cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Breathing easier? The known impacts of biodiesel on air quality.

Substantial scientific evidence exists on the negative health effects of exposure to petroleum diesel exhaust. Many view biodiesel as a ‘green’, more environmentally friendly alternative fuel, especially with respect to measured reductions of particulate matter in tailpipe emissions. Tailpipe emissions data sets from heavy-duty diesel engines comparing diesel and biodiesel fuels provide important information regarding the composition and potential aggregate contribution of particulate matter and other pollutants to regional airsheds. However, exposure – defined in this instance as human contact with tailpipe emissions – is another key link in the chain between emissions and human health effects. Although numerous biodiesel emissions studies exist, biodiesel exposure studies are nearly absent from the literature. This article summarizes the known impacts of biodiesel on air quality and health effects, comparing emissions and exposure research. In light of rapidly changing engine, fuel and exhaust technolog...
State-space search for improved autonomous UAVs assignment algorithm

This paper describes an algorithm that generates vehicle task assignments for autonomous uninhabited air vehicles in cooperative missions. The algorithm uses a state-space best-first search of a tree that incorporates all of the constraints of the assignment problem. Using this algorithm a feasible solution is generated immediately, that monotonically improves and eventually converges to the optimal solution. Using Monte Carlo simulations the performance of the search algorithm is analyzed and compared to the desirable assignment algorithm attributes. It is shown that the proposed deterministic search method can be implemented for given run times, providing good feasible solutions.
Strategies to prevent HIV transmission among heterosexual African-American women.

African-American women are disproportionately affected by HIV, accounting for 60% of all cases among women in the United States. Although their race is not a precursor for HIV, the socioeconomic and cultural disparities associated with being African American may increase their risk of infection. Prior research has shown that interventions designed to reduce HIV infection among African-American women must address the life demands and social problems they encounter. The present study used a qualitative exploratory design to elicit information about strategies to prevent HIV transmission among young, low-income African-American women. Twenty five low income African American women, ages 18–29, participated in five focus groups of five women each conducted at a housing project in Houston, Texas, a large demographically diverse metropolitan area that is regarded as one of the HIV/AIDS epicenters in the United States. Each group was audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed using theme and domain analysis. The participants revealed that they had most frequently placed themselves at risk for HIV infection through drugs and drinking and they also reported drug and alcohol use as important barriers to practicing safer sex. The women also reported that the need for money and having sex for money to buy food or drugs had placed them at risk for HIV transmission. About one-third of the participants stated that a barrier to their practicing safe sex was their belief that there was no risk based on their being in a monogamous relationship and feeling no need to use protection, but later learning that their mate was unfaithful. Other reasons given were lack of concern, being unprepared, partner's refusal to use a condom, and lack of money to buy condoms. Finally, the women stated that they were motivated to practice safe sex because of fear of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, desire not to become pregnant, and personal experience with someone who had contracted HIV. This study offers a foundation for further research that may be used to create culturally relevant HIV prevention programs for African-American women.
Power quality issues in a hybrid power system

We analyzed a power system network, which consisted of two types of power generation: wind turbine generation and diesel generation. The power quality and the interaction of diesel generation, the wind turbine, and the local load were the subjects of investigation. From an energy-production point of view, it is desirable to have as much wind energy production as possible in order to save fuel consumption of the diesel engines and to reduce the level of pollution. From the customer point of view, it is desirable to have good power quality at the receiving end. The purpose of this paper is to show the impact of wind power plant in the entire system. Also, we discuss how the startup of the wind turbine and the transient condition during load changes affects the voltage and frequency in the system.
Longitudinal impact of physical activity on lipid profiles in middle-aged adults: the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study.

Evidence exists that increased levels of physical activity decrease the population burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Although risk factors for CVD, including plasma lipids and lipoproteins, have been associated with physical activity, studies including a sizeable number of minority participants are lacking. Our purpose was to interrogate the longitudinal effect of physical activity on plasma lipids and lipoproteins in the African American and white participants of the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. Nine years of follow-up data on 8,764 individuals aged 45–64 years at baseline were used in linear mixed-effects models to estimate the association between increases in baseline physical activity on mean change in HDL, LDL, total cholesterol, and triglyceride levels. Increases in the level of activity were associated with increases in HDL in all strata and decreases in triglycerides among white participants. Physical activity was associated with LDL in all women, while the association with total cholesterol was limited to African American women. This study is one of the few to investigate the effect of physical activity on lipids and lipoproteins in a race- and sex-specific manner. Overall our results highlight the importance of physical activity on plasma lipid profiles and provide evidence for novel differential associations.
China's Eco-Cities as Variegated1 Urban Sustainability: Dongtan Eco-City and Chongming Eco-Island

