cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Using Beta-Version mHealth Technology for Team-Based Care Management to Support Stroke Prevention: An Assessment of Utility and Challenges.

Background: Beta versions of health information technology tools are needed in service delivery models with health care and community partnerships to confirm the key components and to assess the performance of the tools and their impact on users. We developed a care management technology (CMT) for use by community health workers (CHWs) and care managers (CMs) working collaboratively to improve risk factor control among recent stroke survivors. The CMT was expected to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the CHW-CM team. Objective: The primary objective was to describe the Secondary Stroke Prevention by Uniting Community and Chronic Care Model Teams Early to End Disparities (SUCCEED) CMT and investigate CM and CHW perceptions of the CMT’s usefulness and challenges for team-based care management. Methods: We conducted qualitative interviews with all users of the beta-version SUCCEED CMT, namely two CMs and three CHWs. They were asked to demonstrate and describe their perceptions of the CMT’s ease of use and usefulness for completing predefined key care management activities. They were also probed about their general perceptions of the CMT’s information quality, ease of use, usefulness, and impact on CM and CHW roles. Interview transcripts were coded using a priori codes. Coded excerpts were grouped into broader themes and then related in a conceptual model of how the CMT facilitated care management. We also conducted a survey with 14 patients to obtain their perspective on CHW tablet use during CHW-patient interactions. Results: Care managers and community health workers expressed that the CMT helped them keep track of patient interactions and plan their work. It guided CMs in developing and sharing care plans with CHWs. For CHWs, the CMT enabled electronic collection of clinical assessment data, provided decision support, and provided remote access to patients’ risk factor values. Long loading times and downtimes due to outages were the most significant challenges encountered. Additional issues included extensive use of free-text responses and manual data transfer from the electronic medical record. Despite these challenges, patients overall did not perceive the tablet as interfering with CHW-patient interactions. Conclusions: Our findings suggest useful functionalities of CMTs supporting health care and community partners in collaborative chronic care management. However, usability issues need to be addressed during the development process. The SUCCEED CMT is an initial step toward the development of effective health information technology tools to support collaborative, team-based models of care and will need to be modified as the evidence base grows. Future research should assess the CMT’s effects on team performance. [JMIR Res Protoc 2017;6(5):e94]
Authentication proxy as a service

5G, fog computing and the majority of the latest technological trends have minimized latency as a top priority. These initiatives are focusing on physical layer methods to decrease latency, thus keeping the changes transparent to users. Physical layer changes are expensive and in many cases incompatible with the original solution which results in lower adoption rate and higher capital investment. In this paper, we propose a transport/application layer method to decrease latency in mobile cloud environments.
Beyond the Linear Approximation

If you happened to be good at math in high school, chances are you liked the subject. If you’re naturally gifted with a racket in your hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if you enjoyed playing tennis or squash. Personal success, it seems, focuses the mind like little else. Sometimes this rule also applies to entire disciplines. A perusal of old physics textbooks, for instance, quickly suggests that our discipline had been harboring a love affair with all things linear. Not that linear systems are very common in nature. No, linearity is the rare exception and not the rule. Rather, fact is that physics has had a lot of success with linear systems. They yield to mathematical analysis, and this analysis in turn allows for precise predictability. It’s not surprising then that in physics linear systems soon became the model children, the teacher’s pets. In textbooks they received most, if not all, the attention.
Political Consumerism and Buycott’s War on Koch Industries: Activism or slacktivism?

A white fist punches the air, grasping tightly to a fluorescent green dollar bill — the Buycott app’s icon pictorially represents the power of consumer decisions. Buycott was developed by freelance programmer Ivan Pardo and released in May 2013 in order to provide its users with, in the words of its creator, “a platform that empowers [them] to make well-informed purchasing decisions.” The app allows consumers to make politically informed purchases, using their money as their ideological voice. Theoretically, the app was created for both conservative and liberal users, plus all those users in between. However, the app boasts overwhelmingly liberal campaigns, perhaps because liberal political participants are generally younger and more likely to utilize such a technology.
Verification and Semantic Checking of APL Programs

Apl is of interest in regard to program verification for two reasons: (1) Many loops may be replaced by the structured operators, resulting in easier verification of programs with arrays. (2) The partial operators introduce the complication of showing program executability. The latter reason leads to a new form of programming, called “semantic checking.”
INTRODUCTION TO THE EMF 32 STUDY ON U.S. CARBON TAX SCENARIOS

This paper is an introduction to, "The EMF 32 Study on U.S. Carbon Tax Scenarios," part of the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) Model Inter-comparison Project (MIP) number 32. Eleven modeling teams participated in this study examining the economic and environmental impacts of various carbon tax trajectories and differing uses of carbon tax revenues. This special issue of Climate Change Economics documents the results of this study with four crosscutting papers that summarize results across models, and ten papers from individual modeling teams.
A Case Study of Special Educator Professional Development in a Virtual World

