cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Counter-current distribution procedure for the quantitative-qualitative analysis of small amounts of urinary corticosteroids.

Introduction THE present paper is an extension of previous work on procedures for the qualitative-quantitative analysis of small samples of urinary steroids of adrenocortical and gonadal origin (1). It involves the use of countercurrent distribution discussed by Craig (2). The amount of thiosemicarbazide reactive material present is estimated by means of the thiosemicarbazide reaction which Evans and Gillam have shown to be useful for the detection of alpha-beta unsaturated ketones (3). ANALYTIC PROCEDURE 1. Reagents and apparatus: Thiosemicarbazide reagent (Eastman Kodak Company). A 0.1 molar thiosemicarbazide solution in 0.1 molar hydrochloric acid is prepared and filtered into a glass-stoppered bottle. It is stable at room temperature for several months. Ethanol, absolute (U. S. Industrial Chemicals Company) Chloroform, reagent grade. Sodium hydroxide, 0.1 N solution. Secondary butyl alcohol (Eastman Kodak Company, highest purity), redistilled in an all-glass apparatus. Iso-octane (2,2,4-trimethylpenta...
Shedding Light on Nanomedicine

Light is an electromagnetic radiation that can convert its energy into different forms (e.g., heat, chemical energy, and acoustic waves). This property has been exploited in phototherapy (e.g., photothermal therapy and photodynamic therapy (PDT)) and optical imaging (e.g., fluorescence imaging) for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. Light-controlled therapies can provide minimally- or noninvasive spatiotemporal control as well as deep tissue penetration. Nanotechnology provides numerous advantages, including selective targeting of tissues, prolongation of therapeutic effect, protection of active payloads, and improved therapeutic indices. This review explores the advances that nanotechnology can bring to light-based therapies and diagnostics, and vice versa, including photo-triggered systems, nanoparticles containing photoactive molecules, and nanoparticles that are themselves photoactive. Limitations of light-based therapies such as photic injury and phototoxicity are discussed.
Exploratory Visualization of Surgical Training Databases for Improving Skill Acquisition

A new visualization system analyzes multidimensional surgical performance databases of information collected via emerging surgical robot and simulator technologies. In particular, it has visualized force, position, rotation, and synchronized video data from 300 bimanual laparoscopic surgery tasks performed by more than 50 surgeons. To explore data, the system uses a multiple-coordinated-views framework. It provides techniques to select and filter multivariate time series data, visualize animated force plots in conjunction with contextual videos, encode multivariate bimanual tool trace data in 3D visualizations, and link visualizations to a database management system via a new generalizable data model. Insights and feedback from an interdisciplinary iterative design process and use case studies support the utility of visualization in this emerging area of data-driven surgical training.
Diversity in Chemotaxis Mechanisms among the Bacteria and Archaea

The study of chemotaxis describes the cellular processes that control the movement of organisms toward favorable environments. In bacteria and archaea, motility is controlled by a two-component system involving a histidine kinase that senses the environment and a response regulator, a very common type of signal transduction in prokaryotes. Most insights into the processes involved have come from studies of Escherichia coli over the last three decades. However, in the last 10 years, with the sequencing of many prokaryotic genomes, it has become clear that E. coli represents a streamlined example of bacterial chemotaxis. While general features of excitation remain conserved among bacteria and archaea, specific features, such as adaptational processes and hydrolysis of the intracellular signal CheY-P, are quite diverse. The Bacillus subtilis chemotaxis system is considerably more complex and appears to be similar to the one that existed when the bacteria and archaea separated during evolution, so that understanding this mechanism should provide insight into the variety of mechanisms used today by the broad sweep of chemotactic bacteria and archaea. However, processes even beyond those used in E. coli and B. subtilis have been discovered in other organisms. This review emphasizes those used by B. subtilis and these other organisms but also gives an account of the mechanism in E. coli.
Scribe: a large-scale and decentralized application-level multicast infrastructure

This paper presents Scribe, a scalable application-level multicast infrastructure. Scribe supports large numbers of groups, with a potentially large number of members per group. Scribe is built on top of Pastry, a generic peer-to-peer object location and routing substrate overlayed on the Internet, and leverages Pastry's reliability, self-organization, and locality properties. Pastry is used to create and manage groups and to build efficient multicast trees for the dissemination of messages to each group. Scribe provides best-effort reliability guarantees, and we outline how an application can extend Scribe to provide stronger reliability. Simulation results, based on a realistic network topology model, show that Scribe scales across a wide range of groups and group sizes. Also, it balances the load on the nodes while achieving acceptable delay and link stress when compared with Internet protocol multicast.
The influence of climate on the tectonic evolution of mountain belts.

