cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Ptps-14The Need For Multi-Targeted Therapy In Pediatric Brain Tumors With Braf Mutation

Emerging evidence confirms dysregulation of BRAF gene inducing oncogenesis of pediatric brain tumors. To-date few reports show short-lived efficacy using BRAF inhibitors in these tumors. This indicates the need to target diverse pathways to have sustained clinical efficacy. We present two cases where a combination of vemurafenib (BRAF inhibitor) with everolimus (mTOR inhibitor) as a part of an IRB approved protocol was used. A 10-year-boy diagnosed with a left parietal pleomorphic xanthoastrocytoma (PXA) demonstrated tumor progression despite radiotherapy and three surgical interventions over two years. The tumor showed BRAF mutation for which he received a combinatorial therapeutic approach using the above two drugs given orally every day on a 28 day cycle. He experienced a partial response after two cycles and continued response after 13 cycles. This therapy has been well-tolerated with only minor (Grade I) skin rash. The child remains clinically stable with a Lansky score of 100. The second case is a 13-year-old female diagnosed at 1 year of age with a right-sided optic pathway glioma. The biopsy was consistent with pilocytic astrocytoma. The tumor progressed through multiple chemotherapeutic regimens, including carboplatin, vincristine, vinblastine, celexocib. Molecular analysis performed at our institution demonstrated the tumor to harbor a BRAF mutation for which she is currently receiving the above therapeutic regimen. She is tolerating the therapy well, with mild mouth sores. Her tumor after four cycles shows ongoing response and stable vision. It is now known that these tumors can induce escape mechanisms conferring therapeutic resistance and short-lived efficacy, undermining single drug BRAF targeted approach. This is the first ongoing study targeting these pathways (RAF/MAPK/ERK) and PI3K/mTOR pathway in pediatric brain tumors with BRAF mutation. Larger prospective larger studies are warranted to overcome therapeutic limitations through optimal combination therapy targeting multiple signaling pathways.
Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: A Vision

This essay offers a comprehensive vision for a higher education program incorporating critical thinking across the curriculum (CTAC) at hypothetical Alpha College, employing a rigorous detailed conception of critical thinking called “The Alpha Conception of Critical Thinking”. The program starts with a 1-year, required, freshman course, two-thirds of which focuses on a set of general critical thinking dispositions and abilities. The final third uses subject-matter issues to reinforce general critical thinking dispositions and abilities, teach samples of subject matter, and introduce subject-specific critical thinking. Subject-matter departmental and other units will make long-range plans for incorporating critical thinking in varying amounts in subject-matter courses, culminating in a written Senior Thesis/Project involving investigating, taking, and defending a position, which reinforce critical thinking abilities and dispositions and increase subject-matter knowledge. Teaching approaches used in the program are involving and based on the principle, “We learn what we use.” Both summative and formative assessment are employed as appropriate. Coordination and support are extensive. Objections and concerns are discussed, and alternatives, including possible transitions, are considered. An extended review of research supports moving toward CTAC.
Visualizing and Understanding Nonnegativity Constrained Sparse Autoencoder in Deep Learning

In this paper, we demonstrate how complex deep learning structures can be understood by humans, if likened to isolated but understandable concepts that use the architecture of Nonnegativity Constrained Autoencoder (NCAE). We show that by constraining most of the weights in the network to be nonnegative using both \(L_1\) and \(L_2\) nonnegativity penalization, a more understandable structure can result with minute deterioration in classification accuracy. Also, this proposed approach yields a more sparse feature extraction and additional output layer sparsification. The concept is illustrated using MNIST and the NORB datasets.
African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World

Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967–75. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa ('familyhood' in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 70s world.
Phylogeographic structure in long‐tailed voles (Rodentia: Arvicolinae) belies the complex Pleistocene history of isolation, divergence, and recolonization of Northwest North America's fauna

Quaternary climate fluctuations restructured biodiversity across North American high latitudes through repeated episodes of range contraction, population isolation and divergence, and subsequent expansion. Identifying how species responded to changing environmental conditions not only allows us to explore the mode and tempo of evolution in northern taxa, but also provides a basis for forecasting future biotic response across the highly variable topography of western North America. Using a multilocus approach under a Bayesian coalescent framework, we investigated the phylogeography of a wide-ranging mammal, the long-tailed vole, Microtus longicaudus. We focused on populations along the North Pacific Coast to refine our understanding of diversification by exploring the potentially compounding roles of multiple glacial refugia and more recent fragmentation of an extensive coastal archipelago. Through a combination of genetic data and species distribution models (SDMs), we found that historical climate variability influenced contemporary genetic structure, with multiple isolated locations of persistence (refugia) producing multiple divergent lineages (Beringian or northern, southeast Alaska or coastal, and southern or continental) during glacial advances. These vole lineages all occur along the North Pacific Coast where the confluence of numerous independent lineages in other species has produced overlapping zones of secondary contact, collectively a suture zone. Finally, we detected high levels of neoendemism due to complex island geography that developed in the last 10,000 years with the rising sea levels of the Holocene.
Cannon A-waves due to pacemaker syndrome

