cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Rapid and widespread white matter plasticity during an intensive reading intervention.

White matter tissue properties are known to correlate with performance across domains ranging from reading to math, to executive function. Here, we use a longitudinal intervention design to examine experience-dependent growth in reading skills and white matter in grade school-aged, struggling readers. Diffusion MRI data were collected at regular intervals during an 8-week, intensive reading intervention. These measurements reveal large-scale changes throughout a collection of white matter tracts, in concert with growth in reading skill. Additionally, we identify tracts whose properties predict reading skill but remain fixed throughout the intervention, suggesting that some anatomical properties stably predict the ease with which a child learns to read, while others dynamically reflect the effects of experience. These results underscore the importance of considering recent experience when interpreting cross-sectional anatomy–behavior correlations. Widespread changes throughout the white matter may be a hallmark of rapid plasticity associated with an intensive learning experience. White matter properties correlate with cognitive performance in a number of domains. Here the authors show that altering a child’s educational environment though a targeted intervention program induces rapid, large-scale changes in the white matter, and that these changes track the learning process.
How to Ace Literature A Streetwise Guide for the Math Student

(2003). How to Ace Literature A Streetwise Guide for the Math Student. Math Horizons: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 8-9.
A MODEL OF ADDICTION AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

Many consumer behaviors are both addictive and social. Understanding how these two phenomena interact informs basic models of human behavior, and matters for policymakers when the behavior is regulated. I develop a new model of demand that incorporates both addiction and social interactions and show that, under certain conditions, social interactions reinforce the effects of addiction. I also show how the dynamics introduced by addiction can solve the pernicious problem of identifying the causal effects of social interactions. I then use the model to illustrate a new and important identification problem for studies of social interactions: existing estimates cannot be used to draw welfare conclusions or even to deduce whether social interactions increase aggregate demand. Finally, I develop a method that allows researchers to distinguish between two common forms of social interactions and draw welfare conclusions. (JEL D11, H20)
Timing is everything: A technology transition framework for regulatory and market readiness levels

Abstract Meeting technology-based policy goals without sufficient lead time may present several technology, regulatory and market-based challenges due to the speed of technological adoption in existing and emerging markets. Installing incremental amounts of technologies, e.g., cleaner fossil, renewable or transformative energy technologies throughout the coming decades, may prove to be a more attainable goal than a radical and immediate change the year before a policy goal is set to be in place. This notion of steady installation growth over acute installations of technology to meet policy goals is the core topic of discussion for this research. This research operationalizes this notion by developing the theoretical underpinnings of regulatory and market acceptance delays by building upon the common Technology Readiness Level (TRL) framework and offers two new additions to the research community. The Regulatory Readiness Level (RRL) and Market Readiness Level (MRL) frameworks were developed. These components, collectively called the Technology, Regulatory and Market (TRM) readiness level framework allow one to build new constraints into existing Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). A system dynamics model was developed to illustrate the TRM framework. The framework helps identify the factors, and specifically the rate at which we must support technology development, necessary to meet our desired technical and policy goals in the coming decades.
Design and measurement methods for a lithium vapor box similarity experiment

The lithium vapor box divertor is a concept for handling the extreme divertor heat fluxes in magnetic fusion devices. In a baffled slot divertor, plasma interacts with a dense cloud of Li vapor which radiates and cools the plasma, leading to recombination and detachment. Before testing on a tokamak, the concept should be validated: we plan to study detachment and heat redistribution by a Li vapor cloud in laboratory experiments. Mass changes and temperatures are measured to validate a direct simulation Monte Carlo model of neutral Li. The initial experiment involves a 5 cm diameter steel box containing 10 g of Li held at 650 °C as vapor flows out a wide nozzle into a similarly sized box at a lower temperature. Diagnosis is made challenging by the required material compatibility with lithium vapor. Vapor pressure is a steep function of temperature, so to validate mass flow models to within 10%, absolute temperature to within 4.5 K is required. The apparatus is designed to be used with an analytical balance to determine mass transport. Details of the apparatus and methods of temperature and mass flow measurements are presented.
Optimizing the linearity in high-speed photodiodes

Analog photonic links require high-fidelity, high-speed optical-to-electrical conversion for applications such as radio-over-fiber, synchronization at kilometer-scale facilities, and low-noise electronic signal generation. Photodetector nonlinearity is a particularly vexing problem, causing signal distortion and excess noise, especially in systems utilizing ultrashort optical pulses. Here we show that photodetectors designed for high power handling and high linearity can perform optical-to-electrical conversion of ultrashort optical pulses with unprecedented linearity over a large photocurrent range. We also corroborate and expand upon the physical understanding of how the broadband, complex impedance of the circuit following the photodiode modifies the linearity - in some cases quite significantly. By externally manipulating the circuit impedance, we extend the detector’s linear range to higher photocurrents, with over 50 dB rejection of amplitude-to-phase conversion for photocurrents up to 40 mA. This represents a 1000-fold improvement over state-of-the-art photodiodes and significantly extends the attainable microwave power by a factor of four. As such, we eliminate the long-standing requirement in ultrashort pulse detection of precise tuning of the photodiode’s operating parameters to coincide with a nonlinearity minimum. These results should also apply more generally to reduce nonlinear distortion in a range of other microwave photonics applications.
Fine-Needle Aspiration Biopsy: Perceptions of Physicians at an Academic Medical Center

