cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Transient paraplegia following alcohol celiac plexus block.

Background and Objectives. A pancreatic cancer patient developing transient paraplegia compatible with spinal cord ischemia, following alcohol celiac plexus neurolysis, is described. Methods. A 58-year-old man with metastatic pancreatic cancer underwent celiac (deep splanchnic) alcohol neurolysis for management of severe epigastric and midback pain. In spite of apparently adequate needle position, he developed transient paraplegia consistent with anterior spinal artery syndrome. Results. The clinical findings suggest ischemia of the anterior spinal cord with complete motor and sensory paralysis to a T8 spinal cord level resulting from an anterior spinal artery syndrome. Conclusions. The cause of the limited bilateral transient paralysis following celiac plexus block in this patient may involve ischemia of the spinal cord associated with reversible arterial spasm following the injection of ethanol solution.
Attaining Moral Knowledge in the Church and Models of Adult Learning

The sacrament of reconciliation has fallen into disuse among Roman Catholics. For the Holy See this signifi es a loss of a sense of sin and reconciliation, rightly connecting moral consciousness and faith in salvation with sacramental celebration. Cultural studies underscore the importance of ritual practices as an essential element of religion’s ability to deal with the experience of moral evil. However, decline in the frequency of confession may also be complicated by indifference among North American Catholics to current roles and power relations in the Church. In light of moral individualism in society and new ways of envisioning the Church fostered by Vatican II, the challenge of moral education in the Church is complex, but hopeful. Effective religious education, responsive to the situation of contemporary Catholics, will seek innovative approaches that are rooted in the tradition and developed in communities of living faith. The essay suggests that theories of transformative learning and communities of practice offer helpful models for responding to the crisis of sin and reconciliation in Roman Catholicism.
Location Science Research: A Review

This document presents a broad review of facility location and location science research. The goal of this report is not to provide an exhaustive list of location science topics (an undertaking far beyond the scope of a single journal article), but rather to provide the reader with a more general review of the location science research landscape. This document starts with a short introduction to some of the more germane aspects of all location science research.
Shifting Sands and Pyrrhic Victories – The Case of India

Pursuing civil litigation in India can be an expensive, uncertain and protracted process. Court fees vary across the country, and can be very high (for example, 10% of the suit value) and even if a plaintiff is successful, the court will not always award costs in her favour. An understaffed judiciary ensures that cases may take years to be finally decided. This article considers costs and fees under two broad heads – court fees, and all other fees (such as attorney fees). India’s Code of Civil Procedure vests deciding courts with the discretion to decide how costs are to be awarded, and requires them to give reasons in case courts choose not to allow costs “following the event,” thereby suggesting that the legislative imperative was for costs to be shifted to the loser. In practice, though, courts rarely so shift costs completely, indicating a significant disconnect between what the statute intended and what is actually practiced by courts. These twin features of cost and fee allocation in India are the inspiration for the title of this article.
A Numerical Study of Transient Mass Transport Through a Circular Hole Connecting Two Semi-Infinite Media

A numerical model of transient diffusive mass transfer through a circular hole that connects two semi-infinite media was used as a means of determining potential effects of waste container penetrations on the release of immobilized contaminants into the environment. The finite difference model as developed necessarily includes treatment of mass transport in both the waste and surrounding medium and allows calculation of release rates for cases with and without preferential adsorption and differing diffusivities of the two media. The dimensionless contaminant release rate was found to vary over several orders of magnitude depending on the product of the ratio of the distribution coefficient and the media diffusivities only. As would be intuitively expected, partitioning favoring the surrounding medium and higher relative waste medium diffusivity cause higher transport rates. There was definitely no unexpected enhancement in the release rate in the case of perforations over that of an uncontained waste form.
Activation of phagocytosis by immune checkpoint blockade

Inhibition of macrophage-mediated phagocytosis has emerged as an essential mechanism for tumor immune evasion. One mechanism inhibiting the innate response is the presence of the macrophage inhibitory molecule, signal regulatory protein-α (SIRPα), on tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) and its cognate ligand cluster of differentiation 47 (CD47) on tumor cells in the tumor microenvironment. On the basis of a recently discovered programmed death protein 1 (PD-1) in TAMs, we discuss the potential inhibitory receptors that possess new functions beyond T cell exhaustion in this review. As more and more immune receptors are found to be expressed on TAMs, the corresponding therapies may also stimulate macrophages for phagocytosis and thereby provide extra anti-tumor benefits in cancer therapy. Therefore, identification of biomarkers and combinatorial therapeutic strategies, have the potential to improve the efficacy and safety profiles of current immunotherapies.
Fast linearized coronagraph optimizer (FALCO) I: a software toolbox for rapid coronagraphic design and wavefront correction