A wide variety of legislation impacts the jobs of special education teachers in the United States. In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law, mandating that states develop standards and report outcomes for all students in the key areas of math and reading. In 2004, the reauthorized Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) came into effect calling for accountability and “assessments of how students with disabilities progress within the general curriculum” (Lynch & Adams, 2008). This is implemented by writing individual education plans (IEPs) that state goals for individual students with disabilities. Another recent approach by states (including the state of Utah) is the development of a standardized “common core” for language arts and mathematics instruction. This is used by all teachers to guide the assessment of all students within grade levels (Samuels, 2011). In the state of Utah, this is called the Utah Core Standards. For Utah special education teachers and speech-language pathologists (SLP), hereafter called special education professionals, writing standards-based IEP goals using the Utah Core Standards are required by the law (Lynch & Adams, 2008; Samuels, 2011).
Covered Stents in the Treatment of Pulmonary Arteriovenous Malformations

Seven patients with pulmonary arteriovenous malformations (PAVMs) not well suited to coil and/or plug treatment were treated with expanded polytetrafluoroethylene-covered stents. Mean diameter of treated arteries was 6 mm. Complete technical success was achieved in 7 of 8 PAVMs, 6 using only covered stents and 1 using both a covered and a bare stent owing to endoleak. In 1 patient, the parent vessel was sacrificed after identification of additional feeding vessels following stent graft placement. In 6 patients with median imaging follow-up of 8 months (range, 1-121 months), all stent grafts were patent, and all treated PAVMs were completely excluded without persistence.
The co-occurrence of driver mutations in chronic myeloproliferative neoplasms

Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) are clonal disorders characterized by proliferation of one or more elements of the myeloid lineage. Key genetic aberrations include the BCR-ABL1 gene rearrangement in Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) and JAK2/MPL/CALR aberrations in Philadelphia chromosome-negative MPNs. While thought to be mutually exclusive, occasional isolated reports of coexistence of BCR-ABL1 and JAK2, and JAK2 with MPL or CALR aberrations have been described. Given the paucity of data, clinical characteristics and outcome of patients harboring concurrent Philadelphia-positive and Philadelphia-negative mutations or dual Philadelphia-negative driver mutations have not been systematically evaluated, and their clinical relevance is largely unknown. It is difficult to determine the true relevance of co-existing driver mutations on outcomes given the rarity of its occurrence. In this case series, we describe those patients who had dual driver mutations detected at any point during the course of their disease and characterized their clinical and laboratory features, bone marrow pathology, and overall disease course.
Single-Molecule Analysis of Cell-Virus Binding Interactions

Adhesion assays based on single molecule interactions are a useful option when discerning between avidity and affinity in complex systems. This is especially true for viral adhesion to living cells which typically involves a complex system of proteins working together to lead to productive infection. Here, we discuss assays that have been used to quantitatively study the adhesion of viral and cellular receptors including surface plasmon resonance, real time fusion assays involving viral fluorescent tags and single molecule force spectroscopy (SMFS). We highlight the advantages of SMFS over other methods, including its specificity, versatility and application to studying the adhesion of HIV-1 to human cells. We discuss how using SMFS with infectious virus and living cells allow us to distinguish the adhesion of HIV-1 surface protein, gp120, to its primary cellular receptor, CD4, from the adhesion of gp120 to its secondary co-receptor, CCR5.
Simulation using excel data tables in teaching introductory statistics

Many students have difficulties in understanding the basic statistics concepts such as central limit theorem, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and p-values in traditional way of teaching. Use of computer simulation methods is the new trend in teaching introductory statistics courses. Many statistics instructors are adopting this new approach in their classrooms. Computer simulation methods give clear and visible justification of the concept and that can be more convincing to students. Many statistics software packages offer the capabilities of data simulation. In this paper, I will demonstrate the use of Excel standard functions and the Data Table facility for simulation in introductory statistics to learn the sampling distribution of the mean. This approach enhances the understanding of the central limit theorem which builds a good foundation for other concepts such as confidence intervals and hypothesis testing.
Ab Initio Study of the Nonequivalence of Adsorption of D- and L-Peptides on Clay Mineral Surfaces