In an earlier survey, we asked private practitioners in San Francisco about their perceptions of fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB). In the present study we sent the same survey to clinicians in our hospital, a tertiary medical center. Although the response rate to this survey was lower, it appears that FNAB is used more often in our hospital than it is among private practitioners for the evaluation of palpable masses (53% vs 24%), and that it is most often performed by pathologists. Seventy percent of the FNAB at this institution were performed by pathologists; a small percentage (7%) of cases (nonpalpable) were performed by a radiologist for the evaluation of intra-thoracic and intra-abdominal lesions. Fifty-nine percent of private practitioners performed the FNAB themselves, and the remainder (39%) were referred to pathologists, radiologists, and surgeons. That there are differences in perceptions concerning the use of FNAB in a variety of specific clinical settings was also illustrated by this survey.
The tao of inference in privacy-protected databases

To protect database confidentiality even in the face of full compromise while supporting standard functionality, recent academic proposals and commercial products rely on a mix of encryption schemes. The recommendation is to apply strong, semantically secure encryption to the "sensitive" columns and protect other columns with property-revealing encryption (PRE) that supports operations such as sorting.We design, implement, and evaluate a new methodology for inferring data stored in such encrypted databases. The cornerstone is the multinomial attack, a new inference technique that is analytically optimal and empirically outperforms prior heuristic attacks against PRE-encrypted data. We also extend the multinomial attack to take advantage of correlations across multiple columns. This recovers PRE-encrypted data with sufficient accuracy to then apply machine learning and record linkage methods to infer columns protected by semantically secure encryption or redaction.We evaluate our methodology on medical, census, and union-membership datasets, showing for the first time how to infer full database records. For PRE-encrypted attributes such as demographics and ZIP codes, our attack outperforms the best prior heuristic by a factor of 16. Unlike any prior technique, we also infer attributes, such as incomes and medical diagnoses, protected by strong encryption. For example, when we infer that a patient in a hospital-discharge dataset has a mental health or substance abuse condition, this prediction is 97% accurate.
Textual Analogy Parsing: What's Shared and What's Compared among Analogous Facts

To understand a sentence like “whereas only 10% of White Americans live at or below the poverty line, 28% of African Americans do” it is important not only to identify individual facts, e.g., poverty rates of distinct demographic groups, but also the higher-order relations between them, e.g., the disparity between them. In this paper, we propose the task of Textual Analogy Parsing (TAP) to model this higher-order meaning. Given a sentence such as the one above, TAP outputs a frame-style meaning representation which explicitly specifies what is shared (e.g., poverty rates) and what is compared (e.g., White Americans vs. African Americans, 10% vs. 28%) between its component facts. Such a meaning representation can enable new applications that rely on discourse understanding such as automated chart generation from quantitative text. We present a new dataset for TAP, baselines, and a model that successfully uses an ILP to enforce the structural constraints of the problem.
Evaluating airsoft electric guns for control of invasive brown treesnakes

Author(s): Knox, Adam J.; Lardner, Bjorn; Adams, Amy Yackel; Reed, Robert N. | Abstract: Firearms are often used in lethal control of invasive vertebrates, but safety and regulatory aspects limit the circumstances under which they can be used. During August 2016 at the Brown Treesnake Project laboratory on Guam, we evaluated hobby‐grade Airsoft Electric Guns (AEGs; a lower powered, less‐hazardous, and less‐regulated alternative to firearms) for capture and control of small animals, with specific emphasis on invasive brown treesnakes (Boiga irregularis). Tests of AEGs differing in power with ammunition (plastic pellets) masses ranging from 0.20 to 0.39 g, fired at gelatin blocks from distances of 4, 8, and 12 m, showed that heavy ammunition is of overriding importance for maximizing lethality: 0.39‐g pellets penetrated more deeply at 12 m than did 0.20‐g pellets at 4 m. Inspection of tissue damage in brown treesnake carcasses subjected to fire with the 0.39‐g ammunition from the same distances suggested that injuries sustained by a direct hit from 12 m would often be lethal, and snakes would be unlikely to survive multiple hits from automatic fire discharged at approximately 17/s. Limited trials with live snakes helped us to understand behavioral responses in a snake hit by ≥1 pellets, including distance traveled over time. Based on these factors, we assessed the risk that a snake injured by pellet fire might evade subsequent capture by rapid responders in the proximity. We also discuss ethical considerations and regulatory advantages of using AEGs.
Characterizing Variation in Crowd-Sourced Data for Training Neural Language Generators to Produce Stylistically Varied Outputs