The Fast Linearized Coronagraph Optimizer (FALCO) is an open-source toolbox of routines for coronagraphic focal plane wavefront correction. The goal of FALCO is to provide a free, modular framework for the simulation or testbed operation of several common types of coronagraphs. FALCO includes routines for pair-wise probing estimation of the complex electric field and Electric Field Conjugation (EFC) control, and we ask the community to contribute other wavefront correction algorithms. FALCO utilizes and builds upon PROPER, an established optical propagation library. The key innovation in FALCO is the rapid computation of the linearized response matrix for each deformable mirror (DM), which facilitates re-linearization after each control step for faster DM-integrated coronagraph design and wavefront correction experiments. FALCO is freely available as source code in MATLAB at github.com/ajeldorado/falco-matlab and will be available later this year in Python 3 at github.com/ajeldorado/falco-python.
Faculty Development Program for Emergency Medicine Physicians in India: A Pilot Program.

Background The specialty of emergency medicine (EM) is developing worldwide at a rapid pace. While more and more postgraduate training programs are developing, a major gap persists in numbers and availability of well-trained academic faculty members. This article describes a pilot faculty development program (FDP) aimed to develop advanced academic skills among a group of EM physicians in India. Methods A FDP was developed with foundations in adult learning principles, using a combined approach of online and in-person didactic sessions. Specific expectations were established regarding academic contributions to participants' home institutions. Mentorship relationships were established between academic emergency physicians and program participants. Results A 12-month pilot program was implemented across four EM training programs in India. Nine faculty members completed the full requirements of the pilot program, eight of whom have continued to work as academic faculty members in EM training programs. Academic productivity among these physicians since completion of the program includes 11 abstract publications, six peer-reviewed articles, and 71 mentorship relationships. Program challenges included participant attrition, connectivity issues, and low rates of completion of evaluation requirements by both participants and mentors. Conclusions This pilot program in faculty development provides a foundation from which further programs may be developed in the international sector. Effective faculty development is a cornerstone of good academic medicine, which is of particular relevance, importance, and challenge in the global context of a developing specialty.
Gendered Influences on Peer Assessments of Team Behavior

This Research Full Paper will examine how gender may correlate with peer perceptions of behaviors on engineering student project teams. While peer assessments are often used to encourage personal responsibility for group tasks (and discourage “social loafing”), they may fail to account for the way students’ attributes contribute to their perceptions of the behavior of peers. These perceptions may be inconsistently held from one person to the next and are driven by various factors (like gender), including the attributes of the judger, the individual being judged, the relationship between the two, and/or the group at large. This study seeks to answer: Does the perception of a peer’s team behavior (in terms of frequency or severity) vary with the gender identity of the individuals involved? This study uses a newly-created survey called the Team Behaviors and Attitudes Survey to assess the subjective perceptions of each of eleven undesirable teammate behaviors. Data has been collected from 47 teams, involving 329 unique pairings of students. For each of these behaviors, proportion tests and chi-square hypothesis tests are used to assess whether gender identity affects how severely and frequently behaviors are perceived, respectively. Males were found to often rate others more severely than females, regardless of the gender of the target. Other results were mixed, emphasizing the particularities inherent in perception creation.
A Gratitude Exercise for Couples

When individuals experience gratitude they receive many benefits, including increased meaning in life, optimism, happiness, and greater connection to others. Multiple theorists and researchers citi...
High density microelectrode recording predicts span of therapeutic tissue activation volumes in subthalamic deep brain stimulation for Parkinson disease.

Abstract Background Subthalamic deep brain stimulation alleviates motor symptoms of Parkinson disease by activating precise volumes of neural tissue. While electrophysiological and anatomical correlates of clinically effective electrode sites have been described, therapeutic stimulation likely acts through multiple distinct neural populations, necessitating characterization of the full span of tissue activation. Microelectrode recordings have yet to be mapped to therapeutic tissue activation volumes and surveyed for predictive markers. Objective Combine high-density, broadband microelectrode recordings with detailed computational models of tissue activation to describe and to predict regions of therapeutic tissue activation. Methods Electrophysiological features were extracted from microelectrode recordings along 23 subthalamic deep brain stimulation implants in 16 Parkinson disease patients. These features were mapped in space against tissue activation volumes of therapeutic stimulation, modeled using clinically-determined stimulation programming parameters and fully individualized, atlas-independent anisotropic tissue properties derived from 3T diffusion tensor magnetic resonance images. Logistic LASSO was applied to a training set of 17 implants out of the 23 implants to identify predictors of therapeutic stimulation sites in the microelectrode recording. A support vector machine using these predictors was used to predict therapeutic activation. Performance was validated with a test set of six implants. Results Analysis revealed wide variations in the distribution of therapeutic tissue activation across the microelectrode recording-defined subthalamic nucleus. Logistic LASSO applied to the training set identified six oscillatory predictors of therapeutic tissue activation: theta, alpha, beta, high gamma, high frequency oscillations (HFO, 200–400 Hz), and high frequency band (HFB, 500–2000 Hz), in addition to interaction terms: theta x HFB, alpha x beta, beta x HFB, and high gamma x HFO. A support vector classifier using these features predicted therapeutic sites of activation with 64% sensitivity and 82% specificity in the test set, outperforming a beta-only classifier. A probabilistic predictor achieved 0.87 area under the receiver-operator curve with test data. Conclusions Together, these results demonstrate the importance of personalized targeting and validate a set of microelectrode recording signatures to predict therapeutic activation volumes. These features may be used to improve the efficiency of deep brain stimulation programming and highlight specific neural oscillations of physiological importance.
The colonial roots of agricultural modernization in Mozambique: the role of research from Portugal to ProSavana

