cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Paediatric Palliative Care in Singapore

Paediatric palliative care is the “Cinderella” of the palliative movement in the world. It is lagging behind adult palliative movement for a variety of reasons. In Singapore, the situation is no different: the adult palliative services are more developed and more accepted by the medical community as well as the public. When it comes to paediatric palliative services, there is a denial of its necessity and a lack of resources and support. However, the winds of change are here and there is currently a formal Paediatric Palliative Care Programme in the only children’s hospital in Singapore, the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital. More funding is in the pipeline and the programme is set to expand. Paediatric palliative care has its own unique challenges and barriers which may make it difficult for adult services to serve paediatric palliative needs. There are many misconceptions about what palliative care is about and what role it should play in paediatric care, even amongst doctors. Hopefully with increasing awareness and better availability of services, and best of all, when the end-users (physicians as well as patient and family) experience the added value of palliative care, there would be better acceptance and utilisation of paediatric palliative services so that it becomes a necessary part of basic holistic health care for children with life-threatening or life-limiting illnesses.
Achieving Peace of Mind: The Benefits of Neurobiology Evidence for Battered Women Defendants

Despite its potential to diminish the culpability of battered women accused of crimes, neurobiology evidence has yet to be meaningfully deployed in the interest of these defendants. This article describes how neurobiology evidence can provide insights into the effects of battering, at both an individual and ecological level. Domestic violence advocates and medical professionals are becoming increasingly conscious of the neurobiological consequences of battering, producing a wellspring of evidence with potential relevance to the battered woman’s case. By distilling this evidence into tangible assertions admissible in myriad legal settings, this article lays a foundation for the integration of neurobiological evidence into the defense of battered women.Breaking rank with contemporary literature on the subject, this article adopts a position of pragmatic acquiescence to the continued use of the embattled battered woman’s syndrome. Unlike previous reforms advanced, neurobiology evidence does not necessitate the creation of new law nor does it entail the recognition of an archetypal battered woman. The evidence works cooperatively with existing defense strategies to provide a holistic account of battering for the purposes of reducing the battered woman defendant’s culpability.Scholarship is sharply divided about the role of neuroscience in the criminal law. Skepticism abounds about the philosophical relevance of neuroscience evidence to the law. The delicate balancing of legal norms reflected in criminal law’s current use of neuroscience is placed in a distinctly new light when viewed from the perspective of a battered woman’s legal defense.
Tell me Dave

It is important for a robot to be able to interpret natural language commands given by a human. In this paper, we consider performing a sequence of mobile manipulation tasks with instructions described in natural language. Given a new environment, even a simple task such as boiling water would be performed quite differently depending on the presence, location and state of the objects. We start by collecting a dataset of task descriptions in free-form natural language and the corresponding grounded task-logs of the tasks performed in an online robot simulator. We then build a library of verb-environment instructions that represents the possible instructions for each verb in that environment, these may or may not be valid for a different environment and task context. We present a model that takes into account the variations in natural language and ambiguities in grounding them to robotic instructions with appropriate environment context and task constraints. Our model also handles incomplete or noisy natural language instructions. It is based on an energy function that encodes such properties in a form isomorphic to a conditional random field. We evaluate our model on tasks given in a robotic simulator and show that it successfully outperforms the state of the art with 61.8% accuracy. We also demonstrate a grounded robotic instruction sequence on a PR2 robot using the Learning from Demonstration approach.
Single-cell cDNA libraries

Publisher Summary A set of genes expressed by a living being confer developmental and functional specificity and show the physical characteristics reflected as phenotypes. Most methods for expression analysis at the transcript level are designed for evaluating one or at most a few genes per experiment. Alternatively, the information represented by all of the cellular transcripts can be captured as a library of complementary DNA (cDNA) molecules. This method offers a means to simultaneously assess all the range of genes expressed in a given biological sample. This chapter discusses about these cDNA libraries. Such a library of expressed genes conveys the identity and level of expression for each gene transcript in a given population of cells. This chapter thus reflects the "transcriptome", the dynamic link between the genome and the proteome. cDNA libraries have proven useful for a variety of applications. These applications include the identification of tissue-specific genes, differential gene expression studies, and the discovery of homologous genes between species. Generally, a high-quality cDNA library will faithfully represent the sequence, size, and complexity of the original mRNA population. At the end, the chapter explores certain alternate methods including homopolymer tailing and heat shock transformation.
Prevalence and features of colorectal lesions among Hispanics: A hospital-based study.

