cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Neurobiological Platform for Moral Values

What we humans call ethics or morality depends on four interlocking brain processes: (1) caring (supported by the neuroendocrine system, and emerging in the young as a function of parental care). (2) Learning local social practices and the ways of others – by positive and negative reinforcement, by imitation, by trial and error, by various kinds of conditioning, and by analogy. (3) Recognition of others' psychological states (goals, feelings etc.). (4) Problem-solving in a social context. These four broad capacities are not unique to humans, but are probably uniquely developed in human brains by virtue of the expansion of the prefrontal cortex. 1
Shrouded Prices and Firm Reputation: Evidence from the U.S. Hotel Industry

Firms in many industries engage in price obfuscation—tactics that intentionally make prices more difficult for consumers to discern. Although existing research has focused on the short-term financi...
Adjusting for guessing and applying a statistical test to the disaggregation of value-added learning scores

AbstractIn 2016, Walstad and Wagner developed a procedure to split pre-test and post-test responses into four learning types: positive, negative, retained, and zero learning. This disaggregation is...
How Unequal Perceptions of User Reviews Impact Price Competition

When a consumer cannot fully assess her valuations of competing products prior to purchase, she must make a purchase decision based on imperfect product information. However, with the advent of online channels for widely disseminating individual user reviews, consumers are now able to learn from the experiences of others and update their expectations regarding product valuations. We analyze the interaction of user reviews and experience uncertainty, with a specific focus on the potential for negative and positive reviews to be weighted differently in a consumer's assessment of the valence of the posted reviews. We find that overweighting of negative reviews by consumers can lead to surprising results in terms of pricing and profits in a competitive context. In particular, if consumer awareness is higher for the lower quality product, it can charge higher prices and realize higher profits in equilibrium than its higher quality competitor when consumers are strongly influenced by negative reviews. We also show that a higher weighting on positive reviews by consumers always helps the firm with a lower consumer awareness.
Income and Lottery Sales Transfers Trump Income from Work and Wealth

The effect of income on lottery expenditures has generally been studied using an aggregate measure of income, usually personal income. Reasons exist for thinking that lottery expenditures do not re...
Radical Pelvic Surgery With Preservation of Sexual Function

Recent neuroanatomical findings make it possible to identify the pelvic plexus and branches that innervate the corpora cavernosa intraoperatively. These anatomical principles have been used to modify standard radical prostatectomy and cystoprostatectomy to prevent postoperative sexual dysfunction. Radical retropubic prostatectomy has been performed on 320 men, who have been followed for 1-5 years after surgery; 74% of these men are now potent after surgery. Positive surgical margins were present in 10% of the cases; the actuarial overall local recurrence at 5 years (with or without distant metastases) is 10%. These results are consistent with past experience and data reported elsewhere in the literature. Radical cystoprostatectomy has been performed on 25 men over the past 5 years. Pathologic evaluation of all specimens demonstrated negative surgical margins, no patient has developed local recurrence, and of the patients who had cystectomy alone, 83% are now potent after surgery. With application of these principles to colorectal surgery, similar favorable impact on quality of life with improved surgical accuracy may be possible.
Achieving Practical and Accurate Indoor Navigation for People with Visual Impairments

Methods that provide accurate navigation assistance to people with visual impairments often rely on instrumenting the environment with specialized hardware infrastructure. In particular, approaches that use sensor networks of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons have been shown to achieve precise localization and accurate guidance while the structural modifications to the environment are kept at minimum. To install navigation infrastructure, however, a number of complex and time-critical activities must be performed. The BLE beacons need to be positioned correctly and samples of Bluetooth signal need to be collected across the whole environment. These tasks are performed by trained personnel and entail costs proportional to the size of the environment that needs to be instrumented. To reduce the instrumentation costs while maintaining a high accuracy, we improve over a traditional regression-based localization approach by introducing a novel, graph-based localization method using Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) and particle filter. We then study how the number and density of beacons and Bluetooth samples impact the balance between localization accuracy and set-up cost of the navigation environment. Studies with users show the impact that the increased accuracy has on the usability of our navigation application for the visually impaired.
Hemorrhagic Cystitis Due to Herpes Simplex Virus as a Marker of Disseminated Herpes Infection

Herpetic cystitis has rarely been reported. Herein are described two immunocompromised female patients with genital or buttock herpetic lesions in whom hemorrhagic cystitis due to herpes simplex virus type 2 developed in the setting of disseminated herpetic infection. Both patients had indwelling Foley catheters. Urinary tract instrumentation may cause local or widespread dissemination of genital herpes in immunocompromised patients.
Hypertension Associated With Unilateral Hydronephrosis as a Complication of Crohn’s Disease