In 2010, political leaders of three countries—Brazil, Japan, and Mozambique—announced an ambitious trilateral collaboration intended to re-make the Mozambican savannah. Political and business leade...
Genetic disruption of the inflammasome adaptor ASC has minimal impact on the pathogenesis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy in mdx mice.

Abstract Aim Up-regulation of inflammasome proteins was reported in dystrophin-deficient muscles. However, it remains to be determined whether inflammasome activation plays a role in the pathogenesis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. This study was therefore set out to investigate whether genetic disruption of the inflammasome pathway impacts the disease progression in mdx mice. Main methods Mice deficient in both dystrophin and ASC (encoded by Pycard [PYD And CARD Domain Containing]) were generated. The impact of ASC deficiency on muscular dystrophy of mdx mice were assessed by measurements of serum cytokines, Western blot, real-time PCR and histopathological staining. Key findings The pro-inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-α, IL-6, KC/GRO and IL-10 were markedly increased in the sera of 8-week-old mdx mice compared to WT. Western blotting showed that P2X7, caspase-1, ASC and IL-18 were upregulated. Disruption of ASC and dystrophin expression in the mdx/ASC−/− mice was verified by Western blot analysis. Histopathological analysis did not find significant alterations in the muscular dystrophy phenotype in mdx/ASC−/− mice as compared to mdx mice. Significance Taken together, our results show that disruption of the central adaptor ASC of the inflammasome is insufficient to alleviate muscular dystrophy phenotype in mdx mice.
Role of Brainwaves in Neural Speech Decoding

Neural speech decoding aims at direct decoding of speech from the brain to restore speech communication in patients with locked-in syndrome (fully paralyzed but aware). Despite the recent progress, exactly which aspects of neural activities are characterizing the decoding process is still unclear. Neural oscillations have been associated with playing a key functional role in neural information processing and thus might provide significant insight into the decoding process. Previous research has investigated a limited range of neural frequencies for decoding, usually the high-gamma oscillations (70−200Hz) in electrocorticography (ECoG) and lower-frequency waves (1−70Hz) in electroencephalography (EEG). Hence, the exact contribution of specific frequency bands is still unclear. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a non-invasive method for directly measuring underlying brain activity and has the temporal resolution needed to investigate the role of cortical oscillations in speech decoding, which we attempted in this study. We used three machine learning classifiers (linear discriminant analysis (LDA), support vector machine (SVM), and artificial neural network (ANN) to classify different imagined and spoken phrases for finding the role of brainwaves in speech decoding. The experimental results showed a significant contribution of low-frequency Delta oscillations (0.1−4 Hz) in decoding and the best performance was achieved when all the brainwaves were combined.
Scholars of Tort Law: Professor William Lloyd Prosser (1898-1972)

This chapter, presented at Oxford at the “Scholars of Tort Law” conference, is concerned with William Prosser, the most important U.S. tort scholar of the twentieth century. Prosser exerted considerable influence on the development of several specific tort doctrines, notably strict products liability, privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Instead of his well-known contributions to these discrete torts, this chapter focuses more broadly on Prosser’s overall effects, particularly regarding the paramount tort of negligence. Prosser attempted to adjust negligence to two Realist challenges: Realists’ belief in the public nature of seemingly private disputes and the undermining of certainty caused by emphasising the facts of each case. To the first challenge, Prosser reconceptualised the elements of negligence as involving public policy choices. To the second, Prosser attempted to present a negligence formula that was both flexible and predictable. Prosser succeeded in presenting a more flexible negligence formula incorporating public policy factors, but failed in enhancing predictability, with far-reaching consequences for tort law as a compensatory mechanism.
Filling anomaly for general two- and three-dimensional C 4 symmetric lattices