Proliferating environmental sustainability policy frameworks suggest that sustainability and economic competitiveness are essentially interdependent and mutually enhancing. Under these policy discourses, cities are designated as strategic geographical locales for fulfilling the green capitalist goal of reconciling the contradictions between the environment and development that have long bedeviled capitalism. While most urban sustainability agendas are crafted based on the experience of post-industrial countries, the promise of green capitalism and sustainability faces different challenges where industrial production still dominates the economy. However, research on whether and how urban sustainability policies are geographically variegated is still sparse, particularly beyond western (post)industrial capitalism. Examining the Dongtan eco-city project and the associated Chongming eco-island project in Shanghai, we interrogate how sustainability is imagined and practiced on the ground within the distinctive...
Deriving the Dividend Discount Model in the Intermediate Microeconomics Class

In this article, the authors show that the dividend discount model can be derived using the basic intertemporal consumption model that is introduced in a typical intermediate microeconomics course. This result will be of use to instructors who teach microeconomics to finance students in that it demonstrates the value of utility maximization in obtaining one of the first stock valuation models used in basic finance.
Interconnect-aware high-level synthesis for low power

Interconnects (wires, buffers, clock distribution networks, multiplexers and buses) consume a significant fraction of total circuit power. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of optimizing on-chip interconnects for power during high-level synthesis. We present a methodology to integrate interconnect power optimization into high-level synthesis. Our binding algorithm not only reduces power consumption in functional units and registers in the resultant register-transfer level (RTL) architecture, but also optimizes interconnects for power. We take physical design information into account for this purpose. To estimate interconnect power consumption accurately for deep sub-micron (DSM) technologies, wire coupling capacitance is taken into. consideration. We observed that there is significant spurious (i.e., unnecessary) switching activity in the interconnects and propose techniques to reduce it. Compared to interconnect-unaware power-optimized circuits, our experimental results show that interconnect power can be reduced by 53.1% on an average, while reducing overall power by an average of 26.8% with 0.5% area overhead. Compared to area-optimized circuits, the interconnect power reduction is 72.9% and overall power reduction is 56.0% with 44.4% area overhead.
The winged-helix transcription factor FoxD3 is important for establishing the neural crest lineage and repressing melanogenesis in avian embryos

The winged-helix or forkhead class of transcription factors has been shown to play important roles in cell specification and lineage segregation. We have cloned the chicken homolog of FoxD3, a member of the winged-helix class of transcription factors, and analyzed its expression. Based on its expression in the dorsal neural tube and in all neural crest lineages except the late-emigrating melanoblasts, we predicted that FoxD3 might be important in the segregation of the neural crest lineage from the neural epithelium, and for repressing melanogenesis in early-migrating neural crest cells. Misexpression of FoxD3 by electroporation in the lateral neural epithelium early in neural crest development produced an expansion of HNK1 immunoreactivity throughout the neural epithelium, although these cells did not undergo an epithelial/mesenchymal transformation. To test whether FoxD3 represses melanogenesis in early migrating neural crest cells, we knocked down expression in cultured neural crest with antisense oligonucleotides and in vivo by treatment with morpholino antisense oligonucleotides. Both experimental approaches resulted in an expansion of the melanoblast lineage, probably at the expense of neuronal and glial lineages. Conversely, persistent expression of FoxD3 in late-migrating neural crest cells using RCAS viruses resulted in the failure of melanoblasts to develop. We suggest that FoxD3 plays two important roles in neural crest development. First, it is involved in the segregation of the neural crest lineage from the neuroepithelium. Second, it represses melanogenesis, thereby allowing other neural crest derivatives to differentiate during the early stages of neural crest patterning.
Combined frequency and amplitude modulation for the STARNET WDM computer communication network

STARNET is an experimental wavelength-division multiplexed computer communication network that makes use of combined modulation of a single transmitter laser to implement a virtual-ring control sub-network and a reconfigurable high-speed sub-network over a passive star architecture. In this letter, we demonstrate a new technique of combined modulation that works by direct frequency-shift keyed (FSK) modulation and external amplitude-shift keyed (ASK) modulation of a semiconductor laser. By adjusting the amplitude modulation depth to 0.8, both the 125 Mb/s ASK receiver and the 1.244 Gb/s FSK receiver operate with equal bit-error ratios less than 10/sup -9/ for a received signal power of -24 dBm. >
Power Supply Noise: A Survey on Effects and Research

As technology scales to 32 nm and functional frequency and density continue to rise, PSN effects, which can reduce a circuit's noise immunity and could lead to failures, pose new challenges to chip manufacturers and foundries. This article provides an overview of low-power and delay testing, and surveys ongoing research for analyzing and dealing with PSN effects during delay test and timing analysis.
In Search of Value: An International Comparison of Cost, Access, and Outcomes