Obstructive uropathy with hydronephrosis is a well-known complication of Crohn's disease. The treatment for this condition is still controversial. This is the case study of a 14-year-old girl with documented right-sided obstructive uropathy secondary to Crohn's disease associated with renin-mediated hypertension secondary to her obstructive uropathy. The patient had complete resolution of her hypertension following surgery, which involved only resection of the involved bowel without ureterolysis.
Enhanced acoustic transmission through a slanted grating

Abstract It is known that an acoustic wave incident on an infinite array of aligned rectangular blocks of a different acoustic material exhibits total transmission if certain conditions are met [1] which relate the unique “intromission” angle of incidence with geometric and material properties of the slab. This extraordinary acoustic transmission phenomenon holds for any slab thickness, making it analogous to a Brewster effect in optics, and is independent of frequency as long as the slab microstructure is sub-wavelength in the length-wise direction. Here we show that the enhanced transmission effect is obtained in a slab with grating elements oriented obliquely to the slab normal. The dependence of the intromission angle θ i is given explicitly in terms of the orientation angle. Total transmission is achieved at incidence angles ± θ i , with a relative phase shift between the transmitted amplitudes of the + θ i and − θ i cases. These effects are shown to follow from explicit formulas for the transmission coefficient. In the case of grating elements that are rigid the results have direct physical interpretation. The analytical findings are illustrated with full wave simulations.
Optimizing the Profitability and Quality of Service in Carshare Systems Under Demand Uncertainty

Carsharing has been considered as an effective means to increase mobility and reduce personal vehicle usage and related carbon emissions. In this paper, we consider problems of allocating a carshare fleet to service zones under uncertain one-way and round-trip rental demand. We employ a two-stage stochastic integer programming model, in the first stage of which we allocate shared vehicle fleet and purchase parking lots or permits in reservation-based or free-floating systems. In the second stage, we generate a finite set of samples to represent demand uncertainty and construct a spatial-temporal network for each sample to model vehicle movement and the corresponding rental revenue, operating cost, and penalties from unserved demand. We minimize the expected total costs minus profit and develop branch-and-cut algorithms with mixed-integer, rounding-enhanced Benders cuts, which can significantly improve computation efficiency when implemented in parallel computing. We apply our model to a data set of Zipcar in the Boston-Cambridge, Massachusetts, area to demonstrate the efficacy of our approaches and draw insights on carshare management. Our results show that exogenously given one-way demand can increase carshare profitability under given one-way and round-trip price differences and vehicle relocation cost whereas endogenously generated one-way demand as a result of pricing and strategic customer behavior may decrease carshare profitability. Our model can also be applied in a rolling-horizon framework to deliver optimized vehicle relocation decisions and achieve significant improvement over an intuitive fleet-rebalancing policy. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0644 .
Kinetic Simulation of Collisional Magnetized Plasmas with Semi-implicit Time Integration

Plasmas with varying collisionalities occur in many applications, such as tokamak edge regions, where the flows are characterized by significant variations in density and temperature. While a kinetic model is necessary for weakly-collisional high-temperature plasmas, high collisionality in colder regions render the equations numerically stiff due to disparate time scales. In this paper, we propose an implicit–explicit algorithm for such cases, where the collisional term is integrated implicitly in time, while the advective term is integrated explicitly in time, thus allowing time step sizes that are comparable to the advective time scales. This partitioning results in a more efficient algorithm than those using explicit time integrators, where the time step sizes are constrained by the stiff collisional time scales. We implement semi-implicit additive Runge–Kutta methods in COGENT, a high-order finite-volume gyrokinetic code and test the accuracy, convergence, and computational cost of these semi-implicit methods for test cases with highly-collisional plasmas.
Indirectly Visible Bayesian Student Models

Inspectable Bayesian student models have been used to support student reflection, knowledge awareness and communication among teacher, students and parents. This paper presents a new approach to interacting with inspectable Bayesian student models called indirectly visible Bayesian student models. In this approach, the student model is seen through the eyes of a pedagogical agent (e.g., a virtual student). This approach has been implemented in the context of an Assessment-Based Learning Environment for English grammar (English ABLE), where the student is asked to help a pedagogical agent find grammatical errors on various sentences. Since the pedagogical agent's knowledge levels, which are also the student's knowledge levels, are always visible, the student can see how much the pedagogical agent "knows" based on his/her actions. Initial reactions to this approach have been positive. We are planning on integrating it into assessment-based learning and gaming environments as indicators of progress that continuously change in light of new evidence.
Remarks on the Homogenization and Boundary Control of Distributed Systems

Abstract Two boundary control problems for distributed systems with oscillatory coefficients are discussed. It is shown that the corresponding averaged problems have effective cost functionals that depend nontrivially on the coefficients and on the geometry of the boundary.
Adventures in Higher Education, Happiness, And Mindfulness

