cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Super-Resolution Imaging of Fluorophore-Labeled DNA Bound to Gold Nanoparticles: A Single-Molecule, Single-Particle Approach

We use a triplet-state-mediated super-resolution technique to map the location of individual fluorescently labeled double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) bound to the surface of gold nanorods. By calculating the emission center position for each fluorescent tag on the nanoparticle surface, we successfully reconstruct the orientation and shape of the underlying gold nanorods but fail to reconstruct the expected size of the nanorods. We have tested several experimental strategies to address the size mismatch issue, including using a more rigorous model to fit the contribution of the gold nanorod luminescence to the overall signal, tuning fluorophore coverage density and fluorophore identity, and increasing the spacing between the gold nanorod and the fluorescent tag. Although each experiment provided additional insight into the system, the size mismatch issue has not been resolved. However, in all experiments, we observe differences in the apparent locations of where the dsDNA is bound to gold nanorods, an observation...
An Examination of the edTPA Portfolio Assessment and Other Measures of Teacher Preparation and Readiness

The authors examined the outcomes on several measures of world language teacher preparedness, including university- and state-mandated summative evaluations and the edTPA portfolio assessment, for seven world language teacher candidates during their final semester of clinical practice. The candidates were enrolled in an initial certification program (Spanish P–12) at the same university in Georgia. The results revealed that edTPA scores were not well aligned with mentor teachers’ and supervisors’ evaluations on the university-wide instrument and that measures of teacher content knowledge and target language proficiency did not correlate well with candidates’ edTPA scores. The disparity between edTPA scores and other measures of teacher preparation was most apparent for the two nonnative English speakers. The findings suggest that candidates whose primary language is not English may need additional support with academic English. Moreover, the present study found that candidates, mentors, and supervisors lacked an understanding of how the various university, state, and national assessments fit together to measure the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are necessary for effectively teaching a world language. Training on the content and purpose of the edTPA may be needed so that stakeholders understand the benefit of having a national-level view of candidates’ knowledge and skills
Nutrient Cycling in Grassed Roadside Ditches and Lawns in a Suburban Watershed

Roadside ditches are ubiquitous in developed landscapes. They are designed to route water from roads for safety, with little consideration of water quality or biogeochemical implications in ditch design and minimal data on environmental impacts. We hypothesize that periodic saturation and nutrient influxes may make roadside ditches hotspots for nitrogen (N) removal via denitrification as well as biological production of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) nitrous oxide (NO), methane (CH), and carbon dioxide (CO). Research sites included 12 grassed ditches and adjacent lawns with varying fertilization in a suburban watershed in central New York, where lawns represented a reference with similar soils as ditches but differing hydrology. We measured potential denitrification using the denitrification enzyme assay in fall 2014 and GHG fluxes using in situ static chambers between summer 2014 and 2015, including sample events after storms. Potential denitrification in ditches was significantly higher than in lawns, and rates were comparable to those in stream riparian areas, features traditionally viewed as denitrification hotspots. Ditches had higher rates of CH emissions, particularly sites that were wettest. Lawns were hotspots for NO and CO respiratory emissions, which were driven by nutrient availability and fertilizer application. Extrapolating up to the watershed, ditches have the potential to remove substantial N loads via denitrification if managed optimally. Ditch GHG emissions extrapolated across the watershed were minimal given their much smaller area compared with lawns, which were the greater contributor of GHGs. These findings suggest that roadside ditches may offer new management opportunities for mitigating nonpoint source N pollution in residential watersheds.
Stage-specific predictive models for breast cancer survivability.

Abstract Background Survivability rates vary widely among various stages of breast cancer. Although machine learning models built in past to predict breast cancer survivability were given stage as one of the features, they were not trained or evaluated separately for each stage. Objective To investigate whether there are differences in performance of machine learning models trained and evaluated across different stages for predicting breast cancer survivability. Methods Using three different machine learning methods we built models to predict breast cancer survivability separately for each stage and compared them with the traditional joint models built for all the stages. We also evaluated the models separately for each stage and together for all the stages. Results and conclusions Our results show that the most suitable model to predict survivability for a specific stage is the model trained for that particular stage. In our experiments, using additional examples of other stages during training did not help, in fact, it made it worse in some cases. The most important features for predicting survivability were also found to be different for different stages. By evaluating the models separately on different stages we found that the performance widely varied across them. We also demonstrate that evaluating predictive models for survivability on all the stages together, as was done in the past, is misleading because it overestimates performance.
Cutaneous Tumor and Tumor Syndromes

Cutaneous tumors may be benign or can be associated with more serious medical issues. In some cases reassurance may be appropriate, in other cases further workup may be indicated in order to address possible complications.
THE POWER OF “TOTAL PRODUCTIVITY MANAGEMENT” FOR COMPETITIVENESS IN THE 1990'S AND BEYOND.

