cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Model of Current Practice Regarding Prescriptions of Controlled Substances and the Perceived Benefits of E-Prescribing in an Academic Medical Center

To review current practices regarding prescribing controlled substances at an academic medical center and describe possible advantages of electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS). A 10-question multiple choice survey was sent electronically to all house staff at an academic medical center. Aggregated data was analyzed for trends. 193 surveys (18.8 %) were completed. Of all respondents, 46.6 % were not able to write their own prescriptions. 70.0 % have used another provider's prescription pad to write prescriptions. 53.4 % have had prescriptions rejected or not filled by a pharmacy for being written incorrectly. 59.6 % kept a patient as an inpatient for a longer period of time due to the inability to obtain a prescription, costing an estimated $3.28 million per year. 58.0 % needed to have a patient return to the hospital to pick up prescriptions for an estimated 1583 return trips to the hospital yearly. 35.1 % had a patient return to the emergency department due to uncontrolled pain, estimated at $139,000 in yearly emergency department patient charges. The authors' survey highlights some of the financial, legal, efficiency, and satisfaction disadvantages due to the inability to use EPCS. Implementing EPCS and making it ubiquitous may limit some inefficiencies in academic hospital systems.
Characterizing Young Adults' Susceptibility to Waterpipe Tobacco Use and Their Reactions to Messages About Product Harms and Addictiveness

Introduction There is very little insight into the psychosocial characteristics of young adults susceptible to waterpipe tobacco use and their reactions to messages about harms of waterpipe tobacco smoking (WTS). We investigated how young adults who were or were not susceptible to WTS differed on various characteristics and their reactions to messages about WTS harms. Methods Young adults ages 18 to 30 who had never used waterpipe tobacco were recruited through an online crowdsourcing site. Participants were stratified on susceptibility status (susceptible or not) and randomized to receive messages about harms and addictiveness of WTS or a control condition that received no messages. Participants' perceptions of risk and worry, their attitudes toward, and willingness/curiosity to try WTS were assessed. Results Compared to nonsusceptible participants, susceptible participants perceived themselves to be at lower risk and worried less about harms and addictiveness of WTS, had more positive attitudes toward use, and expressed a greater willingness and curiosity to try it. Among susceptible participants, messages decreased willingness/curiosity to try WTS; messages had no effect on nonsusceptible participants. The message effects among susceptible participants were explained by more negative attitudes and less ambivalence toward WTS. Conclusions Susceptible young adults' psychosocial characteristics place them at high risk for future uptake of WTS. Brief public health messages about harm and addiction may deter susceptible young adults' willingness to try WTS and prevent WTS initiation and progression. Implications Findings suggest that in order to curb the initiation of WTS among susceptible young adults, interventions should target risk appraisals and attitudes toward WTS.
Differential effects of Mas receptor deficiency on cardiac function and blood pressure in obese male and female mice

MasR deficiency abolishes protection of female mice from obesity-induced hypertension. Male MasR-deficient obese mice have reduced blood pressure and declines in cardiac function. ANG-(1–7) infusio...
Swept Sine Vibration Test Conservatism

The excessive overtest associated with the swept sine vibration test method was measured quantitatively using the index of conservatism and the associated overtest factor for a dynamic mass model of a typical spacecraft component. The response to a fixed amplitude sine sweep test was compared with the flight transient vibration environment for sweep rates of 2, 4, and 6 octaves/min and 300 Hz/min. A response-limited test was also conducted at 6 octaves/min. The conservatism was measured using several characterizations; namely: number of peaks exceeding, ranked peaks, shock response spectrum, shock intensity, three-dimensional shock response spectrum, and ranked peaks. Overtest factors exceeding an order of magnitude were measured for the test response with the number of peaks exceeding and the three-dimensional shock response spectrum.
rAMPing Up Stress Signaling: Protein AMPylation in Metazoans

Protein AMPylation – the covalent attachment of an AMP residue to amino acid side chains using ATP as the donor – is a post-translational modification (PTM) increasingly appreciated as relevant for both normal and pathological cell signaling. In metazoans single copies of filamentation induced by cAMP (fic)-domain-containing AMPylases – the enzymes responsible for AMPylation – preferentially modify a set of dedicated targets and contribute to the perception of cellular stress and its regulation. Pathogenic bacteria can exploit AMPylation of eukaryotic target proteins to rewire host cell signaling machinery in support of their propagation and survival. We review endogenous as well as parasitic protein AMPylation in metazoans and summarize current views of how fic-domain-containing AMPylases contribute to cellular proteostasis.
Physical and Functional Characterization of a Viral Genome Maturation Complex