This Article recounts my unique adventures in higher education, including being a Princeton University freshman mathematics major at age 14, Harvard University applied mathematics graduate student at age 17, economics or finance faculty at multiple schools, first-year law student at the University of Chicago, second- and third-year law student at Stanford University, and law faculty at multiple schools. This Article also candidly discusses my experiences as student and professor and openly shares how I was able to achieve sustainable happiness by practicing mindfulness to reduce fears, rumination, and worry in facing adversity, disappointment, and setbacks. This Article analyzes why law schools should teach law students about happiness and mindfulness. This Article discusses how to teach law students about happiness and mindfulness. Finally, this Article provides brief concluding thoughts about how law students can sustain happiness and mindfulness once they graduate from law school.
Does the Fed Impact Stock Prices

The influence of the Fed’s actions on equity prices has been a source of significant speculation in recent years. This article uses a well-regarded measure for the “fair” value of interest rates to measure the degree to which the Fed is influencing interest rate and then relates that level of interference to equity returns. We find that Fed’s actions are correlated with a modest negative impact on US equity prices—that is Fed interference has a slight negative relationship with broader equity returns. In contrast, outside the US, Central Bank interference generally has a stronger positive relationship to equity returns.
Nanos promotes epigenetic reprograming of the germline by down-regulation of the THAP transcription factor LIN-15B.

Every new embryo inherits a set of starting instructions from its mother. These instructions are called a ‘maternal dowry’ and help a fertilized egg through the first few stages of development. Later, the maternal dowry is removed so that the embryo’s genetic instructions can take over. In animals, some of the cells in this early embryo become specialized to produce eggs (technically called oocytes) or sperm. These cells are called germ cells, and they are needed for reproduction. A protein called Nanos helps germ cells become different to other cells, but it is not clear how Nanos has this effect. Lee et al. studied Nanos in the embryos of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans. In many ways, early development is the same in the worm as in many other animals. By examining worms that did not have Nanos, Lee et al. showed that germ cells without Nanos do not lose their maternal dowry. As a result, the cells still contain a molecule called LIN-15B, which makes other types of cells in the worm. Ultimately, without Nanos, the germ cells do not develop and die leaving the worm sterile. Germ cells are essential for living things to reproduce and have children. Understanding how they are created can teach scientists a lot about how embryos develop before birth. This could eventually help to boost fertility in endangered species or to treat human sterility.
Electrostrictive microelectromechanical fibres and textiles

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) enable many modern-day technologies, including actuators, motion sensors, drug delivery systems, projection displays, etc. Currently, MEMS fabrication techniques are primarily based on silicon micromachining processes, resulting in rigid and low aspect ratio structures. In this study, we report on the discovery of MEMS functionality in fibres, thereby opening a path towards flexible, high-aspect ratio, and textile MEMS. The method used for generating these MEMS fibres leverages a preform-to-fibre thermal drawing process, in which the MEMS architecture and materials are embedded into a preform and drawn into kilometers of microstructured multimaterial fibre devices. The fibre MEMS functionality is enabled by an electrostrictive P(VDF-TrFE-CFE) ferrorelaxor terpolymer layer running the entire length of the fibre. Several modes of operation are investigated, including thickness-mode actuation with over 8% strain at 25 MV m−1, bending-mode actuation due to asymmetric positioning of the electrostrictive layer, and resonant fibre vibration modes tunable under AC-driving conditions. Micro-electromechanical systems fabrication techniques are based on silicon micromachining processes, resulting in rigid and low aspect ratio structures. Here the authors demonstrate a flexible, high aspect ratio micro-electromechanical system in fibre enabled by an electrostrictive ferrorelaxor terpolymer layer.
Reconciling Competence and Consent in Opioid-Dependence Research: The Value of Vulnerability Rhetoric.

Central to addiction is a complex interplay between the erosion of the will to refrain from harmful behavior such as psychotropic drug use and how changes in human brain neurocircuitry continuously...
Borrowing to Save? The Impact of Automatic Enrollment on Debt

Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan. Four years after hire, automatic enrollment causes no significant change in credit scores (point estimate 0.001 standard deviations) or debt balances excluding auto loans and first mortgages (point estimate -0.6% of annual salary). We also find no significant increase in auto loan and first mortgage balances in our main regression specification, although the estimated increases in these categories are economically and statistically significant in alternative specifications.
Risk management for dynamic Radioisotope Power Systems