Because of the exponential and unprecedented growth of technology during the last 30 years, we have seen major changes in management thinking both in manufacturing companies as well as in the service-oriented firms, local-, state-, and federal governments, and even judicial systems. Yet, the rate of assimilation of such thinking is far behind the rate of growth in complexity and uncertainty of socio-economic-technical systems in companies and organizations both in the well-developed and in the developing countries. The traditional emphasis on labor productivity needs to be replaced by a more systemic, total-systems oriented “total productivity” thinking. This paper presents a number of arguments in favor of the author's “Total Productivity Management” as opposed to labor productivity management. Many elements of this concept have been implemented during the last 10 years in many types of manufacturing and service organizations. The appropriateness of this management approach to the 1990's and beyond is well defended here.
Next generation sequencing analysis of soy glyceollins and 17-β estradiol: Effects on transcript abundance in the female mouse brain.

Glyceollins (Glys) are produced by soy plants in response to stress and are known for their anti-estrogenic activity both in vivo and in vitro in cancer cell lines as well as peripheral tissues. Glys can also exhibit non-estrogen receptor (ER) mediated effects. The effects of Glys on gene expression in the brain are still unclear. For this study, 17-β estradiol (E2) or placebo slow-release pellets were implanted into ovariectomized CFW mice followed by 11 days of exposure to either Glys or vehicle i.p. injections. We then examined the female mouse brain transcriptome using paired-end RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) on the Illumina GAIIx platform. The goal of this study was to compare and contrast the results obtained from RNA-Seq with the results from our previous whole brain microarray experiment, which indicated that Glys potentially act through both ER-mediated and non-ER-mediated mechanisms, exhibiting a gene expression profile distinct from E2-treated groups. Our results suggest that the transcripts regulated by both E2 and Glys alone or in combination annotated to similar pathway maps and networks in both microarray and RNA-Seq experiments. Additionally, unlike our microarray data analysis, RNA-Seq enabled the detection of treatment effects on low expression transcripts of interest (e.g., prolactin and growth hormone). Collectively, our results suggest that depending on the gene, Glys can regulate expression independently of E2 action, similarly to E2, or oppose E2's effects in the female mouse brain.
News Translation and Globalization: Narratives on the Move

This chapter discusses the concept of narrative in news translation; it describes how narratives are constructed and reflected in translation by analyzing the narrative of political leadership. It claims that newspapers use translation to indulge their readers in global stories packaged in a localized context and focuses on the target version as a text bracketed in the institutional space of the newspaper that accommodates it. The basis for the analysis is a corpus of articles translated into Greek, whose theme revolves around the 2008 Presidential Campaign in the USA to show some examples of how Leadership was retranslated in Greek. Ultimately, the chapter argues that translation, as a process, participates in what has been termed by Bhabha as “global transformation of capital,” which seems to remove spatial bounding. Yet the news text is a highly localized construct that may ultimately disrupt the assimilative globalization forces.
Jumping the Barrier: Modeling Drug Penetration across the Blood-Brain Barrier.

Determining the penetration of drugs across the blood-brain barrier is a significant challenge in central nervous system drug development. The use of a mechanistic physiologically-based pharmacokinetic model can predict drug exposures in the brain without needing in situ drug measurements.
Medicaid Expansion and Disparity Reduction in Surgical Cancer Care at High-Quality Hospitals.

Background The Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion has been heavily debated due to skepticism about Medicaid's ability to provide high-quality care. Particularly, little is known about whether Medicaid expansion improves access to surgical cancer care at high-quality hospitals. To address this question, we examined the effects of the 2001 New York Medicaid expansion, the largest in the pre-Affordable Care Act era, on this disparity measure. Study Design We identified 67,685 nonelderly adults from the New York State Inpatient Database who underwent select cancer resections. High-quality hospitals were defined as high-volume or low-mortality hospitals. Disparity was defined as model-adjusted difference in percentage of patients receiving operations at high-quality hospitals by insurance type (Medicaid/uninsured vs privately insured) or by race (African American vs white). Levels of disparity were calculated quarterly for each comparison pair and then analyzed using interrupted time series to evaluate the impact of Medicaid expansion. Results Disparity in access to high-volume hospitals by insurance type was reduced by 0.97 percentage points per quarter after Medicaid expansion (p Conclusions Pre-Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion reduced the disparity in access to surgical cancer care at high-volume hospitals by payer. However, it was associated with increased racial disparity in access to high-quality hospitals. Addressing racial barriers in access to high-quality hospitals should be prioritized.
Statistical QoS-driven power adaptation for distributed caching based mobile offloading over 5G wireless networks

