cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
FREQUENT GENOTYPE CHANGES AT −308, AND 488 REGIONS OF THE TUMOR NECROSIS FACTOR - α (TNF-α) GENE IN PATIENTS WITH PROSTATE CANCER

Purpose: Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) is involved in oncogenesis of several cancers. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether genotype changes of TNF-α promoter regions (−238, −308) and at the 488 region are associated with human prostate cancer. Materials and Methods: The DNA from 73 cases of human prostate cancer was analyzed by allele-specific polymerase chain reaction to characterize the genotype changes of three regions of the TNF-α gene in prostate cancer patients. We also determined the genotype frequency in these patients. The relative risk of variant genotype was calculated by comparing with our previous data from healthy controls. Results: Genetic changes were detected in 15.1% (11/73) of prostate cancer samples at 488 region of TNF-α. Seventy-three percent (53/73) of the patients showed genotype GA at −308 region of TNF-α. Genotype GA at 488 region in TNF-α was observed in 73% (53/73) of the cancer and 71% (52/73) of the normal tissue. The relative risks of incidence for prostate cancer was14-fold higher in people with genotype GA at −308 region of TNF-α. The relative incidence for prostate cancer was a 17-fold higher in-patient with genotype GA at 488 region of TNF-α. Genotype GA at −308 of TNF-α was related to higher clinical tumor stage of prostate cancer than genotype G (p Conclusions: The present study demonstrates, for the first time, that the genotype changes in −308 and 488 regions of TNF-α are associated with prostate cancer.
Four potential disconnects in the community planning process

Although participatory planning has become a well-established emphasis in the planning field, planners often find that land-use outcomes conflict with community goals, resulting in a dissatisfied c...
Speaking With Doctors in Restaurants

As the secretary of Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, I've adopted this rule: I accept every invitation to talk to physicians in my state about the changes under way in the health care system. Usually these events happen at dinnertime, during a meeting of a local specialty society.
Technology Programs:::for All or for Some?

The 1990s have been a decade of great spending and great introspection, particularly when it comes to educational allocations. Citizens, corporations, and public officials are becoming increasingly inquisitive about where their money is going and if the dollars spent are making a difference. For 5 years, the multimillion-dollar Delaware Technology Innovation Challenge project has implemented LightspanTM educational software in the classrooms and homes of elementary school students. Program goals are to increase parent involvement, generate more time for learning, and improve student achievement. On the surface, the program seems to have met its goals. Parents report being more involved in their child's education. Students and parents describe the time spent on the software at home as not replacing traditional homework, but rather television watching. And, student achievement in both reading and mathematics has increased at rates higher than would be expected. However, a closer examination of evaluation results reveals the program has worked best for lower achieving students; students who scored below the 50th percentile in fall testing had much greater achievement gains than their higher scoring peers. This paper investigates whether evaluation findings are reflective of the program's implementation or rather reveal a limitation of the technology.
Inheritance law in an aging society.

An exploratory analysis of states' inheritance law changes between 1961 and 1990 was conducted in order to discern major trends and their implications for older families. Results suggested that states were modifying their laws in ways similar to suggestions of the law community's Uniform Probate Code, with about one third of the states adopting the Code itself. Consequently, inheritance law has become less traditional and paternalistic and more like "facilitative law," that is, flexible, accommodating, and supportive of family autonomy and decisionmaking authority. These changes and new laws that simplify procedures, protect the dependent and vulnerable, treat marital property more like community property, recognize variant family forms, and enable extrafamilial bequests, may serve to minimize family disruption, conserve resources, and allow families to tailor property divisions and procedures to particular needs and wishes. An impact study is proposed for disclosing the actual effects of inheritance law ...
Video Comprehensibility and Attention in Very Young Children

Earlier research established that preschool children pay less attention to television that is sequentially or linguistically incomprehensible. The authors of this study determined the youngest age for which this effect can be found. One hundred and three 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds' looking and heart rate were recorded while they watched Teletubbies, a television program designed for very young children. Experimenters manipulated comprehensibility by either randomly ordering shots or reversing dialogue to become backward speech. Infants watched 1 normal segment and 1 distorted version of the same segment. Only 24-month-olds, and to some extent 18-month-olds, distinguished between normal and distorted videos by looking for longer durations toward the normal stimuli. The results suggest that it may not be until the middle of the second year that children demonstrate the earliest beginnings of comprehension of video as it is currently produced.
Social Signal Processing [Exploratory DSP]