Abstract The implementation of dynamic power conversion technology in Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS) for spaceflight has potential for improved specific power and efficiency, compared with existing Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs). This proposed expansion of current RPS technology necessitates a full exploration of the requirements, goals, and concerns related to risks in developing and deploying such systems. The nature of dynamic systems also presents a new set of challenges related to the presence of moving machinery not intrinsic to traditional RTG units. A general RPS risk management methodology is outlined, which is used to identify and assess the variables and operational scenarios introducing risk throughout the design, fabrication, and system integration processes. This paper will demonstrate how mission requirements for Dynamic RPS concepts (DRPS) drive decisions throughout the development process. This work will define the standard practices for decision making within the scope of the risks associated with DRPS hardware development and deployment in sensitive spacecraft near sensitive payloads. Examples of potential risk areas are analyzed for the proposed dynamic systems, and compared to those associated with traditional RTG technologies. This analysis shows the promise for DRPS systems to elevate and extend the capabilities for power systems used in future NASA missions.
The Phagocyte Oxidase Controls Tolerance to Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infection.

Protection from infectious disease relies on two distinct strategies: antimicrobial resistance directly inhibits pathogen growth, whereas infection tolerance protects from the negative impact of infection on host health. A single immune mediator can differentially contribute to these strategies in distinct contexts, confounding our understanding of protection to different pathogens. For example, the NADPH-dependent phagocyte oxidase (Phox) complex produces antimicrobial superoxide and protects from tuberculosis (TB) in humans. However, Phox-deficient mice display no sustained resistance defects to Mycobacterium tuberculosis , suggesting a more complicated role for NADPH Phox complex than strictly controlling bacterial growth. We examined the mechanisms by which Phox contributes to protection from TB and found that mice lacking the Cybb subunit of Phox suffered from a specific defect in tolerance, which was caused by unregulated Caspase-1 activation, IL-1β production, and neutrophil influx into the lung. These studies imply that a defect in tolerance alone is sufficient to compromise immunity to M. tuberculosis and highlight a central role for Phox and Caspase-1 in regulating TB disease progression.
Agent-based modeling in electrical energy markets using dynamic Bayesian networks

Due to uncertainties in generation and load, optimal decision making in electrical energy markets is a complicated and challenging task. Participating agents in the market have to estimate optimal bidding strategies based on incomplete public information and private assessment of the future state of the market, to maximize their expected profit at different time scales. In this paper, we present an agent-based model to address the problem of short-term strategic bidding of conventional generation companies (GenCos) in a power pool. Based on the proposed model, each GenCo agent develops a private probabilistic model of the market (using dynamic Bayesian networks), employs an online learning algorithm to train the model (sparse Bayesian learning), and infers the future state of the market to estimate the optimal bidding function. We show that by using this multiagent framework, the agents will be able to predict and adapt to approximate Nash equilibrium of the market through time using local reasoning and incomplete publicly available data. The model is implemented in MATLAB and is tested on four test case systems: two generic systems with 5 and 15 GenCo agents, and two IEEE benchmarks (9-bus and 30-bus systems). Both the day-ahead (DA) and hour-ahead (HA) bidding schemes are implemented.
Formulation and characterization of power system electromechanical oscillations

When generators of a power system are subject to a large disturbance, their electromechanical oscillations (EOs) are essentially nonlinear as observed from their rotor angle waveforms due to the nonlinear power network. However, traditional modal analysis has not given enough considerations to nonlinearities in EOs. This paper analytically formulates the accurate oscillation frequency (OF) of an EO mode addressing nonlinearities. It is revealed that when the system model and condition are fixed, the OF of any EO mode is energy-dependent as a function of the oscillation amplitude (OA). That is characterized by a new tool named Frequency-Amplitude (F-A) curve regarding each mode, from which the frequency decreases from the natural frequency toward zero when the amplitude grows to a critical threshold. The paper proves that an F-A curve is actually a projection of the system trajectory between the stable equilibrium and the stability boundary onto the OF-OA plane regarding one mode. Based on the concept of F-A curve, a stability index is defined and estimated from measurements for online angle stability analysis. The proposed methodology is presented in detail using an SMIB system and then demonstrated on the IEEE 9-bus system and WECC 179-bus system having multiple EO modes.
On some polytopes contained in the 0, 1 hypercube that have a small Chvátal rank

In this paper, we consider polytopes P that are contained in the unit hypercube. We provide conditions on the set of 0, 1 vectors not contained in P that guarantee that P has a small Chvatal rank. Our conditions are in terms of the subgraph induced by these infeasible 0, 1 vertices in the skeleton graph of the unit hypercube. In particular, we show that when this subgraph contains no 4-cycle, the Chvatal rank is at most 3; and when it has tree width 2, the Chvatal rank is at most 4. We also give polyhedral decomposition theorems when this graph has a vertex cutset of size one or two.
Alternate Assessment Formats for Progress Monitoring Students With Intellectual Disabilities and Below Average IQ: An Exploratory Study:

As part of standards-based reforms, there is increasing emphasis on ensuring that students with moderate intellectual disabilities (ID), including students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), learn to read. There is also converging evidence that explicit teaching of letter sounds, phonics, and sight words is effective for this population, but that students’ responsiveness varies. A critical part of individualizing reading instruction for students with disabilities is the reliable assessment of progress and mastery of reading skills. However, assessment of many students with ID and students with ASD is challenging because of attention, behavioral, and communication issues related to testing situation; therefore, obtaining consistent results often proves to be a difficult task. We hypothesized that alternate assessment presentation formats, as a testing accommodation, would improve the reliability, validity, and consistency of assessment performance. In this study, three different presentation formats—wor...
EXOGENOUS TESTOSTERONE DOES NOT INDUCE OR EXACERBATE THE METABOLIC FEATURES ASSOCIATED WITH PCOS AMONG TRANSGENDER MEN

Objective: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a complex condition which can include menstrual irregularity, metabolic derangement, and increased androgen levels. The mechanism of PCOS is unknown. Some suggest that excess production of androgens by the ovaries may cause or exacerbate the metabolic findings. The purpose of this study was to assess the role of increased testosterone on metabolic parameters for individuals presumed to be chromosomally female by examination of these parameters in hormone-treated transgender men. Methods: In 2015 and 2016, we asked all transgender men who visited the Endocrinology Clinic at Boston Medical Center treated with testosterone for consent for a retrospective anonymous chart review. Of the 36 men, 34 agreed (94%). Serum metabolic factors and body mass index (BMI) levels for each patient were graphed over time, from initiation of therapy through 6 years of treatment. Bivariate analyses were conducted to analyze the impact of added testosterone. Results: Regressions me...
Single-cell transcriptomics of the mouse kidney reveals potential cellular targets of kidney disease

Our understanding of kidney disease pathogenesis is limited by an incomplete molecular characterization of the cell types responsible for the organ’s multiple homeostatic functions. To help fill this knowledge gap, we characterized 57,979 cells from healthy mouse kidneys by using unbiased single-cell RNA sequencing. On the basis of gene expression patterns, we infer that inherited kidney diseases that arise from distinct genetic mutations but share the same phenotypic manifestation originate from the same differentiated cell type. We also found that the collecting duct in kidneys of adult mice generates a spectrum of cell types through a newly identified transitional cell. Computational cell trajectory analysis and in vivo lineage tracing revealed that intercalated cells and principal cells undergo transitions mediated by the Notch signaling pathway. In mouse and human kidney disease, these transitions were shifted toward a principal cell fate and were associated with metabolic acidosis.
The value of rapid semi-automated morphometric analysis system in predicting malignancy in thyroid follicular neoplasm

To constuct and evaluate a rapid semiautomated system in discriminating malignant from benign follicular thyroid neoplasms.Sixty formalin fixed paraffin embeded blocksof follicular thyroid neoplasms were retreived and slides were prepared and H and E stained. A morphometric system was constructed to be as rapid as possible and was tested. No signficant difference was found in ratio of largest nuclear to smallest nuclear diameter between follicualr adenoma and follicualr carcinoma groups. Rapid semiautomated morphometric analysis is of no help in predicting malignancy in follicular thyroid neoplasm.
What’s left of general jurisprudence? On law’s ontology and content

The aim of this paper is to show that general jurisprudence is in no need of reinvention. The sentiment shared by many contemporary legal philosophers that theories about the nature of law have rea...
Tensors, Differential Geometry and Statistical Shading Analysis

We develop a linear algebraic framework for the shape-from-shading problem, because tensors arise when scalar (e.g., image) and vector (e.g., surface normal) fields are differentiated multiple times. Using this framework, we first investigate when image derivatives exhibit invariance to changing illumination by calculating the statistics of image derivatives under general distributions on the light source. Second, we apply that framework to develop Taylor-like expansions and build a boot-strapping algorithm to find the polynomial surface solutions (under any light source) consistent with a given patch to arbitrary order. A generic constraint on the light source restricts these solutions to a 2-D subspace, plus an unknown rotation matrix. It is this unknown matrix that encapsulates the ambiguity in the problem. Finally, we use the framework to computationally validate the hypothesis that image orientations (derivatives) provide increased invariance to illumination by showing (for a Lambertian model) that a shape-from-shading algorithm matching gradients instead of intensities provides more accurate reconstructions when illumination is incorrectly estimated under a flatness prior.
A Doubly Latent Space Joint Model for Local Item and Person Dependence in the Analysis of Item Response Data