The United States spent the most resources on health care of all the twenty-nine industrialized countries in 1996 by a wide margin. Managed care and other recent initiatives have been credited with slowing the rate of increase in the U.S. health care spending in recent years. Although the rate of increase slowed, it was still more rapid than the rate in most other industrialized countries between 1990 and 1996. Among the twenty-nine industrialized countries, the United states had the lowest percentage of its population eligible for publicly mandated insurance in 1995. Since 1960 Greece, Korea, and Mexico have surpassed the United States on this measure. AMong the twenty-nine industrialized countries, only the United States had less than half of its population eligible for publicly mandated health insurance in 1995. The United States appears to be comparable to the other G7 countries in terms of access to physicians, in-patient hospital services, and pharmaceuticals. However, on outcomes indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality, the United States is frequently in the bottom quartile among the twenty-nine industrialized countries, and its relative ranking has been declining since 1960.
Populations of X-Ray Sources in Galaxies

Today’s sensitive X-ray observations allow the study of populations of X-ray binaries in galaxies as distant as 20–30 Mpc. Photometric diagrams and luminosity functions applied to these populations provide a direct probe of the evolved binary component of different stellar populations. The study of the X-ray populations of E and S0 galaxies has revamped the debate on the formation and evolution of low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) and on the role of globular clusters in these processes. Though overall stellar mass drives the amount of X-ray binaries in old stellar populations, the amount of sources in star-forming galaxies is related to the star-formation rate. Short-lived, luminous, high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) dominate these young X-ray populations. The most luminous sources in these systems are the debated ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs). Observations of the deep X-ray sky, and comparison with deep optical surveys, are providing the first evidence of the X-ray evolution of galaxies.
Early and Late Results of Repair of Partial Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Connection to the Superior Vena Cava with a Pericardial Baffle

The early and late results of repair of partial anomalous pulmonary venous connection to the superior vena cava with a simple pericardial baffle without enlargement of the superior vena cava were examined. Fifteen consecutive patients received operations between 1973 and 1983, and all survived. They have been followed for a mean of 6 years and a minimum of 2 years. Nodal rhythm and atrial dysrhythmias were present in 6 patients (40%) early after operation. However, every patient resumed normal sinus rhythm prior to hospital discharge except 1 adult who remained in the preoperative rhythm of atrial flutter-fibrillation. No patient has clinical evidence of a residual atrial level shunt or superior vena cava obstruction. All have received an excellent clinical result, and none, except the patient in chronic atrial fibrillation, require cardiac medication. These results are comparable or superior to those obtained with more intricate procedures that use either complex atrial flaps or translocation of the superior vena cava to the atrial appendage.
Big data and the future of ecology

The need for sound ecological science has escalated alongside the rise of the information age and “big data” across all sectors of society. Big data generally refer to massive volumes of data not readily handled by the usual data tools and practices and present unprecedented opportunities for advancing science and inform- ing resource management through data-intensive approaches. The era of big data need not be propelled only by “big science” – the term used to describe large-scale efforts that have had mixed success in the individual-driven culture of ecology. Collectively, ecologists already have big data to bolster the scientific effort – a large volume of distributed, high-value information – but many simply fail to contribute. We encourage ecologists to join the larger scientific community in global initiatives to address major scientific and societal problems by bringing their distributed data to the table and harnessing its collective power. The scientists who contribute such information will be at the forefront of socially relevant science – but will they be ecologists?
Distribution of GABA-like immunoreactive neurons and fibers in the central visual nuclei and retina of frog, Rana pipiens

Immunocytochemistry was used to study the distribution of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) throughout the central visual nuclei and retina in Rana pipiens. In the retina, GABA immunoreactivity (both somata and fibers) was observed in all layers except the outer nuclear layer (ONL). Contrary to earlier reports, about 30% of total neurons within ganglion cell layer (GCL) expressed GABA immunoreactivity. Double-labeling studies indicated that about half of the GABA-containing perikarya in the GCL were retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). In the diencephalon, intensely labeled GABA-immunoreactive neurons and nerve fibers were observed within the neuropil of Bellonci (nB) and corpus geniculatum (CG), while only immunoreactive puncta were found in the rostral visual nucleus (RVN). In the pretectal region, the posterior thalamic nucleus (nPT) contained the most intensely labeled GABA immunoreactive perikarya and nerve fibers in the entire brain. Lightly immunoreactive perikarya were also found in the large-celled nucleus lentiformis mesencephali (nLM), as well as in the pretectal gray, which contains neurons postsynaptic to the retinal terminal zones within nLM. In the optic tectum (OT), both immunoreactive perikarya and fibers were found within superficial layers 8 and 9, whereas only densely packed immunoreactive perikarya were evident in the deep tectal layers (i.e. 2, 4, 6). The nucleus of the basal optic root (nBOR) contained a small number of lightly labeled GABA-immunoreactive perikarya, mostly located in the dorsal half of the nucleus. A large number of perikarya within the nucleus isthmi (NI) were also immunostained.
Non-Archimedian Geometry and Applications to Particle Theory

