A 4-year record of aerosol size and hygroscopic growth factor distributions measured at the Department of Energy’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in Oklahoma, U.S. were used to estimate supersaturation (S)-dependent cloud condensation nuclei concentrations (NCCN). Baseline or reference NCCN(S) spectra were estimated using κ-Kohler Theory without any averaging of the measured distributions by creating matrices of size- and hygroscopicity-dependent number concentration (N) and then integrating for S > critical supersaturation (Sc) calculated for the same size and hygroscopicity pairs. Those estimates were first compared with directly measured NCCN at the same site. Subsequently, NCCN was calculated using the same dataset but with an array of simplified treatments in which the aerosol was assumed to be either an internal or an external mixture and the hygroscopicity either assumed or based on averages derived from the growth factor distributions. The CCN spectra calculated using the simplified treatments were compared with those calculated using the baseline approach to evaluate the error introduced with commonly used approximations.
Substituted thiadiazoles as energy-rich anolytes for nonaqueous redox flow cells

Understanding structure–property relationships is essential for designing energy-rich redox active organic molecules (ROMs) for all-organic redox flow batteries. Herein we examine thiadiazole ROMs for storage of negative charge in the flow cells. These versatile molecules have excellent solubility and low redox potentials, allowing high energy density to be achieved. By systematically incorporating groups with varying electron accepting/withdrawing ability, we have examined substituent effects on their properties of interest, including redox potentials, calendar lives of charged ROMs in electrolyte, and the flow cell cycling performance. While the calendar life of energized fluids can be tuned in a predictable fashion over a wide range, the improvements in the calendar life do not automatically translate into the enhanced cycling performance, indicating that in addition to the slow reactions of charged species in the solvent bulk, there are other parasitic reactions that occur only during the electrochemical cycling of the cell and can dramatically affect the cycling lifetime.
Eco-Approach and Departure (EAD) Application for Actuated Signals in Real-World Traffic

The connected vehicle eco-approach and departure (EAD) application for signalized intersections has been widely studied and is deemed to be effective in terms of reducing energy consumption and both greenhouse gas and other criteria pollutant emissions. Prior studies have shown that tangible environmental benefits can be gained by communicating the driver with the signal phase and timing (SPaT) information of the upcoming traffic signals with fixed time control to the driver. However, similar applications to actuated signals pose a significant challenge due to their randomness to some extent caused by vehicle actuation. Based on the framework previously developed by the authors, a real-world testing has been conducted along the El Camino Real corridor in Palo Alto, CA, USA, to evaluate the system performance in terms of energy savings and emissions reduction. Strategies and algorithms are designed to be adaptive to the dynamic uncertainty for actuated signal and real-world traffic. It turns out that the proposed EAD system can save 6% energy for the trip segments when activated within DSRC ranges and 2% energy for all trips. The proposed system can also reduce 7% of CO, 18% of HC, and 13% of NOx for all trips. Those results are compatible with the simulation results and validate the previously developed EAD framework.
Two-Round Multiparty Secure Computation from Minimal Assumptions

We provide new two-round multiparty secure computation (MPC) protocols assuming the minimal assumption that two-round oblivious transfer (OT) exists. If the assumed two-round OT protocol is secure against semi-honest adversaries (in the plain model) then so is our two-round MPC protocol. Similarly, if the assumed two-round OT protocol is secure against malicious adversaries (in the common random/reference string model) then so is our two-round MPC protocol. Previously, two-round MPC protocols were only known under relatively stronger computational assumptions. Finally, we provide several extensions.
Generating Talking Face Landmarks from Speech

The presence of a corresponding talking face has been shown to significantly improve speech intelligibility in noisy conditions and for hearing impaired population. In this paper, we present a system that can generate landmark points of a talking face from an acoustic speech in real time. The system uses a long short-term memory (LSTM) network and is trained on frontal videos of 27 different speakers with automatically extracted face landmarks. After training, it can produce talking face landmarks from the acoustic speech of unseen speakers and utterances. The training phase contains three key steps. We first transform landmarks of the first video frame to pin the two eye points into two predefined locations and apply the same transformation on all of the following video frames. We then remove the identity information by transforming the landmarks into a mean face shape across the entire training dataset. Finally, we train an LSTM network that takes the first- and second-order temporal differences of the log-mel spectrogram as input to predict face landmarks in each frame. We evaluate our system using the mean-squared error (MSE) loss of landmarks of lips between predicted and ground-truth landmarks as well as their first- and second-order temporal differences. We further evaluate our system by conducting subjective tests, where the subjects try to distinguish the real and fake videos of talking face landmarks. Both tests show promising results.
Should I Buy This When I Have So Much? Reflection On Personal Possessions As An Anti-Consumption Strategy