Face-to-face communication conveys social context as well as words. It is this social signaling that allows new information to be smoothly integrated into a shared, group-wide understanding. Social signaling includes signals of interest, determination, friendliness, boredom, and other "attitudes" toward a social situation. Psychologists speculate that social signaling may have evolved as a way to establish hierarchy and group cohesion because social signaling functions as a subconscious discussion about relationships, resources, risks, and rewards. In many situations the nonlinguistic signals that serve as the basis for this social discussion are just as important as conscious content for determining human behavior. In what follows we discuss challenges in exploratory processing of social signals and tools that allow us to predict human behavior and sometimes exceed even expert human capabilities. These tools potentially permit computer and communications systems to support social and organizational roles instead of viewing the individual as an isolated entity. Example applications include automatically patching people into socially important conversations, instigating conversations among people in order to build a more solid social network, and reinforcing family ties.
A novel approach to the estimation of the long-range dependence parameter

A new method to estimate the Hurst parameter of certain classes of random processes is presented. This method applies to Gaussian processes that are either exactly second-order self-similar or fractional ARIMA. The case of the former is of special interest because local area network traffic is well-known to be of this form. Confidence intervals and bias are obtained for the estimates using the new method. The new method is then applied to pseudo-random data and to real traffic data. The performance of the new method is compared to that of the widely-used wavelet method, which demonstrates that the former is much faster and produces much smaller confidence intervals of the long-range dependence parameter
Crime Alert! How Thinking about a Single Suspect Automatically Shifts Stereotypes toward an Entire Group

Crime alerts are meant to raise community awareness and identify individual criminal suspects; they are not expected to affect attitudes and beliefs toward the social group to which an individual suspect belongs. However, psychological principles of learning, categorization, and memory predict that what is learned about an instance can color perception of an entire category. At the intersection of psychology, criminal justice, sociology, and media studies, two experiments were conducted to test the effect that providing individual racial identity in crime alerts has on racial group stereotypes. In Experiment 1, participants visualized four scenarios involving Black or White would-be criminals. Results revealed that in the case where Black would-be criminals were made salient in memory, participants demonstrated significantly more negative implicit stereotypes toward Blacks as a group compared with a condition in which White would-be criminals were more salient in memory. In Experiment 2, participants read a written description of a crime scene with a suspect who was either depicted as White or Black, and then imagined the suspect. On both implicit and explicit measures of group stereotypes obtained afterward, participants who read about a Black criminal reported and revealed more anti-Black0pro-White stereotypes than did those who read about a White criminal. Crime alerts that mention racial identity, whatever their benefit, come with the burden of shifting stereotypes of social groups. In this context, the value of racial identification in crime alerts warrants reconsideration.
Whose success? The state–foreign capital nexus and the development of the automotive industry in Slovakia

Using the case study of Slovakia, this article considers the role of the state in the rapid growth of the automotive industry in integrated peripheral markets of the global automotive industry. Although this growth has been mainly driven by the investment strategies of automotive lead firms, the state has played an important role by accommodating the strategic needs of foreign capital through neoliberal economic policies. In addition to secondary sources, the empirical research is based on a 2010 survey of 299 Slovak-based automotive firms with a response rate of 44% and on 38 on-site firm-level interviews conducted between 2011 and 2013 and one in 2005. The analysis draws upon approaches in economic geography, international political economy and upon global value chains and global production networks perspectives to argue that the successful development of the automotive industry in Slovakia has been achieved at the expense of its overwhelming dependence on foreign capital and corporate capture. The arti...
The Order of Strand Exchanges in Cre-LoxP Recombination and its Basis Suggested by the Crystal Structure of a Cre-LoxP Holliday Junction Complex

Cre recombinase uses two pairs of sequential cleavage and religation reactions to exchange homologous DNA strands between 34 base-pair (bp) LoxP recognition sequences. In the oligomeric recombination complex, a switch between "cleaving" and "non-cleaving" subunit conformations regulates the number, order, and regio-specificity of the strand exchanges. However, the particular sequence of events has been in question. From analysis of strand composition of the Holliday junction (HJ) intermediate, we determined that Cre initiates recombination of LoxP by cleaving the upper strand on the left arm. Cre preferred to react with the left arm of a LoxP suicide substrate, but at a similar rate to the right arm, indicating that the first strand to be exchanged is selected prior to cleavage. We propose that during complex assembly the cleaving subunit preferentially associates with the LoxP left arm, directing the first strand exchange to that side. In addition, this biased assembly would enforce productive orientation of LoxP sites in the recombination synapses. A novel Cre-HJ complex structure in which LoxP was oriented with the left arm bound by the cleaving Cre subunit suggested a physical basis for the strand exchange order. Lys86 and Lys201 interact with the left arm scissile adenine base differently than in structures that have a scissile guanine. These interactions are associated with positioning the 198-208 loop, a structural component of the conformational switch, in a configuration that is specific to the cleaving conformation. Our results suggest that strand exchange order and site alignment are regulated by an "induced fit" mechanism in which the cleaving conformation is selectively stabilized through protein-DNA interactions with the scissile base on the strand that is cleaved first.
Analysis of validation tests of the Langley pilot transonic cryogenic tunnel