One of the biggest challenges of end-to-end language generation from meaning representations in dialogue systems is making the outputs more natural and varied. Here we take a large corpus of 50K crowd-sourced utterances in the restaurant domain and develop text analysis methods that systematically characterize types of sentences in the training data. We then automatically label the training data to allow us to conduct two kinds of experiments with a neural generator. First, we test the effect of training the system with different stylistic partitions and quantify the effect of smaller, but more stylistically controlled training data. Second, we propose a method of labeling the style variants during training, and show that we can modify the style of the generated utterances using our stylistic labels. We contrast and compare these methods that can be used with any existing large corpus, showing how they vary in terms of semantic quality and stylistic control.
Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS) : Defining A New Macro Measure of Education

The standard summary metric of education-based human capital used in macro analyses—the average number of years of schooling in a population—is based only on quantity. But ignoring schooling quality turns out to be a major omission. As recent research shows, students in different countries who have completed the same number of years of school often have vastly different learning outcomes. This paper therefore proposes a new summary measure, Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS), that combines quantity and quality of schooling into a single easy-to-understand metric of progress. The cross-country comparisons produced by this measure are robust to different ways of adjusting for learning (for example, by using different international assessments or different summary learning indicators), and the assumptions and implications of LAYS are consistent with other evidence, including other approaches to quality adjustment. The paper argues that (1) LAYS improves on the standard metric, because it is a better predictor of important outcomes, and it improves incentives for policymakers; and (2) its virtues of simplicity and transparency make it a good candidate summary measure of education.
Effects of consumer use practices on nanosilver release from commercially available food contact materials.

Migration evaluation involving nano-enabled food contact materials (FCMs) mostly focuses on potential nanoparticle release from new unused products. This may not represent consumer use practices en...
On the Effectiveness of Type-based Control Flow Integrity

Control flow integrity (CFI) has received significant attention in the community to combat control hijacking attacks in the presence of memory corruption vulnerabilities. The challenges in creating a practical CFI has resulted in the development of a new type of CFI based on runtime type checking (RTC). RTC-based CFI has been implemented in a number of recent practical efforts such as GRSecurity Reuse Attack Protector (RAP) and LLVM-CFI. While there has been a number of previous efforts that studied the strengths and limitations of other types of CFI techniques, little has been done to evaluate the RTC-based CFI. In this work, we study the effectiveness of RTC from the security and practicality aspects. From the security perspective, we observe that type collisions are abundant in sufficiently large code bases but exploiting them to build a functional attack is not straightforward. Then we show how an attacker can successfully bypass RTC techniques using a variant of ROP attacks that respect type checking (called TROP) and also built two proof-of-concept exploits, one against Nginx web server and the other against Exim mail server. We also discuss practical challenges of implementing RTC. Our findings suggest that while RTC is more practical for applying CFI to large code bases, its policy is not strong enough when facing a motivated attacker.
Persistence and Nonpersistence as Complementary Models of Identical Quantum Particles

According to our understanding of the everyday physical world, observable phenomena are underpinned by persistent objects that can be reidentified (or tracked) across time by observation of their distinctive properties. This understanding is reflected in classical mechanics, which posits that matter consists of persistent, reidentifiable particles. However, the mathematical symmetrization procedures used to describe identical particles within the quantum formalism have led to the widespread belief that identical quantum particles lack either persistence or reidentifiability. However, it has proved difficult to reconcile these assertions with the fact that identical particles are routinely assumed to be reidentifiable in particular circumstances. For example, when two electrons move through a bubble chamber, each is said to generate a sequence of bubbles (a 'track') that is caused by one and the same particle. Moreover, neither of these assertions accounts for the mathematical form of the symmetrization procedures used to describe identical particles within the quantum framework, leaving open theoretical possibilities other than bosonic and fermionic behavior, such as paraparticles, which do not appear to be realized in nature. Here we propose the novel idea that both persistence and nonpersistence models must be employed in order to fully account for the behaviour of identical particles. Thus, identical particles are neither persistent nor nonpersistent. We prove the viability of this viewpoint by showing how Feynman's and Dirac's symmetrization procedures arise through a synthesis of a quantum treatment of these models, and by showing how reidentifiability emerges in a context-dependent manner. We further show that the persistence and nonpersistence models satisfy the key characteristics of Bohr's concept of complementarity, and thereby propose that the behavior of identical particles is a manifestation of a persistence-nonpersistence complementarity, analogous to Bohr's wave-particle complementarity for individual particles. Finally, we construct a precise parallel between these two complementarities, and detail their conceptual similarities and dissimilarities.
Adventure in three worlds.