Despite having ample possessions, many Western consumers continue to buy new things frenetically. In this research, our central proposition is that one approach to resist shopping temptations and stifle the buying urge is to get consumers to reflect on and evoke a momentary desire for, recently used possessions. We contribute to the anti-consumption literature by theorizing that the desire to consume, like willpower, may function as a limited motivational resource, and get depleted upon reflecting about favored personal possessions, leaving less desire for subsequent shopping urges. Across four studies, consumers who reflected on their recently used personal possessions experienced less desire for an unexpectedly encountered product, were less likely to buy impulsively, and expressed a lower willingness-to-pay for new products. Our theorizing advances anti-consumption theory by broadening its scope. In addition to rejection, restriction, and reclaim, reflection is proposed as a fourth strategy for individ...
Small Animal Multivariate Brain Analysis (SAMBA) – a High Throughput Pipeline with a Validation Framework

While many neuroscience questions aim to understand the human brain, much current knowledge has been gained using animal models, which replicate genetic, structural, and connectivity aspects of the human brain. While voxel-based analysis (VBA) of preclinical magnetic resonance images is widely-used, a thorough examination of the statistical robustness, stability, and error rates is hindered by high computational demands of processing large arrays, and the many parameters involved therein. Thus, workflows are often based on intuition or experience, while preclinical validation studies remain scarce. To increase throughput and reproducibility of quantitative small animal brain studies, we have developed a publicly shared, high throughput VBA pipeline in a high-performance computing environment, called SAMBA. The increased computational efficiency allowed large multidimensional arrays to be processed in 1–3 days—a task that previously took ~1 month. To quantify the variability and reliability of preclinical VBA in rodent models, we propose a validation framework consisting of morphological phantoms, and four metrics. This addresses several sources that impact VBA results, including registration and template construction strategies. We have used this framework to inform the VBA workflow parameters in a VBA study for a mouse model of epilepsy. We also present initial efforts towards standardizing small animal neuroimaging data in a similar fashion with human neuroimaging. We conclude that verifying the accuracy of VBA merits attention, and should be the focus of a broader effort within the community. The proposed framework promotes consistent quality assurance of VBA in preclinical neuroimaging, thus facilitating the creation and communication of robust results.
Student Evaluations, Neoliberal Managerialism, and Networks of Mistrust

Though student evaluations and their flaws have been much commented on lately—in addition to recent coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and NPR’s education blog, major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have also devoted coverage to this issue—there has been little attention paid to student evaluations’ place and function in the larger ideological framework of contemporary higher education. That is, the flaws of student evaluations are not isolated from the larger issues threatening higher education today, but rather are symptoms of the way neoliberal policies have reshaped the university and the roles of teachers and students within it over the past three decades.
The right to social insecurity: a human rights perspective on the evolution of Australian welfare policy

In this lecture I use an international human rights law lens through which to look at some of the key trends in current Australian welfare law and policy. In contrast to the focus in the mid-1970s ...
Privatizing procreative liberty in the shadow of eugenics

The late John Robertson is renowned for the theory of ‘procreative liberty’ that he expounded in his pioneering book, Children of Choice. Procreative liberty captures the ‘freedom to reproduce without sex’ above and beyond the ‘freedom to have sex without reproduction’ that are recognized by constitutional rights to abortion and birth control. Most controversial among Robertson's work on procreative liberty was its application to prenatal selection. Unless the state had very good reasons, he argued, people should be free to access reproductive medicine or technology to have a child who or would be born with particular traits. Prospective parents in the USA today face no official limits in using sperm banks, egg vendors, IVF clinics, or surrogacy agencies with an eye toward choosing for certain characteristics. But should they be protected, this essay asks, when mix-ups or misdiagnoses thwart the selection of offspring traits? The best answer to this question extends the theory of procreative liberty from government restrictions to professional negligence. It also demands sensitivity to genetic uncertainty, the limits of private law, and the history of eugenics in America. Or so I argue in this tribute to the inimitable John Robertson.
Characteristic subgroup lattices and Hopf–Galois structures

The Hopf–Galois structures on normal field extensions K/k with G = Gal(K/k) are in one-to-one correspondence with the set of regular subgroups N of Perm(G), the group of permutations of G as a set,...
Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study and meta-analysis.