A pilot transonic cryogenic pressure tunnel has recently been developed and proof tested at the NASA Langley Research Center. In addition to providing an attractive method for obtaining high Reynolds number results at moderate aerodynamic loadings and tunnel power, this unique tunnel allows the independent determination of the effects of Reynolds number, Mach number, and dynamic pressure (aeroelasticity) on the aerodynamic characteristics of the model under test. The proof of concept experimental and theoretical studies are briefly reviewed. Experimental results obtained on both two- and three-dimensional models have substantiated that cryogenic test conditions can be set accurately and that cryogenic gaseous nitrogen is a valid test medium.
Male mating opportunities affect sex allocation in a protrandric-simultaneous hermaphroditic shrimp

Sex allocation theory predicts phenotypic adjustments by individuals in their investments into the male and female reproductive function in response to environmental conditions. I tested for phenotypically plastic shifts in sex allocation in a protandric simultaneous hermaphrodite, in which individuals mature and reproduce as males first, and later in life, as simultaneous hermaphrodites. I predicted that initially maturing males should adjust the timing of maturation as hermaphrodites according to male mating opportunities mediated by population size of hermaphrodites. In a first experiment, males maintained with only one hermaphrodite reduced the time they spent as males in comparison to males maintained with no conspecifics, presumably because total reproductive output is maximized by two individuals being simultaneous hermaphrodites when the mating system is a pair. Conversely, males maintained in groups with two or more hermaphrodites increased the time they spent as males in comparison to single males. This delay in maturation was not an effect of resource depletion with increasing shrimp density because the growth rate of males did not differ among most of the experimental treatments. One hypothesis to explain this social mediation of sex allocation is that the smaller males are more successful in mating as males than are the larger hermaphrodites: it will pay reproductively for males to delay maturation as hermaphrodites in large but not in small groups. In agreement with this notion, a second experiment demonstrated that smaller males were four times more successful than were larger hermaphrodites in inseminating shrimps reproducing as females. The informative cue that males may use to perceive different group sizes deserves further attention.
Photophobia in Primary Headaches

Background Photophobia is a debilitating feature of many headache disorders. Overview Clinical and preclinical research has identified several potential pathways involved in enhanced light sensitivity. Some of these structures include trigeminal afferents in the eye, second-order neurons in the trigeminal nucleus caudalis, third-order neurons in the posterior thalamus, modulatory neurons in the hypothalamus, and fourth-order neurons in the visual and somatosensory cortices. It is unclear to what degree each site plays a role in establishing the different temporal patterns of photophobia across different disorders. Peptides such as calcitonin gene-related peptide and pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide may play a role in photophobia at multiple levels of the visual and trigeminal pathways. Conclusion While our understanding of photophobia has greatly improved in the last decade, there are still unanswered questions. These answers will help us develop new therapies to provide relief to patients with primary headache disorders.
Grave New World? Workplace Skills For Todays College Graduates

Today’s college graduates face an uncertain and demanding job market in which they are likely to encounter evolving skill needs, reduced hiring, and heightened competition from experienced laid off workers and globally available labor. These realities underscore the importance expressed by educators and practitioners of identifying attributes new college graduates should have to meet the challenges and access opportunities of the 21 st century workplace. This paper identifies those core competencies through comprehensive literature review, original studies using primary data, and contextual analysis of the contemporary workplace in which the skills will be valued.
Compact 10 TW laser to generate multi-filament arrays

The design and construction of a compact 10 TW Ti:sapphire CPA system for the generation of filament arrays is presented. The design and implementation challenges are discussed, in particular the optimization of beam quality.
Perinatal and Childhood Stroke

The epidemiology, risk factors, outcome and prognosis of perinatal and childhood stroke were reviewed at a workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, MD, on Sept 18 and 19, 2000.
Marrying Late in Life

While upward mobility was more common before the age of 50 it did not cease at any set age. Manv old people continued to move up. The really top positions were achieved in later years when economic and social positions also became more favorable. Downward mobility was common in youth; women moved down more than men before the age of 50 but men moved down more in the later years. Upward mobility in a lifetime characterized the upper and both middle classes, while downward mobility centered in the two lower classes. Lower lower class aged tried for better status and some achieved it temporarily but could not continue on that path or failed to consolidate their success. Personal characteristics of the aged were involved with mobility; those who went up continued to carry responsibility, remained independent and fairly active; the downward movers were able to carry only limited responsibility, became dependent, and had to accept increasing inactivity.3
Race Prejudice and Intolerance—A Distinction