A 67-year-old woman underwent orthotopic heart transplantation for end-stage familial cardiomyopathy. Epicardial pacing wires were placed during the transplant surgery and remained in situ. Sixteen...
Memorialization and Presence: Capturing the Legacies of the Young Lords in New York

This essay reviews the three-venue exhibition iPresente! The Young Lords in New York, which opened in July of 2015 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio and the Loisaida Center in th...
Ultrasonographic Evaluation of Zone II Partial Flexor Tendon Lacerations of the Fingers: A Cadaveric Study.

Objectives Accurate assessment of zone II partial flexor tendon lacerations in the finger is clinically important. Surgical repair is recommended for lacerations of greater than 50% to 60%. Our goal was to evaluate ultrasonographic test characteristics and accuracy in identifying partial flexor tendon lacerations in a cadaveric model. Methods From fresh-frozen above-elbow human cadaveric specimens, 32 flexor digitorum profundus tendons were randomly selected to remain intact or receive low- or high-grade lacerations involving 10% to 40% and 60% to 90% of the radioulnar width within Verdan Zone II, respectively. Static and dynamic ultrasonography using a linear array 14-MHz transducer was performed by a blinded musculoskeletal radiologist. Sensitivities, specificities, and other standard test performance metrics were calculated. Actual and measured percentages of tendon laceration were compared by the paired t test. Results After randomization, 24 tendons were lacerated (12 low- and 12 high-grade), whereas 8 remained intact. The sensitivity and specificity in detecting the presence versus absence of a partial laceration were 0.54 and 0.75, respectively, with positive and negative likelihood ratio values of 2.17 and 0.61. For low-grade lacerations, the sensitivity and specificity were 0.25 and 0.85, compared to 0.83 and 0.85 for high-grade lacerations. Ultrasonography underestimated the percentage of tendon involvement by a mean of 18.1% for the study population as a whole (95% confidence interval, 9.0% to 27.2%; P < .001) but accurately determined the extent for correctly diagnosed high-grade lacerations (–6.7%; 95% confidence interval, –18.7% to 5.2%; P = .22). Conclusions Ultrasonography was useful in identifying and characterizing clinically relevant high-grade zone II partial flexor digitorum profundus lacerations in a cadaveric model.
Ancestral resurrection reveals mechanisms of kinase regulatory evolution

Protein kinases are crucial to coordinate cellular decisions and therefore their activities are strictly regulated. We used ancestral resurrection to uncover a mechanism underlying the evolution of kinase control within the ERK family of Mitogen Activated Protein Kinases (MAPKs). Kinase activities switched from high to low intrinsic autophosphorylation at the transition from the ancestors of ERKs1-5 and ERKs1-2. A shortening of the loop between β3-αC and a mutation in the gatekeeper residue drove this transition. Molecular dynamics simulations suggested that the change in the β3-αC loop length affected kinase cis-autophosphorylation by altering the positioning of catalytic residues and by allowing greater flexibility in the L16 kinase loop. This latter effect likely synergizes with the known role of gatekeeper mutations in facilitating domain closure and thus kinase activation, providing a rationale for the synergy between the two evolutionary mutations. Our results shed light on the evolutionary mechanisms that led to tight regulation of a central kinase in development and disease.
Home intravenous antibiotic therapy: new technologies.

Over the past 15 years, an increasing variety of intravenous (IV) therapies have been administered to patients both at home and in the outpatient setting. Intravenous anti-infective and chemotherapeutic agents, analgesics, blood product and coagulation factor replacement, immunoglobulins, and even positive inotropic drugs [12] have been safely and effectively administered at home. All of these therapeutic modalities share a number of characteristics including the need for an integrated team approach (physicians, pharmacists, and nurses), careful inclusion and exclusion criteria, a structured follow up process, and increased responsibility on the patient’s part for self-care. [17] In the United States, the increased interest in, and availability of, structured home care infusion services (both hospital- and home-based), new venous access devices, the increased emphasis on the economic aspects of health care provision, and the development of a variety of new infusion technologies, have enabled more patients to be appropriately and conveniently treated with home or outpatient IV antibiotics. In most instances, either the patient or someone in the home (parent, spouse, or other support person) administers the IV drug. In Europe, potential barriers to the implementation of home IV antibiotic services include such issues as who may legally administer IV drugs, the availability of trained staff, and financial reimbursement for such services. Structural and legal issues may differ between countries.
The Dvoretsky-Rogers Theorem