Item response theory (IRT) is one of the most widely utilized tools for item response analysis; however, local item and person independence, which is a critical assumption for IRT, is often violated in real testing situations. In this article, we propose a new type of analytical approach for item response data that does not require standard local independence assumptions. By adapting a latent space joint modeling approach, our proposed model can estimate pairwise distances to represent the item and person dependence structures, from which item and person clusters in latent spaces can be identified. We provide an empirical data analysis to illustrate an application of the proposed method. A simulation study is provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in comparison with existing methods.
Antimicrobial-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae: trends and management

Management of pneumococcal infections has been challenged by the development of resistance and, more recently, the unexpected spread of resistant clones of serotypes, such as 19A, following the introduction of a conjugate pneumococcal vaccine for use in children in 2000. High-dose penicillin G and many other agents continue to be efficacious parenterally for pneumonia and bacteremia. However, treatment options for meningitis and for infections treated with oral agents, particularly in children, have been limited by resistance. Empiric treatment guidelines should reflect the emerging threats from increased drug resistance. Compliance with guidelines by physicians and patients is important to prevent further development of resistance as new classes of agents are unlikely to be available in the next decade.
A Moonlighting Role for SPCA2 in E-cadherin Biogenesis and Suppression of Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition

Progression of benign tumors to invasive, metastatic cancer requires loss of the cell-adhesion protein E-cadherin. Although intensive efforts have focused on gene repression and silencing mutations, much less is known about posttranslational control of E-cadherin expression in cancer. SPCA2 is a secretory pathway Ca2+-ATPase that is down-regulated in metastatic breast cancer. We show that SPCA2 is tightly co-expressed with epithelial signature genes and required for E-cadherin biogenesis and cell surface expression. Unexpectedly, this function is uncoupled from Ca2+ pumping and mediated by binding to E-cadherin. Loss of SPCA2 is sufficient to disrupt cell-cell adhesion in tumorspheres and elicit mesenchymal gene expression through Hippo-YAP signaling. These findings point to a causal link between low SPCA2 levels and the epithelial-mesenchymal transition required for breast cancer metastasis.
Strong Functional Representation Lemma and Applications to Coding Theorems

This paper shows that for any random variables $X$ and $Y$ , it is possible to represent $Y$ as a function of $(X,Z)$ such that $Z$ is independent of $X$ and $I(X;Z|Y)\le \log (I(X;Y)+1)+4$ bits. We use this strong functional representation lemma (SFRL) to establish a bound on the rate needed for one-shot exact channel simulation for general (discrete or continuous) random variables, strengthening the results by Harsha et al. and Braverman and Garg, and to establish new and simple achievability results for one-shot variable-length lossy source coding, multiple description coding, and Gray–Wyner system. We also show that the SFRL can be used to reduce the channel with state noncausally known at the encoder to a point-to-point channel, which provides a simple achievability proof of the Gelfand–Pinsker theorem.
Towards Selective-Alignment: Bridging the Accuracy Gap between Alignment-Based and Alignment-Free Transcript Quantification

We introduce an algorithm for selectively aligning high-throughput sequencing reads to a transcriptome, with the goal of improving transcript-level quantification in difficult or adversarial scenarios. This algorithm attempts to bridge the gap between fast \nab algorithms and more traditional alignment procedures. We adopt a hybrid approach that is able to produce accurate alignments while still retaining much of the efficiency of non-alignment-based algorithms. To achieve this, we combine edit-distance-based verification with a highly-sensitive read mapping procedure. Additionally, unlike the strategies adopted in most aligners which first align the ends of paired-end reads independently, we introduce a notion of co-mapping. This procedure exploits relevant information between the "hits" from the left and right ends of paired-end reads before full mappings for each are generated, improving the efficiency of filtering likely-spurious alignments. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of selective alignment in improving the accuracy of efficient transcript-level quantification from RNA-seq reads. Specifically, we show that selective-alignment is able to resolve certain complex mapping scenarios that can confound existing non-alignment-based procedures, while simultaneously eliminating spurious alignments that fast mapping approaches can produce. Selective-alignment is implemented in C++11 as a part of Salmon, and is available as open source software, under GPL v3, at: \hrefhttps://github.com/COMBINE-lab/salmon/tree/selective-alignment https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/salmon/tree/selective-alignment
Explaining the slow U.S. recovery: 2010–2017

This paper argues that the slow U.S. recovery after the 2008–2009 recession was due to sluggish government spending. The analysis uses a structural macroeconometric model. Conditional on government policy, the errors in predicting output for the 2009.4–2017.4 period are within what one would expect historically. Productivity and labor force participation are endogenous variables in the model, and so their behaviors in this period are a consequence of the slow growth rather than a cause.
Structural consistency and controllability for diverse colorization

Colorizing a given gray-level image is an important task in the media and advertising industry. Due to the ambiguity inherent to colorization (many shades are often plausible), recent approaches started to explicitly model diversity. However, one of the most obvious artifacts, structural inconsistency, is rarely considered by existing methods which predict chrominance independently for every pixel. To address this issue, we develop a conditional random field based variational auto-encoder formulation which is able to achieve diversity while taking into account structural consistency. Moreover, we introduce a controllability mechanism that can incorporate external constraints from diverse sources including a user interface. Compared to existing baselines, we demonstrate that our method obtains more diverse and globally consistent colorizations on the LFW, LSUN-Church and ILSVRC-2015 datasets.
Epigenome-wide Analysis Identifies Genes and Pathways Linked to Neurobehavioral Variation in Preterm Infants.