Summary Background Low carbohydrate diets, which restrict carbohydrate in favour of increased protein or fat intake, or both, are a popular weight-loss strategy. However, the long-term effect of carbohydrate restriction on mortality is controversial and could depend on whether dietary carbohydrate is replaced by plant-based or animal-based fat and protein. We aimed to investigate the association between carbohydrate intake and mortality. Methods We studied 15 428 adults aged 45–64 years, in four US communities, who completed a dietary questionnaire at enrolment in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study (between 1987 and 1989), and who did not report extreme caloric intake ( 4200 kcal per day for men and 3600 kcal per day for women). The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. We investigated the association between the percentage of energy from carbohydrate intake and all-cause mortality, accounting for possible non-linear relationships in this cohort. We further examined this association, combining ARIC data with data for carbohydrate intake reported from seven multinational prospective studies in a meta-analysis. Finally, we assessed whether the substitution of animal or plant sources of fat and protein for carbohydrate affected mortality. Findings During a median follow-up of 25 years there were 6283 deaths in the ARIC cohort, and there were 40 181 deaths across all cohort studies. In the ARIC cohort, after multivariable adjustment, there was a U-shaped association between the percentage of energy consumed from carbohydrate (mean 48·9%, SD 9·4) and mortality: a percentage of 50–55% energy from carbohydrate was associated with the lowest risk of mortality. In the meta-analysis of all cohorts (432 179 participants), both low carbohydrate consumption ( 70%) conferred greater mortality risk than did moderate intake, which was consistent with a U-shaped association (pooled hazard ratio 1·20, 95% CI 1·09–1·32 for low carbohydrate consumption; 1·23, 1·11–1·36 for high carbohydrate consumption). However, results varied by the source of macronutrients: mortality increased when carbohydrates were exchanged for animal-derived fat or protein (1·18, 1·08–1·29) and mortality decreased when the substitutions were plant-based (0·82, 0·78–0·87). Interpretation Both high and low percentages of carbohydrate diets were associated with increased mortality, with minimal risk observed at 50–55% carbohydrate intake. Low carbohydrate dietary patterns favouring animal-derived protein and fat sources, from sources such as lamb, beef, pork, and chicken, were associated with higher mortality, whereas those that favoured plant-derived protein and fat intake, from sources such as vegetables, nuts, peanut butter, and whole-grain breads, were associated with lower mortality, suggesting that the source of food notably modifies the association between carbohydrate intake and mortality. Funding National Institutes of Health.
Connecting With Students Through a Critical, Participatory Curriculum: An Exploration Into a High School History Teacher’s Construction of Teacher–Student Relationships:

Standardized testing is a top priority in schools, with conversations around teaching and learning reduced to raising student test scores. Often any other conversations about how schools should ser...
Real exchange rate convergence: The roles of price stickiness and monetary policy

Abstract In many open-economy models based on Dornbusch (1976), the speed of convergence of the real exchange rate is tied to the stickiness of prices. The “purchasing power parity puzzle” concerns the empirical fact that real exchange rates appear to converge more slowly than nominal prices. In some New Keynesian models, when there is no interest-rate smoothing, the stickiness of prices does not matter at all for persistence, as Benigno (2004) showed. We show that in the presence of interest-rate smoothing, price stickiness does matter and endogenous real-exchange rate persistence is bounded above by the interest rate smoothing parameter and by the probability of a firm not changing prices under Calvo pricing. We also explain the relationship between the New Keynesian framework with Calvo pricing, and the Dornbusch framework where price stickiness is integral to real exchange rate convergence.
Bank Runs and Moral Hazard : A Review of Deposit Insurance

Deposit insurance is a widely adopted policy to promote financial stability in the banking sector. Deposit insurance helps ensure depositors' confidence in the financial system and prevents contagious bank runs, but it also comes with an unintended consequence of encouraging banks to take on excessive risk. This paper reviews the economic costs and benefits of deposit insurance and highlights the importance of institutions and specific design features for how well deposit insurance schemes work in practice.
Resting Heart Rate and Psychopathy Revisited: Findings From the Add Health Survey:

Despite the prior linkages of low resting heart rate to antisocial behavior broadly defined, less work has been done examining possible associations between heart rate to psychopathic traits. The s...
Load balanced distributed directories

We present LB-Spiral, a novel distributed directory protocol for shared objects, suitable for large-scale distributed shared memory systems. Each shared object has an owner node that can modify its value. The ownership may change by moving the object from one node to another in response to move requests. The value of an object can be read by other nodes with lookup requests. The distinctive feature of LB-Spiral is that it balances the processing load on nodes in addition to minimizing the communication cost in general network topologies. In contrast, the existing distributed directory protocols for general network topologies only minimize the communication cost. In particular, LB-Spiral achieves poly-log approximation for both load and communication cost in general networks with respect to the problem parameters.
Establishing Appropriate Trust via Critical States

In order to effectively interact with or supervise a robot, humans need to have an accurate mental model of its capabilities and how it acts. Learned neural network policies make that particularly challenging. We propose an approach for helping end-users build a mental model of such policies. Our key observation is that for most tasks, the essence of the policy is captured in a few critical states: states in which it is very important to take a certain action. Our user studies show that if the robot shows a human what its understanding of the task's critical states is, then the human can make a more informed decision about whether to deploy the policy, and if she does deploy it, when she needs to take control from it at execution time.
Writing flexibility in argumentative essays: a multidimensional analysis