In this paper, we derive symmetry indicator formulas for the filling anomaly on two-dimensional (2D) ${C}_{4}$ symmetric square lattices with and without time reversal, inversion symmetry, or their product, in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. We go beyond previous work by considering lattices with atoms occupying multiple Wyckoff positions. We also provide an algorithm using the Smith normal form that systematizes the derivation. The formulas determine the corner charge in 2D atomic or fragile topological insulators, as well as in three-dimensional (3D) insulators and semimetals by studying their 2D slices in momentum space. We apply our results to a 3D tight-binding model on a body-centered tetragonal lattice, whose projection into the 2D plane has two atoms in the unit cell. Our symmetry indicators correctly describe the higher-order hinge states and Fermi arcs in cases where the existing indicators do not apply.
Library Teaching Anxiety: Understanding and Supporting a Persistent Issue in Librarianship

Teaching roles in academic libraries can be accompanied by a great deal of anxiety. This study surveyed librarian attitudes toward their teaching role and librarians’ experiences with teaching anxiety. Sixty-four percent of librarians participating in the survey said they experienced teaching anxiety, including 65.10 percent experiencing physical symptoms and 73.43 percent of librarians who experienced teaching anxiety experiencing psychological symptoms. Findings indicate tension between sustaining a work-life balance and managing physical and psychological symptoms. Based on these findings, the researchers propose supports that can help mitigate the adverse effects of teaching anxiety on library instructors.
Law enforcement investigation of non-sexual child abuse: Physical abuse, neglect and Abusive Head Trauma:

This study examined the experiences of law enforcement in investigating physical abuse, neglect and Abusive Head Trauma (AHT). Law enforcement (N = 388) in the United States were surveyed regarding...
Justice beliefs buffer against perceived barriers to colorectal cancer screening among African Americans.

African Americans develop and die from colorectal cancer (CRC) more than any other racial group in the United States. Perceived barriers to screening (e.g. embarrassment and financial costs) likely...
Multi-Functional Sandwich Composites for Spacecraft Applications: An Initial Assessment

Current spacecraft implement relatively uncoupled material and structural systems to address a variety of design requirements, including structural integrity, damage tolerance, radiation protection, debris shielding and thermal insulation. This investigation provided an initial assessment of multi-functional sandwich composites to integrate these diverse requirements. The need for radiation shielding was addressed through the selection of polymeric constituents with high hydrogen content. To provide increased damage tolerance and debris shielding, manufacturing techniques were developed to incorporate transverse stitching reinforcement, internal layers, and a self-healing ionomer membrane. To assess the effects of a space environment, thermal expansion behavior of the candidate foam materials was investigated under a vacuum and increasing temperature. Finally, a thermal expansion model was developed for foam under vacuum conditions and its predictive capability assessed.
Structuring German postwar ideologies: review of A. Dirk Moses, German intellectuals and the Nazi past

It is not only because much of the ideological landscape of postwar West Germany remains to borrow one historian's metaphor "uncharted intellectual territory" that German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past comes as such a key contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century thought. To be sure, while certain canonized figures, such as Jurgen Habermas, Gunter Grass, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, and even the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have received adequate attention in Anglophone scholarship, we have precious few studies in English on many of the thinkers examined here by Moses. These are the lesser-known postwar "historians, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and educationalists" (p. 10) who served on government advisory committees, became ministers of culture and education, or in other ways decisively shaped the political discourse of the Federal Republic. For that reason alone Moses was guaranteed to cover new ground. But it is ultimately the innovative way in which he has mapped his subject matter that makes this work stand out, not only as an indispensable guide to early debates about Nazism and West German democracy, but more generally as a distinctively original model for writing about intellectuals and their ideas. "This book is not a conventional intellectual history," we are told in the introduction (p. 10). Part of what makes that statement true is the attention Moses pays to fields that is all too often terra incognita for intellectual historians namely, structural anthropology and the voluminous but neglected literature on German social psychology. His case for integrating research on family life, transgenerational transmission, and the like into a history of intellectuals rests on the deceptively profound insight that political ideas and ideologies, arguably nowhere more so than in postwar Germany, often possess "existential" significance for their articulators. Drawing on Erving Goffman's theories of social drama, Moses presents the political
Using ES Cells Labeled with GFP for Analyzing Cell Behavior During Differentiation

Mouse embryonic stem (ES) cell is a unique yet highly successful system to study stem cell maintenance and differentiation. In this protocol, we describe the generation of engineered mouse ES cells that stably express GFP alone or GFP fused with histone H2B, which allow the cells to be traced live or in fixed samples. This system can be used to study cell behavior changes as ES cells differentiate into different lineages.
Teaching a Hardwood Silviculture and Management Course: Experience and Ideas Including Using Blackboard® Web-Based Courseware