Neonatal molecular biomarkers of neurobehavioral responses (measures of brain-behavior relationships), when combined with neurobehavioral performance measures, could lead to better predictions of long-term developmental outcomes. To this end, we examined whether variability in buccal cell DNA methylation (DNAm) associated with neurobehavioral profiles in a cohort of infants born less than 30 weeks postmenstrual age (PMA) and participating in the Neonatal Neurobehavior and Outcomes in Very Preterm Infants (NOVI) Study (N = 536). We tested whether epigenetic age, age acceleration, or DNAm levels at individual loci differed between infants based on their NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) profile classifications. We adjusted for recruitment site, infant sex, PMA, and tissue heterogeneity. Infants with an optimally well-regulated NNNS profile had older epigenetic age compared to other NOVI infants (β1 = 0.201, p-value = 0.026), but no significant difference in age acceleration. In contrast, infants with an atypical NNNS profile had differential methylation at 29 CpG sites (FDR < 10%). Some of the genes annotated to these CpGs included PLA2G4E, TRIM9, GRIK3, and MACROD2, which have previously been associated with neurological structure and function, or with neurobehavioral disorders. These findings contribute to the existing evidence that neonatal epigenetic variations may be informative for infant neurobehavior.
Global attention for name tagging

Many name tagging approaches use local contextual information with much success, but can fail when the local context is ambiguous or limited. We present a new framework to improve name tagging by utilizing local, document-level, and corpus-level contextual information. For each word, we retrieve document-level context from other sentences within the same document and corpus-level context from sentences in other documents. We propose a model that learns to incorporate document-level and corpus-level contextual information alongside local contextual information via document-level and corpus-level attentions, which dynamically weight their respective contextual information and determines the influence of this information through gating mechanisms. Experiments on benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves state-of-the-art results for Dutch, German, and Spanish on the CoNLL-2002 and CoNLL-2003 datasets. We will make our code and pre-trained models publicly available for research purposes.
When to preempt? Age of information minimization under link capacity constraint

In this paper, we consider a scenario where a source continuously monitors an object and sends time-stamped status updates to a destination through a rate-limited link. We assume updates arrive randomly at the source according to a Bernoulli process. Due to the link capacity constraint, it takes multiple time slots for the source to complete the transmission of an update. Therefore, when a new update arrives at the source during the transmission of another update, the source needs to decide whether to skip the new arrival or to switch to it, in order to minimize the expected average age of information (AoI) at the destination. We start with the setting where all updates are of the same size, and prove that within a broadly defined class of online policies, the optimal policy should be a renewal policy, and has a sequential switching property. We then show that the optimal decision of the source in any time slot has threshold structures, and only depends on the age of the update being transmitted and the AoI at the destination. We then consider the setting where updates are of different sizes, and show that the optimal Markovian policy also has a multiple-threshold structure. For each of the settings, we explicitly identify the thresholds by formulating the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and solve it through value iteration. Special structural properties of the corresponding optimal policy are utilized to reduce the computational complexity of the value iteration algorithm.
Early patterns of skill acquisition and immigrants' specialization in STEM careers.

We provide empirical evidence of immigrants’ specialization in skill acquisition well before entering the US labor market. Nationally representative datasets enable studying the academic trajectories of immigrant children, with a focus on high-school course-taking patterns and college major choice. Immigrant children accumulate skills in ways that reinforce comparative advantages in nonlanguage intensive skills such as mathematics and science, and this contributes to their growing numbers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. These results are compatible with well-established models of skill formation that emphasize dynamic complementarities of investments in learning.
Queueing Models for Patient-Flow Dynamics in Inpatient Wards

Long delays for patients waiting to be admitted to inpatient units are currently the standard state of affairs in urban hospitals in the United States and around the world. To alleviate congestion,...
Flutter Prediction for Aircraft Conceptual Design