Simple physical arguments, analogue experiments and numerical experiments all suggest that the internal dynamics of actively deforming collisional mountain ranges are influenced by climate. However, obtaining definitive field evidence of a significant impact of climate on mountain building has proved challenging. Spatial correlations between intense precipitation or glaciation and zones of rapid rock-uplift have indeed been documented in numerous mountain ranges, and are consistent with model predictions. More compelling evidence — such as tectonic changes in response to (rather than just coincident with) climate change — has, however, rarely been documented. Triggered by a climate-driven increase in erosion rate, friction-dominated mountain ranges are expected to show a number of simultaneous responses: a decrease in the width of the range, a temporary increase in sediment yield, a persistent increase in the rate of rock uplift and a reduction in the subsidence rate of surrounding basins. The most convincing field evidence for such a coordinated response of a mountain range to climate change comes from the European Alps and the St Elias range of Alaska. Field studies and experimental research during the past two decades have provided considerable evidence for a significant influence of climate on tectonics. Recent advances suggest that model predictions can guide future fieldwork aimed at substantiating this view.
Brief psychosocial education, not core stabilization, reduced incidence of low back pain: results from the Prevention of Low Back Pain in the Military (POLM) cluster randomized trial

Effective strategies for the primary prevention of low back pain (LBP) remain elusive with few large-scale clinical trials investigating exercise and education approaches. The purpose of this trial was to determine whether core stabilization alone or in combination with psychosocial education prevented incidence of low back pain in comparison to traditional lumbar exercise. The Prevention of Low Back Pain in the Military study was a cluster randomized clinical study with four intervention arms and a two-year follow-up. Participants were recruited from a military training setting from 2007 to 2008. Soldiers in 20 consecutive companies were considered for eligibility (n = 7,616). Of those, 1,741 were ineligible and 1,550 were eligible but refused participation. For the 4,325 Soldiers enrolled with no previous history of LBP average age was 22.0 years (SD = 4.2) and there were 3,082 males (71.3%). Companies were randomly assigned to receive traditional lumbar exercise, traditional lumbar exercise with psychosocial education, core stabilization exercise, or core stabilization with psychosocial education, The psychosocial education session occurred during one session and the exercise programs were done daily for 5 minutes over 12 weeks. The primary outcome for this trial was incidence of low back pain resulting in the seeking of health care. There were no adverse events reported. Evaluable patient analysis (4,147/4,325 provided data) indicated no differences in low back incidence resulting in the seeking of health care between those receiving the traditional exercise and core stabilization exercise programs. However, brief psychosocial education prevented low back pain episodes regardless of the assigned exercise approach, resulting in a 3.3% (95% CI: 1.1 to 5.5%) decrease over two years (numbers needed to treat (NNT) = 30.3, 95% CI = 18.2 to 90.9). Core stabilization has been advocated as preventative, but offered no such benefit when compared to traditional lumbar exercise in this trial. Instead, a brief psychosocial education program that reduced fear and threat of low back pain decreased incidence of low back pain resulting in the seeking of health care. Since this trial was conducted in a military setting, future studies are necessary to determine if these findings can be translated into civilian populations. NCT00373009 at ClinicalTrials.gov - http://clinicaltrials.gov/
Fault Detection in Continuous-Time Systems with Uncertain Parameters

In model-based fault diagnosis for dynamic systems with uncertain parameters, an envelope of all fault-free behaviors can be determined from the model and used as a reference for detecting faults. We demonstrate here a method for generating an envelope that is rigorously guaranteed to be complete, but without significant overestimation. The method is based on an interval approach, but uses Taylor models to reduce the overestimation often associated with interval methods. To speed fault detection, a method that uses bounded-error measurement data and a constraint propagation procedure is proposed for shrinking the envelope. To demonstrate these methods, two fault detection scenarios in a nonlinear, coupled system are considered.
Anorexia nervosa: telemetric assessment of family interaction and hospital events.

Abstract We have completed an extensive longitudinal investigation of a patient with anorexia nervosa, in which psychomotor activity measures were obtained continuously. In our attempt to point out the overall value of objective measurements of activity, we have investigated family impact data in this case. This report illustrates the first application of a telemetric mobility system for the assessment of family interaction and hospital ward events. Furthermore, it proposes a method for quantifying one aspect of the biologic impact of day-time psycho-social occurences.
Estrogenic substances in the blood of women