Genome packaging is strongly conserved in the complex double-stranded DNA viruses, including the herpesviruses and many bacteriophages. In these cases, viral DNA is packaged into a procapsid shell by a terminase enzyme. The packaging substrate is typically a concatemer composed of multiple genomes linked in a head-to-tail fashion, and terminase enzymes perform two essential functions: 1) excision of a unit length genome from the concatemer (genome maturation) and 2) translocation of the duplex into a procapsid (genome packaging). While the packaging motors have been described in some detail, the maturation complexes remain ill characterized. Here we describe the assembly, physical characteristics, and catalytic activity of the λ-genome maturation complex. The λ-terminase protomer is composed of one large catalytic subunit tightly associated with two DNA recognition subunits. The isolated protomer binds DNA weakly and does not discriminate between nonspecific DNA and duplexes that contain the packaging initiation sequence, cos. The Escherichia coli integration host factor protein (IHF) is required for efficient λ-development in vivo and a specific IHF recognition sequence is found within cos. We show that IHF and the terminase protomer cooperatively assemble at the cos site and that the small terminase subunit plays the dominant role in complex assembly. Analytical ultracentrifugation analysis reveals that the maturation complex is composed of four protomers and one IHF heterodimer bound at the cos site. Tetramer assembly activates the cos-cleavage nuclease activity of the enzyme, which matures the genome end in preparation for packaging. The stoichiometry and catalytic activity of the complex is reminiscent of the type IIE and IIF restriction endonucleases and the two systems may share mechanistic features. This study, to our knowledge, provides our first detailed glimpse into the structural and functional features of a viral genome maturation complex, an essential intermediate in the development of complex dsDNA viruses.
A game-theoretic study of load redistribution attack and defense in power systems

Abstract The wide deployment of advanced computer technologies in power systems monitoring and control will inevitably make the power grid more vulnerable to various cyber attacks. Load redistribution (LR) attack is regarded as a typical and viable cyber attack against power grids, which may mislead the power re-dispatch and cause unnecessary load loss. It is critical to develop methods for optimal allocation of limited defensive resources to safeguard the power grid, especially those considering the probabilistic behaviors of the attackers. To prevent the LR attacks, the optimal budget allocation and the game-theoretic attack and defense interaction are studied in this paper. Specifically, the attack and defense interactions are incorporated in the bilevel modeling of LR attacks. A few important substations are selected based on their criticality as cyber protection targets. For defending the critical substations, an optimal budget allocation strategy is developed to minimize the expected load loss subjected to the attacker’s capability. Further, cybersecurity reinforcement strategies are studied using game-theory based approaches for different attack scenarios. The proposed methods are tested in different scenarios based on an IEEE test system, and the simulation results validate that the proposed methods are effective. This study offers new insight into preventing and mitigating the LR attack effectively.
Integrated flight system analysis model for solar sailing smallsats

The solar sail is an exciting technology, enabling spacecraft to maneuver through space without expending propellant to reach their destinations. The Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout mission, being developed by the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is implementing a solar sail on a 6U CubeSat platform to address a specific set of key strategic knowledge gaps laid out by NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD). NEA Scout's mission is to perform a close and slow encounter of a representative NEA as a robotic precursor for future human exploration. In addition to the resource limitations synonymous with small satellites, the NEA Scout flight system is further constrained by the implementation of the solar sail; for the CubeSat's expected 2.5-year mission, the solar sail is the flight system's primary attitude pointing constraint in order to achieve the trajectory needed to reach its target NEA. Due to the unique configuration challenges of fitting an 86 m2 solar sail in the vehicle, NEA Scout's solar panels and medium gain antenna are fixed in a plane parallel to the sail. With the sail pointing constraint, the flight system cannot optimally orient the solar panels directly at the sun, subjecting them to a continuous cosine loss in generation. This may be the first deep space mission that has been designed to nominally not point at the sun — a challenge that traditional systems engineering and power models are not designed to handle optimally. To meet these challenges for NEA Scout and other similar mission concepts, JPL has created a novel flight system analysis model to rapidly simulate and iterate trajectories against spacecraft subsystem performance. Following mission design trajectory inputs, the model performs a Monte Carlo simulation of the flight system's performance. The outputs are distributions of the telecommunications downlink time (important for navigation and data sufficiency) and solar sail cruise angle (important for recharging the batteries before the next downlink). These distributions are processed and give key insight into the feasibility of the reference trajectory and likelihood of mission success.
Properties of synthetic epitaxial graphene/molybdenum disulfide lateral heterostructures

Abstract Graphene has been proposed as a high-quality contact to two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) for the development of “all 2D” devices. Here, we demonstrate the direct-growth of epitaxial graphene (EG) based lateral heterostructures where the EG acts as a directly grown contact to a molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) channel. Utilizing a “seed-free” process, the nucleation of MoS2 occurs at the lateral substrate/graphene interface, and subsequently grows outward from the edge of the graphene. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of the heterostructure provides the first direct observation that a pristine vertical overlap of MoS2 on graphene exists, instead of previously reported horizontal stitching, and demonstrates full preservation of the van der Waals gap in the overlap region. Electrolytic gating of the MoS2/EG heterostructures provides evidence that EG can significantly improve transport compared to the traditional metal/MoS2 junctions, reducing contact resistance by > 10x, while reducing the sheet resistance by ∼ 70%.
Exploration of BRAFV600E as a diagnostic adjuvant in the non-invasive follicular thyroid neoplasm with papillary-like nuclear features (NIFTP).