Recall that a normed linear space X is a Banach space if and only if given any absolutely summable series in ∑n x n in X, lim n ∑ k-1 n x k exists. Of course, in case X is a Banach space, this gives the following implication for a series ∑ n x n : if ∑ n ∥x n ∥ < ∞, then ∑ n x n is unconditionally convergent; that is, ∑ n x π(n) converges for each permutation π of the natural numbers.
1.1 kV vertical p-i-n GaN-on-sapphire diodes

Gallium nitride (GaN) has excellent material properties for power switching applications. The availability of low-defect density bulk GaN substrates has generated increased interest in vertically-structured devices [1]–[2]. By defining the electric field vertically, devices can sustain higher voltages within a smaller device footprint when compared to lateral topologies [2]. Despite record performance in vertical bulk-based devices, vertical heteroepitaxial devices remain attractive as a low-cost alternative [3]–[7]. A key design parameter is the drift layer thickness which, to first order, determines the maximum achievable breakdown voltage. For GaN-on-Si, drift layers have been limited to $\sim 3\ \mu \mathrm{m}$ due to film quality issues from lattice and thermal mismatches [4], [6]. For growth on sapphire, films $> 10\ \mu \mathrm{m}$ can be achieved. To date, drift layers $\leq 7\ \mu \mathrm{m}$ -thick and hard breakdown voltages $ have been reported for p-i-n GaN-on-sapphire [3], [5]. This may be due to difficulties with high-quality deep mesa etching. Recently, we reported exceptionally smooth $> 10\ \mu \mathrm{m}$ -deep GaN etching which enables the use of thicker drift layers and simplified processing [8]. Here, vertical p-i-n GaN-on-sapphire diodes with $a 10\ \mu m$ -thick drift layer are demonstrated with 1.1 kV soft breakdown (defined at 0.1 A/cm2) and irreversible hard breakdown $at > 1.3\ kV$ . These results are, to our knowledge, the highest breakdown voltage reported for $GaN$ diodes on foreign substrates and were achieved without edge termination techniques due to our high-quality mesa isolation etch.
Experimental and numerical investigation of interfacial microstructure in fully age-hardened 15-5 PH stainless steel during impact welding

This work explores high-speed impact of fully age-hardened 15-5 PH stainless steel with itself at average impact speed of 682 m/s and impact angles ranging from 8° to 28°. It was assumed that higher angles corresponded with higher shear stresses at impact point. Microstructural examination indicated more pronounced shear-induced features at higher angles, such as nanoscale elongated grains and adiabatic shear bands. Interfacial waves, a feature associated with impact welding, were most prominent at 12° and 16°. White etching layers (WELs), a constituent formed by rapid heating and cooling at impact, were found along the impact interface and most prominently at the front and back vortices of the interfacial waves. WELs (along the interface) were softer than base materials due to overaging, whereas materials surrounding the interface were harder than base materials due to grain refinement. Numerical simulations based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics method were employed to predict the local temperature and strain distributions which supported microstructural findings. Thus, through high-speed impact experiments carried out at different angles along with advanced microscopy and numerical simulations, this work helped reveal the microstructural response of 15-5 PH stainless steel in a range of dynamic shear conditions.
The impact of a dedicated multidisciplinary tumor board on care for patients with brain metastases.

e13585Background: Brain metastases are the most common tumors to affect the central nervous system. Treatment options have recently evolved with the use of targeted therapies, immunotherapy, and in...
Tandem silylformylation-allyl(crotyl)silylation: a new approach to polyketide synthesis

Abstract Tandem intramolecular silylformylation–allyl(crotyl)silylation reactions have been developed that allow the highly efficient synthesis of polyketide fragments. The substrates are subjected to Rh(I)-catalyzed silylformylation to afford β-(diallyl)silyl aldehydes which undergo spontaneous uncatalyzed allylsilylation. This unusual spontaneous allylsilylation reaction is driven by strain release Lewis acidity, which arises from the ∼95° O–Si–C bond angle in the oxasilacyclopentane product of the silylformylation reaction. The methodology has been developed both for alkene and alkyne substrates, may be used to establish as many as three stereocenters, and has been shown to be amenable to use in an iterative fashion.
Initial Development of Multi-item Direct Behavior Rating Measures of Academic Enablers