The assigning of Negroes to separate (Jim Crow) coaches on southern railroads, although attacked on several fronts during the war years, remained at a standstill. The Jim Crow accommodations, however, were improved on most southern roads as a result of the Supreme Court's ruling in Congressman Arthur Mitchell's (Negro) case in 1941, when the court held that separate accommodations for Negroes must be equal to those for whites, and that Negroes paying first-class fares must have first-class accommodations. Abiding by the letter of the law, most of the railroads now serve Negroes in the dining cars either after the whites have been served or at separate tables, which are shut off from the rest of the diner by curtains. An effort to break down this practice was made by 18 Negro seamen in 1943, but they met without success. The Interstate Commerce Commission held that the railroad's refusal to serve them in the diner while white people were eating did not constitute discrimination.
Embodying the Tragic Father(s): Autobiography and Intertextuality in Aristophanes

This paper examines the role of the generation gap in Aristophanes' construction of his persona throughout Wasps , Clouds , and Peace . It contends that in Wasps and Clouds Aristophanes defines the relationship with his audience and his rivals by presenting himself as the figure of a paternal son. The same stance shapes the comic poet's generic self-positioning in the initial scene of Peace , where the parody of Euripides' Aeolus and Bellerophon evinces a corrective attitude in relation not only to the troubled images of fatherhood offered in the two tragic plays, but also to Aristophanes' unsuccessful performances as a paternal son in his earlier comedies. Euripidean intertextuality thus serves as a discursive medium through which Aristophanes dramatizes the turning points of his poetic autobiography.
Discussion on the thermal control of the spray cooling device for direct air-cooling units

In order to make the direct air-cooling units operate safely in summer and ensure the units output,the spray cooling devices are used in many direct air-cooling units,so which can improve the capability of the direct air-cooling units operating safely in summer.The control system of the traditional spray cooling system is too simple,which caused the waste of the lots of desalted water,and increased the cost of the units energy consumption.Through discussing the control system of spray cooling devices puts forward the reasonable control methods.
Corrosion Inhibition Control of Ferritic Stainless Steel in Hydrochloric Acid Electrolytes

Electrochemical method,weight loss and scanning electron microscope(SEM) were employed to investigate the corrosion behavior of ferritic stainless steel in hydrochloric acid electrolytes.SDS(sulfosalicylic acid dihydrate) and SAD(sodium doclecyl sulfate) were tested as corrosion inhibitors for ferritic stainless steel in 5% HCl at 40℃.The results showed that the ferritic stainless steel keeps active dissolving in hydrochloric acid electrolytes and suffers from uniform corrosion accompanied with intergranular corrosion along the grain boundaries.Both SDS and SAD are interface inhibitors and their inhibition efficiency have a threshold.When the concentration of inhibitor is 0.015%,both the two inhibitors decrease dramatically the corrosion rate of stainless steel.The inhibiting efficiency of SAD is higher than that of SDS under the same concentrations.
Perirenal Urinary Extravasation Associated with Urethral Valves in Infants

We present 7 cases of urethral valves and perirenal urinary extravasation, and review 37 cases reported previously in the literature. The extravasation usually is from the kidney (66 per cent) and often is associated with reflux (70 per cent). It appears to be a pressure-related phenomenon. Although the mortality associated with the condition is significant (32 per cent) renal function is usually preserved. Prompt treatment with correction of metabolic acidosis, and decompression of the tense abdomen and the urinary tract is recommended.
Corporate Social Responsibility Scale Development Proposal

It has been found that social ratings have a positive association with corporate success. Institutional investors are more likely to invest in socially responsible companies (Graves and Waddock 1994; Teoh and Shiu 1990). There is also a positive link between social rating and performance (McGuire et al. 1988; Wokutch and Spenser 1987). Waddock and Graves (1997) have noted that the most serious problem with studying social responsibility in the past has been issues with measurement.
Anticipating the “Ball and Chain”? Reciprocal Associations Between Marital Expectations and Delinquency

Marriage has been identified as a mechanism that may explain decreased delinquency among young adults, but whereas marriage is increasingly delayed, crime continues to decrease across the transition to adulthood. Most adolescents and young adults expect to marry one day, and these expectations may suppress delinquency. Conversely, increased delinquency may also predict decreased marital expectations. Longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (N = 7,057), a sample of youth who were aged 12 to 17 years in 1997, were used to examine the reciprocal association between an expressed expectation to marry soon and participation in delinquent behavior. Results from an autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation model suggested that greater expectations to marry were significantly associated with less delinquent activity 1 year later. Greater delinquent activity was not significantly associated with subsequent marital expectations. Youth with the greatest expectations to marry may temper their behavior even before vows are taken.
Review: Computer Methods in Membrane Biomechanics.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to review analytical, experimental, and numerical methods for studying the nonlinear, pseudoelastic behavior of membranes of interest in biomechanics, and second, to present illustrative examples from the literature for a variety of biomembranes (e.g., skin, pericardium, pleura, aneurysms, and cells) as well as elastomeric membranes used in balloon catheters and new cell stretching tests. Although a membrane approach affords great simplifications in comparison to the three-dimensional theory of nonlinear elasticity, associated problems are still challenging. Computer-based methods are essential, therefore, for performing the requisite experiments, analyzing data, and solving boundary and initial value problems. Emphasis is on stable equilibria although material instabilities and elastodynamics are discussed.
Increased erythrocyte phosphatidylserine exposure in sickle cell disease: flow-cytometric measurement and clinical associations