To support the emerging next era of mobile wireless networks, researchers have made a great deal of efforts in promising techniques in multimedia services — the statistical quality of service (QoS) technique, which has been proved to be effective in statistically guaranteeing delay-bounded video transmissions over the time-varying wireless channels. On the other hand, as the 5G-promising techniques, the device-to-device (D2D) assisted mobile traffic offloading and caching techniques have also been proposed to significantly improve the overall system capacity as well as mitigate the traffic congestion at the base stations for the real-time traffic over 5G wireless networks. However, how to efficiently integrate these advanced techniques in supporting the statistical QoS requirements have imposed many new challenges not met before. To effectively overcome the aforementioned problems, in this paper we propose the statistical QoS-driven power adaptation scheme for the distributed caching assisted mobile offloading scheme over 5G wireless networks. In particular, under the Nakagami-m fading model, we establish the system models for the D2D assisted caching and the partial in-network transcoding. Given the statistical QoS constraints, we derive and analyze the effective capacity under our developed optimal adaptation policies for cache-enabled D2D assisted mobile offloading system under 5G wireless networks. Also conducted is a set of simulations which show that our proposed scheme outperforms the other existing schemes to efficiently implement the statistical QoS requirements over cache-enabled 5G wireless networks.
Optimal Stochastic Eco-Routing Solutions for Electric Vehicles

A stochastic energy aware routing framework is proposed for electric vehicles with the goal of enhancing the sustainability of future electrified transportation systems. A stochastic decision making framework is introduced to handle the random effects of environmental factors on transportation energy cost. The problem of optimal routing is formulated as a stochastic programming problem and risk control of the overall energy is applied to find the minimum energy route. The original discrete optimization problem is tackled using convex relaxation and transformation. The optimal path is constructed using a highly efficient primal-dual interior point algorithm for the relaxed problem with a subsequent reconstruction of the solution for the original discrete problem. Two electric drive limitations, i.e., battery capacity and drive line efficiency, are made an integral part of the decision making framework in order to obtain realistic results by incorporating actual vehicle data. Detailed simulations demonstrate the utility of the introduced approach and its superiority to existing, traditional routing engines.
Reproducible Research in Document Analysis and Recognition

With reproducible research becoming a de facto standard in computational sciences, many approaches have been explored to enable researchers in other disciplines to adopt this standard. In this paper, we explore the importance of reproducible research in the field of document analysis and recognition and in the Computer Science field as a whole. First, we report on the difficulties that one can face in trying to reproduce research in the current publication standards. These difficulties for a large percentage of research may include missing raw or original data, a lack of tidied up version of the data, no source code available, or lacking the software to run the experiment. Furthermore, even when we have all these tools available, we found it was not a trivial task to replicate the research due to lack of documentation and deprecated dependencies. In this paper, we offer a solution to these reproducible research issues by utilizing container technologies such as Docker. As an example, we revisit the installation and execution of OCRSpell which we reported on and implemented in 1994. While the code for OCRSpell is freely available on github, we continuously get emails from individuals who have difficulties compiling and using it in modern hardware platforms. We walk through the development of an OCRSpell Docker container for creating an image, uploading such an image, and enabling others to easily run this program by simply downloading the image and running the container.
Source, recency, and degree of stress in adolescence and suicide ideation.

This study sought to identify factors related to stress that predict suicide ideation among adolescents. The sample consisted of 425 students aged 14 to 18 years. Multiple regression analysis revealed that recency and degree of stress were significant in the prediction of degree and recency of suicide ideation. The implications of these and other findings for prevention and intervention (e.g., health education, parent workshops, and adolescent support groups) are discussed.
Structural behavior of shallow geodesic lattice domes

Abstract This paper describes experiments and analysis of the complete post-buckling behavior of shallow geodesic lattice domes. Although individual members are straight, their geometric arrangement approximates a curved surface and typical behavior is highly nonlinear, including the possibility of sudden jumps in which there may be multiple discontinuous pops from one equilibrium configuration to another. A number of shallow domes were produced using a 3D printer and tested using a load cell and proximity laser sensor. In contrast to most previous studies, rather than pinned or semi-rigid joints, the lattices studied here incorporate moment-transmitting joints and clamped boundary conditions at the perimeter. Thus, flexure is the dominant mode of deformation under lateral loading and coupled instability behaviors are possible in practice. The complete load-displacement relationship and multiple equilibrium configurations are exhibited both in experiment and in simulation. The experimental data shows a close correlation with nonlinear finite element analysis using path-following techniques. A typical member (coupled) buckling behavior and its influence on the critical load are presented. Conclusions are drawn with respect to symmetry and geometric sensitivity.
Wood variability in mature longleaf pine: differences related to cardinal direction for a softwood in a humid subtropical climate