Although there is a growing body of evidence to support the use of direct behavior rating (DBR) as a formative behavioral assessment method in school-based problem-solving models, this work has centered largely on the assessment of attending and problem behaviors and on the use of single-item DBR scales. The primary purpose of the current study was to report on the development and initial validation of teacher-completed multi-item DBR scales (DBR-MIS) designed to expand upon prior DBR research to assess three constructs representing behaviors that are widely considered to support student academic achievement (academic engagement, interpersonal skills, and study skills), only one of which (academic engagement) has been the target of DBR assessment methods. Development of the scales involved a content validity study utilizing feedback from a panel of consumers (teachers, parents, and school administrators) and a panel of researchers with expertise in school-based behavioral assessment. Results of an exploratory factor analysis of ratings of students completed by teachers in Grades K through 3 (N = 307) supported a one-factor solution for each of the aforementioned constructs. Favorable internal consistency was found for each scale.
A Cybermanufacturing and AI Framework for Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) Additive Manufacturing Process

Abstract In Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) along, more than 50 process parameters are known to affect print quality. The current state-of-the-art practice in process control only considers a small fraction of them – mainly on laser power and scanning speed affecting temperature gradient and geometry of a melting pool. This letter proposes a system-wide platform involving various machine learning principles and leveraging production data stored in the cloud. The proposed framework aims to identify process parameters that may affect print quality so that a viable process control strategy can be formulated.
Smart Plant Life Monitoring System

In this age of technology, people want to be always connected to all things in their lives, which for many people include their house plants. The growing adoption of internet-of-things (IoT) in consumers, commercial, industrial, and services applications means the cost and accessibility of such technology is fast improving. This paper presents the design and development of a monitoring system that is capable of reporting various metrics of a common houseplant. These metrics include light intensity, temperature, and soil moisture. In order to facilitate the reporting process, the device implements an SMTP-based system to communicate with its owner remotely. Furthermore, in order to extend battery life, many power-saving features starting with a hardware level control and working up to the software level are implemented.
Biologic therapy in psoriasis: navigating the options.

Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that can have a considerable social and psychosocial impact in patients with skin of color. The lesions are difficult to treat and often present with notable frustration for both patients and physicians. Although current treatment ladders can delay procedures and surgical intervention, some believe that surgery should be introduced earlier in the management of HS. In this article, we review current surgical procedures for the management of HS. It is imperative that dermatologists are informed about the different techniques available for treating this disease to determine the best route to care for their patients.
Quality Certification and Market Transparency with Decentralized Information Management

This paper studies how decentralized information management affects asset quality uncertainty and consumer welfare. We show that quality certification improves transparency but has a non-monotonic impact on trading activity and the fee for certification. Thus, when a single agent serves as a centralized quality certifier, she has an incentive to leave the market opaque even if the resolution of uncertainty increases consumer welfare. By contrast, in a decentralized system, record keepers competitively determine the reliability of quality certification. Each record keeper does not incorporate the impact of her monitoring on the general equilibrium transparency, as well as the non-monotonic reaction of the fee revenue. Thus, it may outperform the centralized counterpart in terms of consumer welfare. As a leading example, we apply our discussions to the blockchain economy and derive its implications for the cryptocurrency price and the total hash rate.
Introduction to Propaganda and International Criminal Law: From Cognition to Criminality

Introduction to this book addresses the conceptual and evidentiary issues relating to the nature, role and position of propaganda in international criminal law. A sequel to the earlier 'Propaganda, War Crimes Trials and International Law: From Speakers’ Corner to War Crimes' (Routledge, 2012), this book is the first to synthesize the knowledge, procedures and methods of international criminal law with the social cognitive sciences. Including a comprehensive overview of the most relevant case law, jurisprudence and scientific studies, this introduction and the book as a whole offer a series of practical insights and strategies for both academics and legal professionals.
Overview of Mechanotransduction

Abstract Mechanotransduction refers to the biological phenomenon wherein mechanical stresses applied to cells are translated into chemical signals that elicit adaptive responses. Mechanotransduction is involved in many critical biologic responses from vasodilation to hearing, balance, sensation of joint position, muscle contraction, and touch. In bone, mechanotransduction is central to defining the shape, mass, and strength of bone. This section considers bone mechanotransduction broadly beginning with principles of how load is applied to bone, the anatomy of bone, and molecular structure of bone and how that defines the loads experienced by bone, bone sensing cells and, finally, the system of cellular signals by which mechanical loads are translated into a biological response whereby bone is removed or accrued.
Early regeneration following the presalvage cutting of hemlock from hemlock-dominated stands

Live overstory hemlock were cut from three hemlock hardwood stands on the watershed of the Barkhamsted Reservoir in northwestern Connecticut. The presalvage cuttings occurred during a hemlock looper outbreak and in anticipation of hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) infestation. All merchantable and accessible hemlock trees were cut, as were a smaller quantity of other species. The stands were harvested in 1992, 1994, and 1995?96. Over- and understory vegetation were surveyed in the harvested stands and in three nearby uncut, control stands in 1996. Findings suggest that the cut stands will regenerate to hardwoods in the near term. Hemlock regeneration was minimal and insufficient to replace harvested trees. Presalvage cutting of hemlock from hemlock-dominated stands, which typically lack sufficient advance hemlock regeneration, will contribute to the loss of the cover type due to HWA-caused mortality.
Chapter 9 – Creep of Intermetallics