The author relates an unlikely journey from his rural village in India, through medical school, a prestigious fellowship with Sir Stewart Duke-Elder, and a colorful career in the United Kingdom and the USA, as a clinician and researcher, particularly in the area of vascular disease of the eye and optic nerve
Declines in Motor Transfer Following Upper Extremity Task-Specific Training in Older Adults

Abstract Background Age-related declines in function can limit older adults' independence with activities of daily living (ADLs). While task-specific training maybe a viable approach to improve function, limited clinical resources prevent extensive training on wide ranges of skills and contexts. Thus, training on one task for the benefit of another (i.e., transfer) is important in geriatric physical rehabilitation. The purpose of this study was to test whether motor transfer would occur between two functionally different upper extremity tasks that simulate ADLs in a sample of older adults following task-specific training. Methods Ninety community dwelling adults ages 43 to 94 years old performed two trials of a functional dexterity and functional reaching task at baseline, and were then assigned to one of two groups. The training group completed 3 days of task-specific training (150 trials) on the functional reaching task, whereas the no-training group received no training on either task. Both groups were re-tested on both tasks at the end of Day 3. Results No significant interactions were observed between group (training vs. no-training) and time (baseline vs. re-test) on the functional dexterity task (i.e. transfer task), indicating no difference in the average amount of change from baseline to re-test between the groups. However, post hoc bivariate linear regression revealed an effect of age on motor transfer within the training group. For those who trained on the functional reaching task, the amount of transfer to the dexterity task was inversely related to age. There was no significant relationship between age and motor transfer for the no-training group. Discussion and conclusions Results of our a priori group analysis suggest that functional reaching training did not, on average, transfer to the dexterity task. However, post hoc regression analysis showed that motor transfer was both experience- and age-dependent, such that motor transfer may decline with advanced age. Future research will consider how functional and cognitive aging influences transfer of motor skills across different activities of daily living.
GenomeGraphR: A user-friendly open-source web application for foodborne pathogen whole genome sequencing data integration, analysis, and visualization

Food safety risk assessments and large-scale epidemiological investigations have the potential to provide better and new types of information when whole genome sequence (WGS) data are effectively integrated. Today, the NCBI Pathogen Detection database WGS collections have grown significantly through improvements in technology, coordination, and collaboration, such as the GenomeTrakr and PulseNet networks. However, high-quality genomic data is not often coupled with high-quality epidemiological or food chain metadata. We have created a set of tools for cleaning, curation, integration, analysis and visualization of microbial genome sequencing data. It has been tested using Salmonella enterica and Listeria monocytogenes data sets provided by NCBI Pathogen Detection (160,000 sequenced isolates in 2018). GenomeGraphR presents foodborne pathogen WGS data and associated curated metadata in a user-friendly interface that allows a user to query a variety of research questions such as, transmission sources and dynamics, global reach, and persistence of genotypes associated with contamination in the food supply and foodborne illness across time or space. The application is freely available (https://fda-riskmodels.foodrisk.org/genomegraphr/).
Gate-Tunable Near-Field Heat Transfer

Active control over the flow of heat in the near-field holds promise for nanoscale thermal management, with applications in refrigeration, thermophotovoltaics, and thermal circuitry. Analogously to its electronic counterpart, the metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) capacitor, we propose a thermal switching mechanism based on accumulation and depletion of charge carriers in an ultrathin plasmonic film, via application of external bias. In our proposed configuration, the plasmonic film is placed on top of a polaritonic dielectric material that provides a surface phonon polariton (SPhP) thermal channel, while also ensuring electrical insulation for application of large electric fields. The variation of carrier density in the plasmonic film enables the control of the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) thermal channel. We show that the interaction of the SPP with the SPhP significantly enhances the net heat transfer. We study SiC as the oxide and explore three classes of gate-tunable plasmonic materials, transparent ...
Firm beliefs and long-run demand effects in a labor-constrained model of growth and distribution

One of the most debated questions in alternative macroeconomics regards whether demand policies have permanent or merely transitory effects. While demand matters in the long run in (neo-) Kaleckian economics, both economists operating within other Keynesian traditions (e.g. Skott 1989) as well as Classical economists Dumenil and Levy (Manchester School 67(6):684–716, 1999) argue that in the long-run output growth is constrained by an exogenous natural growth rate. This paper attempts to bridge the gap by analyzing the role of firm beliefs about the state of the economy in a labor-constrained growth and distribution model based on Kaldor (Review of Economic Studies 23(2):83–100, 1956) and Goodwin (Journal of Evolutionary Economics 1(1):29–47, 1991) that is also compatible with the evolutionary perspective on coordination (or the lack thereof) within markets by Metcalfe et al. (Cambridge Journal of Economics 30:7–32, 2006). The main innovation is the inclusion of beliefs about economic activity in an explicitly dynamic choice of capacity utilization at the firm level. We show that: (i) the relevance of such beliefs generates an inefficiently low utilization rate and labor share in equilibrium, but (ii) the efficient utilization rate can be implemented through fiscal policy. Under exogenous technical change, (iii) the inefficiency does not affect the equilibrium employment rate and growth rate, but expansionary fiscal policy has positive level effects on both GDP and the labor share. However, (iv) with endogenous technical change a la Verdoorn (1949), fiscal policy has also temporary growth effects. Finally, (v) the fact that the choice of utilization responds to income shares has a stabilizing effect on growth cycles, even under exogenous technical change, that is analogous to factor substitution.
Throughput Analytics of Data Transfer Infrastructures