FOR 4033: “Silviculture and Management of Hardwoods” is an optional, senior-level course taught in the School of Renewable Natural Resources at Louisiana State University. The primary goal of this course is to make students more knowledgeable and appreciative of hardwood resources. A secondary goal is to make students as competitive as possible for all hardwood employment opportunities. These goals are accomplished by assisting students in learning various aspects of the ecology, silviculture, and management of hardwood ecosystems. This knowledge is then integrated into a silviculture plan for a non-industrial private forest landowner based on his or her ownership objectives. Emphasis is placed on timber utilization, wildlife habitats, and recreation in bottomland hardwood ecosystems given the abundance of this resource in Louisiana and the southern United States. A variety of teaching techniques are utilized in this course including classroom environment preparation, student participation, laboratory demonstration with hands-on learning, a weekend field trip, and team-oriented commu1 Lockhart: Teaching a hardwood silviculture and management course Published by DigitalCommons@USU, 2002 Volume IX Natural Resources and Environmental Issues 42 nication with a non-industrial private forest landowner. A recent addition to the teaching environment is the utilization of Blackboard. Blackboard is a Web-based teaching platform that allows an instructor to organize and deliver course materials for easy access by students. Blackboard has enabled me to present more information regarding the ecology, silviculture, and management of hardwoods in a more-effective format. Student reception of the Blackboard program after one year of use has been excellent although challenges do exist.
Iterative Wiener filters for image restoration

Wiener filtering, an iterative procedure which successively uses the Wiener-filtered signal as an improved prototype to update the covariance estimates, is investigated. The convergent properties of this iterative Wiener filter are analyzed. It has been shown that the iterative Wiener filter converges to a fixed point which does not correspond to the true covariance. Based on the analysis presented, and iterative filter is proposed to correct for the convergence error which results in suboptimal performance of the original iterative Wiener filter. The performance of this filter is shown to be theoretically optimal. Experiments are conducted in a practical setting to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. >
Colorectal cancer surveillance in primary sclerosing cholangitis and inflammatory bowel disease

Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a chronic, cholestatic liver disease which leads to end-stage cirrhosis, is a recognized risk factor for hepatobiliary and colonic carcinogenesis, and carries a median liver transplant (LT) free survival time of approximately 15 years.1-4 Due to its progressive and idiopathic nature, lack of effective pharmacotherapy, and paucity of predictors of adverse outcomes,5 PSC is the 5th most common indication for LT in the United States6 and a leading indication in several other countries worldwide.3,7 One of the feared and costly complications of PSC is development of colorectal cancer (CRC). CRC is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer and third leading cause of cancer-related death in men and women, and on a global scale, there are an estimated 1,200,000 million new diagnoses of CRC and over 600,000 CRC-related deaths annually, many of which could be prevented by increasing the use of established screening and surveillance tests.8,9 At particular risk of CRC are the 70% of PSC patients who also have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD),10-15 a chronic disorder of the alimentary tract which, in the United States alone, has a prevalence of approximately 1,000,000 persons and direct and indirect costs exceeding 11,000,000,000 dollars.9,16,17 IBD is associated with a 6-fold increased risk of CRC compared to the general population (with the exact risk depending on the duration and extent of IBD as well as other less understood factors),16,18 but when there is co-existing PSC, this risk rises to nearly 30fold.10,11,14 Therefore, it is no overstatement that management of PSC-IBD and its complications, not the least of which is CRC, engenders substantial patient-level and public health burden.9,19,20 Many hepatologists will have, as part of their practice, patients with PSC-IBD. Very frequently, the consulting hepatologist oversees the management of these patients, including but not limited to laboratory monitoring, bone densitometry, and hepatobiliary and CRC surveillance; as a result, the overall health of these patients relies considerably on the hepatologist and having an informed, integrated care team.17 CRC surveillance is particularly critical in these patients given the aforementioned statistics as well as the fact that:16
Efficient algorithms for multi-file caching

Multi-File Caching issues arise in applications where a set of jobs are processed and each job requests one or more input files. A given job can only be started if all its input files are preloaded into a disk cache. Examples of applications where Multi-File caching may be required are scientific data mining, bit-sliced indexes, and analysis of sets of vertically partitioned files. The difference between this type of caching and traditional file caching systems is that in this environment, caching and replacement decisions are made based on “combinations of files (file bundles),” rather than single files. In this work we propose new algorithms for Multi-File caching and analyze their performance. Extensive simulations are presented to establish the effectiveness of the Multi-File caching algorithm in terms of job response time and job queue length.
Array Beamforming Networks

This chapter contains sections titled: Transmission Lines S Parameters Matching Circuits Corporate and Series Feeds Slotted Waveguide Arrays Blass Matrix Butler Matrix Lenses Reflectarray Array Feeds for Reflectors Array Feeds for Horn Antennas Phase Shifters Transmit/Receive Modules Digital Beamforming Neural Beamforming Calibration ]]>
Developing Android applications: pre-conference workshop