Summary The non-invasive follicular thyroid neoplasm with papillary-like nuclear features (NIFTP) and encapsulated follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma (EFVPTC) are distinguished from classical papillary thyroid carcinoma with predominantly follicular architecture (CPTCPFA) by distinct histomorphologic and molecular features. CPTCPFA frequently harbor the oncogenic variant BRAFV600E while NIFTP and EFVPTC are largely RAS driven. CPTCPFA have rare papillae and intranuclear pseudoinclusions that may distinguish them from NIFTP or EFVPTC. We evaluated for BRAFV600E mutation using mutation-specific BRAF (VE1) antibody immunohistochemistry (BRAFVE) as part of an immunomorphologic tumor panel, often including HBME1, for follicular-patterned lesions with nuclear atypia. An archival search identified cases of NIFTP, CPTCPFA, or EFVPTC between 2015–2017, and demographic data, tumor characteristics, molecular data, and metastases were documented. Our search yielded 275 tumors across categories, and 208 were tested with BRAFVE. Sixty-one NIFTP and 31 sub-centimeter NIFTP were tested, and none (0/92) were positive for BRAFVE. Nineteen CPTCPFA and 14 sub-centimeter CPTCPFA were tested with 18 of 33 (54.5%) BRAFVE positive. Sixty-one EFVPTC and 21 sub-centimeter EFVPTC were tested, with 12 of 81 (14.8%) positive. Mean follow-up time was 1.5 years. Six (4.6%) patients with concurrent classical papillary thyroid carcinoma had local lymph node metastases at time of NIFTP diagnosis, as did 15 of 111 (13.5%) EFVPTC. Six of 34 (14.7%) CPTCPFA had local nodal metastases with five being considered the primary lesion. One EFVPTC (0.9%), BRAFVE negative, metastasized to femur. The findings indicate that BRAFVE used in conjunction with routine sampling of follicular-patterned tumors is a useful diagnostic adjuvant.
Genetic Programming Based on Error Decomposition: A Big Data Approach

An investigation of the deviations of error and correlation for different stages of the multi-stage genetic programming (MSGP) algorithm in multivariate nonlinear problems is presented. The MSGP algorithm consists of two main stages: (1) incorporating the individual effect of the predictor variables, (2) incorporating the interactions among the predictor variables. The MSGP algorithm formulates these two terms in an efficient procedure to optimize the error among the predicted and the actual values. In addition to this, the proposed pipeline of the MSGP algorithm is implemented with a combination of parallel processing algorithms to run multiple jobs at the same time. To demonstrate the capabilities of the MSGP, its performance is compared with standard GP in modeling a regression problem. The results illustrate that the MSGP algorithm outperforms standard GP in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and computational cost.
Engineers, Social Scientists, and Nuclear Power

The PAGES collaboration (University of Tokyo and University of California, Berkeley) brought together nuclear engineers and social scientists to try out new ways of engaging engineering graduate students with societal issues around nuclear power. The program was built around seminars and summer schools. Because of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, it ended up culminating in a weeklong program for students in summer 2011 to examine the Fukushima Daiichi accident as a socio-technical catastrophe and an invitation to rethink nuclear engineers’ possible roles in a post-Fukushima world. This chapter reflects on the PAGES collaboration and the Fukushima Daiichi summer school from the perspective of one of the social scientists involved. It narrates the experience of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries at a moment of challenge and in a space where social science is not well anchored to start. Out of this narrative, the chapter aims to draw some potentially generalizable suggestions for social scientists who are trying to engage engineers and graduate students, given the constraints of time, attention, and trust.
The Impact of Chemo Brain on the Patient with a High-Grade Glioma

Health-related quality of life for patients with high-grade gliomas has always been poor. The multiple insults to the brain—tumor existence and surgical procedures, irradiation, the level of stress and anxiety suffered and the adjuvant medications— steroids and anti-convulsants, all combine to diminish their health-related quality of life. Prior to the development of chemotherapy agents capable of penetrating the blood brain barrier, prognosis was 6 to 18 months. Life expectancy was short and there was little time to address the health-related quality of life. The newer agents have served to extend life, but have added another condition to the existing poor health-related quality of life, i.e., chemo brain. Chemo brain affects all cognitive function. The patients have great difficulty processing information. They have reduced attentional and concentration capability and cannot learn new information. The overall impact on their lives renders them unemployable and places a great burden on their families and on society. This chapter provides an overview of the patient experience and the burden placed on their families and on society.
Fission-fragment energy deposition in argon