The assessment of argumentative writing generally includes analyses of the specific linguistic and rhetorical features contained in the individual essays produced by students. However, researchers have recently proposed that an individual’s ability to flexibly adapt the linguistic properties of their writing may more accurately capture their proficiency. However, the features of the task, learner, and educational context that influence this flexibility remain largely unknown. The current study extends this research by examining relations between linguistic flexibility, reading comprehension ability, and feedback in the context of an automated writing evaluation system. Students (n = 131) wrote and revised six argumentative essays in an automated writing evaluation system and were provided both summative and formative feedback on their writing. Additionally, half of the students had access to a spelling and grammar checker that provided lower-level feedback during the writing period. The results provide evidence for the supposition that skilled writers demonstrate linguistic flexibility across the argumentative essays that they produce. However, analyses also indicate that lower-level feedback (i.e., spelling and grammar feedback) have little to no impact on the properties of students’ essays nor on their variability across prompts or drafts. Overall, the current study provides important insights into the role of flexibility in argumentative writing skill and develops a strong foundation on which to conduct future research and educational interventions.
WIC Participation and Relative Quality of Household Food Purchases: Evidence from FoodAPS

We examine the effect of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on the quality of household food purchases using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) and propensity score matching. A healthy purchasing index (HPI) is used to measure nutritional quality of household food purchases. WIC foods explain the improvement in quality of food purchases, not self‐selection of more nutrition‐conscious households into the program. The improvement in purchase quality was driven entirely by WIC participating households who redeemed WIC foods during the interview week. There was no significant difference between WIC participants who did not redeem WIC foods and eligible nonparticipants. In this sample, there is no evidence that lack of access to clinics has adverse effects on participation nor is there evidence that HPI depends on supermarket access. A supervised machine learning process supports our main conclusion on the importance of WIC foods.
Las decisiones de los inversionistas a través del lente de la economía del comportamiento

Traditional economic theory postulates that people are rational. This implies that people make decisions to maximize their utility functions and to do this, that they have fully and correctly evaluated their preferences and limitations. Behavioral economics recognizes that this is not always true, that sometimes information is incomplete. This article is examines some of the effects of behavioral economics (which come largely from cognitive psychology) in decision-making by investors in the stock exchanges.
On Distributed PV Hosting Capacity Estimation, Sensitivity Study and Improvement

This paper first studies the estimated distributed PV hosting capacities of seventeen utility distribution feeders using the Monte Carlo simulation based stochastic analysis, and then analyzes the sensitivity of PV hosting capacity to both feeder and photovoltaic system characteristics. Furthermore, an active distribution network management approach is proposed to maximize PV hosting capacity by optimally switching capacitors, adjusting voltage regulator taps, managing controllable branch switches and controlling smart PV inverters. The approach is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem and a genetic algorithm is developed to obtain the solution. Multiple simulation cases are studied and the effectiveness of the proposed approach on increasing PV hosting capacity is demonstrated.
High-order, stable, and conservative boundary schemes for central and compact finite differences

Abstract Stable and conservative numerical boundary schemes are constructed such that they do not diminish the overall accuracy of the method for interior schemes of orders 4, 6, and 8 using both explicit (central) and compact finite differences. Previous attempts to develop stable numerical boundary schemes for non-linear problems have resulted in schemes which significantly reduced the global accuracy and/or required some form of artificial dissipation. Thus, the schemes developed in this paper are the first to not require this tradeoff, while also ensuring discrete conservation and allowing for direct boundary condition enforcement. After outlining a general procedure for the construction of conservative boundary schemes of any order, a simple, yet novel, optimization strategy which focuses directly on the compressible Euler equations is presented. The result of this non-linear optimization process is a set of high-order, stable, and conservative numerical boundary schemes which demonstrate excellent stability and convergence properties on an array of linear and non-linear hyperbolic problems.
Graphamine: Amine-Functionalized Graphane for Intrinsic Anhydrous Proton Conduction

New proton conducting materials are needed to enable operation of proton exchange membrane fuel cells at intermediate temperatures and conditions of low humidity. We report that graphane functionalized with amine groups (graphamine) can conduct protons in the complete absence of water, as demonstrated by ab initio density functional theory molecular dynamics simulation. Graphamine’s intrinsic proton conductivity is due to its contiguous network of hydrogen bonds, which facilitate a “Grotthuss-like” proton hopping mechanism. Our calculations show that graphamine is an electronic insulator having a direct band gap of 3.08 eV. Our calculated phonon density of states and elastic properties indicate that graphamine is mechanically stable, with an in-plane Young’s modulus of 262 J/m2, which lies in between the values for graphene and graphane. We predict that graphamine has the transport, electronic, and structural properties required for a viable anhydrous proton conduction membrane material.
Impulsive Noise Detection in OFDM-based Systems: A Deep Learning Perspective