Ab initio geometry optimizations were performed of the structures of the L and D enantiomers of the model dipeptide, N-formyl alanine amide (L-Ala and D-Ala, respectively) adsorbed on the mineral surface in the interlayer space of the 2:1 clay, nontronite. Density functional procedures were used as implemented in the ab initio program CASTEP, in fully periodic calculations in which the properties of a model unit cell are determined by including the effects of its neighboring cells in an infinite crystal. Geometry optimization included the atomic positions of the mineral and the adsorbates within the unit cell, in addition to unit cell lengths and angles, achieving full optimization of the entire crystal system. In agreement with previous studies of the adsorption of organic compounds on clay mineral surfaces, in the most stable arrangement of L-Ala and D-Ala found here, the two molecules reside flat on the mineral basal plane, forming a parallel monolayer. The resulting L-Ala/mineral cocrystal is more stable, by 6 kcal/mol, than D-Ala. A characteristic structural difference exists for the enantiomers in that, in the optimized structure of L-Ala, the C(α)–C(β) bond is directed away from one of the mineral basal planes toward the dioctahedral cavity of the other, while the side group of D-Ala is parallel to the mineral basal plane and pointing to the nearest neighbor in an adjacent unit cell. As expected, the reverse results are obtained for the adsorption of L-Ala and D-Ala on a nontronite surface that is the enantiomer of the one used above. The geometry optimizations illustrate the structural compatibility of clay mineral lattices with peptide structures. That is, balance of adsorption energies and peptide interaction energies, and mineral lattice structure and periodicity allow for adsorption structures, which involve the entire backbone of a single peptide molecule and can, at the same time, immobilize the adsorbates in such a way that stabilizing intermolecular interactions occur across unit cell boundaries. Compatibility of the repeat distances on the clay surface with repeat distances of peptides should be an important property when clay minerals serve as templates for protein synthesis.
Properties of factor VIIa/tissue factor complexes in an umbilical vein model

An umbilical vein model was designed in which washed vein segments are filled with a reaction mixture containing factor VIIa, Ca(+)+, and a substrate, either 3H-factor IX or 3H-factor X. The vein wall provides the tissue factor (TF) for factor VIIa/TF complexes that activate the substrates as measured by activation peptide release. The model was developed to study TF induced on venous endothelium in situ. However, unlike previous studies with TF expressed on cultured umbilical vein endothelial cells, factors IX and X were activated without first having to expose the vein wall to a perturbing stimulus. Histologic studies revealed that washing the vein and mixing the reaction mixture before subsampling had disrupted the endothelium. Immunostaining with anti-TF antibodies revealed no staining of endothelium but intense staining in extensions of Wharton's jelly penetrating fenestrations of the muscularis media of the vein. Thus, the model provided data on factor VIIa/TF formed, not on endothelium, but within the mucoid connective tissue of Wharton's jelly. It is known that factor VIIa/TF formed with TF in suspension or with TF expressed on the surface of cultured cells activates factor X more rapidly than factor IX. In contrast, in the umbilical vein model, when each substrate was present in an 88 nmol/L concentration, factors IX and X were activated at equivalent rates (mean activation rate for factor IX, 18.8 +/- 3.6 nmol/L/h; for factor X, 17.8 +/- 2.9 nmol/L/h; n = 9 paired vein segments). These data strengthen the evidence that factor VIIa/TF activation of factor IX represents a key initial reaction of coagulation in tissues. These results also show that data obtained with factor VIIa/TF complexes formed on the surface of cultured cells need not hold for factor VIIa/TF complexes formed in extracellular matrix.
Interacting with virtual reality

Interacting with virtual reality is fundamentally different from interacing with traditional desktop graphics. The three features that characterize virtual reality interaction are immersion, rich interaction and presence; I define these features. To achieve them, virtual reality system designers need to address many different issues. I discuss some of these issues, in particular multiple inputs, multiple outputs, multiple participants, dynamic virtual worlds, user interface paradigms and performance.
Abstract P142: Aberrant Notch2 Signaling in the Vascular Endothelium Leads to Increased Proliferation and Migration Operant in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension

Background: Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) develops when pulmonary vascular resistance rises sharply, leading to right heart failure and death. Most studies have focused on attenuating lung ...
A Legionella pneumophila Kinase Phosphorylates the Hsp70 Chaperone Family to Inhibit Eukaryotic Protein Synthesis

Summary Legionella pneumophila (L.p.), the microbe responsible for Legionnaires’ disease, secretes ∼300 bacterial proteins into the host cell cytosol. A subset of these proteins affects a wide range of post-translational modifications (PTMs) to disrupt host cellular pathways. L.p. has 5 conserved eukaryotic-like Ser/Thr effector kinases, LegK1–4 and LegK7, which are translocated during infection. Using a chemical genetic screen, we identified the Hsp70 chaperone family as a direct host target of LegK4. Phosphorylation of Hsp70s at T495 in the substrate-binding domain disrupted Hsp70’s ATPase activity and greatly inhibited its protein folding capacity. Phosphorylation of cytosolic Hsp70 by LegK4 resulted in global translation inhibition and an increase in the amount of Hsp70 on highly translating polysomes. LegK4’s ability to inhibit host translation via a single PTM uncovers a role for Hsp70 in protein synthesis and directly links it to the cellular translational machinery.
Abstract 248: Redesign of Order Entry to Improve Noninvasive Cardiac Test Selection