To support increasingly distributed scientific and big-data applications, powerful data transfer infrastructures are being built with dedicated networks and software frameworks customized to distributed file systems and data transfer nodes. The data transfer performance of such infrastructures critically depends on the combined choices of file, disk, and host systems as well as network protocols and file transfer software, all of which may vary across sites. The randomness of throughput measurements makes it challenging to assess the impact of these choices on the performance of infrastructure or its parts. We propose regression-based throughput profiles by aggregating measurements from sites of the infrastructure, with RTT as the independent variable. The peak values and convex-concave shape of a profile together determine the overall throughput performance of memory and file transfers, and its variations show the performance differences among the sites. We then present projection and difference operators, and coefficients of throughput profiles to characterize the performance of infrastructure and its parts, including sites and file transfer tools. In particular, the utilization-concavity coefficient provides a value in the range [0, 1] that reflects overall transfer effectiveness. We present results of measurements collected using (i) testbed experiments over dedicated 0–366 ms 10 Gbps connections with combinations of TCP versions, file systems, host systems and transfer tools, and (ii) Globus GridFTP transfers over production infrastructure with varying site configurations.
Optimal Retail Location: Empirical Methodology and Application to Practice

We empirically study the spatiotemporal location problem motivated by an online retailer that uses the Buy-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store fulfillment method. Customers pick up their orders from trucks par...
Hepatocyte growth factor stimulates invasion across reconstituted basement membranes by a new human small intestinal cell line

Hepatocyte growth factor/scatter factor (HGF/SF) is a protein growth factor whose pleiotropic effects on epithelial cells include the stimulation of motility, mitosis and tubulogenesis. These responses are mediated by the cell surface tyrosine kinase receptor c-met. Because both the cytokine and receptor are found in the gastrointestinal tract, we have studied the effects of HGF/SF on transformed gut epithelial cells which express c-met. Here we describe the response of a new transformed human jejunal epithelioid cell line (HIE-7) to HGF/SF. Morphologically HIE-7 cells are immature. Their epithelial lineage was confirmed by reactivity with the epithelial specific antibodies AE1/AE3, Cam 5.2, Ber-EP4 and anti-EMA and is consistent with their expression of c-met mRNA and protein. In addition, electron microscopic analysis revealed the presence of primitive junctions and rudimentary microvilli, but features of polarization were absent. When grown on reconstituted basement membranes, HIE-7 cells formed closely associated multicellular cord-like structures adjacent to acellular spaces. However, the cells did not mature structurally, form lumen-like structures or express disaccharidase mRNA, even in the presence of recombinant HGF (rHGF). On the other hand, rHGF induced HIE-7 cells to scatter and stimulated their rapid migration in a modified wound assay. To determine whether the motogenic effect caused by rHGF is associated with HIE-7 cell invasiveness across reconstituted basement membranes, a Boyden chamber chemoinvasion assay was performed. rHGF stimulated a 10-fold increase in the number of HIE-7 cells that crossed the basement membrane barrier, while only stimulating a small increase in chemotaxis across a collagen IV matrix, suggesting that the cytokine activates matrix penetration by these cells. rHGF also stimulated the invasion of basement membranes by an undifferentiated rat intestinal cell line (IEC-6) and by two human colon cancer cell lines which are poorly differentiated (DLD-1 and SW 948). In contrast, two moderately well differentiated colon cancer cell lines (Caco-2 and HT-29) did not manifest an invasive response when exposed to rHGF. These results suggest that HGF/SF may play a significant role in the invasive behavior of anaplastic and poorly differentiated gut epithelial tumors.
Integrating Electrical Machines and Antennas via Scalar and Vector Magnetic Potentials; an Approach for Enhancing Undergraduate EM Education

This Innovative Practice Work In Progress paper presents an approach for enhancing undergraduate Electromagnetic education.
Extracting information from the limit order book: New measures to evaluate equity data flow

In this research, we develop a set of new measures to evaluate the data flow in the U.S. equity exchanges using Level I order book data. The quantities we develop and use to summarize trading activity are: the activity-weighted spread and the activity-weighted return. We study the distribution of these two quantities and observe that there are significant changes in their behavior when equity markets are impacted by an external event. We focus the study on three exchanges: New York Stock Exchange (NYS), NASDAQ InterMarket (THM) and NYSE Arca (PSE) since they exhibit the largest impact to the proposed measures. We also study two different financial events which happened suddenly without any prior warning. These events are: May 6, 2010 the ``Flash Crash'', and April 23, 2013, the ``Hoax tweet'' event. Based on the results we obtain, the order flow dynamic is disturbed during these rare events. We quantify this change by measuring the number of detected ``anomalies'' for each exchange and equity studied. We believe the methodology we propose may be capable of detecting a potential unforecasted event as it is impacting the equity markets.
Economics versus politics: pitfalls of policy advice