To begin, I shall give a very elementary introduction to p-adic numbers. I apologize to the cognoscenti but experience suggests that if I start talking about details of p-adic strings all but a small minority of the audience will be unable to follow.
Local Operators and Measures for Heterogeneous Face Recognition

This chapter provides a summary of local operators recently proposed for heterogeneous face recognition . It also analyzes performance of each individual operator and demonstrates performance of composite operators. Basic local operators include local binary patterns (LBP), generalized local binary patterns (GLBPs), Weber local descriptors (WLDs), Gabor filters, and histograms of oriented gradients (HOGs). They are directly applied to normalized face images. The composite operators include Gabor filters followed by LBP, Gabor filters followed by WLD, Gabor filters followed by GLBP, Gabor filters followed by LBP, GLBP and WLD, Gabor ordinal measures (GOM), and composite multi-lobe descriptors (CMLD). When applying a composite operator to face images, images are first normalized and processed with a bank of Gabor filters and then local operators or combinations of local operators are applied to the outputs of Gabor filters. After a face image is encoded using the local operators, the outputs of local operators are converted to a histogram representation and then concatenated, resulting in a very long feature vector. No effective dimensionality reduction method or feature selection method has been found to reduce the size of the feature vector. Each component in the feature vector appears to contribute a small amount of information needed to generate a high fidelity matching score. A matching score is generated by means of Kullback-Leibler distance between two feature vectors. The cross-matching performance of heterogeneous face images is demonstrated on two datasets composed of active infrared and visible light face images. Both short and long standoff distances are considered.
Pediatric Sedation Management

1. Sean Barnes, MD, MBA* 2. Myron Yaster, MD† 3. Sapna R. Kudchadkar, MD‡ 1. *Department of Anesthesiology & Critical Care Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center, Baltimore, MD. 2. †Departments of Anesthesiology & Critical Care Medicine, Pediatrics, and Neurosurgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center, Baltimore, MD. 3. ‡Departments of Anesthesiology & Critical Care Medicine and Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center, Baltimore, MD. The differences between deep sedation and general anesthesia in the practice of pediatric procedural sedation are often underemphasized and must be a key part of clinician education to optimize patient selection and safety. After completing this article, the reader should be able to: 1. Define the various levels of procedural sedation. 2. Know how to prepare for adverse events associated with procedural sedation. 3. Identify special patient populations that pose challenges to performing safe procedural sedation. 4. Understand basics of pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) sedation assessment and management. 5. Know common pharmacologic agents used for sedation in the PICU and best practices for weaning of sedative medications. Historically, children have been undertreated for pain and painful procedures. Many practitioners believed that children neither remembered nor experienced pain to the same degree that adults did. Fortunately, the past 25 years has seen an explosion in research and interest in pediatric pain and sedation management. Indeed, the provision of sedation and analgesia for children undergoing procedures and mechanical ventilation is now routine and the standard of care. Due to a wide spectrum of ages and developmental levels, sedation of infants and children is associated with unique challenges for even the most seasoned practitioner. Therefore, understanding the optimal level of sedation for each child’s circumstance and …
Impact of Personality on Cognitive Aging: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the association between personality factors and age-related longitudinal cognitive performance, and explore interactions of stress-proneness with apolipoprotein E (APOE) ɛ4, a prevalent risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods: A total of 510 neuropsychiatrically healthy residents of Maricopa County recruited through media ads (mean age 57.6±10.6 years; 70% women; mean education 15.8±2.4 years; 213 APOE ɛ4 carriers) had neuropsychological testing every 2 years (mean duration follow-up 9.1±4.4 years), and the complete Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Personality Inventory-Revised. Several tests were administered within each of the following cognitive domains: memory, executive skills, language, visuospatial skills, and general cognition. Primary effects on cognitive trajectories and APOE ɛ4 interactions were ascertained with quadratic models. Results: With personality factors treated as continuous variables, Neuroticism was associated with greater decline, and Conscientiousness associated with reduced decline consistently across tests in memory and executive domains. With personality factors trichotomized, the associations of Neuroticism and Conscientiousness were again highly consistent across tests within memory and to a lesser degree executive domains. While age-related memory decline was greater in APOE ɛ4 carriers as a group than ɛ4 noncarriers, verbal memory decline was mitigated in ɛ4 carriers with higher Conscientiousness, and visuospatial perception and memory decline was mitigated in ɛ4 carriers with higher Openness. Conclusions: Neuroticism and Conscientiousness were associated with changes in longitudinal performances on tests sensitive to memory and executive skills. APOE interactions were less consistent. Our findings are consistent with previous studies that have suggested that personality factors, particularly Neuroticism and Conscientiousness are associated with cognitive aging patterns. (JINS, 2016, 22, 765–776)
Disclosing neuroimaging incidental findings: A qualitative thematic analysis of health literacy challenges