Publisher Summary The term ‘‘intermetallics'’ is used to designate the intermetallic phases and compounds that result from the combination of various metals. Intermetallics often have high melting temperatures (usually higher than 1000°C), partly because of the strong bonding among unlike atoms, which, in general, is a mixture between metallic, ionic, and covalent to different extents. The presence of these strong bonds also results in high creep resistance. Another factor that contributes to the superior strength of intermetallics at elevated temperature is the high degree of long-range order. The effect of order is, first, to slow diffusivity. The reason for this is that the number of atoms per unit cell is large in a material with long-range order. Therefore, in alloys in which dislocation climb is rate-controlling, a decrease in the diffusion rate would result in a drop in the creep rate and therefore, in an increase of the creep resistance. Second, the presence of a high degree of long-range order may retard the viscous motion of dislocations. This is because when a dislocation moves in a non-perfect lattice, the long-range order is damaged and this leads to an increase in energy or a dragging force. Thus, the presence of order results in a decrease of the creep rate in the intermetallic alloys in which the mechanism of viscous glide of dislocations is rate controlling.
Release of treated effluent into streams: A global review of ecological impacts with a consideration of its potential use for environmental flows

Worldwide, the addition of treated wastewater (i.e. effluent) to streams is becoming more common as urban populations grow and developing countries increase their use of wastewater treatment plants. Release of treated effluent can impair water quality and ecological communities, but also could help restore flow and maintain aquatic habitat in water‐stressed regions. To assess this range of potential outcomes, we conducted a global review of studies from effluent‐fed streams to examine the impacts of effluent on water quality and aquatic and riparian biota. We identified 147 quantitative studies of effluent‐fed streams, most of which were from the U.S.A. and Europe. Over 85% of the studies identified water quality as a primary study focus, including basic physical and chemical parameters, as well as trace organic contaminants. Nearly 60% of the studies had at least some focus on aquatic or riparian biota, primarily fish, aquatic invertebrates, and basal resources (e.g. algae). Effluent inputs generally impaired water quality near discharge points, mainly through increased water temperature, nutrients, and concentrations of trace organic contaminants, but also via decreased dissolved oxygen levels. The majority of ecological studies found that basal resources, aquatic invertebrates, and fish were negatively affected in a variety of ways (e.g. biodiversity losses, replacement of sensitive with tolerant species). However, several studies showed the importance of effluent in providing environmental flows to streams that had been dewatered by anthropogenic water withdrawals, especially in semi‐arid and arid regions. Knowledge gaps identified include the abiotic impacts of effluent, such as changes in channel morphology and hydrology (e.g. how nutrient‐rich and warmer effluent affects infiltration rates or interactions with groundwater), the effects of effluent on plants and vertebrates (e.g. amphibians, birds), and the impact of effluent‐induced perennialisation on naturally intermittent or ephemeral streams. Although effluent‐fed streams often exhibit signs of ecological impairment, there is great potential for these systems to serve as refuges of aquatic biodiversity and corridors of ecological connectivity when wastewater treatment standards are high, especially in semi‐arid and arid regions where natural streams have been dewatered.
A Statistical Perspective on Discovering Functional Dependencies in Noisy Data

We study the problem of discovering functional dependencies (FD) from a noisy data set. We adopt a statistical perspective and draw connections between FD discovery and structure learning in probabilistic graphical models. We show that discovering FDs from a noisy data set is equivalent to learning the structure of a model over binary random variables, where each random variable corresponds to a functional of the data set attributes. We build upon this observation to introduce FDX a conceptually simple framework in which learning functional dependencies corresponds to solving a sparse regression problem. We show that FDX can recover true functional dependencies across a diverse array of real-world and synthetic data sets, even in the presence of noisy or missing data. We find that FDX scales to large data instances with millions of tuples and hundreds of attributes while it yields an average F1 improvement of 2x against state-of-the-art FD discovery methods.
A compound duration model for high-frequency asset returns

Abstract This paper builds a model of high-frequency equity returns by separately modeling the dynamics of trade-time returns and trade arrivals. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we characterize the distributional behavior of high-frequency asset returns both in ordinary clock time and in trade time. We show that when controlling for pre-scheduled market news events, trade-time returns of the near-month E-mini S&P 500 futures contract are well characterized by a Gaussian distribution at very fine time scales. Second, we develop a structured and parsimonious model of clock-time returns using a time-changed Brownian motion composed with a general, non-Levy directing process. Particular cases of this model allow for leptokurtosis and volatility clustering in clock-time returns, even when trade-time returns are Gaussian. Finally, we highlight conditions for the directing process which are required in order to generate proper volatility dynamics while simultaneously matching the unconditional distribution of returns. In-sample fitting and out-of-sample realized volatility forecasting demonstrate the strength of our model relative to leading candidates.
Expanding buprenorphine treatment to people experiencing homelessness through a mobile, multidisciplinary program in an urban, underserved setting

