cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Severe exfoliative skin rash with icodextrin.

A 56-year-old African-American diabetic male with end-stage renal disease on cycler peritoneal dialysis was initiated on icodextrin last fill due to volume overload. Approximately 2 weeks later, he developed a generalized rash over the torso and limbs, sparing the face and mucosal surfaces. The rash became exfoliative as shown in Figures 1 and 2. The skin lesions completely resolved within days of discontinuation of icodextrin. Icodextrin is a starch-derived, water-soluble glucose polymer, which is particularly useful for the long dwell in either continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis or continuous cycling peritoneal dialysis. The reported incidence of skin rash with icodextrin is about 10%. A variety of skin lesions have been reported including exfoliative dermatitis, acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis, maculopapular rash, and chronic lymphocytic vasculitis. Onset of rash varies from days to months post initial exposure, but usually occurs within a few weeks of exposure. It typically improves within weeks of discontinuing use of icodextrin. Icodextrin is partially absorbed from the peritoneum via the peritoneal lymphatic drainage. It is metabolized via alpha amylase into maltose and other glucose polymers. The allergenic icodextrin epitopes responsible for these skin reactions remain unknown.
New-onset syncope in older adults: focus on age and etiology

The authors explored the differences in clinical presentation, etiology, mortality, and recurrences of new-onset syncope in 502 patients across 3 age groups: middle-aged (36-60 years), older (61-75 years), and elderly (older than 75 years). Clinical features of syncopal episodes were similar except for more frequent presyncopal episodes in patients older than 75 years. Yield of diagnostic tests was similarly low except for higher incidence of positive tilt-table test (60%) in older patients. Syncope remained unexplained more frequently in the elderly (54% vs 37% in middle-aged and 43% in older adults, P=.01). Syncope recurrence was higher in the middle-aged and elderly groups. Overall mortality for the 3 age groups was similar to that recorded in the general population after adjustment for age and comorbidities. Etiology of syncope was not associated with age- and comorbidity-adjusted all-cause mortality. Cardiovascular mortality was significantly higher in patients with cardiogenic syncope (adjusted hazard ratio, 2.44; P=.044).
Trapping of deuterium at damage in graphite

Enhanced retention of deuterium (D) and tritium (T) in graphite due to neutron damage could result in large T inventories in future DT fueled fusion devices such as CIT and ITER. This paper describes experiments done to characterize the effect of lattice damage on retention of D in graphite. Lattice damage was produced in several types of graphite by irradiation with 6 MeV C+ ions or with neutrons. The damaged graphite was then heated to 1200{degree}C and exposed to D{sub 2} gas. The concentration of D retained in the graphite was measured by nuclear reaction analysis and compared to the level of damage. In POCO, N3M and H451 graphites, D retention increased with damage at low damage levels but saturated above 0.04 dpa at a D concentration of about 650 atomic ppM. D retention in damaged highly oriented pyrolytic graphite was an order of magnitude smaller than in the other graphites indicating that crystalline microstructure is an important factor. These results indicate that neutron damage in CIT and ITER may cause retention of large inventories of tritium in graphite components. 5 refs., 4 figs., 1 tab.
Narrow-band control experiments in active vibration isolation

This paper presents experimental results in active vibration isolation using a new version of the adaptive Least Mean Squares control algorithm. The algorithm is implemented digitally as a tracking notch filter in an experiment where the actuator and error sensor are collocated. A pair of all-pass filters are utilized to generate the sine and cosine signals needed by the adaptive filter and troublesome modes of the plant are identified off-line and cancelled by direct inversion. The closed loop system shows two orders of magnitude reduction in force transmissibility over open loop and over a decade of frequencies.© (1994) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Estrogen or Estrogen Receptor Agonist Inhibits Lipopolysaccharide Induced Microglial Activation and Death