Mature longleaf pine ( Pinus palustris Mill .) trees were harvested to compare wood property data for opposing bark-to-pith wood strips representing the northern and southern cardinal (or compass) directions. For each of the ten 70-yr-old trees used in the study,wood property datawere compared at breast height (BH) and three relative heights: one-quarter height (1Q), midheight (MID), and three-quarter height (3Q). Scanning of the specimens by X-ray densitometry gave specific gravity (SG) profiles that were used to determine wood properties for comparison. No significant differences were determined for wood property data at BH, MID, or 3Q. However, data at 1Q showed higher ring SG (p . 0.043) and percent latewood (p . 0.018) for the northern side, although no differences were observed in the earlywood or latewood SG. This indicated that the higher ring SG for the northern direction results from a greater proportion of latewood. Partitioning the data into estimated juvenile-transition wood and mature wood zones demonstrated that the greater ring SGand percent latewood values in the northern direction occurredwithin the mature wood zone. Findings presented herein appear to provide the first demonstration of variation in wood properties with respect to cardinal direction for a pine species growing in a humid subtropical climate.
Income Timing and Liquidity Constraints: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment.

Abstract People in developing countries sometimes desire deferred income streams, which replace more-frequent income flows with a single, later lump sum. We study the effects of short-term wage deferral using a randomized experiment with participants in a temporary cash-for-work program. Workers who are assigned to lump-sum payments are five percentage points more likely to purchase a high-return investment. We discuss the role of both barriers to saving and credit constraints in explaining our results. While stated preferences for deferred payments suggest a role for savings constraints, the evidence is also consistent with a simpler model of credit constraints alone.
Dining in Cleveland: A foodie destination

Over the past few years Cleveland has become a foodie destination, full of award-winning chefs and locally sourced restaurants. Known for the diversity of its ethnic options and the restaurants of several high profile chefs, Cleveland dining is admired by residents and visitors alike. Whether you’re a vegetarian, an adventurous eater, in the mood for comfort food, or simply looking for a convenient bite to eat, the Cleveland food scene has you covered.
Providence in Medicine.

We had witnessed a power we could not understand or explain, but it was real. I felt deep stirrings of faith that I hadn't experienced since childhood.
Understanding Community Behaviors In For-Profit Open Source Hardware Projects

Free contributors have successfully shown the potential in large/complex software co-creation in the Free and Open Source Software Movement, triggering many discussions and exploration ventures from academia to industry and to the government. Though many research efforts explored whether the same level of co-creation efforts could take place broadly in the hardware realm, very few research studies focus on profit-seeking hardware projects initiated by companies. In fact, the specific nature of being tangible and profitable makes company-led open source hardware projects suspicious to be really ?open? to contributors. Community has been identified as the critical driver in many open projects. By reviewing the evolution of company-community interactions over time and different community behaviors in different open development context, authors in this paper hope to identify best community-company interaction forms for open source hardware companies. Using grounded theory and case studies, we construct a framework to describe and identify company community?s different behaviors and different roles.
Gender differences in short-term cardiovascular effects of giving and receiving support for health concerns in marriage.

Objective Little is known about the cardiovascular effects of mutual emotional spousal support given for health concerns. We examined the hypotheses that: (a) mutual support (both spouses giving and receiving support) compared to one-sided or no support, would decrease blood pressure and heart rate in both spouses during a recovery period; and (b) wives would benefit more from mutual support than would husbands. A second aim was to examine gender differences in cardiovascular reactivity, distress, and closeness in response to receiving support regardless of mutuality. Method In 98 married couples (Age 50+), spouses discussed health concerns and were assigned randomly to one of four conditions: neither spouse received support (n = 26), only the wife received support from the husband (n = 22), only the husband received support from the wife (n = 23), or both received support (n = 27). Systolic and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate were measured during baseline, the discussions, and recovery. Distress, closeness, and support were self-reported. Support quality was observationally coded. Results Mutual support did not affect cardiovascular reactivity. When husbands received support from wives, husbands' blood pressure and distress decreased, and both partners' closeness increased. When wives received support, husbands and wives felt closer, but both partners' heart rate remained elevated and wives felt more distressed. Conclusions Receiving support individually may be more important than receiving support mutually for older adult spouses coping with their health concerns. Also, support interventions for couples coping with health conditions should take into account that husbands receive greater benefits from spousal support than wives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Fear not, want not: Untangling the effects of social cost of failure on high-growth entrepreneurship