Returning neuroimaging incidental findings (IF) may create a challenge to research participants’ health literacy skills as they must interpret and make appropriate healthcare decisions based on complex radiology jargon. Disclosing IF can therefore present difficulties for participants, research institutions and the healthcare system. The purpose of this study was to identify the extent of the health literacy challenges encountered when returning neuroimaging IF. We report on findings from a retrospective survey and focus group sessions with major stakeholders involved in disclosing IF. We surveyed participants who had received a radiology report from a research study and conducted focus groups with participants, parents of child participants, Institutional Review Board (IRB) members, investigators and physicians. Qualitative thematic analyses were conducted using standard group-coding procedures and descriptive summaries of health literacy scores and radiology report outcomes are examined. Although participants reported high health literacy skills (m = 87.3 on a scale of 1–100), 67 % did not seek medical care when recommended to do so; and many participants in the focus groups disclosed they could not understand the findings described in their report. Despite their lack of understanding, participants desire to have information about their radiology results, and the investigators feel ethically inclined to return findings. The language in clinically useful radiology reports can create a challenge for participants’ health literacy skills and has the potential to negatively impact the healthcare system and investigators conducting imaging research. Radiology reports need accompanying resources that explain findings in lay language, which can help reduce the challenge caused by the need to communicate incidental findings.
New microelectrode techniques for intracellular work in small cells

Abstract Newly developed techniques are described for making both single and dual channel ultrafine electrodes, and for advancing these electrodes into small cells. Together with our previously described methods of electrode beveling, all of these techniques are found to be highly successful in rod outer segments of the toad retina, which average only about 6.0 μm in diameter. Hence the new techniques of making and advancing electrodes solve the main problems that have limited intracellular work in small cells. These techniques should also increase the efficiency of intracellular work in cells of all sizes. They thus offer promising possibilities for greatly expanding the preparations and problems that may be studied in neurophysiology.
Eyeballs on science: Impact is not just citations, but how big is readership?

A full evaluation of the impact of scientific publications needs to count readers who don9t generate citations. But this is very difficult to do. I set up a scholarly foraging experiment to try to estimate readership for my own body of work: a personal web site with ‘reprint’ pdf files available for downloading and a web statistics program engaged to count these downloads. (I made the site topically rather than author-oriented to increase potential audience size.) Despite this, human users are difficult to count. There are a lot of bots, spiders, and other web programs that increasingly mimic human behavior (e.g., with IP- and chrono-camouflage), and humans9 own behaviors are changing (e.g., reading papers online many times). From four years of data, after culling both automated activity (a fascinating ecosystem) and humans reading repeatedly online, my papers receive ~4000-8000 downloads per year, about an order of magnitude higher than the number of citations they receive annually. This is a conservative minimum, because these publications can be obtained from other sources as well. On average, this body of work may be being read at an approximately 10:1 download-to-citation ratio. At a more granular scale, downloads do not correlate with citations; there are some papers being downloaded at about a 100:1 ratio, and it turns out these are exactly how they were meant to be used (e.g., an instruction manual). How intensively someone reads a paper is of course highly variable, but this exercise gives us an idea of how broad our publications9 impacts actually are. Citations alone don9t come close to measuring it.
Low cost wireless sensors for distribution grid intelligence and resiliency

Extreme weather events have been known to cause massive disruptions in power leading to significant outages in the recent past. The main goal of this study is to improve situation intelligence in the distribution grid to determine the downed lines, impacted areas, location of healthy lines and nodes, and the amount of distributed generation available at customer locations to serve the critical loads (healthcare facilities, law enforcement, natural gas delivery network, gasoline pumping stations, water distribution facilities, etc.). A multi-tiered wireless sensor network is designed that has the ability to report to the substation with information on the attributes of an outage, including location, possible extent of the outage, and potential use of DER for backup power. An interactive visualization software is developed to display the sensor data.
Watermarking Cryptographic Functionalities from Standard Lattice Assumptions

A software watermarking scheme allows one to embed a “mark” into a program without significantly altering the behavior of the program. Moreover, it should be difficult to remove the watermark without destroying the functionality of the program. Recently, Cohen et al. (STOC 2016) and Boneh et al. (PKC 2017) showed how to watermark cryptographic functions such as PRFs using indistinguishability obfuscation. Notably, in their constructions, the watermark remains intact even against arbitrary removal strategies. A natural question is whether we can build watermarking schemes from standard assumptions that achieve this strong mark-unremovability property.
Neutron Yields for Antiproton Microfission Experiments

Neutrons that are produced following antiproton annihilation on uranium nuclei are transported through compressed targets by the SCATTER Monte Carlo code in support of antiproton microfission exper...
Measuring a state of mind indicative of thriving using the Student Pharmacist Inventory of Professional Engagement (S-PIPE).