Inflammation is an important pathogenic mechanism in many neurodegenerative disorders. Activated microglia play a pivotal role in releasing pro-inflammatory factors including interleukin-1 (IL-1), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) for inducing inflammation. While microglia mediated inflammation is essential in maintaining CNS homeostasis, chronic inflammation results in activation of proteases for cell death. Here, we examined the effect of PPT (estrogen receptor α agonist), DPN (estrogen receptor β agonist), and estrogen on rat primary microglia following exposure to lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Exposure of microglia to LPS (200 ng/ml) for 24 h induced cell death. After LPS toxicity for 15 min, microglia were treated with 25 nM PPT, 25 nM DPN, or 100 nM estrogen that prevented cell death by attenuating the release of IL-1α, IL-1β, TNF-α, and COX-2. Treatment of cells with 100 nM fulvestrant (estrogen receptor antagonist) prior to addition of PPT, DPN, or estrogen significantly decreased their ability to prevent cell death, indicating involvement of estrogen receptor (ER) in providing PPT, DPN, or estrogen mediated cytoprotection. Reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT–PCR) analyses showed alterations in mRNA expression of Bax, Bcl-2, calpain, and calpastatin during apoptosis. We also examined mRNA expression of ERβ and ERα following exposure of microglia to LPS and subsequent treatment with PPT, DPN, or estrogen. We found that estrogen or estrogen receptor agonists upregulated expression of ERs. Overall, results indicate that estrogen receptor agonist or estrogen uses a receptor mediated pathway to protect microglia from LPS toxicity.
A Fractal Measure for Comparing the Work Effort of Human and Artificial Agents Performing Management Functions

Thanks to the growing sophistication of artificial agent technologies, businesses will increasingly face decisions of whether to have a human employee or artificial agent perform a particular function. This makes it desirable to have a common temporal measure for comparing the work effort that human beings and artificial agents can apply to a role. Existing temporal measures of work effort are formulated to apply either to human employees (e.g., FTE and billable hours) or computer-based systems (e.g., mean time to failure and availability) but not both. In this paper we propose a new temporal measure of work effort based on fractal dimension that applies equally to the work of human beings and artificial agents performing management functions. We then consider four potential cases to demonstrate the measure's diagnostic value in assessing strengths (e.g., flexibility) and risks (e.g., switch costs) reflected by the temporal work dynamics of particular managers.
U.N. peace‐building in Guatemala

A country deeply divided along ethnic and class lines, Guatemala is now emerging from the longest and bloodiest internal war in Latin America in recent times. Guatemalan society—the vast civil society networks, the government, the military, the guerrilla organizations (URNG), and the business sector—looks eagerly toward the formal signing of the peace accords, the result of arduous negotiations. Although the armed conflict may end—no small achievement given its horrendous human cost—the problems that produced the war remain in place and will affect the long‐term prospects for real peace. Although the U.N. has been present in Guatemala through the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees and the U.N. Development Program, we will focus on MINUGUA (Mision de las Naciones Unidas de verification de derechos humanos en Guatemala), the organization charged with monitoring the nation's human rights situation. We will examine MINUGUA's role in laying the basis for peace in violence‐torn Guatemala. MINUGUA has followed i...
Pharmacokinetics of 18F-labeled fleroxacin in rabbits with Escherichia coli infections, studied with positron emission tomography.

18F-labeled fleroxacin was used to measure the pharmacokinetics of fleroxacin in healthy and infected animals by positron emission tomography (PET) and tissue radioactivity measurements. In all experiments, a pharmacological dose of unlabeled drug (10 mg/kg) was coinjected with the tracer. The pharmacokinetics of [18F]fleroxacin was measured in groups of healthy mice (n = six per group) at 10, 30, 60, and 120 min after injection and in groups of rats with Escherichia coli thigh infections (n = six per group) at 60 and 120 min after injection by radioactivity measurements in excised tissues. In healthy rabbits (n = 4) and in rabbits with E. coli thigh infections (n = 4), tissue concentrations of drug were determined by serial PET imaging over 2 h; after the final image was acquired, animals were sacrificed and concentrations measured by PET were compared with the results of tissue radioactivity measurements. In all three species, there was rapid equilibration of [18F]fleroxacin to significant concentrations in most peripheral organs; low concentrations of drug were detected in the brain. Accumulations of radiolabeled drug in infected and healthy thigh muscles were similar. Peak concentrations of drug of more than three times the MIC for 90% of members of the family Enterobacteriaceae (greater than 100-fold for most organisms) were achieved in all tissues except brain and remained above this level for more than 2 h. Especially high peak concentrations were achieved in the kidney (greater than 75 micrograms/g), liver (greater than 50 micrograms/g), blood (greater than 25 micrograms/g), and bone and lung (greater than 10 micrograms/g).Since the MICs for 90% of all Enterobacteriaceae are <2 micrograms/ml, fleroxacin should be particularly useful in treating gram-negative infections affecting these tissues. In contrast, the low concentration of drug delivered to the brain should limit the toxicity of the drug for the central nervous system.
The barberplaid illusion: plaid motion is biased by elongated apertures