The gas-dynamic response of argon to fission-fragment energy deposition is simulated, for the first time explicitly including the coupling between the gas density, which is spatially and temporally varying, and the power density. In simulations of three experiments with different initial fill pressures of argon, good agreement was found between calculated and observed pressure rises, after the experimental pressure rise data from one case were used as a calibration. However, in each case, the calculated thermal energy deposition corresponding to the experimental pressure data was about half the fission-fragment kinetic energy release into the gas predicted by neutron and fission-fragment transport calculations. Also, the experimental pressure data exhibited a decay not seen in the simulations, which did not incorporate an energy-loss mechanism.
Congressional Power to Change Constitutional Law: Three Lacunae

One of the most basic principles of American constitutionalism is that Congress cannot statutorily overturn the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions. Although it can reverse statutory decisions, Congress is not able to supersede the Court's constitutional rules because it cannot change the source of law being interpreted - the Constitution - outside of the amendment process of Article V. Given the problems with judicial supremacy for many constitutional theorists, there has been a noticeable gap in the literature on the ways in which Congress can, in fact, successfully challenge the Court's reading of the Constitution. Few scholars provide any account of how other governmental institutions or even the constitutional culture at large can directly confront and overturn a given constitutional rule.This Article seeks to address this gap in the scholarship by highlighting three areas - three lacunae - where Congress has the ability to displace constitutional rules by statute. Congress has the power to overturn constitutional decisions in three specific areas within the federalism realm: state sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment, intergovernmental tax immunity for both state and federal governments, and the Dormant Commerce Clause. This Article will demonstrate that judicial decisions on these subjects create true constitutional rules and that the acceptance of Congress's power to overturn these decisions tells us something important about our Constitution and our federalism. The existence of these three anomalies suggests that adaptability and accommodation often take constitutional precedence over theoretical purity, especially when issues of federalism are involved.
Pesticide in the Mississippi River floodplain and its possible linkage to colon cancer risk in the US

Result of this study shows that elevated colorectal cancer risk in Mississippi River floodplain of the United States is likely linked to historically high pesticide application. Mississippi River b...
Binary phase plate for high-intensity non-diffracting hollow beam structure

We propose a new technique for the formation of non-diffracting hollow beam structures using the combination of an axicon lens and a binary multi-sector phase plate. The phase plate provides an azimuthal π-modulation of the phase of the transmitted wavefront. The produced intensity distribution is well described by a pair of optical vortices having opposite topological charges associated with the number of sectors in the phase plate. The proposed technique forms a spatial intensity pattern with a maximal intensity that is 2 times higher when compared with similar techniques, such as spiral phase plates.
Research methods to investigate significant life experiences: review and recommendations: Reprinted from Environmental Education Research (1998) 4(4), pp. 383–397

This article reviews different research approaches to understanding the significant experiences that influence people’s environmental concern and behaviour, with an emphasis on identifying the strengths and weaknesses of existing studies. It also reviews relevant findings regarding the validity of autobiographical memory, as memory is the medium which selects and interprets the significant events reported to researchers. The review notes promising new directions in recent studies, but makes several concrete suggestions regarding how researchers in this field can refine existing methods and broaden their approaches.
David Oliver: £25m for hospices won't go far.

Last month the prime minister pledged a one-off payment of £25m (€28m; $31m) to boost hospices and palliative care services.1 Boris Johnson’s words were warm and supportive, hinting at more money soon. But was this more than a gesture? Certainly, the pledge is there in a Number 10 press release,2 including some positive reaction from the health secretary and charity chief executives at Hospice UK and Thames Hospice. Within a day of Johnson’s announcement, however, the chair of NHS Clinical Commissioners told the Health Service Journal that the £25m would come from ringfencing existing NHS budgets, inevitably at the expense of other cash starved services.3 Not new money after all, then. Hospice UK recently conducted a survey on the current …
“I Just Want Them to See Me As…Me”: Identity, Community, and Disclosure Practices Among College Students on the Autism Spectrum

Background: The purpose of this project was to understand how college students on the autism spectrum integrate their diagnosis into their identity, whether they connect with a broader “autism comm...
Staging a realistic entity resolution challenge for students

This paper describes the experience of constructing and deploying a significant exercise in entity resolution as a way to more closely simulate the challenges often encountered in real-world data integration projects. Based on a consistent set of synthetically generated demographic data that have been separated and disrupted in a controlled manner, the datasets used in the exercise are large enough (several thousand records) to provide students with a significant challenge yet small enough to be managed within a semester course using tools that will run on a desktop platform. Because the starting state of the integrated data is known, student progress in re-integrating the data can be readily and objectively measured to give students feedback on their progress and also allowing them to assess the effectiveness of different strategies and approaches they might try. The details given here are based on the experience of conducting the ER challenge on three occasions in two different courses.
Predicting Outcome in Schizophrenia: Neuroimaging and Clinical Assessments

Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disorder accompanied by debilitating cognitive and psychosocial impairments over the course of the disease. As disease trajectories exhibit considerable inter-individual heterogeneity, early clinical and neurobiological predictors of long-term outcomes are desirable for personalized treatment and care strategies. Despite this obvious clinical need, studies examining predictors of long-term outcome in schizophrenia are still scarce, as they meet several obstacles, especially the need to acquire, maintain, and repeatedly assess large cohorts of patients over a longer course of time.
HCAPP: Scalable Power Control for Heterogeneous 2.5D Integrated Systems

Package pin allocation is becoming a key bottleneck in the capabilities of designs due to the increased bandwidth requirements. 2.5D integration compounds these package-level requirements while introducing an increased number of compute units within the package. We propose a decentralized power control implementation called Heterogeneous Constant Average Power Processing (HCAPP) to maintain the power limit while maximizing the efficiency of the package pins allocated for power. HCAPP uses a hardware-based decentralized design to handle fast power limits, maintain scalability and enable simplified control for heterogeneous systems while maximizing performance. As extensions, we evaluate a software interface and the impact of different accelerator designs. Overall, HCAPP achieves 7% speedup over a RAPL-like implementation. The power utilization improves from 79.7% (RAPL-like) to 93.9% (HCAPP) with this design. A priority-based static software control methodology alongside HCAPP provides average speedups of 8.3% (CPU), 5.4% (GPU), and 12% (Accelerator) for the prioritized component compared to the unprioritized version.
SEM-Drude Model for the Accurate and Efficient Simulation of MgCl2-KCl Mixtures in the Condensed Phase.

There is a long history of models that to different extents reproduce structural and dynamical properties of high-temperature molten salts. Whereas rigid ion models can work fairly well for some of...
How the mitochondrial calcium uniporter complex (MCUcx) works

Cytosolic calcium enters the mitochondrial matrix through the mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU) where it acts as a signal that regulates ATP production (1), metabolic fuel selection (1⇓–3), and if excessively high, triggers cell death (4). The complete complex of the MCU subunits is now referred to as the mitochondrial calcium uniporter holocomplex (MCUcx) (5). In PNAS, Vais et al. (6) focus on how the levels of Ca2+ inside the mitochondrial matrix ([Ca2+]m) can regulate the MCUcx itself. Here, the MCUcx was investigated by patch clamping a vesicular preparation made from the inner mitochondrial membrane (IMM) of a single mitochondrion, called a “mitoplast” (Fig. 1 A ). This approach was pioneered 17 y ago by Yuriy Kirichok, Grigory Krapivinsky, and David Clapham (7) and was a huge step toward our understanding of how mitochondria work. By patch clamping single mitoplasts from COS-7 cells or a region of the mitoplast membrane, they identified a femto-Siemens (fS) single-channel conductance under physiological conditions. It was highly selective for Ca2+ and had an open probability (Po) that was steeply voltage dependent. They suggested that this channel was a good candidate for the MCUcx (Fig. 1 B ). Two independent groups (8, 9) then showed that a molecular component of MCUcx was the likely pore-forming subunit, here called MCUpore but also frequently called “the MCU.” Elucidation of MCUcx structure and function also included the identification of key auxiliary subunits including MICU1-3 (mitochondrial calcium uptake 1-3) and EMRE (essential MCU regulator) (10, 11). Hugely important to our broad understanding of MCUcx was the follow-up work by the Kirichok laboratory. They suggested that there were critical differences in the multisubunit MCUcx in different tissues (12). For example, mitoplasts from different tissues had … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: jlederer{at}som.umaryland.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1
A method for measuring the effect of certified electronic health record technology on childhood immunization status scores among Medicaid managed care network providers.

Abstract Objective To provide a methodology for estimating the effect of U.S.-based Certified Electronic Health Records Technology (CEHRT) implemented by primary care physicians (PCPs) on a Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measure for childhood immunization delivery. Materials and methods This study integrates multiple health care administrative data sources from 2010 through 2014, analyzed through an interrupted time series design and a hierarchical Bayesian model. We compared managed care physicians using CEHRT to propensity-score matched comparisons from network physicians who did not adopt CEHRT. Inclusion criteria for physicians using CEHRT included attesting to the Childhood Immunization Status clinical quality measure in addition to meeting “Meaningful Use” (MU) during calendar year 2013. We used a first-presence patient attribution approach to develop provider-specific immunization scores. Results We evaluated 147 providers using CEHRT, with 147 propensity-score matched providers selected from a pool of 1253 PCPs practicing in Maryland. The estimate for change in odds of increasing immunization rates due to CEHRT was 1.2 (95% credible set, 0.88–1.73). Discussion We created a method for estimating immunization quality scores using Bayesian modeling. Our approach required linking separate administrative data sets, constructing a propensity-score matched cohort, and using first-presence, claims-based childhood visit information for patient attribution. In the absence of integrated data sets and precise and accurate patient attribution, this is a reusable method for researchers and health system administrators to estimate the impact of health information technology on individual, provider-level, process-based, though outcomes-focused, quality measures. Conclusion This research has provided evidence for using Bayesian analysis of propensity-score matched provider populations to estimate the impact of CEHRT on outcomes-based quality measures such as childhood immunization delivery.
In vitro characterization of hierarchical 3D scaffolds produced by combining additive manufacturing and thermally induced phase separation.