Efficient removal of impulsive noise (IN) from received signal is essential in many communication applications. In this paper, we propose a two stage IN mitigation approach for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based communication systems. In the first stage, a deep neural network (DNN) is used to detect the instances of impulsivity. Then, the detected IN is blanked in the suppression stage to alleviate the harmful effects of outliers. Simulation results demonstrate the superior bit error rate (BER) performance of this approach relative to classic approaches such as blanking and clipping that use threshold to detect the IN. We demonstrate the robustness of the DNN-based approach under (i) mismatch between IN models considered for training and testing, and (ii) bursty impulsive environment when the receiver is empowered with interleaving techniques.
Good Feature Selection for Least Squares Pose Optimization in VO/VSLAM

This paper aims to select features that contribute most to the pose estimation in VO/VSLAM. Unlike existing feature selection works that are focused on efficiency only, our method significantly improves the accuracy of pose tracking, while introducing little overhead. By studying the impact of feature selection towards least squares pose optimization, we demonstrate the applicability of improving accuracy via good feature selection. To that end, we introduce the Max-logDet metric to guide the feature selection, which is connected to the conditioning of least squares pose optimization problem. We then describe an efficient algorithm for approximately solving the NP-hard Max-logDet problem. Integrating Max-logDet feature selection into a state-of-the-art visual SLAM system leads to accuracy improvements with low overhead, as demonstrated via evaluation on a public benchmark.
Exact variance component tests for longitudinal microbiome studies.

In metagenomic studies, testing the association between microbiome composition and clinical outcomes translates to testing the nullity of variance components. Motivated by a lung human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) microbiome project, we study longitudinal microbiome data by using variance component models with more than two variance components. Current testing strategies only apply to models with exactly two variance components and when sample sizes are large. Therefore, they are not applicable to longitudinal microbiome studies. In this paper, we propose exact tests (score test, likelihood ratio test, and restricted likelihood ratio test) to (a) test the association of the overall microbiome composition in a longitudinal design and (b) detect the association of one specific microbiome cluster while adjusting for the effects from related clusters. Our approach combines the exact tests for null hypothesis with a single variance component with a strategy of reducing multiple variance components to a single one. Simulation studies demonstrate that our method has a correct type I error rate and superior power compared to existing methods at small sample sizes and weak signals. Finally, we apply our method to a longitudinal pulmonary microbiome study of HIV-infected patients and reveal two interesting genera Prevotella and Veillonella associated with forced vital capacity. Our findings shed light on the impact of the lung microbiome on HIV complexities. The method is implemented in the open-source, high-performance computing language Julia and is freely available at https://github.com/JingZhai63/VCmicrobiome.
Chapter 13 – Financing the Deal: Private Equity, Hedge Funds, and Other Sources of Financing

This chapter begins with a discussion of common sources of merger and acquisition (M&A) financing. The role of private equity firms in financing highly leveraged transactions is discussed in detail. Highly leveraged transactions, typically referred to as leveraged buyouts (LBOs), are discussed in the context of a financing strategy. This chapter also describes the changing nature of LBOs, their impact on innovation, firm performance, and employment, as well as factors contributing to their success, typical capital structures, and the pitfalls of improperly structured LBOs.
Contactless cardiac arrest detection using smart devices.

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death worldwide. Rapid diagnosis and initiation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is the cornerstone of therapy for victims of cardiac arrest. Yet a significant fraction of cardiac arrest victims have no chance of survival because they experience an unwitnessed event, often in the privacy of their own homes. An under-appreciated diagnostic element of cardiac arrest is the presence of agonal breathing, an audible biomarker and brainstem reflex that arises in the setting of severe hypoxia. Here, we demonstrate that a support vector machine (SVM) can classify agonal breathing instances in real-time within a bedroom environment. Using real-world labeled 9-1-1 audio of cardiac arrests, we train the SVM to accurately classify agonal breathing instances. We obtain an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.9993 ± 0.0003 and an operating point with an overall sensitivity and specificity of 97.24% (95% CI: 96.86–97.61%) and 99.51% (95% CI: 99.35–99.67%). We achieve a false positive rate between 0 and 0.14% over 82 h (117,985 audio segments) of polysomnographic sleep lab data that includes snoring, hypopnea, central, and obstructive sleep apnea events. We also evaluate our classifier in home sleep environments: the false positive rate was 0–0.22% over 164 h (236,666 audio segments) of sleep data collected across 35 different bedroom environments. We prototype our proof-of-concept contactless system using commodity smart devices (Amazon Echo and Apple iPhone) and demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying cardiac arrest-associated agonal breathing instances played over the air.
Heat kernel and curvature bounds in Ricci flows with bounded scalar curvature