AIM: To evaluate the prevalence and characteristics of colorectal adenoma and carcinoma in an inner city Hispanic population. METHODS: We reviewed the reports of 1628 Hispanic patients who underwent colonoscopy at Howard University from 2000 to 2010. Advanced adenoma was defined as adenoma ≥ 1 cm in size, adenomas with villous histology, high grade dysplasia and/or invasive cancer. Statistical analysis was performed using χ2 statistics and t-test. RESULTS: The median age of the patients was 54 years, 64.2% were females. Polyps were observed in 489 (30.0%) of patients. Adenoma prevalence was 16.8% (n = 273), advanced adenoma 2.4% (n = 39), and colorectal cancer 0.4% (n = 7). Hyperplastic polyps were seen in 6.6% of the cohort (n = 107). Adenomas predominantly exhibited a proximal colonic distribution (53.7%, n = 144); while hyperplastic polyps were mostly located in the distal colon (70%, n = 75). Among 11.7% (n = 191) patients who underwent screening colonoscopy, the prevalence of colorectal lesions was 21.4% adenoma, 2.6% advanced adenoma; and 8.3% hyperplastic polyps. CONCLUSION: Our data showed low colorectal cancer prevalence among Hispanics in the Washington DC area. However, the pre-neoplastic pattern of colonic lesions in Hispanics likely points toward a shift in this population that needs to be monitored closely through large epidemiological studies.
Conceptual Wiki Page Simulation

This paper describes the preliminary development stages of an agent-based model (ABM) used to understand and anticipate changes to Wiki pages. A discrete space approach was used to structure the model. Letters from words in the wiki were represented as agents which could be changed, deleted, or added based on rates derived from wiki page histories. A C# pre-processor, called Wiki-Hist-Heist, was developed to facilitate analysis of existing wiki page histories and provide model inputs based on detected patterns and resulting distributions. The conceptual version of the Wiki Page ABM was built using AnyLogic. It provided a framework for user-friendly features which allow easy changes to inputs so a variety of pages and scenarios can be modelled. Additionally, this project illustrated the usefulness of ABM in this domain. Limitations and future study directions are included.
CPU ray tracing large particle data with balanced P-k-d trees

We present a novel approach to rendering large particle data sets from molecular dynamics, astrophysics and other sources. We employ a new data structure adapted from the original balanced k-d tree, which allows for representation of data with trivial or no overhead. In the OSPRay visualization framework, we have developed an efficient CPU algorithm for traversing, classifying and ray tracing these data. Our approach is able to render up to billions of particles on a typical workstation, purely on the CPU, without any approximations or level-of-detail techniques, and optionally with attribute-based color mapping, dynamic range query, and advanced lighting models such as ambient occlusion and path tracing.
Diagrams of Countercultural Architecture

ABSTRACTThe concept of the “diagram” has been promoted since the 1990s as an advanced mode of designing and thinking about design. This article proposes that the diagram helps us understand a different architectural moment wrestling with the convergence of overwhelming political, technical, and philosophical challenges: that of the pioneering ecological scene associated with 1960s counterculture in the United States. This approach is helpful in understanding the countercultural “mind” and the way in which it understood the ecological and ontological relationships between design, place, nature, the social, and the whole. The overreaching ambitions of countercultural architecture stand in contrast to the narrowing of architecture's agendas since the 1960s, and it reminds us that architecture is hermeneutic—that it is a way of interpreting the world. Readers of the books and magazines in which these diagrams were published were likely inexpert, forming their ideas about the very means and ends of design. The...
An Application of Psychological Learning Theory to Advertising

THE primary purpose of any advertising is to sell something, be it an idea, a service, or a product. However, as a result of the complexity of measuring the sales effectiveness of an advertisement, most advertisers and their agencies take a secondary course and are concerned with the memory or impression impact of the advertising. Possibly they hypothesize that if advertising is to sell, it must communicate, and the ad that "communicates best" is the one that will produce the greatest memory impression, both quantitatively and qualitatively. An assumption is that the memory production of an advertisement is related to its sales effectiveness. Until data are obtained to the con-
Stereoselective Synthesis of PSI-352938: A β-d-2′-Deoxy-2′-α-fluoro-2′-β-C-methyl-3′,5′-cyclic Phosphate Nucleotide Prodrug for the Treatment of HCV

PSI-352938 is a novel 2′-deoxy-2′-α-fluoro-2′-β-C-methyl 3′,5′-cyclic phosphate nucleotide prodrug currently under investigation for the treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. PSI-352938 demonstrated superior characteristics in vitro that include broad genotype coverage, superior resistance profile, and high levels of active triphosphate in vivo in the liver compared to our first and second generation nucleoside inhibitors of this class. Consequently, PSI-352938 was selected for further development and an efficient and scalable synthesis was sought to support clinical development. We report an improved, diastereoselective synthesis of a key 1′-β-nucleoside intermediate 13 via SN2 displacement of 1-α-bromo ribofuranose sugar 16 with the potassium salt of 6-chloro-2-amino purine and an efficient method to prepare cis-Rp cyclic phosphate (PSI-352938) in a highly stereoselective manner without any chromatographic purification. The 1-α-bromo sugar 16 was stereospecifically prepared from the correspond...
Abstract 4754: A humanized, high affinity anti-CCR4 antibody for immunotherapy of cutaneous T cell lymphoma and characterization on T cell function.

Cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL) is a heterogeneous group of neoplastic disorders characterized by clonally derived and skin-homing malignant T cells that express high level of chemokine receptor CCR4, which is associated with their skin-homing capacity. CCR4 is also highly expressed on T-regulatory cells (Tregs) that can migrate to several different types of chemotactic ligand CCL17- and CCL22-secreting tumors to facilitate tumor cell evasion from immune surveillance. Thus, its high-level expression on CTCL cells and Tregs makes CCR4 a potential ideal target for antibody-based immunotherapy for CTCL and other types of solid tumors. Here, a humanized and affinity optimized anti-CCR4 monoclonal antibody (mAb), mAb2-3, was evaluated. In vitro mechanism studies demonstrated that the potent in vivo anti-tumor effects of this humanized anti-CCR4 mAb could be attributed to antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC), complement mediated cytotoxicity (CDC) and antibody dependent cellular phagocytosis (ADCP). In a mouse CTCL tumor model, anti-CCR4 mAb exhibited an antitumor effect by mediating cellular cytotoxicity through CDC and ADCC via FcγRIIIa expressed murine neutrophils and human nature killer (NK) cells. Moreover, this anti-CCR4 mAb also effectively inhibits chemotaxis of CD4+CD25high Tregs via CCL22 and abrogates Treg suppression activity in vitro by restoring the proliferation of CD4+CD25− effector T cells (Teffs). Taken together, this high-affinity humanized mAb2-3 with potent antitumor effect and a broad range of mechanisms of action on immunity may provide a novel immunotherapy for CTCL and other solid tumors. Citation Format: DeKuan Chang, Thomas Han, Rachael A. Clark, Quan Zhu, Thomas S. Kupper, Wayne A. Marasco. A humanized, high affinity anti-CCR4 antibody for immunotherapy of cutaneous T cell lymphoma and characterization on T cell function. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2013 Apr 6-10; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2013;73(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 4754. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2013-4754
Development and Validation of a Clinical Trial Accrual Predictive Regression Model at a Single NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center

Background Clinical study sites often do not achieve anticipated accrual to clinical trials, wasting critical patient, material, and human resources. The expensive and extensive process to bring a drug to approval highlights the need to streamline clinical pipeline processes. We sought to create a predictive accrual model to be used when considering clinical trial activation at the level of the individual site. Materials and methods This retrospective cohort study used 7 years of registry data from treatment and supportive care interventional studies at a single academic cancer center to build a negative binomial regression model with local and protocol variables known prestudy. Actual, team-predicted, and model-predicted accrual and sensitivity/specificity were calculated. Results To build the model, 207 trials were used. Investigational drug application, disease team, number of national sites, local Institutional Review Board use, total national accrual time, accrual completed, and national enrollment goal were independently and significantly associated with accrual. Predicted accrual was 94% of actual, maintaining predictive value at multiple cutoff values. Validation included 61 trials. The model correctly predicted whether a study would accrue at least 4 subjects 75% of the time. Correlation at the category level was 44.3%, and model sensitivity and specificity are 70% and 78%, respectively. Conclusions We identified and validated national and local key factors associated with accrual at our site. This methodology has not been previously validated broadly with the intent of trial feasibility. Model validation shows it to be an accurate and quick metric in anticipating accrual success that can be used for resource allocation.
Development of a nurse-provided health system strategy for diabetic foot care.

A nurse-provided university health system diabetic foot screening/education/treatment program evaluated 403 patients in the initial 12 months of development. All patients were provided individualized foot-specific patient education, varying in intensity with the magnitude of their risk status. One hundred and forty-five (36%) were categorized as being at risk for the development of a diabetic foot ulcer. Improper footwear capable of producing foot ulceration was recorded in 268 (66.5%) of the enrollees. Seven patients with previously undiagnosed Charcot foot disorder were identified. Eighty-three of the enrollees were seen at least once in follow-up. Sixty-one (73%) used improper footwear at the initial evaluation, which was decreased to 36 (43%) at the first follow-up visit.Nurse-provided foot-specific diabetic screening and education, combined with protective footwear, has been shown to be a cost- and resource-effective method of decreasing the rate of diabetic foot ulcers, and the risk for eventual low...
Catching a virus in a molecular net