Prior research on the effect that formal and informal institutions have on high-growth entrepreneurship has tended to propose policies aimed at either lowering the social cost of failure in society, or creating business-friendly entry environments aimed at increasing the rate of entrepreneurship. These policies have triggered a debate about whether policies that focus on stimulating high-growth entrepreneurship conflict with policy goals aimed at decreasing the social cost of failure in society. Using approach/avoidance as a lens, we examine the relationship between high social costs of failure and the odds of individuals engaging in growth-based entrepreneurship. Our unique dataset captures the entry decisions of 208,089 individuals in 29 OECD countries. We find that while countries with a higher social cost of failure experience lower total entrepreneurial activity, they have higher odds of entrepreneurs having high-growth aspirations and firms with export-led orientations.
A Visual Analysis of Food Availability in Davidson County NC

Community Food Strategies provides guidance and tools to local food networks in North Carolina to empower the creation of equitable policy change at all levels. Their vision is the realization of an equitable food system that improves the quality of life for all. In Davidson County, the recently formed Local Food Network, created under the guidance of Community Food Strategies, is working to create a more equitable and sustainable food system and is evaluating how best to apply their resources toward this end. The county is largely rural, and rural areas tend to have lower food access. Two cities, Lexington and Thomasville, have experienced economic depression over the past three decades with the exodus of furniture manufacturing overseas and as such, both cities have communities that suffer from poverty and food insecurity issues. In this research, we use visual analytics and spatial analysis to build a survey and analysis of local food availability for the county. Visual analytics is increasingly being applied to applications like this to increase understanding of large datasets and improve decision making. This research provides a base analysis for the Local Food Network to present the state of the local food system to potential partners who can help create policies that will increase equity and availability of food to everyone in the county.
Proteomics on longitudinal serum samples differentiates localized and disseminated Lyme disease

Abstract Lyme disease (LD) is the most prevalent vector-borne disease in North America, with ~300,000 new cases annually in the USA alone. LD is most often recognized by the appearance of the skin lesion erythema migrans (EM) at the tick bite site but also can present with signs of disseminated infection manifesting as multiple EM lesions and/or involvement of the heart, nervous system or joints. In this study, we examined the serum proteome of study participants presenting with either a single EM (localized LD) or early disseminated infection (disseminated LD). Samples collected at the time of diagnosis and at convalescent time points were assessed using our in-house developed MStern blotting-based serum proteomics platform. After technical validation of our platform, the temporal analysis from diagnosis to clinical resolution of the infection demonstrates LD stage-associated pathways activation such as a temporary upregulation of acute phase response specific to the participants with disseminated LD. In addition, we identified the members of the serum amyloid A protein family as potentially promising candidate biomarkers to identify those with disseminated LD. The results of this pilot study demonstrate the feasibility of using our time- and cost-effective sample sparing MStern blotting-based serum proteomics platform to efficiently interrogate proteome changes over time in those suffering infections such as LD. These observations establish a new approach to human serum proteomics, provide fresh insight into the host immune responses associated with disease severity (localized versus disseminated infection) and suggest novel biomarker candidate panels for LD stages. Importance We investigated the proteome changes of Borrelia burgdorferi-infected participants with either a single erythema migrans or early disseminated Lyme disease infection. Using our in-house time-and cost-effective proteomics platform, the temporal analysis from diagnosis to clinical resolution of the infection shows a temporary upregulation of the acute phase response specific to the participants with disseminated infection. Finally, specific protein panels were identified as possible biomarker candidates to categorize those having an initial diagnosis of disseminated manifestation using a reference cohort of acute localized infection and a clinically resolved convalescent phase disease samples from the same Lyme disease participants.
Copper Containing Glass-Based Bone Adhesives for Orthopaedic Applications: Glass Characterization and Advanced Mechanical Evaluation

This study addresses issues with currently used bone adhesives, by producing novel glass based skeletal adhesives through modification of the base glass composition to include copper (Cu) and by characterizing each glass with respect to structural changes. Bioactive glasses have found applications in fields such as orthopedics and dentistry, where they have been utilized for the restoration of bone and teeth. The present work outlines the formation of flexible organic/inorganic polyacrylic acid (PAA)/glass hybrids, commercial forms are known as glass ionomer cements (GICs). Initial stages of this research will involve characterization of the Cu-glasses, significant to evaluate the properties of the resulting adhesives. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of annealed Cu glasses indicates the presence of partial crystallization in the glass. The structural analysis of the glass using Raman suggests the formation of CuO nanocrystals on the surface. X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) further confirmed the formation of crystalline CuO phases on the surface of the annealed Cu-glass. The setting reaction was studied using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR FTIR). The mechanical properties of the Cu containing adhesives exhibited gel viscoelastic behavior and enhanced mechanical properties when compared to the control composition. Compression data indicated the Cu glass adhesives were efficient at energy dissipation due to the reversible interactions between CuO nano particles and PAA polymer chains.
Structure-based virtual screening identifies an 8-hydroxyquinoline as a small molecule GLI1 inhibitor