Abstract Background and objectives Inequities in access to buprenorphine treatment remain despite measures to increase access to treatment. “Begin the Turn,” a low-barrier, multidisciplinary mobile care unit with access to outreach services, counseling, case management, and buprenorphine treatment addresses these disparities in an urban setting. Methods Retrospective medical record review of patients during the initial 6 months of operation abstracted patient demographics and clinical data, including 10 categories of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) using a total number of ACEs (ACE score) and measuring scores greater than or equal to 4 given higher risk of chronic disease states at this level. The study collected data in electronic data capture tools. The study assessed retention rates at 1, 3, and 5 months. Results Among the 147 individuals who received care, the mean age was 39.6 years and median onset of opioid use was 21 years of age. Among study participants, 67.3% (n = 99) reported IV use, 91.9% (n = 135) reported previous experiences with addiction treatment, and 49.7% (n = 73) had previously suffered an overdose. Adverse Childhood Experiences surveys demonstrated a mean score of 4.6 (n = 141), with 63.1% (n = 89) having a score of 4 or greater. The percentages of patients retained in care at 1, 3, and 5 months were 61.2%, 36.6%, and 27.6%, respectively. Conclusion and scientific significance The program serves a population with high rates of trauma and overdose. The program can serve as a model for treatment for this population.
Can Artificial Intelligence Lead Us to Genuine Virtue? A Confucian Perspective

Philosophers, technologists, and pundits are beginning to recognize the deep ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence. So far, attention has concentrated in three areas: (1) how we are being damaged or controlled by profit-driven algorithms (“the attention economy”), and what to do about it; (2) how to ensure that autonomous, intelligent machines (like driverless vehicles) make “good” decisions, and how to define what these decisions are; and (3) how to think about (and perhaps resist) the possibility of artificial superintelligence surpassing and perhaps controlling us. To the extent that theorists have looked at the good that AI can bring, they have tended focus on possibilities for material abundance and leisure. In addition, virtually all of this theorizing to-date has been limited to Western ethical frameworks. Especially given the huge investments in AI presently being made in China, it seems prudent to expand our collective philosophical frameworks to encompass a more global set of ethical perspectives.
Validation Assessment of a Pain Interference Questionnaire among Student Pharmacists

Validation studies of pain interference instruments used among student pharmacists are rare yet essential for understanding their appropriate use and interpretation in pharmacy education and practice. This study conducted validation and reliability assessments of a five-item Pain Interference Scale previously administered to student pharmacists. Construct validity was assessed using Rasch analysis. Unidimensionality was measured using: point-biserial measure correlations; percent of raw variance explained by items; difference between expected; variance modeled by items; and Rasch model fit. To assess scale functioning, response frequency distribution, observed average and sample expected logit distribution, Andrich logit distribution, item separation, and item reliability were assessed. Visual examination of the Item-Person Map determined content validity. Items explained 64.2% of data raw variance. The difference between raw variance modeled and observed was 0.6. Point-biserial measure correlations were >0.77. Item mean-square infits were 0.7–1.3 while outfit measures were 0.72–1.16. There were >10 responses per response category, response frequency and Andrich thresholds progressively advanced, and observed average and sample expected logits advanced monotonically, Andrich logits = −2.33–1.69, item separation = 2.61, and item reliability = 0.87. Item probability curves indicated response categories were minimally yet adequately distinct. Cronbach’s alpha = 0.93. The Item-Person Map had a ceiling effect indicating content gaps. In conclusion, the pain interference instrument has acceptable construct validity yet contains content gaps. Additional difficult items should be added to the instrument to better capture pain interference among student pharmacists.
Little Rock and the Legacy of Brown