A metal-organic molecular net composed of tannic acid (TA) and iron(iii) was constructed around the brome mosaic virus (BMV) particle to determine whether the added net could act as a transport barrier for water, and if the net could stabilize the virus in physically or chemically challenging environments. This new virus engineering strategy is expected to provide benefits both in the study and technological applications of viruses. For instance, a virus wrapped in a thin molecular layer could be extracted from solution either in air or vacuum, and its structure, composition and even internal dynamics could be interrogated by methods not compatible with a liquid environment. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) studies of Fe(iii)-TA coated BMV in liquid and in air supported a marked resistance to dehydration when compared to wtBMV. Native charge detection mass spectrometry (CDMS), was employed to estimate the number of molecules in the molecular net which wrapped the virus. The CDMS data suggested that less than one molecular monolayer wrapped the virus. Additionally, it was found, that this very thin molecular coat was sufficient to render the coated viruses resistant to storage conditions that typically lead to virus disassembly over time. A temporary coat imparting increased resistance to disassembly could be useful in adding time delay control or alleviate required storage conditions of engineered viruses for therapeutic purposes.
Embracing the Insulin Revolution in the Ambulatory Care Setting

IN BRIEF Recent additions of various new formulations of insulin to the U.S. marketplace have increased the number of treatment options available to people living with diabetes. However, it is important to take into consideration the implications of these new insulins in terms of patient safety and medication errors, integration with electronic medical records, and financial considerations. This review outlines several considerations for practitioners regarding the implications of these new insulin products for ambulatory care practice.
Stress, Depression, and Occupational Injury among Migrant Farmworkers in Nebraska

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States. Farmworkers, including migrant farmworkers, are at risk for work-related injuries. This study explores the association between stress, depression, and occupational injury among migrant farmworkers in Nebraska. Occupational injury was hypothesized to significantly increase the odds of farmworkers being stressed and depressed. Two hundred migrant farmworkers (mean age = 33.5 years, standard deviation (SD) = 12.53; 93.0% men, 92.9% of Mexican descent) were interviewed. In bivariate analyses, results indicated that stress and depression were positively associated with occupational injury. Two logistic regression models were developed. Occupational injury was a significant factor for depression, but not for stress. Participants who had been injured on the job were over seven times more likely to be depressed. These results highlight the interconnection between the work environment and mental health. More must be done to foster well-being in rural, agricultural communities. Improving occupational health and safety information and training, integrating behavioral health services into primary care settings, and strengthening the protections of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act may improve conditions for migrant farmworkers in the rural Midwest.
Imputing rare variants in families using a two-stage approach.

Recent focus on studying rare variants makes imputation accuracy of rare variants an important issue. Many approaches have been proposed to increase imputation accuracy among rare variants, from reference panel selection to combinations of existing methods to multistage analyses. We aimed to bring the strengths of these new approaches together with our proposed two-stage imputation for family data. Our imputation methods were tested on the region from 46.75Mb to 49.25Mb on chromosome 3. We did quality control based on the proportion of missing genotypes per variant and individual, leaving 495 individuals with 761 genome-wide association studies (GWAS) variants only, 45 with 14,077 sequence variants only, and 419 with both GWAS and sequencing data. All data were prephased using SHAPEIT2 with a duo hidden Markov model algorithm prior to performing imputation. Imputations were performed 100 times, each time masking the sequence data for 1 individual and imputing it from the GWAS data. We used well-imputed genotypes, defined as a probability of greater than 0.9, above 2 different minor allele frequency cutoffs—0.01 and 0.05—from Impute2 as input for Merlin, and compared these results to Impute2 and Merlin separately. The imputed results were evaluated using correlation measurement and the imputation quality score. Our method improved imputation accuracy, measured by imputation quality score, for variants with minor allele frequency between 0.01 and 0.40, but failed to improve accuracy for variants with minor allele frequency less than 0.01 when we used a minor allele frequency cutoff of 0.01 for the Impute2 results. In contrast, our 2-stage approach with a minor allele frequency cutoff of 0.05 performed the worst of all methods for variants with minor allele frequency between 0.01 and 0.40. This method gave promising results, but may be further improved by changing the inclusion criteria of Impute2 variants. More analyses are needed on a larger region with different inclusion thresholds to assess the accuracy of this approach.
Design and optimization of next-generation wireless networks