The glioma-associated family of transcription factors (GLI) have emerged as a promising therapeutic target for a variety of human cancers. In particular, GLI1 plays a central role as a transcriptional regulator for multiple oncogenic signaling pathways, including the hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway. We undertook a computational screening approach to identify small molecules that directly bind GLI1 for potential development as inhibitors of GLI-mediated transcription. Through these studies, we identified compound 1, which is an 8-hydroxyquinoline, as a high-affinity binder of GLI1. Compound 1 inhibits GLI1-mediated transcriptional activity in several Hh-dependent cellular models, including a primary model of murine medulloblastoma. We also performed a series of computational analyses to define more clearly the mechanism(s) through which 1 inhibits GLI1 function after binding. Our results strongly suggest that binding of 1 to GLI1 does not prevent GLI1/DNA binding nor disrupt the GLI1/DNA complex, but rather, it induces specific conformational changes in the overall complex that prevent proper GLI function. These results highlight the potential of this compound for further development as an anti-cancer agent that targets GLI1.
Significance and complications of drilling fluid rheology in geothermal drilling: A review

Abstract The harsh downhole conditions of high pressure and high temperature (HPHT) encountered in geothermal wells make the drilling operation challenging. Drilling in such environments requires a special drilling mud formulation with high thermal stability and good rheological properties to fulfill the drilling fluid functions. Therefore, great efforts should be put into selecting the suitable drilling fluid, optimize and monitor the drilling fluid properties throughout drilling operations, and predicting its performance under downhole conditions. Rheological properties significantly impact many drilling parameters such as hole cleaning, fluid and wellbore stability, wellbore hydraulics, torque and drag, and other drilling issues. This paper discusses water-based drilling fluids' flow behavior under HPHT conditions and highlights the significance of fluid rheology in geothermal drilling. The common challenges and complications related to fluid rheology encountered in geothermal drilling are addressed in this paper, such as hole cleaning, wellbore hydraulics, and drilling fluid stability. This article also reviews the recent advances in drilling mud systems, rheology enhancement, and rheological properties measurements at surface and subsurface conditions. Moreover, the rheology models of drilling fluid at elevated temperatures are reviewed to fully understand their flow behavior and establish a method for drilling engineers to optimize fluid formulations for geothermal drilling.
Predictors of the intention to receive a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

BACKGROUND: It is imperative to understand the predictors of vaccine hesitancy for current and future pandemics. METHODS: A representative sample (age, race & gender) of 1054 US adults was collected in October 2020 to examine the predictors of vaccine hesitancy. Participants were asked several questions including their intention to receive a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. RESULTS: Predictors significantly associated with a greater intention to receive a COVID-19 vaccine included greater perceived feelings of vulnerability to COVID-19, having received a flu vaccination at the time the question was asked, more liberal political orientation, non-Black race, male gender, and a lower naturalness bias. CONCLUSIONS: Vaccines are essential for mitigating current and future pandemics. Multiple strategies are important in encouraging people to be vaccinated and the predictors highlighted here and elsewhere are likely to be useful targets.
Power Side-Channel Attacks on BNN Accelerators in Remote FPGAs

To lower cost and increase the utilization of Cloud Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), researchers have recently been exploring the concept of multi-tenant FPGAs, where multiple independent users simultaneously share the same remote FPGA. Despite its benefits, multi-tenancy opens up the possibility of malicious users co-locating on the same FPGA as a victim user, and extracting sensitive information. This issue becomes especially serious when the user is running a machine learning algorithm that is processing sensitive or private information. To demonstrate the dangers, this paper presents a remote, power-based side-channel attack on a deep neural network accelerator running in a variety of Xilinx FPGAs and also on Cloud FPGAs using Amazon Web Services (AWS) F1 instances. This work in particular shows how to remotely obtain voltage estimates as a deep neural network inference circuit executes, and how the information can be used to recover the inputs to the neural network. The attack is demonstrated with a binarized convolutional neural network used to recognize handwriting images from the MNIST handwritten digit database. With the use of precise time-to-digital converters for remote voltage estimation, the MNIST inputs can be successfully recovered with a maximum normalized cross-correlation of 79% between the input image and the recovered image on local FPGA boards and 72% on AWS F1 instances. The attack requires no physical access nor modifications to the FPGA hardware.
The Other Invisible Hand: How Markets Can Propagate Errors