Background: CCTA offers an exceptional negative predictive value when evaluating patients with suspected coronary disease. Many non-cardiology clinicians remain unaware of this test option and pati...
The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice

Justice is, in part, a form of remembrance: Memory occupies a vital place at the heart of justice and its struggle to keep the victims, crimes, and perpetrators among the unforgotten. I argue that this memory-justice at once informs core judicial practices and ranges beyond them in a manner that leaves judicial closure incomplete. It reminds us of a duty to keep crimes and their victims from the oblivion of forgetting, of a duty to restore, preserve, and acknowledge the just order of the world. Yet, in the shadow of remembrance, other human goods can wither, goods located in the temporal registers of present and future. This latter lesson is important, but it is one with which we are familiar. I emphasize another, with which we are perhaps less at home: the intimacy of memory's bond with justice, not as obsessional or as a syndrome, but as a face of justice itself.
The Legal Protection of Personnel of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations in Times of NIAC

United Nations peacekeeping operations have increasingly been deployed to situations of armed conflict and have frequently been targeted by parties to the conflict. Against this backdrop, the legal protection for personnel of United Nations peacekeeping operations in times of armed conflict has been developed particularly since the 1990s. International humanitarian law and the 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel are now the principal sources of legal protection for personnel of United Nations peacekeeping operations in times of armed conflict. However, they pose difficulties of a different nature in determining when those personnel are protected and when they are not, particularly when such personnel are engaged in hostilities in situations of non-international armed conflict. This chapter explores these issues in detail and concludes that the practice has not sufficiently evolved to resolve them.
The Tomars’ new emotional regime: martial Hindu identity?

ABSTRACTThe Tomar court in Gwalior sponsored the first known extant retellings of the epics in Classical Hindi. This is sometimes interpreted as a Hindu renaissance after an interlude of Sultanate-...
Surface pinning and grain boundary formation in magnetic flux-line lattices of Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8+δ high-T c superconductors

Magnetic decoration has been used to investigate the role of surface pinning on the flux-line lattice (FLL) of high-quality ${\mathrm{Bi}}_{2}$${\mathrm{Sr}}_{2}$${\mathrm{CaCu}}_{2}$${\mathrm{O}}_{8+\mathrm{\ensuremath{\delta}}}$ single crystals. We find that surface steps pin flux lines at the sample surface, and that strong pinning along large steps creates grain boundaries (GBs) in the FLL. Analysis of the competing energetics of pinning versus GB formation leads to a criteria for the formation of extended GBs, and also indicates that these GBs penetrate through the entire sample. Surface pinning, which should occur in all real samples, will thus significantly affect the bulk FLL structure in these materials.
The Disaster of Austerity as a Road to Recovery; “Democracy,” Understood as a Source of Legitimation to be Suspended by the Financial Oligarchs in the Name of Austerity

While the US was able to delay reducing its deficit, and even to increase its debt, the ECB and the IMF demanded Eurozone economies suffering significantly from the Great Recession immediately reduce government spending and begin paying down their debt. Demand killing austerity which caused further economic contraction, often resulting in the decline in GDP being greater than the reduction in government spending. Their national debts, therefore becoming an ever-greater percentage of their shrinking GDP, made it increasingly difficult for these economies to pay them off, occasioning the replacing of democratically elected leaders in countries such as Italy and Greece, by financial technocrats. This in contrast to the US, where the political class, having long subordinated the national interest to those of the corporate oligarchs, faced no such challenge from their owners.
Detection of Precursors to Component Failure in a Spur Gear Drive-Train by Means of a Torque Transducer

In the wind energy industry, gearbox failures are among the most costly and the most frequent, adding significantly to the operation and maintenance costs over the life cycle of the turbine. Despite significant improvements in the understanding of gear loads and dynamics, even to the point of establishing international standards for design and specifications of wind turbine gearboxes, these components generally fall short of reaching their 20 year design life. In a significant number of gearbox failures, the primary bearing on the low speed shaft experiences faults in its operation, such as misalignment and movement on the mounts. To investigate the topic of gear health management, a fault detection approach is applied to a test bed involving a spur gear double-reduction transmission, outfitted with a torque transducer and triaxial accelerometers on the bearing cases. The test bed is not a wind turbine gearbox – the gear arrangement is different and the gears are smaller compared to that of a typical wind turbine gearbox – but it does serve to test the modeling and fault detection methods proposed in this paper. Both baseline and faulted measurements are taken from the experimental set-up for data analysis. It is shown that the torque sensor provides an early indication of fault precursors, such as misalignment and decreased lubrication, while also maintaining the capacity to identify mature faults, such as chipped and missing gear teeth. The measurements are analyzed using statistical based methods – the Mahalanobis distance and Parzen discriminant analysis. These features for fault detection are then characterized at various operating speeds for each of the geartrain conditions of interest. An analytical model is created from first principles for verification of results and for simulation of the free and forced dynamics of the system.
Depolarization Measurements on the ATS-6 20-GHz Downlink: A Description of the VPI a SU Experiment and Some Initial Results (Short Papers)

