cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Linguini: language identification for multilingual documents

Presents Linguini, a vector-space based categorizer tailored for high-precision language identification. We show how the accuracy depends on the size of the input document, the set of languages under consideration and the features used. We found that Linguini could identify the language of documents as short as 5-10% of the size of average Web documents with 100% accuracy. We also describe how to determine if a document is in two or more languages, and in what proportions, without incurring any appreciable computational overhead beyond that of monolingual analysis. This approach can be applied to subject categorization systems to distinguish between cases where, when the system recommends two or more categories, the document belongs strongly to all or really to none.
Alphavirus-based vaccines in melanoma: rationale and potential improvements in immunotherapeutic combinations

Immune checkpoint blockade has formally demonstrated the clinical benefit of immunotherapy against melanoma. New immunotherapeutic modalities are currently explored to improve the management of relapsing/refractory patients. Potent antitumor vaccines would have the advantage to promote long-lasting tumor control while limiting autoimmunity. Alphavirus vectors and nonreplicating particles offer versatile platforms to deliver antigen expression and immunize against cancer. They have shown promising preclinical results and initial proof of clinical activity in melanoma. The growing number of clinically available immunomodulatory agents provides a tremendous opportunity to exploit and revisit anticancer vaccines in the setting of powerful immunotherapeutic combinations. Accelerating the evaluation of alphavirus-based vaccines in patients with immune sensitive, but still very deadly malignancies, such as melanoma, is thus extremely important.
Ongoing SEC Disclosures by Foreign Firms

SEC rules only obligate US-listed foreign firms to supply ongoing disclosures via SEC Form 6-K if it is mandated by their home country exchange or laws. Heterogeneity in transparency and reporting requirements across countries yields significant variation in the discretion firms have to publicly supply information. We show that foreign firms from weaker reporting regimes, and those whose shares trade exclusively on a US exchange, experience greater investor interest and larger market reactions around these filings, but these firms provide significantly fewer disclosures. Moreover, firms supplying more 6-Ks exhibit lower residual uncertainty when reporting annual earnings and have lower overall information asymmetry. Our paper highlights that listing in the US does not subject foreign firms to strict regulatory Our paper highlights that listing in the US does not subject foreign firms to strict regulatory disclosure requirements, but evidence on investor information acquisition and trading behavior suggests market-based incentives encourage firms to provide timely and value-relevant information flows.
The Mutational Profile of Plasma Cell Disorders

Abstract Multiple myeloma is a plasma cell malignancy that is the second most common hematologic cancer. The genetics of the disease have been previously characterized by two major subtypes involving recurrent translocations of the immunoglobulin heavy chain, c-MAF, cyclin D (CCND1) and FGFR3/MMSET oncogenes, and the hyperdiploid group with multiple recurrent trisomies. Further, there are characterized cytogenetic/ploidy subsets that appear to carry prognostic significance. Specifically, gains of chromosomes 5, 9, 11, 15, and 19 confer a good prognosis whilst gain of 1q plus deletions of 1p, 12p, 14q, 16q, and 22q confer a poor prognosis. More recently the application of massively parallel sequencing has revealed further insights into the genetic architecture of multiple myeloma. Work from several groups has identified the contribution of mutations in genes involved in non-canonical NF-kB signaling, MAPK signaling and histone methylation, as well as infrequent mutation of cancer genes implicated in other tumor types and novel genes. These data will be presented to give an overall update on the current state of multiple myeloma genetics and our current level of insight in the genomic complexity that characterizes this disease. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.
What Sort of Global Education? Towards a Modification of International Economics Instruction

Standard instruction in international economics reflects a relatively narrow view of global education and ignores important elements of the literatures on both globalization and international economic policy. The standard syllabus needs to be supplemented with a set of under-emphasized topics to make it more relevant to both students and professionals. These topics include intra-industry trade, foreign direct investment, spatial clusters, open-economy accounting and its implications for explanations of exchange rate determination, the policy trilemma, institutions, aid, and migration. This paper briefly considers each of these topics and suggests ways to best communicate their important attributes in the classroom. This modified syllabus would increase the global education value of international economics and make it more relevant to the way that international economics is practiced in international organizations, including trade ministries, financial ministries, and the major international financial institutions.
Bangladeshi immigrants' willingness to report crime in New York City

Crime reporting by citizens has important implications for police effectiveness in crime control and community safety, yet research on immigrants’ willingness to report crime to the police is very limited. Relying on a purposive and convenience sample of 202 Bangladeshi immigrants from six areas in the New York City, this study examined Bangladeshi immigrants’ willingness to report crime and factors that may affect Bangladeshi immigrants’ willingness to report crime. Results showed that a great majority of the participants reported that they were willing to report crime to the police, and there was a high level of concordance between the participants’ crime-reporting intentions and behaviours. Both fear of crime and general satisfaction with the police were positively related to the Bangladeshi immigrants’ willingness to report crime.
Suggestions for Providing Legitimacy to Ethics Research in Accounting Education