Since the Android mobile platform was first open sourced by Google in November 2007, it has attracted more than 180,000 developers and deployment of 50,000 mobile applications in the Android Market. Today, more than 60 smart phones from major manufacturers run the Android platform. In addition, within the last two years, the number of web searches through mobile phones (both Android and non-Android platforms) has increased five times. All these numbers show how the Android project has gained its momentum to move forward and how mobile applications will become more widely-used by smart phone users. A larger percentage of these users are young adults that include college students.
Linking climate to population variability in marine ecosystems characterized by non-simple dynamics: Conceptual templates and schematic constructs

The ability to abstract and symbolize ideas and knowledge as simplified schematic constructs is an important element of scientific creativity and communication. Availability of such generalized symbolic constructs may be particularly important when addressing a complex adaptive system such as a marine ecosystem. Various examples have appeared in the climate–fisheries literature, each more or less effectively integrating hypothesized effects of several interacting environmental and/or biological processes in controlling population dynamics of exploited fish species. A selection of these are herein presented and reviewed, including match–mismatch, connectivity, school trap, loopholes, ocean triads, stable ocean hypothesis, several classes of nonlinear feedback loops (e.g., ‘P2P’, school-mix feedback, predator pit), as well as several prominent large-scale integrative climatic index series (SOI, NAO, PDO). The importance of considering the potential for adaptation and/or rapid evolution is stressed. An argument is offered for the potential utility of such widely recognizable schematic concepts in offering relatively well-understood, fairly well-defined frameworks for comparative identification and elaboration of important mechanistic linkages between climate variability and fishery dynamics, as well as in easing effective communication among scientists from different regions and disciplinary backgrounds. Certain difficulties in the application of the comparative method are discussed. It is suggested that alleviation of such difficulties may be one of the major benefits of international collaborative programs such as GLOBEC and IMBER.
Studies on Excision of Conjugative Transposons in Enterococci: Evidence for Joint Sequences Composed of Strands with Unequal Numbers of Nucleotides

We determined the nucleotide sequence of polymerase chain reaction products resulting from amplification of joint regions created after excision of transposons Tn5381 and Tn916 from a single site within plasmid pAD1. For both transposons, two joint sequences were observed. One (ATAGAT) was six nucleotides in length and identical to one of the junction sequences flanking the integrated transposon. This sequence also represents the original target sequence within pAD1. The other (TATGT (Tn5381) or TAGTT (Tn916)) was five nucleotides in length and identical to the junction sequence at the other end of the integrated transposons. These results suggest that excision of conjugative transposons from some insertion sites in gram-positive bacteria results in the formation of a joint region heteroduplex mismatched in nucleotide number as well as complementarity.
297 Mixed Cryoglobulinemia from Monoclonal Gammopathy with Membranoproliferative Glomerulonephritis: A Rare Event

MIXED CRYOGLOBULINEMIA FROM MONOCLONAL GAMMOPATHY WITH MEMBRANOPROLIFERATIVE GLOMERULONEPHRITIS: A RARE EVENT Anil Singh (SUNY,Upstate), Noel Nivera, Kenneth Liss, Spiros Arbes, Alan Haratz, Allan Tunkel (Monmouth Medical Center) A 78-year-old woman with diabetes mellitus and hypertension was seen for acute renal insufficiency with a creatinine of 2.5 mg/dl, increased from a baseline of 1.0 mg/dl. Urinalysis showed evidence of hematuria and proteinuria, but no cellular casts. A 24-hour urine collection revealed 5.9 grams of protein. Serum protein electrophoresis showed a decrease in the total serum protein and albumin fraction. Urine protein electrophoresis was negative for any monoclonal proteins. Renal ultrasound revealed normal sized kidneys.Further studies were significant for hypocomplementemia, C3 of 57 mg/dl (normal 85-183 mg/dl) and a C4 of <6mg/dl (normal 16-45 mg/dl). Renal biopsy showed membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis (MPGN) with mixed cryoglobulinemia; immunoflorescence was positive for IgM kappa and polyclonal IgG. Serum immunofixation electrophoresis studies showed monoclonal protein (IgM kappa) and polyclonal IgG in the cryoglobulin fraction Additional studies failed to reveal a cause for her cryoglobulinemia including negative serologies for hepatitis B and C, an ANA titer of 1:40, normal quantitative immunoglobulin concentrations, normal serum viscosity, undetectable hepatitis C RNA, and negative anti-glomerular basement membrane antibodies. Bone marrow biopsy revealed monoclonal gammopathy; kappa-based light chain accounted for 10% of the cellularity. A diagnosis of MPGN with cryoglobulinemia secondary to monoclonal gammopathy was made. The patient responded well to the treatment with daily corticosteroids and once weekly rituximab therapy; as evidenced by decrease in rheumatoid factor from an initial value of 3000 IU/ml to 500 IU/ml after 4 cycles of therapy. The finding of monoclonal gammopathy causing mixed cryoglobulin formation resulting in MPGN is a rare event. There is no standard treatment for monoclonal gammopathy associated cryoglobulinemia with MPGN. Current recommendations are based on limited clinical experiences.
Information based intonation synthesis