A novel paradigm of communication, multi-hop wireless networks, have recently emerged both as a promising and cost-effective architecture to meet the ever-growing demands and expectations of the users. In these class of networks, a collection of wireless nodes dynamically establish and maintain connectivity among themselves, thus, enabling users and nodes to seamlessly internetwork in areas with a little or no communication infrastructure. In spite of the multiple aspects of advantages, however, research efforts have shown that when nodes are randomly or arbitrarily placed in a 2-D region, the capacity available to each source-destination pair becomes vanishingly small, as number of nodes grows to a large level. Motivated by such an issue, in this dissertation we are concerned with the problem of optimizing the capacity of multi-hop wireless networks. First, we propose to use a combination of cooperative communications and multiple channels, which together has great potential to evade various issues that limits the capacity of wireless networks. Further, using the insights of the proposed approach, we design a channel allocation protocol at the MAC layer for wireless networks employing cooperative communications. We also construct an analytical model to optimize the parameters used in the MAC protocol design. Second, we study the performance improvement in a multi-hop wireless network by coupling it with the coverage and capacity of infrastructure networks, referred to as hybrid wireless networks. In doing so, we point out severe flaws in the existing research efforts and design a simple and practical power-aware routing policy, that can adapt to the operating environment, for hybrid wireless networks. In comparison to existing works, we clearly show the gain one could obtain on delay as well as on capacity in executing our design. Lastly, we propose to use transmission power of nodes to increase the amount of information sent across each wireless link. While prior solutions rely on minimum transmission power to improve spatial reuse or lifetime of nodes, we look at the power problem from a different perspective and show that one can obtain a significant gain in capacity by judiciously enhancing the power in a multi-channel multi-hop wireless network. To prove this interesting result, we essentially introduce the novel concept of a co-channel enlarging effect and then quantify the maximum power at which nodes can communicate on a given channel, without causing harmful interference to other simultaneously communicating pairs. We conclude this dissertation by identifying open issues that need further investigation.
Patient experience and process measures of quality of care at home health agencies: Factors associated with high performance

We examined the effects of provider characteristics on home health agency performance on patient experience of care (Home Health CAHPS) and process (OASIS) measures. Descriptive, multivariate, and factor analyses were used. While agencies score high on both domains, factor analyses showed that the underlying items represent separate constructs. Freestanding and Visiting Nurse Association agencies, higher number of home health aides per 100 episodes, and urban location were statistically significant predictors of lower performance. Lack of variation in composite measures potentially led to counterintuitive results for effects of organizational characteristics. This exploratory study showed the value of having separate quality domains.
Efforts towards erasing borders in gynecologic cancer

•Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women in LMIC.•Major efforts to improve research in gynecologic cancer in LMIC are needed.•GOR provides a platform featuring research and review of cancer care in LMIC.
Improving virtual screening predictive accuracy of Human kallikrein 5 inhibitors using machine learning models.

Abstract The readily available high throughput screening (HTS) data from the PubChem database provides an opportunity for mining of small molecules in a variety of biological systems using machine learning techniques. From the thousands of available molecular descriptors developed to encode useful chemical information representing the characteristics of molecules, descriptor selection is an essential step in building an optimal quantitative structural-activity relationship (QSAR) model. For the development of a systematic descriptor selection strategy, we need the understanding of the relationship between: (i) the descriptor selection; (ii) the choice of the machine learning model; and (iii) the characteristics of the target bio-molecule. In this work, we employed the Signature descriptor to generate a dataset on the Human kallikrein 5 (hK 5) inhibition confirmatory assay data and compared multiple classification models including logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest and k-nearest neighbor. Under optimal conditions, the logistic regression model provided extremely high overall accuracy (98%) and precision (90%), with good sensitivity (65%) in the cross validation test. In testing the primary HTS screening data with more than 200 K molecular structures, the logistic regression model exhibited the capability of eliminating more than 99.9% of the inactive structures. As part of our exploration of the descriptor-model-target relationship, the excellent predictive performance of the combination of the Signature descriptor and the logistic regression model on the assay data of the Human kallikrein 5 (hK 5) target suggested a feasible descriptor/model selection strategy on similar targets.
The MUC5B promoter polymorphism and telomere length in patients with chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis: an observational cohort-control study