Empirical approaches used in most accounting research may not always be appropriate when examining accounting ethics - a fact that may be considered suspect to traditionally trained accounting academics. Consequently, research in accounting ethics may not be accorded the legitimacy it deserves, and therefore ethics research is in danger of not receiving the necessary level of effort and interest needed for it to survive in the accounting academic community. By no means do I suggest that legitimacy is a substitute for quality research; rather, I argue that accounting ethics research has traditionally been undervalued due to the use of a different research methodology and its relatively recent entry as an appropriate topic for accounting researchers.
Merleau-Ponty on Taking the Attitude of the Other

ABSTRACTHegel's analysis of the struggle for recognition between two consciousnesses is reconciled by him only in the higher-level subjectivity of absolute consciousness. Merleau-Ponty argues for a paradigm shift from the constitutive model of consciousness and intersubjectivity to a dialogical model that bypasses the aporias of objectification. Dialogue avoids the consequence of mutual annihilation between two consciousnesses fighting for recognition in the objectifying paradigm. But in passing from the natural to the social level of intersubjective selfhood Merleau-Ponty falls short of articulating the linguisticality of the preconscious body-subject. Only because the body-subject is conceived as a prelinguistic, i.e. natural experience, it exhibits the solipsism of the Cartesian cogito. Thus while Merleau-Ponty points out an alternative to the sado-masochistic duel between consciousness as object and other as subject, and consciousness as subject and other as object, this alternative is neither fully c...
Caring for the adolescent with HIV infection or AIDS in the critical care setting.

Caring for the adolescent with HIV infection or AIDS in the critical care setting is challenging. This article discusses medical treatments for HIV, aspects of adolescent development that influence their behaviors, certain behaviors that put adolescents at risk for HIV acquisition, ethical and legal concerns of caring for this population, nursing implications for care, and the needs of nurses caring for this population.
Variational Approximations for Selecting Hierarchical Models of Circular Data in a Small Area Estimation Application

We consider hierarchical regression models for circular data using the projected normal distribution, applied in the development of weights for the Access Point Angler Intercept Survey, a recreational angling survey conducted by the US National Marine Fisheries Service. Weighted estimates of recreational fish catch are used in stock assessments and fisheries regulation. The construction of the survey weights requires the distribution of daily departure times of anglers from fishing sites, within spatio-temporal domains subdivided by the mode of fishing. Because many of these domains have small sample sizes, small area estimation methods are developed. Bayesian inference for the circular distributions on the 24-hour clock is conducted, based on a large set of observed daily departure times from another National Marine Fisheries Service study, the Coastal Household Telephone Survey. A novel variational/Laplace approximation to the posterior distribution allows fast comparison of a large number of models in this context, by dramatically speeding up computations relative to the fast Markov Chain Monte Carlo method while giving virtually identical results.
Knowledge Acquisition and Management: Perspectives, Strategic Implications and Extensions to the Virtual Setting

Copyright © 2000, Idea Group Publishing. This chapter provides an integrative review and synthesis of the knowledge acquisition and management literature. As a starting point, the role of the individual in organizational learning processes is discussed and reconciled. This issue is extended and discussed for the virtual setting. In following sections, the author derives three major theoretical principles from the literature synthesis. These include the knowledge types, knowledge acquisition processes, and organizational memory. Again, each of these principles are extended to the virtual setting. Based on the integration of these principles, a number of conceptual refinements are offered and important strategic implications elaborated. Subsequently, the strategic implications are contrasted and developed for the virtual setting. Communication constraints inherent to the virtual organization bring a unique and likely problematic set of issues with regard to the development and management of organizational knowledge.
A wirelessly powered injection-locked oscillator with on-chip antennas in 180nm SOI CMOS

This paper presents a battery-less mm-sized wirelessly powered injection-locked oscillator with on-chip antennas in 180nm SOI CMOS. The chip harvests electromagnetic radiation from a continuous-wave source in the X-band using an on-chip antenna. In addition, the chip is equipped with a broadband injection-locking oscillator that locks to the frequency of the input and produces a synchronized signal at the half frequency of the input. The new signal is then radiated back using an on-chip dipole antenna. This architecture resolves the conventional self-interference issue in RFID sensors by separating the received and transmitted frequencies. In addition, the locking mechanism improves the phase-noise of the on-chip oscillator to −93dBc/Hz at 100Hz offset.
Automatic and manual tattoo localization

In this paper we introduce two different automatic tattoo localization methods. The first one is a center-surround feature localization method. It combines a center-surround filter with skin and edge features based on the observation that the skin area surrounding the tattoo is homogeneously smooth and skin-colored. The second method is a graph-cut tattoo localization method. It detects the tattoo region using graph-cut segmentation based on image edges, a skin color model and a visual saliency map. In both methods tattoo regions are correctly detected even when a tattoo image includes background clutter. We also describe a manual tattoo localization tool that supports several functions to enable a trained annotator to crop and save tattoo regions efficiently. Experimental results show that our automatic methods achieve good performance on two different tattoo image datasets that include background clutter.
CBT-Enhanced Emotion Regulation as a Mechanism of Improvement for Childhood Irritability.