Abstract 1. The technic of the mucification test for the demonstration of estrogenic substances in blood is described, with a few modifications. 2. The examination by this method of solutions containing known amounts of theelin at various dose levels showed a high degree of accuracy. 3. The present report is based on the examination of 401 specimens of blood from 84 women and 15 prepubertal girls. 4. The blood of 5 out of 7 normal girls between the ages of eight and ten years gave positive reactions for estrin, whereas the tests were negative in 7 out of 8 girls from four to seven years of age. 5. In 22 out of 25 patients it was found that during the course of the menstrual cycle there was an increase in the concentration of estrin in the blood, which occurred during the midinterval and seemed to be associated with ovulation. A secondary rise just before or at the onset of menstruation was noted in seven instances. 6. No characteristic variations were observed in 4 patients with anovulatory cycles. 7. In 10 out of 16 cases of menorrhagia, polymenorrhea, or uterine hemorrhage due to hyperplasia endometrii, a rise in the concentration of the blood estrin was observed at the onset of the bleeding. 8. Three types of blood estrin curves were found in patients with amenorrhea. (1) There was a cyclic rise and fall in the amount of estrin. (2) A constant moderate amount of estrin was present. (3) There was a persistent absence of demonstrable estrogenic hormone. 9. Estrogenic substances were found in the blood of women following castration and in the postclimacteric period. 10. The presence of estrin in the blood was demonstrated in association with increased amounts of anterior pituitary sex hormone.
Search for a common neurocognitive mechanism for language and movements

Examination of the common properties in the three Ss (i.e., speech, script, and sign languages) of human communication suggests that duality of patterning is the key feature in the development of these communication systems. This feature is in essence a sequential strategy that serves as an interface between the increasing number of messages and the limited capacity of our signal production-reception systems. It is argued that since the left hemisphere has a much finer temporal resolution than the right hemisphere, both language and movement systems might have made use of this advantage provided by the left hemisphere to fulfill the requirements of sequential strategy in their early evolution.
EMG onset timing.

To the Editor: I read the recent report by Gilleard and colleagues (January 1998) with great interest, in the hope that the study would shed more light on the issue of relative timing of vastus medialis oblique muscle (VMO) and vastus lateralis muscle (VL) electromyographic (EMG) activity during voluntary activation. I was both surprised and disappointed to find that there were no direct measures of EMG onset timing anywhere in the article. The question posed by the authors—whether patellar taping changes the relative timing of EMG onset in the VMO and VL when subjects ascend and descend stairs—is certainly worthy of investigation. But despite statements such as “changed the timing of VMO and VL activity” and “earlier activation of the VMO,” the authors never actually present any timing data, choosing instead to present, analyze, and discuss data only in terms of knee angle.… [ ARTICLE][1] [ ARTICLE][2] [ ARTICLE][3] [ ARTICLE][4] [ ARTICLE][5] [1]: /lookup/volpage/78/25?iss=1 [2]: /lookup/volpage/64/1813?iss=12 [3]: /lookup/volpage/72/300?iss=4 [4]: /lookup/volpage/73/229?iss=4 [5]: /lookup/volpage/75/813?iss=9
The Equality Paradise: Paradoxes of the Law's Power to Advance Equality

This paper, written for Texas Wesleyan Law School's Gloucester Conference, ?Too Pure an Air: Law and the Quest for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,? is a brief exploration of a broader project. Every civil rights movement must struggle with how to allocate scarce resources to accomplish the broadest change possible. This paper compares the legal and political strategies of the Black rights movement and the women's rights movement in the United States, comparing both the strategy choices and the results. These two movement followed essentially the same strategies. Where they have attained success and where each has failed demonstrates the limits of American legal structures to effectuate social change. The broader project will be to contrast this history with the gay and lesbian rights movement, which has followed a less legalistic strategy and has arguably had greater success. Based on this historical evidence, I argue that the greater the power of the legal structure used, the less likely the result will produce substantive change, because high-level legal structures are constrained by the dominant culture. Without some cultural change, lawmaking through courts is not effective and can perpetuate oppression instead. Legislation can be more effective, but is subject to similar limits of culture in its enactment, interpretation, and enforcement. Paradoxically, the broader the legislation in terms of subject matter and the higher the jurisdiction enacting the legislation, the less effective it will be. Because of these paradoxes of power, The temptation to focus on the most powerful institution, which can offer the staunchest protection and the broadest sweep, in the United States, the Supreme Court and the Constitution, often wins out. This paper seeks to reveal the tradeoff that decision makes.
The Follower’s Role in the Institutionalization of Social Innovations

The insights gained in institutional entrepreneurship studies have considerably advanced our understanding of the institutionalization process of social innovations. The focus on a small set of ins...
Individual and systemic risk trade-offs induced by diversification barriers

Investment diversification is believed to have potential adverse effects on systemic risk. This paper examines the performance of systemic risk with respect to two factors: the available diversification choices and the investor's ability to utilize them. Building on an existing stylized financial system model, we enrich it by partitioning the assets and the investors according to their accessibility level and their ability to expand into the available diversification choices respectively. We show the existence of a trade-off between individual diversification and systemic risk caused by the two factors and we provide analytical characterization of phase transition thresholds for these factors. These thresholds determine under what conditions diversification activity may amplify systemic risk.
Error Analysis Of A Hexapod Machine Tool