This paper reports on the hybrid process we have used for producing hierarchical scaffolds made of poly(lactic-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) and nanohydroxyapatite (nHA), analyzes their internal structu...
MAP Super-shedders:

Traditionally, fecal cultures were either positive or negative for growth of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis (MAP). Nearly all culture-positive cattle were judged to be infected, shedding MAP, thus a threat to spread the disease to susceptible cattle and were culled from the herd as quickly as possible. Over time it was recognized that differences in MAP shedding existed among culture-positive cattle. Cattle were classified as low, moderate or high shedders based on the visible colonies of MAP on the surface of solid media, typically Herrold's egg yolk media (HEYM). Rarely did authors provide the estimated MAP colony forming units (cfu) per gram of manure. Additionally, culture methods were not standardized among diagnostic laboratories in the US, which made it difficult to compare results from one laboratory to another. Laboratories rarely used internal quality control fecal samples. As the infection and disease progressed, the intensity of fecal shedding of MAP increased, culminating in clinical disease which was associated with the greatest numbers of MAP present in manure. Since cattle with clinical signs lose weight and have decreased milk production causing them to be unprofitable, they are soon culled from the herd. If not culled from the herd, they would continue to lose weight and become emaciated with muscle weakness, leading to recumbency requiring euthanasia. The fewest colonies reported is one colony on one of four tubes ofHEYM, which translates into approximately six cfu/gram of feces, assuming the original sample was two grams; 5 ml was transferred from the fecal water tube to the second decontamination tube with HPC. That centrifugation technique was used and the pellet was re-suspended in 1 ml of antibiotic brew, with 200 ul of the re-suspended pellet inoculated onto each of four tubes of HEYM, all with mycobactin J. Low shedders typically had less than 10 colonies on the four tubes ofHEYM. Moderate shedders ranged from 11 to approximately 70 colonies of MAP, while high shedders had more than 70 colonies on any of the four tubes. Calculated on MAP cfu per gram of feces this would be up to 60 cfu for low shedders, 61 to 300 cfu per gram for moderate shedders and more than 300 cfu per gram for heavy shedders. Over the past five years most laboratories in the US report the number of visible MAP colonies on each tube of HEYM, but rarely enumerate above 50 to 70 colonies per tube. Accounting for sample preparation, 50 colonies on each of four tubes represents an estimated 1,050 colony forming units of MAP per gram of manure. The objective of this study was to determine the range of MAP cfu/gram of manure in cattle classified as heavy shedders.
Effects of Rearing Practices that Restrict Antimicrobial Exposure in Feedlot Cattle on Antimicrobial Resistance in Enteric Bacteria

The primary objective of this research was to evaluate differences in antimicrobial resistance among enteric bacteria recovered from feedlot cattle being raised without exposure to antimicrobial drugs (AMDs) and those reared using conventional practices. Forty-seven pens of feedlot cattle (6,347 total animals) produced with restricted antimicrobial drug exposure were purposefully selected for enrollment as were 48 pens of cattle (5,273 total animals) contemporaneously being fed for production of conventional beef products. Fecal samples were collected from the floors of pens throughout the feeding period and cultured to recover non-type-specific Escherichia coli (NTSEC) and Salmonella enterica. Isolates were evaluated for susceptibility to a panel of AMDs. Resistance among NTSEC isolates was most common to tetracycline, streptomycin and sulfamethoxazole, and slightly higher rates of resistance among NTSEC isolates were recovered from conventionally reared cattle. Recorded therapeuticAMD exposures had no detectable impact on the prevalence of resistance among NTSEC. While there were detectable temporal trends among NTSEC for resistance to tetracycline, naladixic acid, chloramphenicol and cephalothin, the direction of trends differed among drugs and were not associated with different rearing practices. Salmonella enterica was recovered rarely (0.73%), but at similar rates in cattle in both management groups. These findings suggest that conventional feedlot production methods (including parenteral and in-feed use of AMDs) do not predictably or uniformly increase the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance among fecal NTSEC when compared to rearing methods used to produce branded "natural" beef products (i.e., beef products with a label certification that source cattle were not exposed to antimicrobial drugs).
Finding Balance and Harmony: Modernity, Food, and the Partaking of the Holy Communion by Converts from Chinese Religious Traditions in Singapore