Research supports the clinical importance of childhood irritability, as well as its developmental implications for later anxiety and depression. Appropriate treatment may prevent this progression; however, little evidence exists to guide clinician decision making regarding treatment for chronic irritability symptoms. Given the empirical support for irritability as a dimension of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), behavioral interventions that improve ODD symptoms, especially through emotion regulation training, are strong candidates for identifying effective treatment strategies for irritability. Data from a randomized controlled effectiveness trial were used to assess hypotheses regarding irritability. The Stop Now and Plan (SNAP) Program was developed for preadolescent youths demonstrating clinically high rates of conduct problems. Participants (252 boys, ages 6–11) were assigned to participate in either SNAP or standard services; data were collected at 4 time points over 15 months. Although lower irr...
Permanent magnet material and pulsating torque minimization in spoke type interior PM machines

This paper proposes an alternative spoke type interior permanent magnet machine (STIPMM) design to minimize the pulsating torque and decrease the use of permanent magnet materials. The proposed rotor design consists of a number of rotor lamination stacks with notches made on the surface and packed in the axial direction. Within each stack, the width of the permanent magnets (PMs) and the span of the notches are different from those in the other lamination stacks. By varying the magnet width and the span of the notches in each lamination stack, the pulsating torque of the machine can be minimized while reducing the amount of PM materials used. A differential evolution (DE) algorithm was used to solve this minimization problem by evaluating a large number of design candidates. Finite element analysis was employed when calculating the cost function of the optimization. The rated performance of the optimum design is benchmarked against a base-line STIPMM in which the rotor was modified based on the 2007 Camry motor model. The results show improvement in the pulsating torque and the PM material utilization of the proposed model.
Reliability improvement to minimize average procurement unit cost of a rotorcraft fleet

Tradespace Exploration (TSE) is a Department of Defense (DOD) Engineered Resilient Systems (ERS) thrust, with overarching goals to develop processes and products capable of performing in a wide range of adverse conditions commonly encountered by military systems. TSE technologies are modernizing system engineering, facilitating stakeholder engagement through distributed collaborative environments for design and analysis of alternatives. However, the majority of TSE research emphasizes tradeoffs between functional requirements, especially those related to performance, not nonfunctional requirements such as reliability, availability, and maintainability, which impact operation and support costs (O&S). This paper presents a model to explicitly consider the impact of reliability improvement on availability and cost with special attention to fleet size and average procurement unit cost (APUC). Examples illustrate how reliability improvement could significantly increase availability as well as reduce lifecycle and average procurement unit cost.
The Gilbert Bilayer Connected Device (PHS) and Other Mesh Repairs

Successful inguinal hernia repair requires reduction of the hernia contents and prevention of recurrence herniation by blockage of the myo-pectineal orifice. An appreciation of the anatomy of the region is necessary for performing the optimal procedure. Because of the complexity of the anatomy and the variable skill of surgeons, there have been many different hernia repair techniques described, seeking the ideal procedure. In 1997, Dr. Arthur Gilbert designed the Prolene Hernia System, a bilayer polypropylene mesh device with a flat underlay and overlay joined by a central connector. The product is suitable for all groin hernia repairs giving immediate strength and excellent long-term outcomes, with less than ½ % recurrence rate, few complications, and minimal chronic pain. The procedure can be done as an outpatient under local anesthesia with sedation.
Trends and Disparities in Cervical Spine Fusion Procedures Utilization in the New York State.