This paper describes the measurement and analysis of the quasi-static errors of a prototype hexapod milling machine at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Emphasis is placed on a) the identification and definition of the parametric errors, b) the development of an analytical model to describe how these parametric errors affect errors in the position and orientation of the tool, c) identification of the most important parametric errors and their potential impact on performance, d) comparison of hexapod error characteristics to those of conventional machine tools, e) description of the techniques used to measure and estimate the hexapod errors, and f) application of the various concepts to model the geometrical and thermal errors of the NIST hexapod, including measurement results.
Gram-Negative Bacterial Infections: A Look at the Past, a View of the Present, and a Glance at the Future

An overview of infections caused by gram-negative bacteria over the past 40 years discloses remarkable changes in their specific etiology and management. These organisms were responsible for disease in the preantibiotic era but at a much lower frequency than at present, and fatality rates were generally high. Bacteria such as Pseudomonas and Serratia, now relatively commonly involved in infection, rarely, if ever, caused disease before antibiotics became available. Although often present in surgical wounds, these organisms clearly were colonizers rather than pathogens. It is clear that the use of potent antimicrobial agents has been responsible for a general decrease in the fatality rates associated with gram-negative bacterial infections. However, it is evident that their use has been involved in the development of potentially lethal complications not seen in the past. Factors presently recognized as playing important roles in the problems associated with the treatment of gram-negative bacterial infections are the increasing number of older and sometimes debilitated patients and the longer survival of individuals with tumors or leukemia who, because of immunosuppression due to disease or treatment, are highly susceptible to invasion by almost any organism. Factors that have increased the magnitude of the problem of treatment of gram-negative bacterial infections include an increasing frequency of bacterial resistance to one or more antibiotics and a tendency of physicians to use more than one drug, sometimes as many as three or four, to treat gram-negative bacterial infections, especially in immunosuppressed people. Such polypharmacy is responsible for the development of suprainfections, some of which are caused by organisms very difficult to eradicate.
Susceptibility of Apple to Injury by Tarnished Plant Bug Adults

MacIntosh and Red Delicious apple flower buds proved highly susceptible to abscission and slightly susceptible to underdevelopment if attacked by field-caged female or male tarnished plant bug adults, Lygus lineolaris (Palisot de Beauvois), from the silver tip through tight cluster stages of development. There was little or no susceptibility to these injury types thereafter. The fruit proved moderately or highly susceptible to malformation (dimples or scabs) if attacked by caged adults from the early pink stage of bud development to 2 weeks after petal fall, With little or no such susceptibility before or after this period.
The Relationship of Lygus Bugs and Thrips to Fruit Deformity in Strawberries

Lygus bugs, Lygus hesperus Knight, caged on the flowers and fruit of strawberries were found to cause fruit deformity or “Catfacing.” Deformity is caused by bugs feeding on individual achenes rather than by a toxic action on the reccptacle itself. Lygus bugs feed on large and small achenes. Consequently, when fruit deformity is caused by lygus bugs, at least some of the achenes in the depressed areas are enlarged. Poor pollination likewise causes “catfacing,” but in such instances all of the achenes in the depressed areas are small. Thrips, Frankliniella occidentalis (Pergande), do not seem to cause fruit deformity. Their feeding sometimes causes a withering of the smaller flowers, but such blossoms usually do not produce marketable fruit. Moderate populations of thrips cause a limited amount of discoloration of the berries, particularly to the seeds, and the fruit under the calyx, but such damage does not seem to warrant control measures. However, very high populations may feed over the entire surface of developing berries and cause a golden brown discoloration that makes the fruit unmarketable.
The Methodology of Semiotic

We have seen how the modern goals of achieving truth-guaranteeing certainty, simplicity, and linear comprehensiveness are incapable of being realized. There is no foundation to which we can reduce or logically relate areas of knowledge and human culture in a linear progression from what is simple and certain to what is relatively complex and controversial. This chapter discusses the revised goals of consensus, primitiveness, and nonlinear comprehensiveness that are applicable to sign comparisons. We begin with a discussion of the concept of primitiveness, and apply it to some examples of sign levels. We then relate the problems of comparing and contrasting signs at different levels to the discipline known as “semiotic,” and contrast this to related forms of inquiry. The last section of the chapter introduces some methodological problems arising when we attempt to compare and contrast features at differing sign levels.
Circulating Biomarkers in Bladder Cancer

Bladder cancer is a molecularly heterogeneous disease characterized by multiple unmet needs in the realm of diagnosis, clinical staging, monitoring and therapy. There is an urgent need to develop precision medicine for advanced urothelial carcinoma. Given the difficulty of serial analyses of metastatic tumor tissue to identify resistance and new therapeutic targets, development of non-invasive monitoring using circulating molecular biomarkers is critically important. Although the development of circulating biomarkers for the management of bladder cancer is in its infancy and may currently suffer from lower sensitivity of detection, they have inherent advantages owing to non-invasiveness. Additionally, circulating molecular alterations may capture tumor heterogeneity without the sampling bias of tissue biopsy. This review describes the accumulating data to support further development of circulating biomarkers including circulating tumor cells, cell-free circulating tumor (ct)-DNA, RNA, micro-RNA and proteomics to improve the management of bladder cancer.
Nonlinear Light-Matter Interactions in Engineered Optical Media