As Christianity arrived on the shores of Singapore closely following British colonization, Western missionaries introduced their interpretation of the Holy Communion into a foreign land and space that was experiencing its first brushes with Western modernity. Contemporaneously, the movement of modernity continues to make an impact upon an important element of life closely intertwined with religious folk practices and culture of locals: food. In the face of modernizing foodscapes and primordial religious backgrounds, converts from Chinese religious traditions to Christianity find themselves navigating the dissonance of Western Holy Communion theologies with the Chinese philosophies of food. How might churches in Singapore begin to respond to the tensions arising when these two philosophical systems meet, and when Christians and churches seem to appropriate “syncretistic” theologies into their liturgical behavior? This article undertakes an interdisciplinary effort by employing social science to explore the modernizing of food in Singapore, as well as engaging Chinese philosophies of food and the body to explain tensions among converts from Chinese religious traditions, and the resistance of local churches towards Chinese understandings of food rituals in the partaking of the Holy Communion. It will also briefly propose that interdisciplinary studies, including liturgical studies, will be essential in developing a more robust theology of the Holy Communion among churches, thereby enhancing its witness within and without.
Abstract MP24: Selective Activation Of DMV Neurons Improves Renal Injury In Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

The cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway is a vagally-mediated mechanism that controls inflammation. Our published data suggest that an impaired cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway contributes t...
Relationships between macroinvertebrates and detritus in freshwater wetlands

AbstractFreshwater wetlands can produce a large volume of detritus annually, including hydrophyte litter in herbaceous habitats and tree-leaf litter and dead wood in forested habitats. It has been ...
Spd-2 Gene Duplication Suggests Cell-Type Specific Assembly Mechanisms of Pericentriolar Material

Centrosomes are multi-protein complexes that function as the major microtubule organizing center (MTOC) for the cell. While centrosomes play tissue-specific MTOC functions, little is known about how particular centrosome proteins are regulated across cell types to achieve these different functions. To investigate this cell type-specific diversity, we searched for gene duplications of centrosome genes in the Drosophila lineage with the aim of identifying centrosome gene duplications where each copy evolved for specialized functions. Through in depth functional analysis of a Spd-2 gene duplication in the Willistoni group, we discovered differences in the regulation of PCM in somatic and male germline cells. The parental gene, Spd-2A, is expressed in somatic cells, where it can function to organize pericentriolar material (PCM) and the mitotic spindle in larval brain neuroblasts. Spd-2A is absent during male meiosis, and even when ectopically expressed in spermatocytes it fails to rescue PCM and spindle organization. In contrast, the new gene duplicate, Spd-2B, is expressed specifically in spermatocytes. During male meiosis, Spd-2B localizes to centrosomes, organizes PCM and spindles, and is sufficient for proper male fertility. Experiments using chimeric transgenes reveal that differences in the C-terminal tails of Spd-2A and Spd-2B are responsible for these functional changes. Thus, Spd-2A and Spd-2B have evolved complementary functions by specializing for distinct subsets of cells. Together, our results demonstrate that somatic cells and male germline cells have fundamentally different requirements for PCM, suggesting that PCM proteins such as Spd-2 is differentially regulated across cell types to satisfy distinct requirements.
De-identification of Address, Date, and Alphanumeric Identifiers in Narrative Clinical Reports

Introduction The Privacy Rule of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requires that clinical documents be stripped of personally identifying information before they can be released to researchers and others. We have been developing a software application, NLM Scrubber, to de-identify narrative clinical reports. Methods We compared NLM Scrubber with MIT's and MITRE's de-identification systems on 3,093 clinical reports about 1,636 patients. The performance of each system was analyzed on address, date, and alphanumeric identifier recognition separately. Their overall performance on de-identification and on conservation of the remaining clinical text was analyzed as well. Results NLM Scrubber's sensitivity on de-identifying these identifiers was 99%. It's specificity on conserving the text with no personal identifiers was 99% as well. Conclusion The current version of the system recognizes and redacts patient names, alphanumeric identifiers, addresses and dates. We plan to make the system available prior to the AMIA Annual Symposium in 2014.
Design optimization of the of an automotive thermoacoustic air conditioning system

A comprehensive algorithm has been developed to design and optimize heat-driven thermoacoustic refrigeration (HDTAR)systems. This algorithm is applied to design and optimize a HDTAR capable of providing 30 w of cooling power at 2°C. The computer code DeltaE is used to simulate the device. The HDTAR has the total length of 1.25 m and the cross sectional area of 0.012m 2 . The results indicate that since HDTAR devices utilize the available waste heat from the automotive engine to cool down the automotive interior, even at relatively low efficiency these devices could still reduce the amount of fuel used in the conventional automotive air conditioning systems.
The efficacy and safety of DPP4 inhibitors compared to sulfonylureas as add-on therapy to metformin in patients with Type 2 diabetes: A systematic review and meta-analysis