The standard approach to policy making and advice in economics implicitly or explicitly ignores politics and political economy and maintains that if possible, any market failure should be rapidly removed. This essay explains why this conclusion may be incorrect; because it ignores politics, this approach is oblivious to the impact of the removal of market failures on future political equilibria and economic efficiency, which can be deleterious. We first outline a simple framework for the study of the impact of current economic policies on future political equilibria — and indirectly on future economic outcomes. We then illustrate the mechanisms through which such impacts might operate using a series of examples. The main message is that sound economic policy should be based on a careful analysis of political economy and should factor in its influence on future political equilibria.
ENLLVM: Ensemble Based Nonlinear Bayesian Filtering Using Linear Latent Variable Models

Real-time nonlinear Bayesian filtering algorithms are overwhelmed by data volume, velocity and increasing complexity of computational models. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble based nonlinear Bayesian filtering approach which only requires a small number of simulations and can be applied to high-dimensional systems in the presence of intractable likelihood functions. The proposed approach uses linear latent projections to estimate the joint probability distribution between states, parameters, and observables using a mixture of Gaussian components generated by the reconstruction error for each ensemble member. Since it leverages the computational machinery behind linear latent variable models, it can achieve fast implementations without the need to compute high-dimensional sample covariance matrices. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with the performance of ensemble Kalman filter on a high-dimensional Lorenz nonlinear dynamical system.
A Comparative Study Of GaN Diodes Grown by MBE on Sapphire and HVPE-GaN /Sapphire Substrates

In this paper we report on the fabrication and characterization of GaN diodes (Schottky and p-n junctions) grown by plasma assisted MBE. We observed that Schottky diodes improve both in reverse as well as forward bias when deposited on 5 μm thick HVPE n+-GaN/sapphire instead of bare sapphire substrates. These improvements are attributed to the reduction of disloctions in the MBE homoepitaxially grown GaN. Similar benefits are observed in the reverse bias of the p-n junctions which according to EBIC measurements are attributed to the reduction of etch pits in the MBE grown p-GaN.
Sebaceous Carcinoma of the Nose: A Rare Presentation of an Uncommon Tumor.

Although SC of the nose has been reported previously, it is diagnosed infrequently. The unusual presentation and history of our patient make this case unique.
Full Correlation in a Multiconfigurational Study of Bimetallic Clusters : Restricted Active Space Pair-Density Functional Theory Study of [2Fe-2S] Systems

Iron–sulfur clusters play a variety of important roles in protein chemistry, and understanding the energetics of their spin ladders is an important part of understanding these roles. Computational ...
Efficient Computation of Optimal Low Thrust Gravity Perturbed Orbit Transfers

We have developed a new method for solving low-thrust fuel-optimal orbit transfer problems in the vicinity of a large body (planet or asteroid), considering a high-fidelity spherical harmonic gravity model. The algorithm is formulated via the indirect optimization method, leading to a two-point boundary value problem (TPBVP). We make use of a hyperbolic tangent smoothing law for performing continuation on the thrust magnitude to reduce the sharpness of the control switches in early iterations and thus promote convergence. The TPBVP is solved using the method of particular solutions (MPS) shooting method and Picard-Chebyshev numerical integration. Application of Picard-Chebyshev integration affords an avenue for increased efficiency that is not available with step-by-step integrators. We demonstrate that computing the particular solutions with only a low-fidelity force model greatly increases the efficiency of the algorithm while ultimately achieving near machine precision accuracy. A salient feature of the MPS is that it is parallelizable, and thus further speedups are available. It is also shown that, for near-Earth orbits and over a small number of en-route revolutions around the Earth, only the zonal perturbation terms are required in the costate equations to obtain a solution that is accurate to machine precision and optimal to engineering precision. The proposed framework can be used for trajectory design around small asteroids and also for orbit debris rendezvous and removal tasks.
LR-GLM: High-Dimensional Bayesian Inference Using Low-Rank Data Approximations

Due to the ease of modern data collection, applied statisticians often have access to a large set of covariates that they wish to relate to some observed outcome. Generalized linear models (GLMs) offer a particularly interpretable framework for such an analysis. In these high-dimensional problems, the number of covariates is often large relative to the number of observations, so we face non-trivial inferential uncertainty; a Bayesian approach allows coherent quantification of this uncertainty. Unfortunately, existing methods for Bayesian inference in GLMs require running times roughly cubic in parameter dimension, and so are limited to settings with at most tens of thousand parameters. We propose to reduce time and memory costs with a low-rank approximation of the data in an approach we call LR-GLM. When used with the Laplace approximation or Markov chain Monte Carlo, LR-GLM provides a full Bayesian posterior approximation and admits running times reduced by a full factor of the parameter dimension. We rigorously establish the quality of our approximation and show how the choice of rank allows a tunable computational-statistical trade-off. Experiments support our theory and demonstrate the efficacy of LR-GLM on real large-scale datasets.
Assessment of environmental and occupational exposure while working with multidrug resistant (MDR) fungus Candida auris in an animal facility

In less than a decade since its identification in 2009, the emerging fungal pathogen Candida auris has become a major public health threat due to its multidrug resistant (MDR) phenotype, high trans...
Improvements to exact Boltzmann sampling using probabilistic divide-and-conquer and the recursive method