Increased exposure of phosphatidylserine (PS) in erythrocytes has been postulated to contribute to the pathophysiology of sickle cell disease because of its possible effects on blood coagulation, cell adhesion, and cell clearance. We developed a flow-cytometric assay to measure exposure of PS on the outer face of the erythrocyte membrane based on addition of fluorescein-annexin V to whole-blood specimens. The assay correlated linearly with binding of 125I-annexin V (r2 = .95, n = 125 samples). Normal donors (n = 30) showed virtually no annexin-positive cells (0.34% +/- 0.18% for 24-hour old samples). In contrast, annexin V binding was above the upper limit of normal in 96% of 205 specimens from 17 adult sickle cell and 2 beta-thalassemia patients; the mean percentage of annexin-positive cells was 2.86% +/- 2.00% (range, 0.4% to 12.0%). Values varied substantially over time for some patients, and mean values varied between patients. The percentage of annexin-positive cells always decreased after transfusion (11 events in 6 patients), and out of proportion to the amount of blood transfused. In conclusion, increased exposure of PS on a subpopulation of erythrocytes in vivo is a virtually universal feature of sickle cell disease, and its measurement may be useful to evaluate clinical status and response to therapeutic measures such as blood transfusion.
Building Rapport between Human and ECA: A Pilot Study

This study is part of a longer-term project to provide embodied conversational agents (ECAs) with behaviors that enable them to build and maintain rapport with their human partners. We focus on paralinguistic behaviors, and especially nonverbal behaviors, and their role in communicating rapport. Using an ECA that guides its players through a speech-controlled game, we attempt to measure the familiarity built between humans and ECAs across several interactions based on paralinguistic behaviors. In particular, we studied the effect of differences in the amplitude of nonverbal behaviors by an ECA interacting with a human across two conversational sessions. Our results suggest that increasing amplitude of nonverbal paralinguistic behaviors may lead to an increased perception of physical connectedness between humans and ECAs.
The epidemiology of spinal tuberculosis in the United States: an analysis of 2002-2011 data.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the incidence of spinal tuberculosis (TB) in the US between 2002 and 2011. METHODS The Nationwide Inpatient Sample database from 2002 to 2011 was used to identify patients with a discharge diagnosis of TB and spinal TB. Demographic and hospital data were obtained for all admissions, and included age, sex, race, comorbid conditions, insurance status, hospital location, hospital teaching status, and hospital region. The incidence rate of spinal TB adjusted for population growth was calculated after application of discharge weights. RESULTS A total of 75,858 patients with a diagnosis of TB were identified, of whom 2789 had a diagnosis of spinal TB (3.7%); this represents an average of 278.9 cases per year between 2002 and 2011. The incidence of spinal TB decreased significantly—from 0.07 cases per 100,000 persons in 2002 to 0.05 cases per 100,000 in 2011 (p < 0.001), corresponding to 1 case per 2 million persons in the latter year. The median age for patient...
The Music of Counterculture Cinema: A Critical Study of 1960s and 1970s Soundtracks Mathew J. Bartkowiak and Yuya Kiuchi. McFarland, 2015.