Abstract Background Professional engagement has importance to the professional of pharmacy, and in particular the growth of student pharmacists. Measurement of this construct would allow investigation of factors that may increase or decrease professional engagement. Objectives To describe the development of the Student Pharmacist Inventory of Professional Engagement (S-PIPE), assess the factor structure and convergent validity, and test for differences in professional engagement based upon demographic and background factors. Methods Potential items for the S-PIPE were developed iteratively through inductive and deductive item-writing, 2 pilot administrations, expert review of items, and assessment of the content validity index, and cognitive interviews with students. The S-PIPE was administered to a cohort of 164 first year student pharmacists at University of Minnesota, along with items querying types and level of involvement in professional experiences and activities. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using principal axis factoring extraction and Promax rotation. The number of factors to retain was based upon eigenvalues, examination of the scree plot, and a parallel analysis. Factors of the S-PIPE were compared to self-rated level of involvement and other demographic factors. Results Three factors were retained accounting for 70.7% of the variance, and named Belonging (α = 0.942, 9 items), Connectedness (α = 0.864, 3 items), and Meaningful Experience (α = 0.760, 4 items). All 3 factors were significantly correlated to self-rated involvement (r = 0.291 to 0.370). Level of professional engagement differed in this study by gender, and pharmacy work experience. Conclusions This study lays the foundation for quantitative research in professional engagement among student pharmacists. Future work is needed to further validate and extend these findings.
To Fight or Not to Fight.

In this issue of Neuron, Watanabe et al. (2017) uncover how octopamine, an invertebrate norepinephrine analog, modulates the neural pathways that bias Drosophila males toward aggression.
Enantioselective Total Synthesis of Cannogenol-3-O-α-l-rhamnoside via Sequential Cu(II)-Catalyzed Michael Addition/Intramolecular Aldol Cyclization Reactions

A concise and scalable enantioselective total synthesis of the natural cardenolides cannogenol and cannogenol-3-O-α-l-rhamnoside has been achieved in 18 linear steps. The synthesis features a Cu(II)-catalyzed enantioselective and diastereoselective Michael reaction/tandem aldol cyclization and a one-pot reduction/transposition, which resulted in a rapid (6 linear steps) assembly of a functionalized intermediate containing C19 oxygenation that could be elaborated to cardenolide cannogenol. In addition, a strategy for achieving regio- and stereoselective glycosylation at the C3 position of synthetic cannogenol was developed and applied to the preparation of cannogenol-3-O-α-l-rhamnoside.
TRANSCATHETER PATENT DUCTUS ARTERIOSUS (PDA) CLOSURE IN LOWER WEIGHT INFANTS (<6KG): MID- AND LONG-TERM FOLLOW-UP

Procedural complications and short-term outcomes following transcatheter PDA (TC-PDA) occlusion in lower weight infants (LWI; <6kg) are well-described, but longer-term outcomes have not been characterized adequately. This study was to describe longer-term outcomes of LWI undergoing TC-PDA occlusion
Navigating different cultural beliefs and practices to support immigrant preschoolers and their families: a Bakhtinian textual analysis on preschool teacher and administrator perspectives

Understanding different cultural beliefs and practices has become increasingly important for early childhood educators in the contemporary United States. This paper investigates how preschool teach...
Acting Out to Call In: Practicing Theatre of the Oppressed With High School Students

This essay describes an arts-based youth participatory action research project titled Theater of Liberation, wherein students and educators practiced Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed techniq...
Forecasting Forest Type and Age Classes in the Appalachian-Cumberland Subregion of the Central Hardwood Region