Summary Background Patients with hypersensitivity pneumonitis are at risk of developing pulmonary fibrosis, which is associated with reduced survival. In families with multiple affected members, individuals might be diagnosed as having idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) or chronic (fibrotic) hypersensitivity pneumonitis, which suggests these disorders share risk factors. We aimed to test whether the genomic risk factors associated with the development and progression of IPF are also associated with the development of fibrosis and reduced survival in people with chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis. Methods We did an observational study of two independent cohorts of patients with chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis, one from the University of California San Francisco, CA, USA (UCSF), and one from the University of Texas Southwestern, TX, USA (UTSW). We measured two common single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with IPF ( MUC5B rs35705950 and TOLLIP rs5743890) and telomere length in peripheral blood leucocytes, and assessed their associations with chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis risk, survival, and clinical, radiographic, and pathological features. We compared findings with those in patients with IPF from the UCSF and UTSW cohorts, and healthy controls from the European population of the 1000 Genomes Project Phase 3, version 1. Findings The cohorts included 145 patients from UCSF and 72 from UTSW. The minor allele frequency (MAF) was greater for MUC5B rs35705950 in patients with chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis than in healthy controls (24·4% in UCSF and 32·3% in UTSW vs 10·7%, both p TOLLIP rs5743890. The MAFs were similar to those for IPF (UCSF 33·3%, p=0·09; UTSW 32·0%, p=0·95). In the combined UCSF and UTSW chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis cohort, we saw associations between extent of radiographic fibrosis and MUC5B rs35705950 minor alleles (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 1·91, 95% CI 1·02–3·59, p=0·045) and short telomere length (adjusted OR per unit change in mean natural logarithm-transformed ratio of telomere repeat copy number to single gene copy number 0·23, 0·09–0·59, p=0·002). Telomere length less than the tenth percentile for age was also significantly associated with reduced survival (log-rank p=0·006). Interpretation The associations between MUC5B rs35705950 and short telomere length with extent of fibrosis, histopathological features of usual interstitial pneumonia, and reduced survival in patients with chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis suggest shared pathobiology with IPF, and might help to stratify risk. Funding National Institutes of Health and Nina Ireland Program for Lung Health.
A Comparison of Two Insect Collection Techniques in Oiled and Non-Oiled Salt Marshes in Louisiana

Insects are important components in coastal marsh ecosystems and can be used as an indicator of marsh health. Collections of insects in coastal marshes are usually made using either sweep nets or insect vacuums. Differences in these 2 methods have not been compared within the marsh ecosystem. Therefore, we compared collections made using these methods in oiled and non-oiled marshes along multiple transects on the Louisiana coast. We found that sweep net collections accounted for 5.9 times more individual arthropods and more total insect taxa when compared with the insect vacuum collections. Oiled marshes had greater total insect richness but similar abundance and average richness as non-oiled sites; however, we found some changes in insect community composition between sites. These results indicate that sweep net collections are an effective means to sample insects in marsh environments and that oil intrusion can lead to changes in arthropod community structure in coastal marshes.
Performance of wells score to predict deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism in endurance athletes

ABSTRACTIntroduction: There are an increasing number of reports describing deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and/or pulmonary embolism (PE) in otherwise healthy endurance athletes. The Wells score is the most commonly used clinical prediction rule to diagnose DVT/PE in clinical populations. However, the Wells score may have limited utility for recognition of DVT/PE in athletes, contributing to missed or delayed diagnosis.Objective: We performed an analysis of the ability of the Wells score to identify DVT/PE events in athletes through a review of published case reports.Methods: A systematic search of the literature yielded 11 case reports.Results: The Wells score had a 100% failure rate in identifying athletes with DVT (0/6) and PE (0/5), resulting in a delayed diagnosis for DVT of 20 ± 14 days. Retrospectively removing ‘differential diagnosis’ from the clinical prediction rule for DVT changed the Wells score median from 0 (range: −1 to 0) to 2 (range: 1 to 2); the threshold for predicting DVT as ‘likely’. There...
Ischemic Conditioning Attenuates Platelet-Mediated Thrombosis: A Tale of Reverse Translation.

Data obtained in both preclinical models and humans have revealed that the favorable cardiac consequences of ischemic conditioning extend beyond a direct effect on the cardiomyocyte. In the current...
Embedded plasmonic nanoantennas for enhanced diamond NV-spin readout

The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color center in diamond has been widely investigated for applications spanning from quantum information processing to nanoscale sensing [1]. Central to its utility is its combination of a long-lived electronic spin state with optical initialization and readout. However, the fidelity of room-temperature NV spin readout is limited, due to the low rate of detected spin-correlated fluorescence photons [2]. Plasmonic nanostructures are a natural fit for increasing the detected fluorescence rate as they can offer directional emission simultaneously with high Purcell enhancement across the broad NV spectrum [3], which has not been demonstrated in NV-coupled dielectric nanostructures [4]. In this work, we optimize and fabricate embedded plasmonic nanoantennas (Figure 1a) consisting of a diamond ridge capped and surrounded by silver with an internal silver bowtie. This design achieves high electric field intensity in the central gap (Figure 1b) as well as high directivity (Figure 1c), and as a result produces a high Purcell factor — collection efficiency product across a large spectral band (Figure 1d). The resulting embedded nanoantennas (Figures 1e, 1f) have a simulated far-field detected photon rate figure of merit of 17.5 integrated across the NV spectrum. This improves upon the state-of-the-art [3] by an order of magnitude, and represents a step towards single-shot NV electron spin readout at room temperature.
Between autonomy and control: Strategies of arbitrage in the “on-demand” economy:

The “on-demand” economy is built upon company strategies of arbitrage between worker autonomy and worker control. Using ethnographic and interview data, I show how these strategies undermine the ec...
Peri-procedural antibiotic prophylaxis in ventricular septal defect: a case study to re-visit guidelines

The current American Heart Association (AHA)/American College of Cardiology (ACC) guidelines do not recommend antibiotic prophylaxis for infective endocarditis (IE) in patients with acyanotic congenital valvular heart disease due to lack of any proven benefit and potential harm associated with antibiotics. As recognized by the guidelines, some acyanotic congenital heart disease, such as ventricular septal defects (VSDs), are associated with a high velocity jet and pose a greater risk of peri-procedural endocarditis. We suggest that an acyanotic congenital heart disease with high velocity jet should be considered for antibiotic prophylaxis for IE.
Secure Attachment to God Uniquely Linked to Psychological Health in a National, Random Sample of American Adults

Relationships between religiousness and psychological health are well established. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate whether perceived relationship with God (i.e., attachment to ...
A Boundary Layer Problem in Power Law Fluids through a Moving Flat Plate

The paper studies the bifurcation solutions for laminar flows governed by a third order nonlinear similarity equation (|f′′(η)| N−1 f′′(η))′+f(η)f′′(η)=0.
Alcoholism and Drug Use

Billions of people around the world drink alcoholic beverages of one type or another. For most, drinking does not constitute a problem. What are the criteria for alcoholism or, as some professionals prefer, “problem drinking?” Robert Straus argues that problem drinking is the broader term and includes alcoholism. He defines as problem drinkers persons who repeatedly use alcohol in amounts greater than “customary dietary use or prevailing socially acceptable customs”; or in amounts that lead to health problems, interfere with everyday relationships with others, or hamper fulfilling family, economic, and community expectations.1 The core of this definition has to do with use that is excessive in terms of prevailing customs or injuries to health or disruption of role relationships.
Local ellipticity of F and regularity of F minimizing currents

Local convex ellipticity of a parametric integrand F at a given point in space and given tangent plane direction is defined. Using this definition, the same type of local regularity is proved for F-minimizing currents near points whose tangent planes are directions at which F is convexly elliptic, as holds for currents minimizing a globally elliptic integrand. Various notions of ellipticity are discussed. Finally, some examples are given of physically interesting parametric integrands that are only locally elliptic, and a conjecture is made as to the overall structure of surfaces minimizing the integrals of such integrands.
Art Therapy, Community Building, Activism, and Outcomes

This article is a descriptive study of two groups who came together through service-learning: The first group is graduate art therapy students enrolled in a research class, who partnered with six community agencies to help them prepare assignments for undergraduate service-learning students in a subsequent semester. The art therapy research students also assisted the agencies with program evaluation. The second group is the six directors of the community agencies who were preparing for service-learning students enrolled in an art history class titled Art as A Social Practice. Service-learning is an experiential pedagogy where community service is integrated into an academic course, and where the services performed meet genuine community needs. The hyphen in service-learning represents the ideal that both the students and community agencies experience benefits from the relationship, although in reality, it is often the experiences of the students rather than the agencies that receive greater attention in the scholarly research literature. The present article places focus on the community agencies that, in the process of planning for service-learners, made two unexpected requests: First they requested that the service-learners stay longer than one semester, and secondly, they requested assistance with evaluating the effectiveness of their programs. This article is about the efforts to respond to these requests through the assistance of art therapy research students. With growing trends in community-based art therapy practice, greater attention to the community agencies where art therapists work is necessary and valuable to art therapy preparation. The present article describes six distinctive communities, illustrating new frontiers of practice. The research students' experiences and the experiences of the community partners were assessed using qualitative methods that included pre and post-questionnaires, written reflections of students, interviews of agency directors and agency, student, and researcher focus group transcripts. This study will inform other art therapy programs who may want to use a service-learning approach to teaching research. A discussion of the promising practices of service-learning and research, as well as the challenges leads to recommendations for art therapy education.
The influence of exercise training dose on fasting acylated ghrelin concentration in older women.