This paper presents a model for generating prosodically appropriate synthesized responses to database queries using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG - cf. [22]), a formalism which easily integrates the notions of syntactic constituency, prosodic phrasing and information structure. The model determines accent locations within phrases on the basis of contrastive sets derived from the discourse structure and a domain-independent knowledge base.
Intestinal Enzymes: Indicators of Proliferation and Differentiation in the Jejunum

Some intestinal enZymes were assayed which were related to: (i) Cellular proliferation, for example, aspartate carbamoyltransferase, thymidine kinase, uridine kinase, and dihydroorotase; (ii) cellular differentiation, for example, lactase, invertase, maltase, alkaline phosphatase, and dipeptidase; and (iii) lysosomes, for example, beta-glucuronidase, acid beta-galactosidase, and acid phosphatase. These enzymatic determinations can be used to distinguish the crypt from the villus during healthy or diseased states.
Static-bag-source meson field theory: Strong-coupling approximation

In this paper we discuss quantum-mechanical strong-coupling calculations on a static-source meson field theory in which only the nucleon isospin degrees of freedom are coupled linearly to an isovector-scalar meson field. The nucleon source function is of the chiral bag type, namely a shell source. We perform numerical calculations in the strong-coupling approximation, namely for g>>(8..pi../sup 2/..mu..R)/sup 1/4/, where g is a dimensionless bare coupling constant, ..mu.. is the meson mass, and R is the bag size. We demonstrate that the corrections to our lowest-order approximation to the dressed nucleon wave function decrease as the coupling strength increases according to the above inequality. We find that there exist reasonable values of the parameters, say gapprox.4 and Rapprox.0.3 fm, for which the lowest-order approximation to the dressed nucleon state of this model is good. We also find collective excitations of the dressed nucleon which are rotational and vibrational excitations in isospin space. The lowest-lying collective excitation is a rotational state which is identified as the ..delta.. in this model. Furthermore, we generalize the model field theory by introducing a feature of the cloudy-bag-model Hamiltonian, namely, an intrinsic isobar source coupled to the meson field. We find that the strong-coupling approximation ismore » realized for significantly smaller values of the bare coupling constant or larger values of the bag size when compared to the previous model. We also find a total bare-..delta.. component on the dressed nucleon state of 36%. Finally, we numerically solve the meson-nucleon scattering problem in the first model by employing the reaction theory of Feshbach.« less
The COQ7 Gene Encodes a Protein in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Necessary for Ubiquinone Biosynthesis (

Ubiquinone (coenzyme Q) is a lipid that transports electrons in the respiratory chains of both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae deficient in ubiquinone biosynthesis fail to grow on nonfermentable carbon sources and have been classified into eight complementation groups (coq1-coq8; Tzagoloff, A., and Dieckmann, C. L.(1990) Microbiol. Rev. 54, 211-225). In this study we show that although yeast coq7 mutants lack detectable ubiquinone, the coq7-1 mutant does synthesize demethoxyubiquinone (2-hexaprenyl-3-methyl-6-methoxy-1,4-benzoquinone), a ubiquinone biosynthetic intermediate. The corresponding wild-type COQ7 gene was isolated, sequenced, and found to restore growth on nonfermentable carbon sources and the synthesis of ubiquinone. The sequence predicts a polypeptide of 272 amino acids which is 40% identical to a previously reported Caenorhabditis elegans open reading frame. Deletion of the chromosomal COQ7 gene generates respiration defective yeast mutants deficient in ubiquinone. Analysis of several coq7 deletion strains indicates that, unlike the coq7-1 mutant, demethoxyubiquinone is not produced. Both coq7-1 and coq7 deletion mutants, like other coq mutants, accumulate an early intermediate in the ubiquinone biosynthetic pathway, 3-hexaprenyl-4-hydroxybenzoate. The data suggest that the yeast COQ7 gene may encode a protein involved in one or more monoxygenase or hydroxylase steps of ubiquinone biosynthesis.
Link between FDA antidepressant warnings and increased suicide attempts in young people is questionable.