Today, Brown v. Board of Education is an icon. Its legal soundness is, for all practical purposes, beyond question. Brown, of course, was the Supreme Court decision holding unconstitutional state-enforced racial segregation in public schools. There are academic critics of Brown, but then there are academic critics of pretty much everything. As far as mainstream legal thought is concerned, the lawfulness of Brown is a fixed point. One can only imagine what would happen if, for example, a nominee for the Supreme Court testified, in his Senate confirmation hearings, that he thought Brown was wrong and should be overruled: The hearing would effectively end on the spot, because the nominee’s chances of being confirmed would be zero. In fact it is doubtful that a nominee who was even equivocal in his or her support of Brown could survive. On the level of theory, too, it is understood all around that if a theory of constitutional interpretation is inconsistent with Brown, the theory goes and Brown stays. Brown is quite clearly inconsistent with the original understandings of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example. But defenders of the theory that the Constitution must be interpreted according to the original understandings contrive ways to explain how that theory, properly conceived, is consistent with Brown. With very rare exceptions, they do not question Brown. The latest, impressive demonstration of Brown’s iconic status occurred last year, in the Supreme Court’s decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. Parents Involved held unconstitutional the efforts of the local school boards in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky, to alleviate racial homogeneity in their schools. All of the Justices, on all sides of the issue, claimed to be faithful to the true
User preferences and library space at Whitworth University Library

The design of library space is undergoing significant changes in layout and focus. Knowing that understanding a specific library’s user needs is essential to effective planning, many academic institutions have undertaken user studies to establish user needs prior to embarking on redesign, or update of library physical space. Librarians at Whitworth University, a small liberal arts college, conducted an online questionnaire of currently enrolled students to appraise current library use and determine potential areas for improvement based on user needs. The survey revealed some unique characteristics of this user group: use of technology for study, and resource discovery was balanced by preferences for non-digital methods of resource access and use.
Poirier's Latest Push

In the course of writing seven books since 1966, the Americanist scholar Richard Poirier has estabhshed several inexhaustible themes. Perhaps the most crucial of these is what, in his excellent monograph on Robert Frost, he called "the work of knowing." It seems that many of our finest American writers?Poirier's list would begin with Emerson, Melville, and a Uneage of "Emersonian pragmatists," including Whitman, Thoreau, WiUiam James, Frost, Stein, and Stevens?have portrayed the work that goes into writing as if it were physically laborious and as if to be so were a virtue (emphasis on vir-, as in virile). Adumbrating Frost's poem "The Axe-Helve," he finds that "work is necessary if we are to get down to the grain of things, the lines in nature which we cannot otherwise know or see." Closely related to this figurative work-ethic is Poirier's repeated emphasis on the work of art, not just drama, music, and dance, but literary art, as performance. Writing and reading both are most rewardingly acts of discovery that require some labor. Poirier is America's most cogent and committed celebrant of the species of literary difficulty that cannot be, as The Waste Land's allusive difficulty can be, attributed chiefly to differences between an author's and a reader's interpre tive communities. He favors what Whitman called, in a line of the 1860 version of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" later expunged, "the push of reading," where this push or interpretive resistance prevents closure and exhaustion even after the whole has been parsed, the hard words looked up. Two books back he went so far as to define Literature as "that writing whose clarities bring on precipitations of density," and he has since repeatedly expressed a like-mindedness regarding Stevens's poetic claim that "speech is not dirty silence / Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier." Because what he admires most in writing is often, to again quote Stevens, "intelUgent beyond intelli gence," because he believes the notion of genius can coexist with otherwise
The ontogeny of brain receptors for corticotropin-releasing factor and the development of their functional association with adenylate cyclase

This study reports the ontogeny of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) receptor binding sites in rat brain, using both membrane binding assays and in vitro receptor autoradiography. CRF binding sites are evident by prenatal day 17, increase to 312% of their adult density by postnatal day 8, then decrease to reach adult values by day 21. Not only the density, but the distribution of CRF binding undergoes major modifications in development. CRF binding sites are most numerous in striatum prenatally, but postnatally, binding is more dense in the cortex, reaching the adult laminar distribution by postnatal day 14. Brain CRF receptors are linked to adenylate cyclase early in postnatal life. This contrasts with the later appearance of most of the guanine nucleotide stimulatory protein and catalytic subunit sites in the rat brain and suggests that CRF receptors may become functional earlier than several other brain receptors that are linked to adenylate cyclase.
Chapter 13 - Isoconversional Kinetics

This chapter presents the evolution of isoconversional methods, provides an overview of their application to the kinetic analysis of various physical and chemical processes, and discusses their advantages and limitations. Isoconversional kinetics is an efficient compromise between the common single-step Arrhenius treatment and the predominantly encountered processes whose kinetics are multi-step and/or non-Arrhenius. Isoconversional methods are capable of detecting and handling such processes in the form of a dependence of the effective activation energy on the extent of conversion and/or temperature. The chapter emphasizes on the development of new techniques and applications of isoconversional methods that have taken place over the past decade. The applications covered include both physical and chemical processes. Physical processes include the crystallization of polymer melts and glasses, the glass transition, and second-order solid–solid transitions. Chemical processes involve reversible decompositions, the degradation of polymers, and crosslinking (curing). The chapter also discusses the methods of making isoconversional (model-free) predictions and the techniques for evaluating the pre-exponential factor and the reaction model.
Double-analog transition (+48,-)48Ti at 35 and 50 MeV