Markets, the arenas where many strategies are enacted, are ubiquitous in modern society. This status is often justified by their presumed ability to aggregate bits of information into a single unbi...
The Efficacy of Variations of Observation and Data Recording on Trainee Performance

The observer effect refers to an increase in a trainee’s performance following an observation in which the trainee records data on the behavior of another individual performing that skill. We exami...
Tracking-Based Interactive Assessment of Saccades, Pursuits, Visual Field, and Contrast Sensitivity in Children With Brain Injury

Visual deficits in children that result from brain injury, including cerebral/cortical visual impairment (CVI), are difficult to assess through conventional methods due to their frequent co-occurrence with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Such impairments hence often go undiagnosed or are only determined through subjective evaluations of gaze-based reactions to different forms, colors, and movements, which limits any potential for remediation. Here, we describe a novel approach to grading visual health based on eye movements and evidence from gaze-based tracking behaviors. Our approach-the "Visual Ladder"-reduces reliance on the user's ability to attend and communicate. The Visual Ladder produces metrics that quantify spontaneous saccades and pursuits, assess visual field responsiveness, and grade spatial visual function from tracking responses to moving stimuli. We used the Ladder to assess fourteen hospitalized children aged 3 to 18 years with a diverse range of visual impairments and causes of brain injury. Four children were excluded from analysis due to incompatibility with the eye tracker (e.g., due to severe strabismus). The remaining ten children-including five non-verbal children-were tested multiple times over periods ranging from 2 weeks to 9 months, and all produced interpretable outcomes on at least three of the five visual tasks. The results suggest that our assessment tasks are viable in non-communicative children, provided their eyes can be tracked, and hence are promising tools for use in a larger clinical study. We highlight and discuss informative outcomes exhibited by each child, including directional biases in eye movements, pathological nystagmus, visual field asymmetries, and contrast sensitivity deficits. Our findings indicate that these methodologies will enable the rapid, objective classification and grading of visual impairments in children with CVI, including non-verbal children who are currently precluded from most vision assessments. This would provide a much-needed differential diagnostic and prognostic tool for CVI and other impairments of the visual system, both ocular and cerebral.
The Sclera and Its Role in Regulation of the Refractive State

The sclera is a dense viscoelastic connective tissue that determines the shape and size of the eye and therefore plays a major role in influencing the refractive state. In mammals, the sclera consists of interwoven lamellae of collagen and elastic fibrils, interspersed with proteoglycans and non-collagenous glycoproteins. Sandwiched between the lamellae are the cell bodies of scleral fibroblasts, which are responsible for the synthesis and degradation of the sclera extracellular matrix. In highly myopic human eyes, the sclera is significantly thinner, becomes weaker and more extensible, and gradually expands under the force of intraocular pressure. However, results from animal studies clearly demonstrate that the scleral changes associated with myopia are not simply the result of weakening and passive ocular expansion, but rather they are brought about through precisely regulated extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling events in defined scleral areas. Research highlighted in this chapter will demonstrate that the sclera is a dynamic tissue, capable of altering its ECM composition, cellular phenotype, and its biomechanical properties in response to changes in the visual environment to regulate ocular size and refraction.
Black-Box Constructions of Two-Party Protocols from One-Way Functions

We exhibit constructions of the following two-party cryptographic protocols given only black-box access to a one-way function: constant-round zero-knowledge arguments (of knowledge) for any language in NP; constant-round trapdoor commitment schemes; constant-round parallel coin-tossing. Previous constructions either require stronger computational assumptions (e.g. collision-resistant hash functions), non-black-box access to a one-way function, or a super-constant number of rounds. As an immediate corollary, we obtain a constant-round black-box construction of secure two-party computation protocols starting from only semi-honest oblivious transfer. In addition, by combining our techniques with recent constructions of concurrent zero-knowledge and non-malleable primitives, we obtain black-box constructions of concurrent zero-knowledge arguments for NP and non-malleable commitments starting from only one-way functions.
BAYESIAN DENSITY ESTIMATION BY MIXTURES OF NORMAL DISTRIBUTIONS