This paper discusses the depolarizing effects of precipitation at millimeter wavelengths and describes an experiment in which depolarization on the ATS-6 satellite 20-GKz downlink is measured. Data are presented for unexplained clear weather variations in the observed polarization and for depolarization by rain and snow. A preliminary analysis indicates that for a given attenuation level, a satellite path exhibits more severe depolarization than experiments with ground systems would predict.
Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Digital Fourth Amendment

Review of Ric Simmons, Smart Surveillance: How to Interpret the Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (2019). In "Smart Surveillance," Ric Simmons argues for the application of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to digital surveillance. This review argues that, although Simmons is right to look to CBA as a tool for applying the Fourth Amendment to new technology, his faith in the courts as the main practitioners of surveillance CBA is misguided. Across a variety of dimensions of institutional competence, the political branches, not the courts, are best placed to make surveillance policy under conditions of technological change.
Long-term Services and Supports, Cognitive Impairment, and Disease Management among Older Chinese Adults

ABSTRACT Rapid population aging elevates burden of chronic and non-communicable diseases among older adults. Despite the critical role of self-management in disease prevention and control, effective management of diseases can be cognitively demanding and may require additional supports from family, friends and social services. Using nationally representative data from China, this paper documents the gradient relationship between cognitive impairment and disease management, and characterizes the differential effects of long-term care services and supports (LTSS) on disease management among older adults in different stages of cognitive impairment. In specific, we examine preventive care use and the management of hypertension, a highly prevalent but inadequately addressed chronic disease in China. We find that a severer stage of cognitive impairment is associated with poorer performance in disease prevention, hypertension awareness and management. While some of the LTSS offered by spouse, friends or community significantly facilitate active disease management behaviors, the effects are only evident among older adults with no cognitive impairment. By contrast, we find no significant effect of LTSS among cognitively impaired individuals. These findings reveal the vulnerability of older adults with cognitive impairment in disease management, and point to the importance of promoting targeted interventions to reduce barriers of receiving and utilizing LTSS, especially among cognitively impaired population.
TXNIP Links Anticipatory Unfolded Protein Response to Estrogen Reprogramming Glucose Metabolism in Breast Cancer Cells.

Estrogen and estrogen receptor (ER) play a fundamental role in breast cancer. To adapt the rapid proliferation of ER+ breast cancer cells, estrogen increases glucose uptake and reprograms glucose metabolism. Meanwhile, estrogen/ER activates the anticipatory unfolded protein response (UPR) preparing cancer cells for the increased protein production required for subsequent cell proliferation. Here, we report that thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP) is an important regulator of glucose metabolism in ER+ breast cancer cells, and estrogen/ER increases glucose uptake and reprograms glucose metabolism via activating anticipatory unfolded protein response (UPR) and subsequently repressing TXNIP expression. By using two widely used ER+ breast cancer cell lines MCF7 and T47D, we showed that MCF7 cells express high TXNIP levels and exhibit mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) phenotype, while T47D cells express low TXNIP levels and display aerobic glycolysis (Warburg effect) phenotype. Knockdown of TXNIP promoted glucose uptake and Warburg effect, while forced overexpression of TXNIP inhibited glucose uptake and Warburg effect. We further showed that estrogen represses TXNIP expression and activates UPR sensor inositol-requiring enzyme 1 (IRE1) via ER in the breast cancer cells, and IRE1 activity is required for estrogen suppression of TXNIP expression and estrogen-induced cell proliferation. Together, our study suggests that TXNIP is involved in estrogen-induced glucose uptake and metabolic reprogramming in ER+ breast cancer cells, and links anticipatory UPR to estrogen reprogramming glucose metabolism.
Targeting PML-RARα with Retinoids

All-trans retinoic acid (ATRA), an oral retinoic acid derivative, revolutionized the treatment and prognosis of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) and anticipated the current age of targeted cancer therapy. The past 25 years have seen an international effort to design multicenter clinical trials that identify the optimal use of ATRA in patients with APL. Indeed, since ATRA is so effective, contemporary clinical trials aim to de-escalate conventional cytotoxic chemotherapy, as has been the case with other highly curable malignancies such as childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In this chapter, we review and reflect upon the seminal clinical trials that have led to the current adoption of ATRA as the standard of care for treating APL.
Exploring Hybrid-Economic Communities and the Technology-Mediated Identities Performed There