Abstract In this paper we analyze Ricci flows on which the scalar curvature is globally or locally bounded from above by a uniform or time-dependent constant. On such Ricci flows we establish a new time-derivative bound for solutions to the heat equation. Based on this bound, we solve several open problems: 1. distance distortion estimates, 2. the existence of a cutoff function, 3. Gaussian bounds for heat kernels, and, 4. a backward pseudolocality theorem, which states that a curvature bound at a later time implies a curvature bound at a slightly earlier time. Using the backward pseudolocality theorem, we next establish a uniform L 2 curvature bound in dimension 4 and we show that the flow in dimension 4 converges to an orbifold at a singularity. We also obtain a stronger e-regularity theorem for Ricci flows. This result is particularly useful in the study of Kahler Ricci flows on Fano manifolds, where it can be used to derive certain convergence results.
Single and Double-Blind Procedures†

When an experiment is conducted, there are many factors other than the independent variable that may influence the behavior of both participants and researchers, possibly leading to biased results. Sources of bias that depend on knowledge about the purpose of the experiment or the details of the research design may be removed by keeping participants and researchers ‘blind’ to such information. Keywords: bias; artifacts; subject effects; experimenter effects; placebo effects
Untangling the Radical Roots of America's Civil Liberties Settlement: Causation, Compromise, and the Taming of Free Speech

This essay is a response to commentary by Amnon Reichman and Mark Graber on The Taming of Free Speech for a symposium in the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies. It addresses their observations that the interwar civil liberties campaign was shaped by events outside the circles of lawyers and activists I explore in the book, and it takes up their invitations to link the history of free speech more explicitly to developments in the wider field of civil liberties advocacy. It pursues their questions by reference to two historical developments that were omitted, for reasons of space and thematic coherence, from my final manuscript: the Sacco and Vanzetti affair, and the ACLU’s debate over its defense of Nazi speech. Both stories link the ACLU’s First Amendment strategy to developments abroad. Both also highlight the very real alternatives to the modern First Amendment that advocates proposed and defended. These controversies and others cast doubt on an overly deterministic account of the ascendance in the United States of the modern First Amendment, if not the survival of judicial review. By extension, they also illuminate connections between the ACLU’s litigation strategy and the recent weaponization of the First Amendment, as well as the usefulness of discarded alternatives in our own historical moment.
Police Contact and the Legal Socialization of Urban Teens.

Contemporary American policing has routinized involuntary police contacts with young people through frequent, sometimes intrusive investigative stops. Personal experience with the police has the potential to corrode adolescents’ relationships with law and skew law-related behaviors. We use the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate how adolescents’ experiences with the police shape their legal socialization. We find that both personal and vicarious police contact are associated with increased legal cynicism. Associations are present across racial groups and are not explained by teens’ behaviors, school settings, or family backgrounds. Legal cynicism is amplified in teens reporting intrusive contact but diminished among teens reporting experiences characterized by procedural justice. Our findings suggest that aggressive policing risks weakening teens’ deference to law and legal authorities.
Lemon: a framework for rapidly mining structural information from the Protein Data Bank

MOTIVATION The Protein Data Bank (PDB) currently holds over 140 000 biomolecular structures and continues to release new structures on a weekly basis. The PDB is an essential resource to the structural bioinformatics community to develop software that mine, use, categorize and analyze such data. New computational biology methods are evaluated using custom benchmarking sets derived as subsets of 3D experimentally determined structures and structural features from the PDB. Currently, such benchmarking features are manually curated with custom scripts in a non-standardized manner that results in slow distribution and updates with new experimental structures. Finally, there is a scarcity of standardized tools to rapidly query 3D descriptors of the entire PDB. RESULTS Our solution is the Lemon framework, a C++11 library with Python bindings, which provides a consistent workflow methodology for selecting biomolecular interactions based on user criterion and computing desired 3D structural features. This framework can parse and characterize the entire PDB in <10 min on modern, multithreaded hardware. The speed in parsing is obtained by using the recently developed MacroMolecule Transmission Format to reduce the computational cost of reading text-based PDB files. The use of C++ lambda functions and Python bindings provide extensive flexibility for analysis and categorization of the PDB by allowing the user to write custom functions to suite their objective. We think Lemon will become a one-stop-shop to quickly mine the entire PDB to generate desired structural biology features. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The Lemon software is available as a C++ header library along with a PyPI package and example functions at https://github.com/chopralab/lemon. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Regret Minimization for Partially Observable Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms that estimate state and state-action value functions have been shown to be effective in a variety of challenging domains, including learning control strategies from raw image pixels. However, algorithms that estimate state and state-action value functions typically assume a fully observed state and must compensate for partial observations by using finite length observation histories or recurrent networks. In this work, we propose a new deep reinforcement learning algorithm based on counterfactual regret minimization that iteratively updates an approximation to an advantage-like function and is robust to partially observed state. We demonstrate that this new algorithm can substantially outperform strong baseline methods on several partially observed reinforcement learning tasks: learning first-person 3D navigation in Doom and Minecraft, and acting in the presence of partially observed objects in Doom and Pong.
Cellular expression through morphogen delivery by light activated magnetic microrobots