Lu and colleagues hypothesised that US Food and Drug Administration antidepressant safety warnings reduced antidepressant prescribing and thereby increased suicide attempts in young people.1 They investigated associations in three age groups between antidepressant prescribing before and after the warnings and suicide attempts, as measured by psychotropic poisonings in patients presenting to emergency departments or admitted to hospital. We question their conclusions that …
Applications for protein sequence–function evolution data: mRNA/protein expression analysis and coding SNP scoring tools

The vast amount of protein sequence data now available, together with accumulating experimental knowledge of protein function, enables modeling of protein sequence and function evolution. The PANTHER database was designed to model evolutionary sequence-function relationships on a large scale. There are a number of applications for these data, and we have implemented web services that address three of them. The first is a protein classification service. Proteins can be classified, using only their amino acid sequences, to evolutionary groups at both the family and subfamily levels. Specific subfamilies, and often families, are further classified when possible according to their functions, including molecular function and the biological processes and pathways they participate in. The second application, then, is an expression data analysis service, where functional classification information can help find biological patterns in the data obtained from genome-wide experiments. The third application is a coding single-nucleotide polymorphism scoring service. In this case, information about evolutionarily related proteins is used to assess the likelihood of a deleterious effect on protein function arising from a single substitution at a specific amino acid position in the protein. All three web services are available at http://www.pantherdb.org/tools.
APPLICATION OF NEURO-FUZZY IDENTIFIER IN THE PREDICTIVE CONTROL OF A POWER PLANT

Abstract An adaptive predictive control methodology is applied for a fossil fuel boiler control. The control algorithm takes advantage of a neuro-fuzzy identifier system for prediction of the boiler response in a future time window. An optimizer algorithm based on evolutionary programming technique (EP) uses the identifier-predicted outputs and determines input sequence in a time window. The present optimized input is applied to the plant, and the prediction time window shifts for another phase of plant output and input estimation. The neuro-fuzzy identifier is trained to provide a good estimation of boiler outputs. Neuro-fuzzy rules and membership parameters are trained based on the data log, applying genetic algorithm and back-propagation, respectively. The obtained intelligent control system is highly structural and applicable on different boiler systems.
Parallel orthogonal factorization null-space method for dynamic quadratic programming

An algorithm has been developed to solve quadratic programs that have a dynamic programming structure. It has been developed for use as part of a parallel trajectory optimization algorithm and aims to achieve significant speed without sacrificing numerical stability. the algorithm makes use of the dynamic programming problem structure and the domain decomposition approach. It parallelizes the orthogonal factorization null-space method of quadratic programming by developing a parallel orthogonal factorization and a parallel Cholesky factorization. Tests of the algorithm on a 32-node INTEL iPSC/2 hypercube demonstrate speedup factors as large as 10 in comparison to the fastest known equivalent serial algorithm.
Recycling processes in tokamaks

Abstract Recycling of the working gas at the walls and limiter of a tokamak discharge plays a pivotal role in the dynamics of the plasma. Because of large recycling rates, plasma can generally be maintained for many particle confinement times without the introduction of new gas from sources external to the vacuum system. The details of recycling are also intimately tied in to the question of plasma density build-up with pulsed-gas. The mechanisms responsible for desorption of working gas from vessel surfaces also cause desorption of impurity gases and thus they are important in both the achievement of high density plasma and the cleanliness of the discharge. Recycling has been studied on numerous tokamaks through various experimental means. In this discussion several of these are reviewed. One technique involves changing the working gas from hydrogen to deuterium and back again, with consequent changes in plasma and wall constituents which are observed by spectroscopic, residual gas analysis, and sample surface probe diagnostics. Absolute spectroscopy of neutral hydrogen emission can yield estimates for the flux of recycling working gas at the edge of the plasma and particle confinement times. It is found that toroidal variations must be carefully taken into account in this case, since under some conditions the recycling at the limiter is important, while under others, recycling at the wall dominates. The condition of the wall itself as regards gases lightly bound on the surface, as well as those more tightly bound in the bulk near the surface, critically influences the recycling processes. This condition is determined by many factors, including various discharge cleaning schemes, tokamak discharges themselves, wall temperature, and titanium gettering.
Neuro-oncological applications of optical spectroscopy

Advances in optics and molecular imaging have occurred rapidly in the past decade. One technique poised to take advantage of these developments is optical spectroscopy (OS). All optical spectroscopic techniques have in common tissue interrogation with light sources ranging from the ultraviolet (UV) to the infrared (IR) ranges of the spectrum, and collection of information on light reflected (reflectance spectroscopy) or light interactions with tissue and emergence at different wavelengths (fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy). OS can provide information regarding intrinsic tissue optical properties such as tissue structure, nuclear density, and the presence or absence of endogenous or exogenous fluorophores. Among other applications, this information has been used to distinguish tumor from normal brain tissues, to detect tumor margins in intrinsic, infiltrating gliomas, to identify radiation damage to tissues, and to assess tissue viability and predict the onset of apoptosis in vitro and in vivo. Potential applications of OS include detection of specific central nervous system (CNS) structures, such as brain nuclei, identification of cell types by the presence of specific neurotransmitters, and the detection of optically labeled cells or drugs during therapeutic interventions. All have potential utility in neuro-oncology, have been investigated in our laboratories, and will be the subject of this review.
Frequency dependent renormalization of optical mass in an electron-phonon system

Abstract A new expression for the renormalized optical mass in an electron-phonon system is derived assuming the validity of the Drude formula with complex frequency dependent relaxation term.