Study design A retrospective review of the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System database of the New York State. Objective This study examined the rate of increase of cervical spine fusion procedures at low-, medium-, and high-volume hospitals, and analyzed racial and socioeconomic characteristics of the patient population treated at these three volume categories. Summary of background data There has been a steady increase in spinal fusion procedures performed each year in the United States, especially cervical and lumbar fusion. Our study aims to analyze the rate of increase at low-, medium-, and high-volume hospitals, and socioeconomic characteristics of the patient populations at these three volume categories. Methods The New York State, Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) database was searched from 2005 to 2014 for the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) Procedure Codes 81.01 (Fusion, atlas-axis), 81.02 (Fusion, anterior column, other cervical, anterior technique), and 81.03 (Fusion, posterior column, other cervical, posterior technique). Patients' primary diagnosis (ICD-9-CM), age, race/ethnicity, primary payment method, severity of illness, length of stay, hospital of operation were included. All 122 hospitals were categorized into high-, medium-, and low-volume. Trends in annual number of cervical spine fusion surgeries in each of the three hospital volume groups were reported using descriptive statistics. Results Low-volumes centers were more likely to be rural and non-teaching hospitals. African American patients comprised a greater portion of patients at low-volume hospitals, 15.1% versus 11.6% compared with high-volume hospitals. Medicaid and self-pay patients were also overrepresented at low-volume centers, 6.7% and 3.9% versus 2.6% and 1.7%, respectively. Compared with Caucasian patients, African American patients had higher rates of postoperative infection (P = 0.0020) and postoperative bleeding (P = 0.0044). Compared with privately insured patients, Medicaid patients had a higher rate of postoperative bleeding (P = 0.0266) and in-hospital mortality (P = 0.0031). Conclusion Our results showed significant differences in hospital characteristics, racial distribution, and primary payments methods between the low- and high-volume categories. African American and Medicaid patients had higher rates of postoperative bleeding, despite similar rates between the three volume categories. This suggests racial and socioeconomic disparities remains problematic for disadvantaged populations, some of which may be attributed to accessibility to care at high-volume centers. Level of evidence 3.
Planting the seed for marijuana use: Changes in exposure to medical marijuana advertising and subsequent adolescent marijuana use, cognitions, and consequences over seven years.

Abstract Background Marijuana use during adolescence is associated with neurocognitive deficits and poorer functioning across several domains. It is likely that more states will pass both medical and recreational marijuana legalization laws in the coming elections; therefore, we must begin to look more closely at the longitudinal effects of medical marijuana (MM) advertising on marijuana use among adolescents so that we can better understand effects that this advertising may have on their subsequent marijuana use and related outcomes. Methods We followed two cohorts of 7th and 8th graders (mean age 13) recruited from school districts in Southern California from 2010 until 2017 (mean age 19) to examine effects of MM advertising on adolescents’ marijuana use, cognitions, and consequences over seven years. Latent growth models examined trajectories of self-reported exposure to medical marijuana ads in the past three months and trajectories of use, cognitions, and consequences. Results Higher average exposure to MM advertising was associated with higher average use, intentions to use, positive expectancies, and negative consequences. Similarly, higher rates of change in MM advertising exposure were associated with higher rates of change in use, intentions, expectancies, and consequences over seven years. Conclusions Results suggest that exposure to MM advertising may not only play a significant role in shaping attitudes about marijuana, but may also contribute to increased marijuana use and related negative consequences throughout adolescence. This highlights the importance of considering regulations for marijuana advertising, similar to regulations in place for the promotion of tobacco and alcohol in the U.S.
Decision-Making in the Boardroom: Problems of Voting

A corporation’s board of directors, a state’s legislature, stockholders at an annual meeting, and this nation’s voters participate at times in the process of group decision-making—the extraction of one group decision from various individual preferences.
THE GENETIC CONTROL OF THE IMMUNE RESPONSE TO HAPTEN-POLY-L-LYSINE CONJUGATES IN GUINEA PIGS

That the immune response to an immunogen by an individual animal is under genetic control is evident from the results of several studies. For example, Fjord-Scheibel (1943), Carlifanti (1948), and Sang and Sobey (1954) showed a statistically significant relationship between the abilities of parents and their offspring to produce high serum titers of antibody to a given immunogen. Also, Ibsen (1959) showed that inbred strains of mice required different doses of antigen to produce a standardized immune response. Recently, Sobey et al. (1966) observed genetically transmissable differences among random bred mice to respond immunologically to bovine serum albumin. Finally, Arquilla and Finn (1965), in studies of the immune response of inbred guinea pigs to bovine insulin, found that strain 2 guinea pigs could make antibodies to an antigenic determinant of insulin to which strain 13 could not make antibodies. However, breeding studies showed complex patterns of inheritance.
Applications of Cosmogenic Isotopes as Atmospheric Tracers

Earth’s atmosphere is constantly bombarded by cosmic-ray particles and the interaction of these cosmic-ray particles with the target nuclei continuously produce a suite of radionuclides which serve as powerful tracers to identify and quantify several atmospheric processes. These include sources and transport and mixing of air masses, exchange of air-masses between various layers of the atmosphere (e.g., stratosphere–troposphere exchange, STE), residence times of atmospheric gases, removal rates and residence times of atmospheric pollutants to name a few. Combining the cosmogenic radionuclides with other naturally-occurring (primarily daughter products of 222Rn) and anthropogenic (mainly derived from nuclear weapons testing) radionuclides, have significantly aided to improve our understanding of the time scales involved with the interhemispheric exchange, meridional mixing and cross-Equator mixing as well as residence time of tropospheric aerosols. In this article, we review some of the key applications of cosmogenic radionuclides tracers in the atmosphere.
NOTES ON EVALUATION OF AN IMPACT PREDICTION AND LOCATION SYSTEM