Microrobots have many potential uses in microbiology since they can be remotely actuated and precisely manipulated in biochemical fluids. Cellular function and response depends on biochemicals. Therefore, various delivery methods have been developed for delivering biologically relevant cargo using microrobots. However, localized targeting without payload leakage during transport is challenging. Here, we design a microrobotic platform capable of on-demand delivery of signaling molecules in biological systems. The on-demand delivery method is based on a light-responsive photolabile linker which releases a cell-to-cell signaling molecule when exposed to light, integrated on the surface of microrobots. Successful delivery of the signaling molecules and subsequent gene regulation is also demonstrated. This proposed method can be used for multiple applications, especially in biology, engineering, and medicine where on-demand delivery of chemical cargo at targeted locations is important.
α,β-Epoxy Vinyl Triflates in Pd-Catalyzed Reactions

Reactions of steroidal α,β-epoxy vinyl triflates in Pd-catalyzed reactions are described. Oxidative insertion of Pd0 into the C−O bond, giving vinylpalladium 12, is faster than formation of the π-a...
Synthesis of 5′-deoxypyridoxal derivatives

A convenient synthesis of 5′-deoxypyridoxal derivatives is described. The method involves catalytic hydrogenolysis of the corresponding 5′-phosphorylated derivatives; products are obtained in high yields.
Genome-Enabled Insights into the Ecophysiology of the Comammox Bacterium “Candidatus Nitrospira nitrosa”

ABSTRACT The recently discovered comammox bacteria have the potential to completely oxidize ammonia to nitrate. These microorganisms are part of the Nitrospira genus and are present in a variety of environments, including biological nutrient removal (BNR) systems. However, the physiological traits within and between comammox and nitrite-oxidizing bacterium (NOB)-like Nitrospira species have not been analyzed in these ecosystems. In this study, we identified Nitrospira strains dominating the nitrifying community of a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) performing BNR under microaerobic conditions. We recovered metagenome-derived draft genomes from two Nitrospira strains: (i) Nitrospira sp. strain UW-LDO-01, a comammox-like organism classified as “ Candidatus Nitrospira nitrosa,” and (ii) Nitrospira sp. strain UW-LDO-02, a nitrite-oxidizing strain belonging to the Nitrospira defluvii species. A comparative genomic analysis of these strains with other Nitrospira -like genomes identified genomic differences in “ Ca . Nitrospira nitrosa” mainly attributed to each strain’s niche adaptation. Traits associated with energy metabolism also differentiate comammox from NOB-like genomes. We also identified several transcriptionally regulated adaptive traits, including stress tolerance, biofilm formation, and microaerobic metabolism, which might explain survival of Nitrospira under multiple environmental conditions. Overall, our analysis expanded our understanding of the genetic functional features of “ Ca . Nitrospira nitrosa” and identified genomic traits that further illuminate the phylogenetic diversity and metabolic plasticity of the Nitrospira genus. IMPORTANCE Nitrospira -like bacteria are among the most diverse and widespread nitrifiers in natural ecosystems and the dominant nitrite oxidizers in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The recent discovery of comammox-like Nitrospira strains, capable of complete oxidation of ammonia to nitrate, raises new questions about specific traits responsible for the functional versatility and adaptation of this genus to a variety of environments. The availability of new Nitrospira genome sequences from both nitrite-oxidizing and comammox bacteria offers a way to analyze traits in different Nitrospira functional groups. Our comparative genomics analysis provided new insights into the adaptation of Nitrospira strains to specific lifestyles and environmental niches. Author Video : An author video summary of this article is available.
Transition Metal Mediated Exo Selective Diels−Alder Reactions: Preparation of 2-Cobalt-Substituted 1,3-Dienes Containing C2 Symmetric 2,3-Dibenzobicyclo[2.2.2]octanedione Dioxime Equatorial Ligands and Their Use in Thermal and Lewis Acid Catalyzed 4 + 2 Cycloadditions