This chapter describes how forest type and age distributions might be expected to change in the Appalachian-Cumberland portions of the Central Hardwood Region over the next 50 years. Forecasting forest conditions requires accounting for a number of biophysical and socioeconomic dynamics within an internally consistent modeling framework. We used the US Forest Assessment System (USFAS) to simulate the evolution of forest inventories in the subregion. The types and ages of forests in the Appalachian-Cumberland portions of the Central Hardwood Region are likely to shift over the next 50 years. Two scenarios bracket a range of forest projections and provide insights into how wood products markets as well as economic, demographic, and climate changes could affect these future forests. Shifts in the future age distributions of forests are dominated by projected harvest regimes that lead to qualitatively different forest conditions. The future area of young forests correlates with change in total forest area—as total forest area declines, so does the area of young forests. However, changes in the area of young forests and forest age class distributions are most directly altered by the extent of harvesting within the Appalachian-Cumberland subregion.
Teacher Identity and Motivation: The Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity

In this chapter, we describe the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI)—a conceptual model that integrates understandings from multiple perspectives on identity and motivation. By using the DSMRI we capture the rich, complex, dynamic, and contextualized nature of teacher identity, while anchoring it in established identity and motivational constructs. The model highlights the central roles of knowledge and emotion in teacher identity and motivation; emphasizes the interdependence of identity elements, and hence the irreducibility of the teacher identity to its components; illustrates the continuous emergence of identity content, structure, and process of formation; and portrays the non-linear and non-deterministic nature of identity change as afforded and constrained by cultural means as well as individual-dispositional characteristics.
Facilitating Technical Compliance Through the Development of a New IT Role

Staying compliant in an increasingly regulated world is a challenge faced by researchers across every institution of higher education and beyond. With the various laws, regulations, and mandates from funding agencies, researchers and the IT staff that support them are spending more time interpreting complex reguirements in an effort to implement compliant technical solutions to properly secure sensitive data. The University of Iowa developed the unigue role of the Research Technology Compliance Specialist in response to these challenges. In this paper, we share the details of such a position as well as its benefits and drawbacks.
Antibiotic Shortages in Pediatrics.

* Abbreviation: FDA — : US Food and Drug Administration Medication shortages are increasingly common and severe in the United States and are a serious health threat. Medication shortages occur when reduced supply of a drug influences how it is prepared, dispensed, or prescribed by pharmacies or providers.1 According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), most shortages are caused by quality and manufacturing problems.2 Consequences of shortages include rationing limited supplies, delays in therapy, medication errors, use of less-efficacious alternatives, and death.3 Recently, critical drugs like sodium chloride and amino acids have been on shortage, exacerbated by damage to manufacturing plants by natural disasters like Hurricane Maria. Although shortages have affected virtually all classes of medications, antimicrobial shortages are common and account for 15% of all drug shortages.1,4 Medication shortages can force clinicians to treat patients with suboptimal therapy, which, in turn, can lead to poor outcomes. Examples relating to antimicrobial agents are when a penicillin shortage led to use of second-line therapies for neurosyphilis, an intravenous trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole shortage led to alternative therapies for Pneumocystis jiroveci infections, an acyclovir shortage led to use of alternative antiviral … Address correspondence to Ritu Banerjee, MD, PhD, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 1161 21st Ave, Nashville, TN 37232. E-mail: ritu.banerjee{at}vumc.org
Spreading Depression and Seizure Unification Experimentally Observed in Epilepsy

Recurrent spontaneous seizures have been considered the sine qua non of epilepsy. Epileptic seizures were first associated with intense electrical activity measured from the brain in 1933 1. Spreading depression of brain activity was discovered by Leao in 1944 2, and has since been shown associated with migraine, stroke and traumatic brain injury 3,4. Although for many years spreading depression was thought to have only rare genetic links to epilepsy 5, recently it has been proposed that seizure-triggered spreading depression could underlie sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP) 6. The physiological underpinning of spreading depression is an electrical spreading depolarization (SD) of brain cells. The depolarization is associated with a large, prolonged negative shift in tissue potential that cannot be well detected with standard human electroencephalographic (EEG) technology. Nevertheless, in recent years, computational models of the dynamics of neuron biophysics have shown a linkage between seizures and SD 7, and have predicted the possibility of dynamic trajectories linking the two phenomena 8. We developed a recording system for chronic, long-term measurements that provides a view of the complex interactions between spontaneous epileptic seizures and spreading depolarizations in the intact brain 9. We here experimentally demonstrate these theoretically predicted trajectories in multiple animal models of epilepsy, showing that spontaneous single seizures are frequently associated with SD, and that SD may mediate between seizures within clusters. We therefore propose that the ictus of epilepsy may be a combination of seizures and SD.
Highly Sensitive Ion Detection With Graphene/Si Schottky Junction Sensors