Accuracy of the Impact Prediction System is estimated relative to the Missile Impact Location System (MILS) pentagon nets at Atlantic Missile Range. Accuracy of the system is expressed as the deviation of the center of an elliptical distribution pattern from a reference point and precision is denoted by the size of the 95% confidence ellipse. The dispersion pattern of two missile types are described and the presence of systematic errors investigated. Computed time of flight data used in conjunction with position data admits inferences concerning the agreement between the drag coefficient used in the program and the actual drag encountered by stabilized and tumbling nose cones.
Calcium Channel Diversity

In recent years a great deal of evidence has accumulated that demonstrates the large amount of diversity that exists between Ca channels. By Ca channels we mean membrane pores that are opened by depolarization, allow Ca2+ to flow down its electrochemical gradient when the channel is open and show a standard selectivity between different divalent cations. Ca2+, Ba2+ and Sr2+ can pass through Ca channels, while Co2+ and Mg2+ cannot. Cd2+, Co2+, Ni2+ and Mn2+ block the channel, but some of the blockers, e.g., Mn2+, can themselves carry current through the channel. This definition of Ca channels excludes several interesting channels which have been shown to allow Ca2+ to enter cells.
Internalized False Confessions

As I wrote this chapter, my attention was drawn to a courtroom in South Carolina, where 41-year-old Billy Wayne Cope was just convicted for the rape and murder of his 12-year-old daughter Amanda. Cope awoke one morning to find the oldest of his three daughters face down, cold and lifeless in her bed. It looked as if she had been strangled to death. Cope’s wife worked the night shift, so she was not home. Immediately he called 911, but when the police arrived they treated him more like a suspect than a grief-stricken father. Based on an erroneous first impression that there was no sign of a forced entry and belief that Cope showed “too little emotion,” the police interviewed him twice, sent him to the hospital for a physical examination, and then took him to the station for questioning that would begin late at night and extend into the early morning.
Understanding Information Operations using YouTubeTracker

YouTube is the second most popular website in the world. Over 300 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute and 5 billion videos are watched every day - almost one video per person worldwide. Because videos can deliver a complex message in a way that captures the audience’s attention more effectively than text-based platforms, it has become one of the most relevant platforms in the age of digital mass communication. This makes the analysis of YouTube content and user behavior invaluable not only to information scientists but also communication researchers, journalists, sociologists, and many more. There exists a number of YouTube analysis tools but few of them provide an in-depth qualitative and quantitative insights into user behavior or networks from massive aggregated data. Towards that direction, we introduce YouTubeTracker - a tool designed to gather YouTube data and gain insights on content and users. This tool can help identify leading actors, networks and spheres of influence, emerging popular trends, as well as user opinion. This analysis can also be used to understand user engagement and social networks. This can help reveal suspicious and inorganic behaviors (e.g., trolling, botting) causing algorithmic manipulations. Utility of the YouTubeTracker application is demonstrated via a case study on NATO’s 2018 Trident Juncture Exercise.
Modernism on the Nile: art in Egypt between the Islamic and the contemporary: by Alex Dika Seggerman, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2019, xvii, 254 pp., $34.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-4696-5304-4

This deeply researched and well-written book is a gem. Although compact, it has nearly 100 illustrations, 24 of them in color. Challenging standard art history frameworks, Seggerman remarks of an o...
ClonoMatch: a tool for identifying homologous immunoglobulin and T cell receptor sequences in large databases.

SUMMARY B cell receptor (BCR) and T cell receptor (TCR) repertoires are generated through somatic DNA rearrangements and are responsible for the molecular basis of antigen recognition in the immune system. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) of DNA and the falling cost of sequencing due to continued development of these technologies have made sequencing assays an affordable way to characterize the repertoire of adaptive immune receptors (sometimes termed the 'immunome'). Many new workflows have been developed to take advantage of NGS and have placed the resulting immunome datasets in the public domain. The scale of these NGS datasets has made it challenging to search through the Complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3), which is responsible for imparting specific antibody-antigen interactions. Thus, there is an increasing demand for sequence analysis tools capable of searching through CDR3s from immunome data collections containing millions of sequences. To address this need, we created a software package called ClonoMatch that facilitates rapid searches in bulk immunome data for BCR or TCR sequences based on their CDR3 sequence or V3J clonotype. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION Documentation, software support and the codebase are all available at https://github.com/crowelab/clonomatch. This software is distributed under the GPL v3 license. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Transcription initiation as a control point in plastid gene expression