The emergence of metamaterials was predicted to enable a plethora of nonlinear light-matter interactions and even new nonlinear materials. Here, we discuss novel opportunities for structured light manipulation in nonlinear soft-matter, gaseous and negative-index media.
Infrastructure hazard resilience trends: an analysis of 25 years of research

Hazard research has made significant strides over the last several decades, answering critical questions surrounding vulnerability and recovery. Recently, resilience has come to the forefront of scholarly debates and practitioner strategies, yet there remain challenges implementing resilience in practice, the result of a complex web of research that spread across numerous fields of study. As a result, there is a need to analyze and reflect on the current state of resilience literature. We reviewed 241 journal articles from the Web of Science and Engineering Village databases from 1990 to 2015 to analyze research trends in geographic location of studies, methods employed, units of analysis, and resilience dimensions studied, as well as correlations between each of these categories. The majority of the studies analyzed were conducted in North America, used quantitative methods, focused on infrastructure and community units of analysis, and studied governance, infrastructure, and economic dimensions of resilience. This analysis points to the need to: (1) conduct studies in developing country contexts, where resilience is particularly important; (2) employ mixed-methods for additional depth to quantitative studies; (3) connect units of analysis, such as infrastructure and community; and (4) expand on the measurement and study of environmental and social dimensions of resilience.
An Assessment of Radiology Residency Program Websites.

Abstract Purpose When prospective radiology residents decide where to apply to residency, many will use the Internet as a resource to garner information. Therefore, it is important for residency programs to produce and maintain an informative and comprehensive website. Here, we review 179 radiology residency program websites for 19 criteria including various aspects related to the residency application process, benefits, didactics, research, clinical training, and faculty leadership. Methods We evaluated 179 radiology residency program websites for the inclusion of 19 different criteria. Criteria for information not available directly on the website and links with no information were considered not present. Results Only 12 of the 179 (6.7%) program websites had at least 80% of the 19 criteria. In addition, 41 programs (23%) had less than 50% of the criteria listed on their websites. Websites ranged from having 16% of the criteria to as much as 95%. Conclusion Although previous studies have shown that prospective radiology resident applicants are influenced by intangibles like current resident satisfaction and academic reputation, they have also shown that applicants are influenced by the educational curriculum, clinical training, program resources, research opportunities, and quality of faculty. Therefore, it is imperative to provide online resources for prospective candidates in an attempt for residency programs to remain competitive in recruiting high-quality US medical student graduates. These findings suggest there is room for improving the comprehensiveness of information provided on radiology residency program websites.
Ultrasmall visible-to-near-infrared emitting silver-sulfide quantum dots for cancer detection and imaging

The large size of many near infrared (NIR) fluorescent nanoparticles prevents rapid extravasation from blood vessels and subsequent diffusion to tumors. This confines in vivo uptake to the peritumoral space and results in high liver retention. We developed a viscosity modulated approach to synthesize ultrasmall silver sulfide quantum dots (QDs) with distinct tunable light emission from visible to near-infrared in spectrum and a QD core diameter between less than 5 nm. Further functionalization of these Ag2S QDs with different type of molecules such as targeting peptides, retains monodisperse, relatively small water soluble QDs without loss of the functionality of the peptide’s high binding affinity to cancerous tumor. Fluorescence and electron microscopy showed that selective integrin-mediated internalization was observed only in cancer cells treated with the peptide-labeled QDs, demonstrating that the unlabeled hydrophilic nanoparticles exhibit characteristics of negatively charged fluorescent dye molecules, which typically do not internalize in cells. The biodistribution profiles of intravenously administered QDs in different mouse models of cancer reveal an exceptionally high tumor-to-liver uptake ratio, suggesting that the small sized QDs evaded conventional opsonization and subsequent high uptake in the liver and spleen. The seamless tunability of the QDs over a wide spectral range with only a small increase in size, as well as the ease of labeling the bright and non-cytotoxic QDs with biomolecules, provides a platform for multiplexing information, tracking the trafficking of single molecules in cells, and selectively targeting disease biomarkers in living organisms without premature QD opsonization in circulating blood.
Interaction energy of a pair of identical coplanar uniformly charged nanodisks

We consider a nanosystem consisting of two coplanar uniformly charged nanodisks that are coupled via Coulomb forces. Such a model represents a typical situation encountered in two-dimensional semiconductor quantum dot systems of electrons. We provide an exact integral expression for the interaction energy between the two coplanar nanodisks as a function of their separation distance. It is found that the difference between a standard Coulomb potential and the current one has features reminiscent of a Lennard-Jones interaction potential. The results derived can be useful to understand formation of clusters and/or aggregates in systems of coplanar charged nanodisks that contain electrons.
The role of defects and critical pore size analysis in the fatigue response of additively manufactured IN718 via crystal plasticity