A graphene/silicon Schottky junction-based ion-sensor with ultrahigh sensitivity for metal ions in a liquid environment is reported. High-quality single layer graphene grown in CVD system was used for device fabrication, and the sensor chip was packaged and encapsulated on a PCB with epoxy resin to meet its aquatic operating environment. Graphene's atomically thin nature and tunable fermi level enabled the device to easily detect ion concentration variations from variation in the Schottky barrier height at the graphene/silicon heterojunction interface. The junction current was observed to change exponentially with the Schottky barrier height, which offers huge advantage over commonly used field effect transistor for sensing applications.
All-Metal Dual-Frequency Circularly Polarized High Gain Antenna for Potential Europa Lander

A new all-metal dual-frequency RHCP high gain antenna is under development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a potential Europa Lander. The antenna is mainly made of metal so it could survive the harsh environment conditions (i.e. very low temperature and high radiation and ESD levels). The antenna is also flat to meet drastic volume constraints and has efficiencies higher than 80% at both the uplink and downlink X-band Deep Space frequency bands. This antenna is a key component for the potential mission enabling Direct Link to Earth (DTE) from and Direct-from-Earth (DFE) to the lander without any relay.
Simulator-free solution of high-dimensional stochastic elliptic partial differential equations using deep neural networks

Abstract Stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) are ubiquitous in engineering and computational sciences. The stochasticity arises as a consequence of uncertainty in input parameters, constitutive relations, initial/boundary conditions, etc. Because of these functional uncertainties, the stochastic parameter space is often high-dimensional, requiring hundreds, or even thousands, of parameters to describe it. This poses an insurmountable challenge to response surface modeling since the number of forward model evaluations needed to construct an accurate surrogate grows exponentially with the dimension of the uncertain parameter space; a phenomenon referred to as the curse of dimensionality. State-of-the-art methods for high-dimensional uncertainty propagation seek to alleviate the curse of dimensionality by performing dimensionality reduction in the uncertain parameter space. However, one still needs to perform forward model evaluations that potentially carry a very high computational burden. We propose a novel methodology for high-dimensional uncertainty propagation of elliptic SPDEs which lifts the requirement for a deterministic forward solver. Our approach is as follows. We parameterize the solution of the elliptic SPDE using a deep residual network (ResNet). In a departure from traditional squared residual (SR) based loss function for training the ResNet, we introduce a physics-informed loss function derived from variational principles. Specifically, our loss function is the expectation of the energy functional of the PDE over the stochastic variables. We demonstrate our solver-free approach through various examples where the elliptic SPDE is subjected to different types of high-dimensional input uncertainties. Also, we solve high-dimensional uncertainty propagation and inverse problems.
From the Top Down? Legislation and Public Initiative in Building a School System in Russia After the Great Reforms: 1855–1914

From a global perspective the spread of mass education might best be examined by focusing on the period 1870–1945—an interval that resulted in an enormous aggrandizement of the reach of the state in many regions of the world.
The New Skills Mismatch? An Examination of Urban Employers' Perceptions About Public Job Training Participants as Prospective Employees.

Previous research has revealed the existence of a mismatch between the skills in demand in the urban labor market and the skill levels of large numbers of the urban poor. Numerous public job training efforts have been initiated to ameliorate this problem. Missing from the extensive evaluations of these programs has been the central issue of whether employers perceive public job training programs to have reduced the skills mismatch gap. Through the use of cross-sectional data analysis methods analyzing survey data from a survey of 693 Chicago area employers, we find that almost half of these employers perceive there to be a skills mismatch between their needs for entry-level workers and the skills of public job training participants. Moreover, the employers who perceive there to be a skills mismatch are those who hire white-collar entry-level workers and those who perceive that public job training participants have poor work habits and are racial and ethnic minorities.
Revolving Fractals

Davis and Knuth in 1970 introduced the notion of revolving sequences, as representations of a Gaussian integer. Later, Mizutani and Ito pointed out a close relationship between a set of points determined by all revolving sequences and a self-similar set, which is called the Dragon. We will show how their result can be generalized, giving a new parametrized expression for certain self-similar sets.
A microrobotic system guided by photoacoustic computed tomography for targeted navigation in intestines in vivo

Recently, tremendous progress in synthetic micro/nanomotors in diverse environment has been made for potential biomedical applications. However, existing micro/nanomotor platforms are inefficient for deep tissue imaging and motion control in vivo. Here, we present a photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT)–guided investigation of micromotors in intestines in vivo. The micromotors enveloped in microcapsules are stable in the stomach and exhibit efficient propulsion in various biofluids once released. The migration of micromotor capsules toward the targeted regions in intestines has been visualized by PACT in real time in vivo. Near-infrared light irradiation induces disintegration of the capsules to release the cargo-loaded micromotors. The intensive propulsion of the micromotors effectively prolongs the retention in intestines. The integration of the newly developed microrobotic system and PACT enables deep imaging and precise control of the micromotors in vivo and promises practical biomedical applications, such as drug delivery.