The extensive processing and protein-assisted stabilization of transcripts have been taken as evidence for a viewpoint that the control of gene expression had shifted entirely in evolution from transcriptional in the bacterial endosymbiont to posttranscriptional in the plastid. This suggestion is however at odds with many observations on plastid gene transcription. Chloroplasts of flowering plants and mosses contain two or more RNA polymerases with distinct promoter preference and division of labor for the coordinated synthesis of plastid RNAs. Plant and algal plastids further possess multiple nonredundant sigma factors that function as transcription initiation factors. The controlled accumulation of plastid sigma factors and modification of their activity by sigma-binding proteins and phosphorylation constitute additional transcriptional regulatory strategies. Plant and algal plastids also contain dedicated one- or two-component transcriptional regulators. Transcription initiation thus continues to form a critical control point at which varied developmental and environmental signals intersect with plastid gene expression.
The Retention of Educators of Color Amidst Institutionalized Racism

Representing approximately 20% of the workforce, educators of color (EOC) leave the field at a rate 25% higher than their White counterparts. Despite workforce diversification efforts, few studies ...
A Framework for Revisiting Brain Death: Evaluating Awareness and Attitudes Toward the Neuroscientific and Ethical Debate Around the American Academy of Neurology Brain Death Criteria.

Background:There remains a lack of awareness around the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) procedural criteria for brain death and the surrounding controversies, leading to significant practice va...
Identification of Protein Markers Predictive of Drug-Specific Survival Outcome in Cancers.

Novel discoveries of biomarkers predictive of drug-specific responses not only play a pivotal role in revealing the drug mechanisms in cancers, but are also critical to personalized medicine. In this study, we identified drug-specific biomarkers by integrating protein expression data, drug treatment data and survival outcome of 7076 patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We first defined cancer-drug groups, where each cancer-drug group contains patients with the same cancer and treated with the same drug. For each protein, we stratified the patients in each cancer-drug group by high or low expression of the protein, and applied log-rank test to examine whether the stratified patients show significant survival difference. We examined 336 proteins in 98 cancer-drug groups and identified 65 protein-cancer-drug combinations involving 55 unique proteins, where the protein expression levels are predictive of drug-specific survival outcomes. Some of the identified proteins were supported by published literature. Using the gene expression data from TCGA, we found the mRNA expression of \(\sim \)11% of the drug-specific proteins also showed significant correlation with drug-specific survival, and most of these drug-specific proteins and their corresponding genes are strongly correlated.
Endoscopic biliary drainage for malignant distal biliary obstruction: which is better - ERCP or EUS?

Presently, following endoscopic ultrasound (EUS)-guided biopsy, an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) with trans-papillary stenting is performed for palliation of malignant distal biliary obstruction (MDBO). However, technical failure and post-procedure pancreatitis are limitations to ERCP. Endoscopic ultrasonography-guided biliary drainage (EUS-BD) after a failed ERCP has a 90% technical success rate and has been shown to be superior when compared to percutaneous methods making EUS an increasingly recognized option for biliary drainage. Supporting this approach, findings from recently concluded randomized trials suggest that the safety profile and technical outcomes for EUS-BD are comparable or even superior to that of ERCP for primary biliary decompression in patients with MDBO. Also, EUS-BD is increasingly being utilized in patients with altered surgical anatomy in lieu of percutaneous techniques and balloon-assisted enteroscopy. A growing body of evidence supports the notion that in the future, EUS may become the primary modality by which biliary decompression is undertaken in majority of patients with MDBO. The roadmap to this eventuality may require further optimization of procedural techniques, technological innovations, and cost reduction.
The Global Impact of Biomass Burning: An Interview with EPA's Robert Huggett

The extent of biomass burning has increased significantly over the past 100 years because of human activities, and such burning is much more frequent and widespread than was previously believed. Biomass burning is now recognized as a significant global source of emissions, contributing as much as 40% of gross carbon dioxide and 38% of tropospheric ozone. Most of the world's burned biomass matter is from the savannas, and because two-thirds of the Earth's savannas are located in Africa, that continent is now recognized as the "burn center" of the planet. In the past few years the international scientific community has conducted field experiments using ground-based and airborne measurements in Africa, South America. and Siberia to better assess the global production of gases and particulates by biomass burning. Researchers are gathering this month in Williamsburg, VA, to discuss the results of these and other investigations at the Second Chapman Conference on Biomass Burning and Global Change, sponsored by the American Geophysical Union. The first international biomass burning conference, held in 1990, was attended by atmospheric chemists, climatologists, ecologists, forest and soil scientists, fire researchers, remote- sensins specialists, and environmental planners and managers from more than 25 countries.When we hear about biomass burning, we usually think of the burning of the worlds tropical forests for permanent land clearing. However, biomass burning serves a variety of land use changes, including the clearing of forests and savannas for agricultural and grazing use; shifting agriculture practices; the control of grass, weeds, and litter on agricultural and grazing lands; the elimination of stubble and waste on agricultural lands after the harvest; and the domestic use of biomass matter.
Choline Acetyltransferase and Neuronal Maturation