Abstract The inherent defects associated with materials produced by selective laser melting (SLM) limits their usage in safety-critical applications. In our work, a crystal plasticity (CP) based framework is developed to identify the critical porosity characteristics, which quantifies the limiting scenarios of fatigue crack initiation at a pore rather than the crystallographic features. 3D virtual microstructures are developed based on the characterization of SLM IN718 for use in the CP simulations. Damage indicator parameters, such as the plastic strain accumulation, elastic stress anisotropy, resolved shear stress and triaxiality, obtained from the CP simulations are used to identify the most probable locations of crack initiation. Pores are explicitly added to the microstructure instantiations in a systematic manner by varying the size, location, and proximity between pores. The critical pore size is defined as the size beyond which the location of crack nucleation transitions from crystallographic features to the pore vicinity, which is determined to be 20 μm in the material of interest with an average grain size of 48 μm. This work is beneficial in qualifying SLM materials given the natural porosity inherent to the manufacturing process, by reducing the number of fatigue experiments.
A Distributed Cooperative Architecture for Robotic Networks with Application to Ambient Intelligence

A Distributed Cooperative Architecture (DCA) for applications of Ambient Intelligence is presented. The proposed cooperative system is composed by several static cameras and by a team of multi-sensor mobile robots. The nodes of the robotic network can act with some degree of autonomy and can cooperate to perform general purpose complex tasks such as distributed people tracking. The paper describes the system architecture and illustrates the feasibility of the proposed approach through preliminary experimental results.
Engineering the Chloroplast Genome to Confer Stress Tolerance and Production of Pharmaceutical Proteins

The life-supporting metabolic process of photosynthesis is carried out in endosymbiotic organelles, the chloroplasts. Scientific endeavors over the last decade have enabled us to successfully engineer the chloroplast genome. This singular development has opened new avenues for agricultural biotechnology and has contributed immensely to our understanding of the basic genetic mechanisms operative within the organelle. The chloroplast genome has been engineered to express agronomically important traits such as disease-resistance, drought-tolerance, herbicide-resistance, insect resistance and production of antibodies, biopharmaceuticals and edible vaccines. The ability to hyper-express prokaryotic and eukaryotic proteins without the drawbacks of gene silencing or position effects, combined with the advantage of gene containment due to plastid maternal inheritance, make chloroplast transformation technology both useful and environmentally-friendly. The recent use of a plant-derived selectable marker for chloroplast transformation is an important development that should help allay public fears about GM foods. In addition, the extension of chloroplast transformation technology to edible plant species such as potato and tomato, coupled with the hyper-expression of antigens, opens up the possibility of oral delivery of vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals. This review focuses on some of these recent accomplishments and their impact.
Challenges Associated to the Multi-Scale Modeling of Fuel Electro-Oxidation for Fuel Cell Applications

The high-cost of materials and efficiency limitations of chemical fuel cells is a topic of primary concern. Industries are currently focusing on proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells engineering and design for improved performance, durability, and reduced cost. This situation has led to an urgent need for understanding, predicting, and optimizing the various transport and electrochemical processes that occur in PEM fuel cells, where modeling plays a key role. Challenges associated to a multi-scale modeling approach to model fuel electro-oxidation in PEM and bio fuel cells are discussed here. A combination of tools involving Density Functional Theory, Transition State Theory, Molecular Mechanics and Kinetic Monte Carlo are combined in order to model fuel electro-oxidation. Information regarding energy barriers and pre-exponential factors needed to determine reaction rates are obtained from Density Functional Theory and Transition State Theory respectively. These microscopic reaction rates are then provided as inputs in a Kinetic Monte Carlo approach, and the fuel oxidation process is modeled on a 2-D reactive surface representing the catalyst.
Antiglutamate therapies in Huntington's disease.

Huntington’s disease is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder caused by an unstable trinucleotide CAG repeat. The mechanism by which the genetic defect leads to neuronal injury and death is unknown, but is thought to include glutamate-mediated excitotoxicity and abnormalities of mitochondrial energy production. Both of these mechanisms may lead to a final common pathway of increased production of free radical species. Prior clinical trials in patients with Huntington’s disease that have addressed these hypotheses have been limited by size. A current, NIH-funded trial of remacemide hydrochloride and Coenzyme Q10 in 340 patients with Huntington’s disease is described. This is the largest and longest multi-center trial in Huntington’s disease to address the glutamate- and mitochondrialmediated hypotheses of neurodegeneration.
Timing and prevalence of revision and removal surgeries after spinal cord stimulator implantation.