Abstract We demonstrate an approach for exact sampling of certain discrete combinatorial distributions, which is a hybrid of exact Boltzmann sampling and the recursive method, using probabilistic divide-and-conquer (PDC). The approach specializes to exact Boltzmann sampling in the trivial setting, and specializes to PDC deterministic second half in the first non-trivial application. A large class of examples is given for which this method broadly applies, and several examples are worked out explicitly.
Deprotection of α-imidazole/benzimidazole ribonucleosides by catalytic carbon tetrabromide initiated photolysis

Abstract Several protected benzimidazole and imidazole α-ribonucleosides were deprotected in excellent yield at ambient temperature using CBr 4 initiated photolysis in methanol at ambient temperature. No selectivity was observed and both trityl and isopropylidene groups were deprotected under the reaction conditions.
Hydration, Ion Pairing, and Sandwich Motifs in Ammonium Nitrate Complexes of Crown Ethers

Abstract Ammonium nitrate coordinates to 18-crown-6 through a near-ideal ‘tripod’ arrangement of hydrogen bonds to alternate crown ether oxygen atoms. Ion pairing interactions are apparent, with the strength of this ion pairing interaction appearing to be reduced by hydration, representing a potentially significant role of water in cation–molecule complexes. The bis(benzo-15-crown-5) complex of ammonium nitrate is of sandwich type structure, with the ammonium ion complexed between two roughly parallel crown ether rings through an unusual but efficient set of linear, bifurcated, and off-axis hydrogen bonding interactions.
6-Substituted-9-(3-formamidobenzyl)-9H-purines. Benzodiazepine receptor binding activity

A series of 6-substituted-9-(3-formamidobenzyl)purines were synthesized and studied for benzodiazepine receptor (BZR) binding activity. Most of the target compounds were prepared by reaction of 6-chloro-9-(3-formamidobenzyl)-9H-purine (17) with the appropriate amine, alcohol or other nucleophilic reagent. Alternatively, the 6-cyclopropylaminopurine 5 was synthesized via the nitrobenzyl precursor 22, and the 6-alkyl-thiopurines 14 and 15 were prepared by alkylation of the appropriate purine with 3-formamidobenzyl bromide. Purines with a variety of 6-substituents retained potent BZR binding properties, although certain bulky 6-substituents led to compounds with diminished activity. None of the compounds exhibited significant activity on a modified Geller-Seifter Conflict schedule.
Interaction between static visual cues and force-feedback on the perception of mass of virtual objects

We use force-feedback device and a game engine to measure the effects of material appearance on the perception of mass of virtual objects. We discover that the perceived mass is mainly determined by the ground-truth mass output by the force-feedback device. Different from the classic Material Weight Illusion (MWI), however, heavy-looking objects (e.g. steel) are consistently rated heavier than light-looking ones (e.g. fabric) with the same ground-truth mass. Analysis of the initial accelerated velocity of the movement trajectories of the virtual probe shows greater acceleration for materials with heavier rated mass. This effect is diminished when the participants lift the object for the second time, meaning that the influence of visual appearance disappears in the movement trajectories once it is calibrated by the force-feedback. We also show how the material categories are affected by both the visual appearance and the weight of the object. We conclude that visual appearance has a significant interaction with haptic force-feedback on the perception of mass and also affects the kinematics of how participants manipulate the object.
Toxoplasma Does Not Secrete the GRA16 and GRA24 Effectors Beyond the Parasitophorous Vacuole Membrane of Tissue Cysts

After invasion, Toxoplasma resides in a parasitophorous vacuole (PV) that is surrounded by the PV membrane (PVM). Once inside the PV, tachyzoites secrete dense granule proteins (GRAs) of which some, such as GRA16 and GRA24, are transported beyond the PVM likely via a putative translocon. However, once tachyzoites convert into bradyzoites within cysts, it is not known if secreted GRAs can traffic beyond the cyst wall membrane. We used the tetracycline inducible system to drive expression of HA epitope tagged GRA16 and GRA24 after inducing stage conversion and show that these proteins are not secreted beyond the cyst wall membrane. This suggests that secretion of GRA beyond the PVM is not important for the tissue cyst stage of Toxoplasma.
Single Crystalline Magnetite Nanotubes

We descried a method to synthesize single crystalline Fe3O4 nanotubes by wet-etching the MgO inner cores of MgO/Fe3O4 core−shell nanowires. Homogeneous Fe3O4 nanotubes with controllable length, diameter, and wall thickness have been obtained. Resistivity of the Fe3O4 nanotubes was estimated to be ∼4 × 10-2 Ω cm at room temperature. Magnetoresistance of ∼1% was observed at T = 77 K when a magnetic field of B = 0.7 T was applied. The synthetic strategy presented here may be extended to a variety of materials such as YBCO, PZT, and LCMO which should provide ideal candidates for fundamental studies of superconductivity, piezoelectricity, and ferromagnetism in nanoscale structures.
Preparation of (Z)- and (E)-vinyl selenides utilizing vinylboronic acids and vinylboronic esters in ionic liquids

Vinylboronic acids and vinylboronic esters react with phenylselenyl chloride in ionic liquids to generate vinyl selenides stereospecifically.
Cyclization of Hindered Fluorinated Dichloro(5- and 6-)alkenyl Radicals. Structural Effects of Olefins on the Selective Formation of 5-exo and 6-endo Cyclization Products.