Publisher Summary This chapter mentions the development of choline acetyltransferase in a restricted segment of the developing nervous system in relation to other parameters of neuronal maturation. A number of studies have indicated that the use of a small segment of the developing neural axis can reveal pronounced changes in the biochemical differentiation of the nervous tissue that are masked in a study of larger areas such as major subdivisions of the brain. Studies have been made recently on the ontogenetic pattern of choline acetyltransferase activity in the lumbosacral spinal cord of the embryonic and newborn rat. Marked similarities can be noted in the development of choline acetyltransferase activity in both the rat and the chick. Although the ontogenetic patterns are not identical, the correlation between increased choline acetyltransferase activity with both synaptogenesis and the development of reflex activity is similar. An additional advantage to studying a restricted segment of the developing nervous system is that a more precise correlation can be made between the morphological, functional, and biochemical parameters of nervous tissue maturation.
A Sister's Story

I HAD A BROTHER. He died of AIDS. Mike was forty-three years old. There are pictures of him in our family album as a little boy, perhaps eight years old, all dressed up in a grey suit. All ears. Grinning. I inspect these pictures of before I was born, straining to catch any clue, any shadow, revealing that he wouldn't get to finish. I knew him well. We were so close, that often in the midst of being overwhelmed by quick successions of intense and varied feelings, I think I should call him. Together, we would discuss in great and intimate detail the effect of his death on our lives, our families, our children, our father. This is the emotional territory we used to cover together and he's left me to do it without him.
Steiner equiangular tight frames redux

An equiangular tight frame (ETF) is a set of unit vectors whose coherence achieves the Welch bound, and so is as incoherent as possible. ETFs arise in numerous applications, including compressed sensing. They also seem to be rare: despite over a decade of active research by the community, only a few construction methods have been discovered. One known method constructs ETFs from combinatorial designs known as balanced incomplete block designs. In this short paper, we provide an updated, more explicit perspective of that construction, laying the groundwork for upcoming results about such frames.
Fixing Copyright in Three Impossible Steps: Review of How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

This review of William Patry’s How to Fix Copyright highlights three of Patry's themes. First is Patry’s insistence that copyright policy be based on real-world evidence, a suggestion that should be uncontroversial but instead runs headlong into the near-religious commitments of copyright stakeholders. Second is Patry’s emphasis on the difference between the interests of creators, on the one hand, and owners of copyright interests, on the other. Third, and finally, is Patry’s focus on the copyright system’s strong tendency to entrench business models and resist change, particularly in the face of new technology.
American Families: A Multicultural Reader

In the past forty years, American families have become more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before. Different family forms and living arrangements have also multiplied, with single-parent families, cohabiting couples with children, divorced couples with children, stepfamilies, and newly-visible same-sex families. During the same period, socioeconomic inequality among families has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s.
The specificity of transglutaminase. I. Human hemoglobin as a substrate for the enzyme.

Abstract The factors influencing the reactivity of the glutamine residues in a protein in the transglutaminase reaction have been investigated using human hemoglobin as a substrate. Although carbonmonoxy hemoglobin and methemoglobin showed essentially no substrate activity, 50% of the glutamine amide groups in heat-denatured hemoglobin or acetylated denatured hemoglobin could be substituted. Variation of the reaction conditions did not increase the substitution. Experiments using hemoglobin α and β chains, as well as those in which heat-denatured hemoglobin that had been enzymatically substituted with methylamine was fingerprinted, indicated that the single glutamine residue in the α chain and one or two out of three glutamines in the β chain are reactive. These results indicate that both the primary sequence about a particular glutamine residue and the conformation of the protein determine the specificity of transglutaminase toward a protein.
Untangling the Blum Medial Axis Transform