The Music of Counterculture Cinema: A Critical Study of 1960s and 1970s Soundtracks Mathew J. Bartkowiak and Yuya Kiuchi. McFarland, 2015.With The Music of the Counterculture Cinema, Mathew Bartkowiak and Yuya Kiuchi offer twelve essays on films with countercultural themes and two insightful interviews, one with Country Joe MacDonald, musician and Woodstock legend, and the other with Robert Greenwald, best known as the director of Steal This Movie (2000). While I could quibble with the selection of films-why, for instance, is Barbarella included and Zappa's 200 Motels excluded?-the authors do not aim to create a definitive list. Instead, their noteworthy objective is to focus on the intersection of music and film and the potency of that intersection to create, maintain, or confirm what may be considered a countercultural perspective, ideology, and legacy. They mostly succeed.The volume features essays on the usual suspects -Monterey Pop, Gimme Shelter, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, and Clockwork Orange, for example -and some surprising choices, particularly Deep Throat and Gas-s-s-s. However, as the authors explain, these latter two films demonstrate the pervasive influence of the counterculture on films and culture. Deep Throat draws on the free love movement to make pornography chic, while using music that, instead of complementing, clashes with the action on the screen, and Roger Corman's Gas-s-s-s, an inane film in which everyone over twenty-five is poisoned, tries to appeal to the counterculture audience for, as Country Joe says, "to cash in on the youth culture" (175). 'Other especially strong essays include those on Head, Harold and Maude, and Gimme Shelter. The cynical and politically alive Head, often considered the Monkees' quest for countercultural legitimacy, breaks narrative conventions and, in the process, breaks audience expectations of the group, which was created for prime-time television and to live outside the social and political turmoil of the 1960s. The result is a film that "has come to be a historical text, capable of measuring the authenticity of the movement itself" (42). The essay on Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude considers how music constructs narrative and mediates onscreen imagery and action for audiences in need of some guidance. For example, the film's music leitmotif, "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" by Cat Stevens, serves several functions: to develop characterization, to establish tone, to inspire audience investment in the film, and to push for audience acceptance of the twenty year-old and eighty year-old's romantic relationship.While the chapter on Monterey Pop is superficial, the provocative essay on Gimme Shelter argues that the film reveals the impotency of countercultural music. …
Manufacturer turned attacker: Dangers of stealthy trojans via threshold voltage manipulation

Applications of Integrated Circuits (ICs) have become pervasive. A striking feature of the contemporary IC industry is that a very large and growing proportion of the IC foundries are now located offshore. While offshoring IC production reduces cost, it also creates a concern that the functionality of the circuits may be compromised by Trojans designed to cause malfunction at a select times. This concern is particularly acute in defense, energy and infrastructure systems. Extensive research has been conducted into detection of Trojans which involve either modification of existing circuitry or addition of extra logic. Some Trojans do not involve addition of logic or modification of physical design - they manipulate existing structures to behave differently. Such Trojans, known as stealthy Trojans, are particularly hard to detect. This work explores utilization of multi-threshold logic and threshold voltage manipulation as an attack vector to introduce stealthy Trojans. Also, a previously unexplored method of using the temperature of the device to, selectively, activate a Trojan is studied. Our work illustrates an attack on a D flip-flop, where we show that the threshold voltages can be manipulated to introduce a permanent stuck-at fault. Further, we show that the manipulation can allow the flipflop to work normally at 25°C while becoming dysfunctional at 60°C. In this paper, we discuss how this feature can be used to compromise the security of cryptographic functions.
Carroll, Sean B. 2016. The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters.

Carroll, Sean B. 2016. The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 263 pages. Illustrations; map. Hardcover $24.95.
Putting a New Spin on Supramolecular Metallacycles: Co3 triangle and Co4 square bearing tetrazine-based radicals as bridges

The synthesis of two new radical-bridged compounds [Co3(bptz)3(dbm)3]·2toluene (1) and [Co4(bptz)4(dbm)4]·4MeCN (2) (bptz = 3,6-bis(pyridyl)-1,2,4,5-tetrazine; dbm = 1,3-diphenyl-1,3-propanedionate) is reported. The presence of the ligand-centered radical has been confirmed by X-ray crystallography and SQUID magnetometry. These complexes are the first metallacycles bearing nitrogen heterocyclic radicals as bridges. Magnetic studies reveal strong antiferromagnetic metal···radical coupling with coupling constants of J = −67.5 and −66.8 cm–1 for 1 and 2, respectively. DFT calculations further support the strong antiferromagnetic coupling between CoII ions and bptz radicals and confirm S = 3 and S = 4 spin ground states for 1 and 2, respectively.
Travel and the Making of North Mesopotamian Polities

AbstractThe emergence of political complexity in northern Mesopotamia ca. 2600 b.c. constituted an important cultural revolution which transformed how people within nascent states understood their communities. This study explores the relationship between inclusive and exclusive political strategies and free and limited access to a range of political and ritual spaces in cities and the countryside. First, it considers how the spatial organization of new cities constructed a particular type of political authority. Second, it reanalyzes several cultic monuments in light of the Ebla texts and Syrian ritual scenes and suggests that they formed pilgrimage networks that were interconnected with the economic and political systems of emerging states. Movement through newly created political landscapes was thus critical to the development of a cognitive schema that made sense of these polities.
RUPEE: Scalable protein structure search using run position encoded residue descriptors

We have developed a fast, scalable, and purely geometric structure search combining techniques from information retrieval and big data with a novel approach to encoding sequences of torsion angles. Along the way, we introduce a new torsion angle plot without breaks in continuity while still maintaining traditional torsion angle ranges, to assist in identifying separable regions of torsion angles. Subsequently, we introduce a new heuristic we call run position encoding, for handling the lack of specificity of items within character sequences containing runs of repeats. Comparing our results to the output of the CATH structural scan, response times are measured in seconds as opposed to minutes and average RMSDs and TM-scores are better. Our approach is a step towards a comprehensive indexing of protein structures scalable to millions of entries. Code and data are available at https://github.com/rayoub/rupee
Impact of numeracy on understanding of prostate cancer risk reduction in PSA screening

Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer in men of average risk remains controversial. Patients' ability to incorporate risk reduction data into their decision-making may depend on their numeracy. We assessed the impact of patients' numeracy on their understanding of the risk reduction benefits of PSA screening. Men attending a general internal medicine clinic were invited to complete a survey. Four versions of the survey each included a three-item numeracy test and PSA risk reduction data, framed one of four ways: absolute (ARR) versus relative risk reduction (RRR), with or without baseline risk (BR). Respondents were asked to adjust their perceived risk of prostate-cancer mortality using the data presented. Accuracy of risk reduction was evaluated relative to how risk data were framed. Among a total of 200 respondents, a majority incorrectly answered one or more of the numeracy items. Overall accuracy of risk adjustment was only 20%. Accuracy varied with data framing: when presented with RRR, respondents were 13% accurate without BR and 31% accurate with BR; when presented with ARR, they were 0% accurate without BR and 35% accurate with BR. Including BR data significantly improved accuracy for both RRR (P = 0.03) and ARR groups (P < 0.01). Accuracy was significantly related to numeracy; numeracy scores of 0, 1, 2, and 3 were associated with accuracy rates of six, five, nine, and 36 percent, respectively (P < 0.01). Overall, numeracy was significantly associated with the accuracy of interpreting quantitative benefits of PSA screening. Alternative methods of communicating risk may facilitate shared decision-making in the use of PSA screening for early detection of prostate cancer.
Remembering Professor Prasanna K. Mohanty (April 1, 1934 – March 9, 2013)

Abstract On March 9, 2018, 5 years had passed since Prasanna K. Mohanty, an extraordinary student of photosynthesis, plant biologist par excellence, a pioneer of Light Regulation of Photosynthesis, a renowned mentor, and a friend of a vast international community of scientists left us. Many of us, who knew him, miss him dearly and cherish his fond memories. Here we include some of the late responses we have received from many friends of Prasanna Mohanty and announce the launch of Prasanna K. Mohanty fellowship for young researchers working in the area of photosynthesis by the International Society of Photosynthesis Research.
Electrochemistry at a single nanoparticle: from bipolar regime to tunnelling

This paper is concerned with long-distance interactions between an unbiased metal nanoparticle (NP) and a nanoelectrode employed as a tip in the scanning electrochemical microscope (SECM). A NP immobilized on the inert substrate acts as a bipolar electrode, producing positive SECM feedback. The tip current magnitude depends strongly on the ratio of the particle and tip radii and the heterogeneous charge-transfer kinetics. The onset of electron tunneling was observed at very short separation distances (<2–3 nm) at which the NP behaves as a part of the tip electrode. The rate constant of the electron-transfer (ET) or electrocatalytic reaction at the NP can be extracted from either feedback or tunneling current. The tunneling mode of SECM can be used to investigate heterogeneous reactions occurring at a single NP without making an ohmic contact with it. This technique can also help elucidate nanoparticle/electrode interactions in various electrochemical systems ranging from NPs immobilized on the electrode surface to nanoimpact collision events.
Itraconazole as a Noncastrating Treatment for Biochemically Recurrent Prostate Cancer: A Phase 2 Study.

Abstract Background Patients with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer and short prostate-specific antigen doubling time (PSADT) are at risk for metastasis yet may wish to avoid androgen deprivation therapy. Itraconazole may have antitumor activity without affecting circulating androgen levels. We therefore evaluated itraconazole as a potentially noncastrating treatment approach in biochemically recurrent prostate cancer. Patients and Methods Patients with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer and PSADT ≤ 15 months, with serum testosterone > 150 ng/dL, were prospectively enrolled. The primary end point was the proportion of patients who experienced ≥ 50% decline from baseline in serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) by week 12. Results Twenty-one patients were enrolled. The median (range) age, baseline PSA, and PSADT at study entry was 72 (49-76) years, 7.6 (1.5-45.5) ng/mL, and 5.7 (1.2-13.0) months, respectively. Among 19 patients with evaluable data, 1 patient (5%) had a > 50% PSA decline. Nine patients (47%) experienced any PSA decline (mean decline 25.0%, range 2%-60%) by week 12. Among 10 patients without a PSA decline, the on-treatment versus pretreatment PSADT was not significantly longer (median 6.8 vs. 4.3 months, P = .17). There was no significant change from baseline to week 12 in serum testosterone (median change = 32.4%, P = .21) or androstenedione (median change = −8.3%, P = .85). The most common adverse events were edema (52%), fatigue (38%), hypertension (24%), and hypokalemia (24%). Conclusion Itraconazole modulates serum PSA levels without lowering serum testosterone. However, the magnitude of effect is modest, and treatment carries risk of toxicities associated with mineralocorticoid excess.
Reversible Optogenetic Control of Growth Factor Signaling During Cell Differentiation and Vertebrate Embryonic Development

To decipher the kinetic regulation of growth factor signaling outcomes, I will introduce our recently developed non-neuronal optogenetic strategies that enable reversible control of growth factor signaling during cell differentiation and embryonic development.
Clinical evaluation of chairside Computer Assisted Design/Computer Assisted Machining nano-ceramic restorations: Five-year status.