There is no consensus on the selection of specific drug therapies when metformin fails in Type 2 diabetes (T2D). This meta-analysis was performed to determine the efficacy and safety of Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors (DPP4-I) compared to sulfonylurea (SU) as add-on therapy to metformin in inadequately controlled T2D patients. We searched MEDLINE, CENTRAL, EMBASE, and CINAHL for randomized trials comparing DPP4-I to SU as add-on therapy to metformin and reported a change in hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). Sixteen articles were included. There was a significantly greater reduction in HbA1c from baseline to 12 weeks with SU versus DPP4-I (MD[95% CI]=0.21%(2 mmol/mol) [0.06, 0.35]) but no significant difference at 52 and 104 weeks (MD[95% CI]=0.06%(-1 mmol/mol) [-0.03, 0.15] and 0.02%(-1 mmol/mol) [-0.13,0.18] respectively). SU was associated with weight gain and DPP4-I with weight loss at all time-points. The incidence of hypoglycemia at 12, 52, and 104 weeks was significantly greater with SU (20%, 24%, and 27% respectively) compared to DPP4-I (6%, 3%, and 4% respectively). The proportion of patients with HbA1c<7%(53 mmol/mol) without hypoglycemia was significantly higher at 52 and 104 weeks among patients on DPP4-I (RR[95% CI]=1.20 [1.05, 1.37] and 1.53 [1.16, 2.02] respectively). There was no significant difference between the two groups in the incidence of other side effects. While both SU and DPP4-I can be considered as options for add-on therapy to metformin in inadequately controlled T2D, SU results in a significantly increased risk of hypoglycemia and weight gain. By contrast, DPP4-I produce 0.4-0.6% (4-7 mmol/mol) reduction in HbA1c, lower risk of hypoglycemia, and weight loss.
Balancing stocks and backlogs with stochastic lead times: A special case

Abstract The paper gives compact, finite horizon and asymptotic results concerning an inventory system, that allows backlogging, with constant demand and costs but stochastic lead times, not necessarily i.i.d., under two special conditions. The special conditions are: (1) no crossovers of orders; (2) there are both shortage and stock build-up between any two consecutive orders. It is shown that the minimal total expected cost, namely, of holding inventory, shortages and replenishments, as well as the optimal replenishment times depend, among other parameters, only on the lead time variances as representatives of the stochastic component of the model. The results are direct extensions of the deterministic EOQ model and lend themselves to tractable sensitivity analysis. Further possible developments are discussed.
Peritoneoscopy: With special reference to widening its applications

Abstract Eighty peritoneoscopies upon seventyfive patients with a variety of conditions are summarized. The following applications of the peritoneoscope, either new or little exploited, are presented: (1) Differential diagnosis of jaundice; (2) differentiating between bleeding peptic ulcer and ruptured esophageal varix; (3) differentiating appendicitis from salpingitis, (4) deciding whether or not gunshot and stab wounds of the abdomen are penetrating, and (5) rupture of follicular cysts of the ovary in women with uterine bleebing and in whome other measures short of surgery have failed.
Experiential Learning-Based vs. Lecture-Based Discussion: The Impact of Degree of Participation and Student Characteristics on Comprehension and Retention.

(1985). Experiential Learning-Based vs. Lecture-Based Discussion: The Impact of Degree of Participation and Student Characteristics on Comprehension and Retention. The Journal of Business Education: Vol. 60, No. 7, pp. 283-287.
Coulomb Gauge in Electromagnetics, The

High-frequency electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering problems where the fields are expressed in terms of potentials have been solved almost exclusively with the Lorentz gauge. However, in this article it is shown that any wave guidance or scattering problem that can be analyzed with the Lorentz gauge can as well be found subject to the Coulomb gauge. The Coulomb gauge displays some unique mathematical features that provide insight into the meaning and structure of potentials. The solution method presented here is sometimes referred to as the “hybrid method of moments (MM) Green's function method.” An important consequence of this method is that the Green functions are in their most general dyadic form. A dyadic Green's function formulation provides a compact procedure for handling general three-dimensional boundary value problems that is uniquely suited to the Coulomb gauge. An interesting aspect of the Coulomb gauge is that is naturally divides the field into static and time-harmonic components. Comparison between the Lorentz and Coulomb gauges is displayed through the surface current distribution obtained with each of these two gauges for cases where a plane wave illuminates a finite-length straight wire and a cylinder tipped wedge. Depending on the problem configuration, the numerical solution to problems posed in the Coulomb gauge can have some computational advantage over a Lorentz gauge formulation. Keywords: Coulomb gauge; potentials; scattering; diffraction
Pathogenicity of Enterococci

Enterococci are unusually well adapted for survival and persistence in a variety of adverse environments, including on inanimate surfaces in the hospital environment and at sites of infection. This intrinsic ruggedness undoubtedly played a role in providing opportunities for enterococci to interact with other overtly drug-resistant microbes and acquire additional resistances on mobile elements. The rapid rise of antimicrobial resistance among hospital-adapted enterococci has rendered hospital-acquired infections a leading therapeutic challenge. With about a quarter of a genome of additional DNA conveyed by mobile elements, there are undoubtedly many more properties that have been acquired that help enterococci persist and spread in the hospital setting and cause diseases that have yet to be defined. Much remains to be learned about these ancient and rugged microbes, particularly in the area of pathogenic mechanisms involved with human diseases.