For over 30 years, Blum's Medial Axis Transform (MAT) has proven to be an intriguing tool for analyzing and computing with form, but it is one that is notoriously difficult to apply in a robust and stable way. It is well documented how a tiny change to an object's boundary can cause a large change in its MAT. There has also been great difficulty in using the MAT to decompose an object into a hierarchy of parts reflecting the natural parts-hierarchy that we perceive. This paper argues that the underlying cause of these problems is that medial representations embody both the substance of each part of an object and the connections between adjacent parts. A small change in an object's boundary corresponds to a small change in its substance but may involve a large change in its connection information. The problems with Blum's MAT are generated because it does not explicitly represent this dichotomy of information. To use the Blum MAT to it's full potential, this paper presents a method for separating the substance and connection information of an object. This provides a natural parts-hierarchy while eliminating instabilities due to small boundary changes. The method also allows for graded, fuzzy classifications of object parts to match the ambiguity in human perception of many objects.
Laser beam propagation in atmospheric turbulence

The optical effects of atmospheric turbulence on the propagation of low power laser beams are reviewed in this paper. The optical effects are produced by the temperature fluctuations which result in fluctuations of the refractive index of air. The commonly-used models of index-of-refraction fluctuations are presented. Laser beams experience fluctuations of beam size, beam position, and intensity distribution within the beam due to refractive turbulence. Some of the observed effects are qualitatively explained by treating the turbulent atmosphere as a collection of moving gaseous lenses of various sizes. Analytical results and experimental verifications of the variance, covariance and probability distribution of intensity fluctuations in weak turbulence are presented. For stronger turbulence, a saturation of the optical scintillations is observed. The saturation of scintillations involves a progressive break-up of the beam into multiple patches; the beam loses some of its lateral coherence. Heterodyne systems operating in a turbulent atmosphere experience a loss of heterodyne signal due to the destruction of coherence.
A Glutamyl Residue in the Active Site of Triphosphopyridine Nucleotide-dependent Isocitrate Dehydrogenase of Pig Heart

Abstract The maximum velocity of the reaction catalyzed by the pig heart TPN-specific isocitrate dehydrogenase depends on the basic form of an enzymatic group of pK 5.7. This pK is independent of temperature from 10–30° and increases in 20% ethanol, suggesting the ionization of a carboxyl group. The enzyme is inactivated by incubation at pH 7.0 with 1 -cyclohexyl-3-(2-morpholinoethyl)-carbodiimide either alone or in the presence of glycine ethyl ester, glycinamide, or glycine. Both the dehydrogenase and decarboxylase functions of the enzyme are affected. The addition of manganous ion and isocitrate or α-ketoglutarate to the incubation mixture produces a striking decrease in the inactivation rate, implying that reaction takes place in the active site. The inactive glycinamide enzyme exhibits a decreased ability to bind manganous ion in the presence of isocitrate, which suggests that the integrity of those amino acid residues susceptible to the carbodiimide and glycinamide are important for the binding of the manganous-isocitrate complex by the enzyme. The most probable sites of reaction of the carbodiimide are tyrosine, cysteine, glutamic and aspartic acids. Inactivation is not reversed by hydroxylamine indicating that tyrosine modification is not responsible; and no significant change in the measurable sulfhydryl content is noted upon inactivation. Treatment of the enzyme with the carbodiimide in the presence of [14C]glycine ethyl ester leads to incorporation of 1 mole of radioactive compound per mole of enzyme, concomitant with inactivation. Exhaustive proteolytic digestion of the radioactive protein followed by paper chromatography and electrophoresis led to the identification of γ-glutamylglycine as the product of the modification reaction. It is concluded that a glutamyl residue is essential for the catalytic function of isocitrate dehydrogenase and may lie within the substrate binding site.
Towards a Transmission Line Limit Preserving Algorithm for Large-Scale Power System Equivalents

Power system equivalents have long been used for reducing the size of power systems networks. While there are a number of equivalencing methods, little attention has been paid on how to retain thermal line limits from the original system. This paper presents an approach to develop an equivalent network for a large scale power system that preserves the thermal line limits from the equivalenced lines. The proposed method is able to assign limits to equivalent lines with inexpensive computation and is operating point independent even with a loaded system. The algorithm is applied to create a backbone type equivalent system of the Eastern Interconnection in North America.
Nitrogen Availability from Compost in High Tunnel Tomato Production

ABSTRACTHigh yield agricultural systems, such as high tunnel (HT) vegetable production, require a large supply of soil nutrients, especially nitrogen (N). Compost is a common amendment used by HT growers both to supply nutrients and to improve physical and biological soil properties. We examined commercially-available composts and their effects on soil N, plant N uptake, and tomato yield in HT cultivation. In addition, a laboratory study examined N and carbon (C) mineralization from the composts, and the usefulness of compost properties as predictors of compost N mineralization was assessed under field and laboratory conditions. The field study used a randomized complete block design with four replications to compare four compost treatments (all added at the rate of 300 kg total N ha−1) with unamended soil and an inorganic N treatment (110 kg N ha−1). Tomatoes were grown in Monmouth, Maine during the summers of 2013 and 2014. Compost NO3−-N and NH4+-N application rates were significantly correlated with s...