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses Bayesian density estimation by mixtures of normal distributions and discusses the estimation of an arbitrary density f(x) on the real line. This density is modeled as a mixture of a countable number of normal distributions. Using such mixtures, any distribution on the real line can be approximated to within any preassigned accuracy in the Levy metric and any density on the real line can be approximated similarly in the L1 norm. Thus, the problem can be considered nonparametric. Asymptotic theory for kernel estimators involves the problems of letting the window size tend to zero at some rate as the sample size tends to infinity.
P-mode principal components analysis, grouping and precipitation regions in California

Three precipitation regions in California are identified, mapped and otherwise described. Four independent sources of precipitation variation were discovered by a P-mode principal components analysis of a covariance matrix and they, plus a fifth dimension of station means, were evaluated by Ward's [14] algorithm in order to arrive at the regionalization. A discussion of the present application of this methodology is also included as it is thought to be a more appropriate procedure than those described by Willmott [16] and others. Data for the study were 120 monthly precipitation totals observed from 1961–1970 at each of 90 randomly chosen stations within California.
Deforestation from the overexploitation of wood resources as a cooking fuel: A dynamic approach to pricing energy resources in Sudan☆

Abstract One important cause of deforestation in arid and semi-arid countries is the overcutting of undervalued trees for fuelwood. Sudan is typical. This study models the costs of deforestation to future generations and argues that governmental policies should ensure that these dynamic costs are reflected in the price of wood fuels.
Martin Walser's Portrait of Uwe Johnson in Breakers

Martin Walser's novel Breakers (Brandung, 1985) contributed in large measure to his prominence as a contemporary German author both because its exotic setting is the Berkeley campus of the University of California and because it thereby became almost unique as an instance of the "campus novel" in German literature. In addition, Walser's satirical and yet lenient account of the middle-age crisis faced by a visiting professor, Helmut Halm, when he falls completely under the spell of a "golden" California young woman (his student), afforded readers new insights into the writing and significance of fiction as a literary genre. In this regard, Walser has undertaken to present his own views concerning literature and its social and artistic significance by way of Halm's analysis of poems by Heine, Rilke, and Shakespeare, and two (arguably three) of Shakespeare's characters, together with an episode in William Faulkner's The Hamlet. These excursions into the literary realm to unearth the truths it affords occur as Halm helps Fran Webb, the perhaps unsuspecting, perhaps conniving object of his affections, in their out-of-class meetings to examine the themes she is writing for another course, one in English Composition. Thus Walser develops in the novel both a discussion of the relevance of fiction and poetry to life, and a story about men and women in their sexual relationship out of marriage and within it. Breakers, in the latter case, explores the marital and extramarital situations in which various members of the German department of the university find themselves. The narrator, who in this novel is a one-point-of-view observer, relating events strictly from Halm's vantage point, pays particular attention not only to the protagonist's dilemma, but also to its counterpart in the unhappy marriage of Rainer Mersjohann, the department chairman. Recent critical comment on Breakers has suggested that Walser's portrait of Mersjohann as a cuckolded husband and incapacitated writer may indeed be a fictionalized version of the state of affairs in the marriage of his friend and an equally renowned novelist Uwe Johnson. This study of Breakers seeks to explore the extent to which Walser has used Johnson's biography in the novel, and the purpose which his appropriation of this material serves.
A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators

Networks of interacting biomolecules carry out many essential functions in living cells, but the 'design principles' underlying the functioning of such intracellular networks remain poorly understood, despite intensive efforts including quantitative analysis of relatively simple systems. Here we present a complementary approach to this problem: the design and construction of a synthetic network to implement a particular function. We used three transcriptional repressor systems that are not part of any natural biological clock to build an oscillating network, termed the repressilator, in Escherichia coli. The network periodically induces the synthesis of green fluorescent protein as a readout of its state in individual cells. The resulting oscillations, with typical periods of hours, are slower than the cell-division cycle, so the state of the oscillator has to be transmitted from generation to generation. This artificial clock displays noisy behaviour, possibly because of stochastic fluctuations of its components. Such 'rational network design may lead both to the engineering of new cellular behaviours and to an improved understanding of naturally occurring networks.
The Biosynthesis of Cell Wall Lipopolysaccharide in Escherichia coli IV. PURIFICATION AND PROPERTIES OF CYTIDINE MONOPHOSPHATE 3-DEOXY-D-MANNO-OCTULOSONATE SYNTHETASE

Abstract Cytidine monophosphate 3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonate synthetase catalyzes the reversible formation of cytidine monophosphate 3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonate from cytidine triphosphate and 3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonate. The synthetase has been purified approximately 170-fold from crude extracts of Escherichia coli 0111-B4. The purified enzyme exhibits an absolute requirement for a divalent cation (Mg++) and is specific for cytidine triphosphate (Km = 2.2 x 10-4 M) and 3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonate (Km = 8 x 10-4 M).