Abstract We performed a retrospective study to characterize the timing and prevalence of revision and removal surgeries after spinal cord stimulator (SCS) implantation in patients with chronic pain. In our analysis of 100 patients who had SCS implants, we found that 34% of patients underwent revision surgery and 53% of patients had their implant removed. Of the patients who required revision surgeries, the majority (56%) eventually opted for removal of their SCS system. The median time to the first revision surgery was 16 months post implantation and the median time to removal was 39 months post implantation. Our findings demonstrate that most SCS systems are removed within a few years post implantation, highlighting the clinical need for a more complete understanding of SCS technology in order to refine patient selection criteria.
Swingers and polyamorists: A comparative analysis of gendered power dynamics:

American culture reveres monogamy, holding it up as an ideal moral standard, as a kind of Holy Grail for intimacy, and as a cornerstone for establishing normative social interactions. Monogamy, as ...
Art History's Agility: K-12 Practices for Higher Education Consideration.

As policymakers and other stakeholders continue to intensify their questions and critiques of art history’s place in the higher education curriculum in the United States (U.S.), researchers have no...
Checking autoimmune genetic risk to stratify immune checkpoint inhibitor responders.

The development of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) in recent years has been one of the most significant advances in the treatment of cancer. However, even among tumors where ICIs have shown the most promise, they are not effective in all patients, and there are no clearly defined molecular or cellular markers to identify patient subgroups most likely to benefit from these agents. Building on the intriguing observation that the development of cutaneous immune-related adverse events (irAEs) is associated with a longer overall survival (OS) in patients treated with PD-1 targeting checkpoint inhibitors, Khan et al. (1) in PNAS investigated whether there could be a genetic explanation. Indeed, they report that patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma (mUC) who carry high genetic risk profiles for two dermatologic autoimmune diseases, psoriasis and vitiligo, are more likely to achieve longer survival rates, marking a genetic basis for ICI response and revealing a screening tool to select patients most likely to have treatment success. To achieve self/nonself discrimination, our immune system has incorporated delicately balanced mechanisms involving costimulatory and inhibitory signals to coordinate immune activation and inactivation to control and calibrate the specificity and amplitude of immune responses. Immune checkpoints regulate this balance. These are molecules that need to be activated (or inactivated) to initiate or block immune responses. Their primary function is to prevent an overrun response that may then be misdirected to destroy healthy cells in the body (“self”). Immune checkpoints engage when bound by specific partner proteins on the surface of T lymphocytes, sending “off” signals to the T cells, whose normal role is to monitor for and direct a cell-mediated response toward “altered self,” including tumor cells. Two checkpoint proteins are central to the regulation of this process: cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4) and programmed cell death 1 (PD-1). The … [↵][1]1Email: aasinha{at}buffalo.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1
Validity of a 3-Hour Breast Milk Expression Protocol in Estimating Current Maternal Milk Production Capacity and Infant Breast Milk Intake in Exclusively Breastfeeding Dyads

Objective: An efficient method for measuring maternal milk production is needed. Our objectives were to: (1) validate a milk production rate (MPR) protocol in exclusively breastfeeding mothers; (2)...
Automated machine learning based speech classification for hearing aid applications and its real-time implementation on smartphone

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been useful in solving benchmark problems in various domains including audio. DNNs have been used to improve several speech processing algorithms that improve speech perception for hearing impaired listeners. To make use of DNNs to their full potential and to configure models easily, automated machine learning (AutoML) systems are developed, focusing on model optimization. As an application of AutoML to audio and hearing aids, this work presents an AutoML based voice activity detector (VAD) that is implemented on a smartphone as a real-time application. The developed VAD can be used to elevate the performance of speech processing applications like speech enhancement that are widely used in hearing aid devices. The classification model generated by AutoML is computationally fast and has minimal processing delay, which enables an efficient, real-time operation on a smartphone. The steps involved in real-time implementation are discussed in detail. The key contribution of this work include the utilization of AutoML platform for hearing aid applications and the realization of AutoML model on smartphone. The experimental analysis and results demonstrate the significance and importance of using the AutoML for the current approach. The evaluations also show improvements over the state of art techniques and reflect the practical usability of the developed smartphone app in different noisy environments.
The Making of Song Dynasty History: Sources and Narratives, 960–1279 CE

In this ambitious work of political and intellectual history, Charles Hartman surveys the major sources that survive as vestiges of the official dynastic historiography of the Chinese Song dynasty (960–1279). Analyzing the narratives that emerge from these sources as products of Song political discourse, Hartman offers a thorough introduction to the texts and the political circumstances surrounding their compilation. Distilling from these sources a 'grand allegory of Song history', he argues that the narratives embedded within reflect tension between a Confucian model of political institutionalism and the Song court's preference for a non-sectarian, technocratic model. Fundamentally rethinking the corpus of texts that have formed the basis of our understanding of the Song and of imperial China more broadly, this far-reaching account of historiographical process and knowledge production illuminates the relationship between official history writing and political struggle in China.
Pervasive and persistent effects of ant invasion and fragmentation on native ant assemblages