This research note describes an ongoing ethnographic study of a professional, knowledge-sharing community of information technology professionals. The overarching goal of the research is to understand the use and consequences of social information systems designed for recognizing and rewarding contributions to professional communities within and beyond the workplace. The research presented in this note explores the following question: How does technology mediate the performance of professional identity, and what role is played by the social institutions – e.g., the firm as employer, the firm as a market actor, the professional community, etc. – in enabling and constraining the construction of a professional identity?
Regulator of G-Protein Signaling 7 Regulates Reward Behavior by Controlling Opioid Signaling in the Striatum

Abstract Background Morphine mediates its euphoric and analgesic effects by acting on the μ-opioid receptor (MOR). MOR belongs to the family of G-protein coupled receptors whose signaling efficiency is controlled by the regulator of G-protein signaling (RGS) proteins. Our understanding of the molecular diversity of RGS proteins that control MOR signaling, their circuit specific actions, and underlying cellular mechanisms is very limited. Methods We used genetic approaches to ablate regulator of G-protein signaling 7 (RGS7) both globally and in specific neuronal populations. We used conditioned place preference and self-administration paradigms to examine reward-related behavior and a battery of tests to assess analgesia, tolerance, and physical dependence to morphine. Electrophysiology approaches were applied to investigate the impact of RGS7 on morphine-induced alterations in neuronal excitability and plasticity of glutamatergic synapses. At least three animals were used for each assessment. Results Elimination of RGS7 enhanced reward, increased analgesia, delayed tolerance, and heightened withdrawal in response to morphine administration. RGS7 in striatal neurons was selectively responsible for determining the sensitivity of rewarding and reinforcing behaviors to morphine without affecting analgesia, tolerance, and withdrawal. In contrast, deletion of RGS7 in dopaminergic neurons did not influence morphine reward. RGS7 exerted its effects by controlling morphine-induced changes in excitability of medium spiny neurons in nucleus accumbens and gating the compositional plasticity of α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid and N -methyl-D-aspartate receptors. Conclusions This study identifies RGS7 as a novel regulator of MOR signaling by dissecting its circuit specific actions and pinpointing its role in regulating morphine reward by controlling the activity of nucleus accumbens neurons.
The Value of Mentoring Programs for African American Male College Students

Retention and graduation rates among African American male college students have received considerable coverage in recent years which is evident based on the literature in this paper. African American male students enroll in community colleges at a steady pace, yet graduation and retention rates are the lowest among this group. By creating mentoring programs designed specifically for African American males, academic success, retention, and graduation rates will improve. In this paper, the author will review the literature pertaining to the implications of mentoring programs for minority male college students. The author will begin by defining mentoring programs, exploring major arguments associated with mentoring programs, and address implications that mentoring has on retention for African American male students. In the final part of the paper, the author provides practical recommendations to effectively implement a mentoring program; summarize the arguments and reemphasize the significance of mentoring program for African American male students.Â Â Â Â Â
Consumer health information on the Internet.

To the Editor: —While we applaud the intent of Fallis and Fricke1 in their recent attempt to provide the public with indicators of accuracy for health information on the Internet, we take exception to some of their methods and conclusions. The topic they have chosen to study is certainly an important one. There exists on the Internet a vast amount of health information, and much of it may be incorrect or easy to misinterpret. The authors' call for impartial validators of such information should be cheered. Nevertheless, we have some methodological concerns with their recent study. The first concern involves their choice of clinical subject matter. The authors claim that managing childhood fever in the home was chosen “because there is a wide consensus among experts in this area.”1 This issue is a point of significant contention among pediatricians.2–4 Even the five topics covered in their methods are …
The Collection, Disposal, and Storage of Carbon Dioxide

To scrub CO2 from the stack gas of a coal fired plant by the most efficient means presently available will require about 43% of the combustion energy of the coal. While appreciable improvement might be realized by burning the coal in pure oxygen, any method of recovery from stack gas will use a substantial fraction of the energy content of the fuel. The best option for disposal is in the ocean, in the form of a negatively-buoyant plume of concentrated solution that would carry the CO2 to deep water and give retention times of many hundreds of years. Alternatively, liquid CO2 could be injected at great depth, or blocks of the solid hydrate or dry ice might be released at the ocean surface. The most efficient option for the future might be floating power stations that use cold, deep seawater both for condenser cooling and CO2 disposal. Depleted oil and gas fields could be used as a near-term storage option. Storage as buried biomass or as a solid near the South Pole seem the least attractive of the options considered.
TEXTAL™: automated crystallographic protein structure determination