This study investigated if exercise dose affected acylated ghrelin response to exercise training, and how body weight or fat mass changes might affect the responses. Non-obese older women (n = 49) were randomly assigned to 4-month moderate-intensity aerobic exercise of one of two doses (8 or 14 kcal kg−1 body weight weekly). Following exercise training, fasting acylated ghrelin concentrations changed differently between the two groups (p for group × time interaction = 0.050). It decreased in the moderate-dose (Cohen’s d = 0.52, p = 0.019), but did not change in the low-dose exercise group. Adjustment for weight or fat changes did not affect these results. Therefore, exercise training dose can have specific effects on acylated ghrelin that are not dependent on weight or fat loss. However, whether the different acylated ghrelin changes are associated with differing degree of subsequent weight maintenance worth further investigation.
Bribery in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Mediating Effects of Institutional Development and Trust:

The issue of bribery raises questions about the implications of institutional development and trust in the raw material industry. This paper uses theories of institutionalism and trust to explore p...
Theory of a Planckian Metal

We present a lattice model of fermions with N flavors and random interactions that describes a Planckian metal at low temperatures T→0 in the solvable limit of large N. We begin with quasiparticles around a Fermi surface with effective mass m^{*} and then include random interactions that lead to fermion spectral functions with frequency scaling with k_{B}T/ℏ. The resistivity ρ obeys the Drude formula ρ=m^{*}/(ne^{2}τ_{tr}), where n is the density of fermions, and the transport scattering rate is 1/τ_{tr}=fk_{B}T/ℏ; we find f of order unity and essentially independent of the strength and form of the interactions. The random interactions are a generalization of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models; it is assumed that processes nonresonant in the bare quasiparticle energies only renormalize m^{*}, while resonant processes are shown to produce the Planckian behavior.
What if 2c and 3c are Integers

(1976). What if 2c and 3c are Integers? The American Mathematical Monthly: Vol. 83, No. 6, pp. 473-473.
Medication Status and Gait Mechanics in Older Adults: A Multivariate Analysis

Background and purpose Falls are the leading cause of unintentional deaths in older adults, with nearly one-third of adults older than 65 years falling annually. Previous work reveals that both medication status and gait changes are contributing factors to falls in older adults; however, it is unknown how these factors interact. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to examine differences between gait biomechanics as a function of medication status in individuals older than 60 years with a self-reported history of falling. It was hypothesized that differences in gait mechanics would be observed as a function of the number of medications in these individuals. Methods A total of 384 participants, age, mean (SD) = 73.2 (4.2) years; height, mean (SD) = 173.09 (16.4) cm; mass, mean (SD) = 65.45 (5.78) kg, were recruited from across the Southwest United States (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California) by the Electronic Caregiver Mobile Fall Risk Assessment Laboratory. Data for cadence, gait velocity, stride length, swing time, and double-support time were collected using a Walkway gait analysis system. Factor analysis was employed to determine whether the gait characteristics were similar to those observed in previous studies. A multivariate analysis with a follow-up univariate analysis was employed to determine group differences in gait factors and variables according to medication number (≥4 medications, n = 262 vs ≤3 medications, n = 122). Results Results of the factor analysis reveal that the data analyzed in the current study are similar to those observed in previous studies, with cadence (factor loading coefficient [FLC] = 0.745), gait velocity (FLC = 0.922), stride length (FLC = 0.789 for left and 0.790 for right) loading positively on a "pace" factor, swing time (FLC = 0.728 for right and 0.683 for left), and double-support time (FLC= 0.723) loading positively on a "rhythm" factor. The results of the multivariate analysis of variance revealed differences in gait factors across groups according to medication status. Univariate follow-up tests reveal that double-support time is longer and stride length is shorter in persons taking 4 or more medications as compared with those on 3 or fewer medications. Conclusion The findings of this study indicate that certain abnormal gait parameters in participants with a history of falls are associated with taking 4 or more medications. Future studies should examine the extent to which gait changes and medications interact to predict falls.
Linear Quadratic Regulator Controller to Improve Transient Frequency Stability Through Virtual Inertia

The increased penetration of photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy resources has raised awareness to the maintenance of the future grid's stability and reliability. One emerging issue is the susceptibility to frequency instability when facing substantial generation-load imbalances due to decrease in rotational inertia of the grid. As a possible solution for frequency instability issues, virtual inertia (VI) is implemented using energy storage systems (ESSs). It is shown that, through a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) controller, frequency change and the rate of change of frequency (ROCOF) of a system are optimally reduced. The designed LQR controller is further tested for the system with decreased inertia and it is able to maintain frequency change for up to 90% of decreased inertia and ROCOF only for up to 10% within the standards. The ROCOF was found to be more sensitive to decreased inertia than change in frequency, which suggests the use of an adaptive controller, instead of a fixed gain LQR controller, in the presence of significant parametric changes.