Objectives This investigation was a longitudinal, randomized clinical trial to measure the clinical performance of a nano-ceramic material (Lava Ultimate/3M) for chairside Computer Assisted Design/Computer Assisted Machining (CAD/CAM) fabricated restorations. Materials and methods One hundred and twenty chairside CAD/CAM onlays were restored with a CEREC system randomly assigned to 60 leucite-reinforced ceramic (IPS EmpressCAD/Ivoclar Vivadent AGBendererstrasse 2FL-9494 SchaanLiechtenstein) onlays and 60 nano-ceramic (Lava Ultimate/3M) onlays. Equal groups of onlays were cemented using a self-etch and a total etch adhesive resin cement. The onlays were recalled for a period of 5 years. Results At 1 week postoperatively, 10% of the onlays cemented with both the self-etch and total etch adhesive resin cements were reported as slightly sensitive. However, all patients were asymptomatic by the 4th week without treatment. Four leucite-reinforced onlays and one nano-ceramic onlay fractured and required replacement. Conclusions Adhesive retention with a self-etch or total etch cementation technique resulted in a similar clinical outcome with no reported debonds. The nano-ceramic onlays had a lower incidence of fracture compared to the leucite-reinforced ceramic onlays with both having a very low risk of fracture. Nano-ceramic onlays performed equally as well as glass ceramic onlays over 5 years of clinical service. Clinical significance Ceramic materials have been a mainstay for chairside CAD/CAM restorations for the past 30 years and a new category of resilient ceramics with a resin matrix has been introduced reported to offer ceramic-like durability and esthetics with resin-like efficiency in handling. There are no long-term clinical studies on the performance of these materials. This is a 5-year randomized clinical trial on the performance of nano-ceramic onlays.
Laparoscopic Ladd Procedure for the Management of Malrotation and Volvulus.

Introduction: While laparoscopic Ladd procedure is commonly performed in patients with asymptomatic malrotation, a paucity of data exists on children with volvulus or with low weight (≤3 kg). Our p...
Engineering Plastics: The Concept that Launched an Industry

Engineering plastics: a family of materials eased on technology that truly launched an industry.
TransLand: An Adversarial Transfer Learning Approach for Migratable Urban Land Usage Classification using Remote Sensing

Urban land usage classification is a critical task in big data based smart city applications that aim to understand the social-economic land functions and physical land attributes in urban environments. This paper focuses on a migratable urban land usage classification problem using remote sensing data (i.e., satellite images). Our goal is to accurately classify the land usage of locations in a target city where the ground truth land usage data is not available by leveraging a classification model from a source city where such data is available. This problem is motivated by the limitation of current solutions that primarily rely on a rich set of ground-truth data for accurate model training, which encounters high annotation costs. Two important challenges exist in solving our problem: i) the target and source cities often have different urban characteristics that prevent the direct application of a model learned from the source city to the target city; ii) the complex visual features in satellite images make it non-trivial to “translate” the images from the target city to the source city for an accurate classification. To address the above challenges, we develop TransLand, an adversarial transfer learning framework to translate the satellite images from the target city to the source city for accurate land usage classification. We evaluate our scheme on the real-world satellite imagery and land usage datasets collected from live different cities in Europe. The results show that TransLand significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art land usage classification baselines in classifying the land usage of locations in a city.
Does Trust in Government Increase Support for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments

Why have decades of high and rising inequality in the United States not increased public support for redistribution? An established theory in political science holds that Americans’ distrust of government decreases their support for redistribution, but empirical support draws primarily on regression analyses of national surveys. I discuss the untestable assumptions required for identification with regression modeling and propose an alternative design that uses randomized experiments about political corruption to identify the effect of trust in government on support for redistribution under weaker assumptions. I apply this to three survey experiments and estimate the effects that large, experimentally induced increases in political trust have on support for redistribution. Contrary to theoretical predictions, estimated effects are substantively negligible, statistically indistinguishable from zero, and comparable to estimates from two placebo experiments. I discuss implications for theory building about causes of support for redistribution in an era of rising inequality and eroding confidence in government.