This paper reports on TEXTAL™, a deployed application that uses a variety of AI techniques to automate the process of determining the 3D structure of proteins by x-ray crystallography. The TEXTAL™ project was initiated in 1998, and the application is currently deployed in three ways: (1) a web-based interface called WebTex, operational since June 2002; (2) as the automated model-building component of an integrated crystallography software called PHENIX, first released in July 2003; (3) binary distributions, available since September 2004. TEXTAL™ and its sub-components are currently being used by crystallographers around the world, both in the industry and in academia. TEXTAL™ saves up to weeks of effort typically required to determine the structure of one protein; the system has proven to be particularly helpful when the quality of the data is poor, which is very often the case. Automated protein modeling systems like TEXTAL™ are critical to the structural genomics initiative, a worldwide effort to determine the 3D structure of all proteins in a high-throughput mode, thereby keeping up with the rapid growth of genomic sequence databases.
Extreme ultraviolet spectrograph ATM experiment S082B

The extreme-ultraviolet double-dispersion photographic spectrograph for the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) experiment S082B on Skylab is described. Novel features were the use of a predisperser grating with a ruling whose spacing varied approximately linearly with distance for the purpose of increasing the instrument speed by reducing the astigmatism and a photoelectric servosystem to stabilize to 1 sec of arc the solar image at various near-limb positions. The 970-3940-A range was covered in two sections with effective resolving power of approximately 30,000 from 1100 A to 1970 A. The spatial resolution was 2 x 60 solar sec of arc. During the Skylab mission 6400 exposures were made with the instrument pointed by an astronaut at selected and recorded solar positions.
The role of free surfaces on the formation of prismatic dislocation loops

Prismatic punching is a process where voids grow through the nucleation and emission of prismatic dislocation loops (PDLs). In this work we employ dislocation dynamics to determine the effect of image stresses produced by the void’s free surface on PDL formation in a face-centered cubic lattice. We find that image stresses cause PDL formation to fall into two distinct pressure regimes. In the low pressure regime, image stresses dominate dislocation cross-slip, reducing the PDL’s size and formation rate.
Faraday’s Laws or Faraday’s Law?

This paper demonstrates how the traditional two verbal laws of electrolysis associated with Michael Faraday may be combined into a single equation or law more in keeping with Faraday’s original intentions, and also emphasizes that the resulting equation is kinetic, rather than thermodynamic, in nature and is equally applicable to working voltaic cells.
A 64-Solenoid, Four-Level Fingertip Search Display for the Blind

This paper describes the design and prototype model of a nonvibrating fingertip search display device. It was designed for use in experiments to determine the importance of fingertip exploration in tactile vision substitution. An 8 ×8 array of miniature dc solenoids mounted on 5 mm centers forms a raised two-dimensional display. With the aid of an IBM PC, it translates a visual image into a contour map of raised pins similar to transitory braille. The four possible pin heights of 0, 0.33, 0.67, and 1 mm represent discrete levels of image intensity. The user controls the location and resolution of the image sent from the IBM PC to the display by moving a mouse.
The ELDER expansion project: building cultural competence among long term home care workers

Abstract This study aimed to improve communication and care provision in five home or long term care settings by raising staff awareness about health beliefs and patterns among varied cultures. Lack of cultural competence is linked to ethnocentric attitudes that can lead to inappropriate communication and ineffective interventions. Understanding the culturally imbedded belief systems of patients and providers is an integral part of effective communication skills that are foundational to optimal team functioning. Participants included five home or long term care agencies in an underserved region of New England. Seventy-four nurses, aids and allied health professionals participated in 10–12 small group interactive sessions. Comparison of pre and post cultural self efficacy scores revealed that participant confidence regarding their knowledge and skills when interacting with other cultures improved interactions with patients and co-workers. Journal exemplars supported the ability of attendees to apply content to the workplace.
Characterization of full surface roughness in agricultural soils using groundbased LiDAR

Microwave emission and scattering models require the parametrization of surface roughness. Traditionally this has been achieved by sampling the surface in transects. In this work, roughness is characterized from 3D surface models derived from ground-based LiDAR. The dataset consist 18 surfaces with varying roughness characteristics. 2D profiles extracted from the surface model constitute the baseline to compare to traditional profiling methods. It was found that sampling using profiles produces an underestimation of the RMSh by 25–63% and an even more severe underestimation in the correlation length that can reach up to an order of magnitude difference. From the 17,178 2D extracted profiles it was determined a significant sensitivity of the roughness parameters to the detrending methods, as well as a poor fit between the experimental ACF and the exponential and Gaussian models. Finally, methodologies to detrend quasi-periodic surfaces and the decomposition of surface at different scales are proposed and illustrate the advantage of having a 3D representation.
Cycle-to-cycle variation effects on turbulent shear stress measurements in pulsatile flows