Biological invasions are a leading cause of global change, yet their long-term effects remain hard to predict. Invasive species can remain abundant for long periods of time, or exhibit population crashes that allow native communities to recover. The abundance and impact of non-native species may also be closely tied to temporally variable habitat characteristics. We investigated the long-term effects of habitat fragmentation and invasion by the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) by resurveying ants in 40 scrub habitat fragments in coastal southern California that were originally sampled 21 years ago. At a landscape scale, fragment area, but not fragment age or Argentine ant mean abundance, continued to explain variation in native ant species richness; the species-area relationship between the two sample years did not differ in terms of slope or intercept. At local scales, over the last 21 years we detected increases in the overall area invaded (+36.7 %, estimated as the proportion of occupied traps) and the relative abundance of the Argentine ant (+121.95 %, estimated as mean number of workers in pitfall traps). Argentine ant mean abundance also increased inwards from urban edges in 2017 compared to 1996. The greater level of penetration into fragments likely reduced native ant richness by eliminating refugia for native ants in fragments that did not contain sufficient interior area. At one fragment where we sampled eight times over the last 21 years, Argentine ant mean abundance increased over time while the diversity of native ground-foraging ants declined from 14 to 4 species. Notably, native species predicted to be particularly sensitive to the combined effect of invasion and habitat loss were not detected at any sites in our recent sampling, including the army ant genus Neivamyrmex. Conversely, two introduced ant species (Brachymyrmex patagonicus and Pheidole flavens) that were undetected in 1996 are now common and widespread at our sites. Our results indicate that behaviorally and numerically dominant invasive species can maintain high densities and suppress native diversity for extended periods.
Ablation of Pyrophosphate Regulators Promotes Periodontal Regeneration.

Biomineralization is regulated by inorganic pyrophosphate (PPi), a potent physiological inhibitor of hydroxyapatite crystal growth. Progressive ankylosis protein (ANK) and ectonucleotide pyrophosphatase/phosphodiesterase 1 (ENPP1) act to increase local extracellular levels of PPi, inhibiting mineralization. The periodontal complex includes 2 mineralized tissues, cementum and alveolar bone (AB), both essential for tooth attachment. Previous studies demonstrated that loss of function of ANK or ENPP1 (reducing PPi) resulted in increased cementum formation, suggesting PPi metabolism may be a target for periodontal regenerative therapies. To compare the effects of genetic ablation of Ank, Enpp1, and both factors concurrently on cementum and AB regeneration, mandibular fenestration defects were created in Ank knockout (Ank KO), Enpp1 mutant (Enpp1asj/asj), and double KO (dKO) mice. Genetic ablation of Ank, Enpp1, or both factors increased cementum regeneration compared to controls at postoperative days (PODs) 15 and 30 (Ank KO: 8-fold, 3-fold; Enpp1asj/asj: 7-fold, 3-fold; dKO: 11-fold, 4-fold, respectively) associated with increased fluorochrome labeling and expression of mineralized tissue markers, dentin matrix protein 1 (Dmp1/DMP1), osteopontin (Spp1/OPN), and bone sialoprotein (Ibsp/BSP). Furthermore, dKO mice featured increased cementum thickness compared to single KOs at POD15 and Ank KO at POD30. No differences were noted in AB volume between genotypes, but osteoblast/osteocyte markers were increased in all KOs, partially mineralized osteoid volume was increased in dKO versus controls at POD15 (3-fold), and mineral density was decreased in Enpp1asj/asj and dKOs at POD30 (6% and 9%, respectively). Increased numbers of osteoclasts were present in regenerated AB of all KOs versus controls. These preclinical studies suggest PPi modulation as a potential and novel approach for cementum regeneration, particularly targeting ENPP1 and/or ANK. Differences in cementum and AB regeneration in response to reduced PPi conditions highlight the need to consider tissue-specific responses in strategies targeting regeneration of the entire periodontal complex.
Amorphous sol-gel insulating films

The porosity of sol-gel thin films may be tailored for specific applications through control of the size and structure of inorganic polymers within the coating sol, the extent of polymer reaction and interpenetration during film formation, and the magnitude of the capillary pressure exerted during the final stage of drying. By maximizing the capillary pressure and avoiding excessive condensation, dense insulating films may be prepared as passivation layers on silicon substrates. Such films can exhibit excellent dielectric integrity, viz., low interface trap densities and insulating properties approaching those of thermally grown SiO{sub 2}. Alternatively, through exploitation of the scaling relationship of mass and density of fractal objects, silica films can be prepared that show a variation in porosity (7--29 %) and refractive index (1.42--1.31) desired for applications in sensors, membranes, and photonics.