Reaction of 3-butenyl radicals generated by photolysis of variously substituted Barton esters (both open-chain 1a−d and cyclohexyl 1e−h) with CF2CCl2 gave a mixture of cyclized products (cyclopenta...
Enantioselective Synthesis of the Cyclopentyl Core of the Axinellamines

Axinellamines A−D (1−4) are novel bis-guanidine alkaloids isolated from the marine sponge Axinella sp. of which Axinellamines B−D (2−4) have been shown to possess bactericidal activity against Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium implicated in pepticular and gastric cancer.1 These natural products are noteworthy for the structural complexity of the polycyclic framework incorporating fused and spirocyclic ring systems. Moreover, embedded within these structures is a stereochemically complex and densely functionalized cyclopentyl core that presents a daunting synthetic challenge. A similarly substituted cyclopentane core can be found in palau'amine 5 which critically differs from that of 1−4 in the relative stereochemical relationships of the pendant functionality.2 Palau'amine 5 has attracted considerable attention due to its potent antibiotic, immunosuppressive, and cytotoxic properties (Chart 1).
Structural complexity meets transport and magnetic anisotropy in single crystalline Ln30Ru4Sn31 (Ln = Gd, Dy).

We present the structure of Ln30Ru4+xSn31–y (Ln = Gd, Dy) and the anisotropic resistivity, magnetization, thermopower, and thermal conductivity of single crystal Ln30Ru4+xSn31–y (Ln = Gd, Tb). Gd30Ru4.92Sn30.54 crystallizes in a new structure-type with space group Pnnm and dimensions of a = 11.784(1) A, b = 24.717(1) A, and c = 11.651(2) A, and V = 3394(1) A3. Magnetic anisotropy and highly anisotropic electrical transport behavior were observed in the single crystals of Gd30Ru4.92Sn30.54 and Tb30Ru6Sn29.5. Additionally, the lattice thermal conductivity of Tb30Ru6Sn29.5 is quite low, and a comparison is made to other Sn-containing compounds.
The Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention: A review of findings and current directions.

The Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention is a longitudinal observational cohort study enriched with persons with a parental history (PH) of probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. Since late 2001, Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention has enrolled 1561 people at a mean baseline age of 54 years. Participants return for a second visit 4 years after baseline, and subsequent visits occur every 2 years. Eighty-one percent (1270) of participants remain active in the study at a current mean age of 64 and 9 years of follow-up. Serially assessed cognition, self-reported medical and lifestyle histories (e.g., diet, physical and cognitive activity, sleep, and mood), laboratory tests, genetics, and linked studies comprising molecular imaging, structural imaging, and cerebrospinal fluid data have yielded many important findings. In this cohort, PH of probable AD is associated with 46% apolipoprotein E (APOE) e4 positivity, more than twice the rate of 22% among persons without PH. Subclinical or worse cognitive decline relative to internal normative data has been observed in 17.6% of the cohort. Twenty-eight percent exhibit amyloid and/or tau positivity. Biomarker elevations, but not APOE or PH status, are associated with cognitive decline. Salutary health and lifestyle factors are associated with better cognition and brain structure and lower AD pathophysiologic burden. Of paramount importance is establishing the amyloid and tau AD endophenotypes to which cognitive outcomes can be linked. Such data will provide new knowledge on the early temporal course of AD pathophysiology and inform the design of secondary prevention clinical trials.
Synthesis of 10-thia-5-deazafolic acid and 2-desamino-2-oxo-10-thia-5-deazafolic acid

The folate analogue, 10-thia-5-deazafolic acid, was obtained via a multistep synthetic sequence beginning with the known intermediate, 2,4-diaminopyrido[2,3-d]pyrirnidine-6-carboxaldehyde. Reduction of this aldehyde with sodium borohydride gave 2,4-diamino-6-(hydroxymethyl)pyrido[2,3-d]pyrimidine, which when heated in base gave 2-amino-3,4-dihydro-6-(hydroxymethyl)-4-oxopyrido[2,3-d]pyrimidine. Treatment of the latter compound with phosphorus tribromide in tetrahydrofuran afforded 2-amino-6-(bromomethyl)-3,4-dihydro-4-oxopyrido[2,3-d]pyrimidine, thus constituting the first successful synthesis of this elusive intermediate. The aforementioned bromomethyl compound reacted smoothly with the sodium salt of ethyl 4-mercaptobenzoate, and the resulting ester was saponified to give 10-thia-5-deazapteroic acid. Conventional peptide bond coupling to di-tert-butyl L-glutamate followed by treatment with trifluoroacetic acid afforded the target compound in respectable yield. Attempts to prepare its 5,6,7,8-tetrahydro derivative by catalytic hydrogenation were unsuccessful.