Flutter prediction is usually a knowledge-based analysis process that aims to reduce the cost of aeroelastic stability margin certification. However, early detection of flutter problems is beneficial in the development of unconventional aircraft. The recently developed automation tool ConceptFEA for structural sizing of aircraft concepts paves the way for rapid physics-based flutter prediction of aircraft concepts. A match-point iteration procedure using the p-k method is implemented for ConceptFEA with minimum user input requirements to generate flutter boundary points. A subsonic business jet concept and its high aspect-ratio wing variant are used to demonstrate how the newly developed flutter prediction capability can be used during aircraft conceptual design. Sized structures, flutter boundary curves, and flutter sensitivity analysis results are generated for these two concepts using ConceptFEA. The relevant equivalent plate theory is provided to show the quantitative relationships between a stiffened panel and its equivalent NASTRAN PSHELL panel. The rapid flutter prediction capability of ConceptFEA makes multidisciplinary collaborations between systems analysts and aeroelasticity experts feasible in practice.
Revisiting Approximate Linear Programming: Constraint-Violation Learning with Applications to Inventory Control and Energy Storage

Approximate linear programs (ALPs) are well-known models for computing value function approximations (VFAs) of intractable Markov decision processes (MDPs). VFAs from ALPs have desirable theoretica...
Reconciling Seemingly Contradictory Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment and the Massachusetts Health Reform

A headline result from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment is that emergency room (ER) utilization increased. A seemingly contradictory result from the Massachusetts health reform is that ER utilization decreased. I reconcile both results by identifying treatment effect heterogeneity within the Oregon experiment and extrapolating it to Massachusetts. Even though Oregon compliers increased their ER utilization, they were adversely selected relative to Oregon never takers, who would have decreased their ER utilization. Massachusetts expanded coverage from a higher level to healthier compliers. Therefore, Massachusetts compliers are comparable to a subset of Oregon never takers, which can reconcile the results.
Mahonian pairs

We introduce the notion of a Mahonian pair. Consider the set, P^@?, of all words having the positive integers as alphabet. Given finite subsets S,[email protected]?P^@?, we say that (S,T) is a Mahonian pair if the distribution of the major index, maj, over S is the same as the distribution of the inversion number, inv, over T. So the well-known fact that maj and inv are equidistributed over the symmetric group, S"n, can be expressed by saying that (S"n,S"n) is a Mahonian pair. We investigate various Mahonian pairs (S,T) with S T. Our principal tool is [email protected]?s fundamental bijection @f:P^@?->P^@? since it has the property that [email protected](w) for any word w. We consider various families of words associated with Catalan and Fibonacci numbers. We show that, when restricted to words in {1,2}^@?, @f transforms familiar statistics on words into natural statistics on integer partitions such as the size of the Durfee square. The Rogers-Ramanujan identities, the Catalan triangle, and various q-analogues also make an appearance. We generalize the definition of Mahonian pairs to infinite sets and use this as a tool to connect a partition bijection of Corteel-Savage-Venkatraman with the Greene-Kleitman decomposition of a Boolean algebra into symmetric chains. We close with comments about future work and open problems.
H19 potentiates let-7 family expression through reducing PTBP1 binding to their precursors in cholestasis.

Cholestasis induces the hepatic long non-coding RNA H19, which promotes the progression of cholestatic liver fibrosis. However, microRNAs that are dysregulated by H19 during cholestasis remain elusive. Using miRNA-sequencing analysis followed by qPCR validation, we identified marked upregulation of eight members of the let-7 family in cholestatic livers by bile duct ligation (BDL) and H19 overexpression. In particular, the expression of let-7a-1/7d/7f-1 was highly induced in H19-BDL livers but decreased in H19KO-BDL livers. Interestingly, H19 decreased the nuclear let-7 precursors as well as the primary transcripts of let-7a-1/7d/7f-1 levels in BDL mouse livers. Bioinformatics, RNA pull-down, and RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP) assays revealed that the crucial RNA-binding protein polypyrimidine tract-binding protein 1 (PTBP1), an H19 interaction partner, interacted with the precursors of let-7a-1 and let-7d and suppressed their maturation. Both PTBP1 and let-7 expression was differentially regulated by different bile acid species in hepatocyte and cholangiocyte cells. Further, H19 negatively regulated PTBP1’s mRNA and protein levels but did not affect its subcellular distribution in BDL mouse livers. Moreover, we found that H19 restrained but PTBP1 facilitated the bioavailability of let-7 miRNAs to their targets. Taken together, this study revealed for the first time that H19 promoted let-7 expression by decreasing PTBP1’s expression level and its binding to the let-7 precursors in cholestasis.
Mechanism of an Arc Fusion Reactor

Arc reactor is the design for compact fusion reactor. In this paper mechanism of an Arc Reactor is discussed which is a multi-isotope radio-decay cell that can be created using Low Energy Nuclear Reactor (LENR) technology which is a low-radiation fusion reactor. Here, Palladium isotope is used as a core and it generates significant amount of power.It also introduces a new portable method to generate power without generating too much heat and heavy radiation.