Accurate evaluation of turbulent velocity statistics in pulsatile flows is important in estimating potential damage to blood constituents from prosthetic heart valves. Variations in the mean flow from one cycle to the next can result in artificially high estimates. Here we demonstrate a procedure using a digital, low-pass filter to remove the cycle-to-cycle variation from turbulence statistics. The results show that cycle-to-cycle variations can significantly affect estimates of turbulent Reynolds stress and should be either eliminated or demonstrated to be small when reporting pulsatile flow results.
Thin films of carbon nanotubes and chemically reduced graphenes for electrochemical micro-capacitors

We report the making of chemically reduced graphene (CRG) sheets separated by layer-by-layer-assembled multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) for electrochemical micro-capacitor applications. Submicron thin films of amine-functionalized MWCNTs (MWCNT-NH2) and CRG derived from graphene oxides, were shown to be cross-linked with amide bonds having high packing densities of ∼70%. These carbon-only electrodes were found to have large volumetric capacitance of ∼160F/cmelectrode3 in an acidic electrolyte (0.5 M H2SO4). The electrode capacitance in a neutral electrolyte (1 M KCl) was found much lower, which supported the hypothesis that the observed high capacitances in the acidic electrolyte can be attributed primarily to redox reactions between protons and surface oxygen-containing groups on carbon.
Linguistics and Ethnographic Description1

The anthropological activity of providing ethnographic descriptions is much like the linguistic activity of providing grammatical descriptions. Both offer rules that account for the occurrence of some phenomena (such as, for instance, particular household types or particular sequences of vocal noises), but at the same time rule others out. How the rules are “discovered” is irrelevant to their status, and their degree of cognitive reality need not be crucial in judging their significance. The rules stand or fall only by their ability to account for linguistic or cultural behavior.
You have the right to understand: the deleterious effect of stress on suspects' ability to comprehend Miranda

Miranda v. Arizona (384 U.S. 436, 1966) required that suspects be explicitly warned of the right to avoid self-incrimination and the right to legal representation. This research was designed to examine whether stress, induced via an accusation of wrong-doing, undermined or enhanced suspects' ability to comprehend their Miranda rights. Participants were randomly assigned to either be accused (n = 15) or not accused (n = 15) of having cheated on an experimental task in a two-cell between-subjects experimental design. Results supported the hypothesis that stress undermines suspects' ability to comprehend their Miranda rights. Participants who were accused of cheating exhibited significantly lower levels of Miranda comprehension than participants who were not accused of cheating. The theoretical processes responsible for these effects and the implications of the findings for police interrogation are discussed.
A genetic mouse model of adult-onset, pervasive central nervous system demyelination with robust remyelination

Adult-onset demyelinating disorders of the central nervous system represent the most common neurological abnormalities in young adults. Nevertheless, our understanding of disease pathogenesis and recovery in demyelinating disorders remains incomplete. To facilitate investigation into these processes, we have developed a new mouse model system that allows for the induction of dipththeria toxin A subunit expression in adult oligodendrocytes, resulting in widespread oligodendrocyte loss and demyelination of the central nervous system. These mice develop severe ataxia and tremor that correlates with impaired axonal conduction in the spinal cord. Strikingly, these animals fully recover from their motor and physiological defects and display extensive oligodendrocyte replenishment and widespread remyelination. This model system demonstrates the robust reparative potential of myelin in the central nervous system and provides a promising model for the quantitative assessment of therapeutic interventions that promote remyelination.
Pre-college pregaming: Practices, risk factors, and relationship to other indices of problematic drinking during the transition from high school to college.

This study examined alcohol use and pregaming (i.e., drinking before going out) in the transition from high school to college and had 3 objectives: (1) evaluating pregaming prevalence and characteristics during this time, (2) determining whether it represents a unique risk for problematic drinking above-and-beyond traditional measures of consumption (i.e., quantity/frequency: QFI, and heavy episodic drinking: HED), and (3) identifying characteristics of individuals who pregame. Alcohol use and beliefs (i.e., self-reported quantity/frequency, pregaming practices, drinking game participation, alcohol-related problems, and expectancies) were assessed in entering freshmen (N = 1171) with prior alcohol use for the 3 months between high school and starting college. Results revealed that 65% of drinkers pregamed in the past, and most did so on fewer than 50% of their overall drinking occasions, consuming an average of 3 drinks in 27 min and most (87%) drank afterward. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that pregaming frequency explained an additional 7.0% of variance in problematic alcohol use above-and-beyond overall drinking and demographic risk factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, and Greek affiliation: R2 = .43 for overall model). Separate analyses indicated that demographics did not moderate the relationship between pregaming and problems. Regression analyses predicting pregaming frequency identified 7 characteristics associated with this outcome including demographics (gender, ethnicity, Greek affiliation), heavy drinking, drinking game frequency, and 2 scales of the Alcohol Expectancy Inventory (AEI: Attractive and Woozy). Findings implicate pregaming as a common practice during the transition to college, and highlight the need for additional studies examining pregaming changes across the freshman year. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). Language: en