Differential cross sections for the double-isobaric-analog-state transition in the reaction /sup 48/Ca(..pi../sup +/,..pi../sup -/)/sup 48/Ti at an incident energy of 35 MeV were measured over the angular range 20/sup 0/--80/sup 0/. The cross section extrapolated to 0/sup 0/ is 3.1 +- 0.8 ..mu..b/sr, and the angular distribution shape is nearly isotropic. The results are compared to second-order optical-potential calculations and to the systematics of low-energy double-charge-exchange reactions. Measurements were also made at 50 MeV at scattering angles of 25/sup 0/ and 40/sup 0/. The analog-state transition could not be clearly observed above the background of non-analog-state transitions.
MSU at ImageCLEF: cross language and interactive image retrieval

In this report, we describe our studies with cross language and interactive image retrieval in ImageCLEF 2004. Typical cross language retrieval requires special linguistic resources, such as bilingual dictionaries. In this study, we focus on the issue of how to achieve good retrieval performance given only an online translation system. We compare two approaches, i.e., a translation-based approach and a model-based approach, and find that the later one performs substantially better than the former one. For interactive image retrieval, we investigated the potential use of user relevance feedback (URF), which was designed to address the mismatch problem between user queries and system descriptions. Our strategy is to let the system select important terms for user feedback before expanding queries. However, our preliminary results appear to indicate that the URF approach developed at the current stage is not working. We report our current investigation and discuss lessons learned from this experience.
Demo abstract disseminate: A demonstration of device-to-device media dissemination

In this demonstration, we showcase Disseminate, a protocol and accompanying Android application for supporting device-to-device dissemination of data that fulfills shared interests of devices in pervasive computing environments. Disseminate is a novel publish-subscribe based protocol that breaks large (likely media heavy) data items into smaller chunks and opportunistically shares the chunks among co-located mobile devices. Interested devices issue subscriptions for the chunks they need and advertisements for the chunks they can share. Our publish mechanism uses a computation of a chunk's uniqueness to determine whether or not to broadcast it to the locally connected devices. The Disseminate app provides an implementation of the protocol in an Android application for sharing photographs via WiFi-Direct broadcast communication.
Changes in endogenous substrates of isolated rabbit heart mitochondria during storage.

Abstract Rabbit heart mitochondria were isolated in the presence of low concentrations (150 to 250 µm) of pyruvate-2- or -3-14C to label the endogenous substrates. Chromatographic analyses of protein-free filtrates of the mitochondria indicated that the principal labeled endogenous substrates were citrate, malate, glutamate, and alanine. During storage of the mitochondria under anoxic conditions at 0°, radioactive citrate disappeared while aspartate and succinate increased. Continual changes in the composition of the endogenous substrates occurred during storage. When air was supplied to the mitochondrial suspension, the changes were similar to, but more rapid than, those occurring under anoxic conditions. Under aerobic conditions, however, radioactive succinate did not appear. Changes in total citrate, alanine, glutamate, and aspartate paralleled the changes in their radioactivity. Although partially metabolized, the endogenous substrates were largely retained by the mitochondria during repeated washing. During storage, in addition to metabolism, partial loss of some substrates into the medium was evident. Possible relationships of the metabolism of the endogenous substrates to the metabolic properties of isolated mitochondria are discussed.
Rural considerations in establishing network adequacy standards for qualified health plans in state and regional health insurance exchanges.

Purpose The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires Health Insurance Exchanges (HIEs) to specify network adequacy standards for the Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) they offer to consumers. This article examines rural issues surrounding network adequacy standards, and offers recommendations for crafting standards that optimize rural access. Method This policy analysis reviews ACA requirements for QHP network adequacy standards, considering Medicaid managed care and Medicare Advantage (MA) standards as models. We analyze the implications of stringent vs flexible access standards in terms of how choices might affect health plans' participation in rural markets and rural enrollees' access to care. Finally, we propose strategies for designing standards with the degree of flexibility most likely to benefit rural consumers. Findings A traditional approach to safeguarding rural access is to impose strict network adequacy standards on plans in rural areas. However, if strict standards prove difficult to meet due to rural provider scarcity, they might diminish QHPs' willingness to serve rural areas. Thus, they could exacerbate rather than alleviate rural access problems. Conclusions To benefit rural communities, network adequacy standards must be strong enough to provide real protections for beneficiaries, yet flexible enough to accommodate rural delivery system constraints and remain attainable for QHPs. Useful strategies to achieve this balance might include: adjusting standards according to degrees of rurality and rural utilization norms; counting midlevel clinicians toward fulfillment of patient-provider ratios; and allowing plans to ensure rural access through delivery system innovations such as telehealth.