The preparation of C2 symmetric 2,3-dibenzobicyclo[2.2.2]octanedione dioxime is reported. This ligand is then used in the preparation of a (pyridine)(glyoxime)2cobalt(III) chloride complex. The chloride is reduced to a cobaloxime anion which reacted with allenic electrophiles to produce (pyridine)(glyoxime)2cobalt-1,3-dienyl complexes. Thermal and Lewis acid catalyzed Diels−Alder reactions of these dienyl complexes as well as the complexes with glyoxime = diphenylglyoxime and dimethylglyoxime are reported. In most cases these Diels−Alder reactions are anti (exo) selective, and in many cases diastereoselectivities are >20:1. Cycloadduct demetalation reactions are also reported which preserve cycloaddition stereochemistry and provide cobalt complexes which can be recycled into the starting dienyl complex.
Stereoretentive O-to-C Rearrangement of Vinyl Acetals: Solvent Cage Effects as a Stereocontrol Element

The Lewis acid-mediated rearrangement of chiral vinyl acetals may be induced to provide the product of stereoretention using Me3Al and BF3·OEt2 in concert. The selectivities obtained in this reaction (86:14 to 96:4) are complementary to that observed when relying on oxocarbenium facial bias to control the newly formed stereocenter. Evidence is presented that this reaction occurs by tight ion-pair binding in the solvent cage. The relay of C−O bond stereochemistry to a C−C bond stereocenter via ionic intermediates is an addition to similar established methods such as the Claisen rearrangement.
Synthesis of the four isomers of 4-aminopyrrolidine-2,4-dicarboxylate : Identification of a potent, highly selective, and systemically-active agonist for metabotropic glutamate receptors negatively coupled to adenylate cyclase

The four isomers of 4-aminopyrrolidine-2,4-dicarboxylate (APDC) were prepared and evaluated for their effects at glutamate receptors in vitro. (2R,4R)-APDC (2a), an aza analog of the nonselective mGluR agonist (1S,3R)-1-aminocyclopentane-1,3-dicarboxylate ((1S,3R)-ACPD, 1), was found to possess relatively high affinity for metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) (ACPD-sensitive [3H]glutamate binding IC50 = 6.49 ± 1.21 μM) with no effects on radioligand binding to NMDA, AMPA, or kainate receptors up to 100 μM. None of the other APDC isomers showed significant mGluR binding affinity, indicating that this interaction is highly stereospecific. Both 1 and 2a were effective in decreasing forskolin-stimulated cAMP formation in the adult rat cerebral cortex (EC50 = 8.17 ± 2.21 μM for 1; EC50 = 14.51 ± 5.54 μM for 2a); however, while 1 was also effective in stimulating basal tritiated inositol monophosphate production in the neonatal rat cerebral cortex (EC50 = 27.7 ± 5.2 μM), 2a (up to 100 μM) was ineffective i...
Dynamic transcriptome profiles within spermatogonial and spermatocyte populations during postnatal testis maturation revealed by single-cell sequencing.

Spermatogenesis is the process by which male gametes are formed from a self-renewing population of spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) residing in the testis. SSCs represent less than 1% of the total testicular cell population in adults, but must achieve a stable balance between self-renewal and differentiation. Once differentiation has occurred, the newly formed and highly proliferative spermatogonia must then enter the meiotic program in which DNA content is doubled, then halved twice to create haploid gametes. While much is known about the critical cellular processes that take place during the specialized cell division that is meiosis, much less is known about how the spermatocytes in the “first-wave” in juveniles compare to those that contribute to long-term, “steady-state” spermatogenesis in adults. Given the strictly-defined developmental process of spermatogenesis, this study explored the transcriptional profiles of developmental cell stages during testis maturation. Using a combination of comprehensive germ cell sampling with high-resolution, single-cell-mRNA-sequencing, we have generated a reference dataset of germ cell gene expression. We show that discrete developmental stages of spermatogenesis possess significant differences in the transcriptional profiles from neonates compared to juveniles and adults. Importantly, these gene expression dynamics are also reflected at the protein level in their respective cell types. We also show differential utilization of many biological pathways with age in both spermatogonia and spermatocytes, demonstrating significantly different underlying gene regulatory programs in these cell types over the course of testis development and spermatogenic waves. This dataset represents the first unbiased sampling of spermatogonia and spermatocytes during testis maturation, at high-resolution, single-cell depth. Not only does this analysis reveal previously unknown transcriptional dynamics of a highly transitional cell population, it has also begun to reveal critical differences in biological pathway utilization in developing spermatogonia and spermatocytes, including response to DNA damage and double-strand breaks.
A new anhydride analog

Abstract A novel imide-forming reaction is described in which 3-(dicyanomethylidene) phthalide (pseudoanhydride) reacts with amines at room temperature. The pseudoanhydride was synthesized by condensation of phthalic anhydride with malononitrile followed by treatment with phosphrous oxychloride.