The perceived direction of motion of plaids windowed by elongated spatial Gaussians is biased toward the window's long axis. The bias increases as the relative angle between the plaid motion and the long axis of the window increases, peaks at a relative angle of approximately 45 deg, and then decreases. The bias increases as the window is made narrower (at fixed height) and decreases as the component spatial frequency increases (at fixed aperture size). We examine several models of human motion processing (cross-correlation, motion-energy, intersection-of-constraints, and vector-sum), and show that none of these standard models can predict our data. We conclude that spatial integration of motion signals plays a crucial role in plaid motion perception and that current models must be explicitly expanded to include such spatial interactions.
Simulation of propagating fronts in geothermal reservoirs with the implicit Leonard total variation diminishing scheme

Abstract Geothermal reservoir engineering requires accurate numerical solution of the advective–diffusive transport equations for strong advective flows of multiphase nonisothermal fluids. Conventional interface weighting schemes such as upstream weighting cause numerical dispersion. Numerical dispersion can be reduced by grid refinement, but this increases execution times and computer memory requirements. As an alternative, higher-order differencing schemes can be used to reduce numerical dispersion, but they often lead to spurious oscillations. These limitations have led to the development of higher-order schemes called total variation diminishing (TVD) schemes. For geothermal reservoir engineering, these schemes must be capable of handling flows that may not be physically total variation diminishing. We have implemented TVD schemes into the implicit geothermal reservoir simulator TOUGH2. We verify the Leonard TVD (LTVD) scheme by comparison to an analytical solution for two-dimensional flow and transport. The LTVD scheme reduces numerical dispersion for tracer transport in a two-phase geothermal reinjection problem. One-dimensional simulations show that the LTVD scheme works well even if the saturation variation increases with time. Because the location of the phase front is strongly coupled to temperature, phase front propagation is sensitive to grid resolution insofar as it affects the temperature field. Phase front propagation in a composite porous medium Buckley–Leverett flow problem, where phase saturations increase upon encountering a second medium, are slightly more accurate for the LTVD scheme as compared to upstream weighting. We find that the LTVD scheme only performs well if the weighting and limiter are applied to saturation rather than to relative permeability. While there is some increased computational cost with the LTVD scheme due to increased linear equation solution time and smaller time-step size, the LTVD scheme is a practical and robust method for reducing numerical dispersion in complex flow problems relevant to geothermal reservoir engineering.
The ego function of protest songs: An application of Gregg's theory of protest rhetoric

This essay applies Richard Gregg's theory of protest rhetoric to 705 American social movement songs from 1800 to 1985 to discover how songs enable protestors to identify against others and thus to locate themselves positively in the social hierarchy. Songs are ideal messages for ego‐enhancement because they are movement‐centered, concerned with social relationships, and highly self‐directed. Terms denoting innocent victimage and wicked victimizer dominate the selected songs, and the vision of reality is negative, dangerous, threatening, and unfair. Relatively few songs emphasize the unity, virtue, wisdom, or bravery of protestors. The self‐image contained in songs does not appear to express a strongly positive identity or locate the oppressed very high in the symbolic or social hierarchy. This self‐image would seem to fulfill three ego functions essential for the early phases of social movements: raising consciousness, allaying guilt, and reclaiming or proclaiming one's ego. However, a different self‐imag...
Aligned Arrays of Te Nanorods Grown from the Faceted Surfaces of Colloidal GeTe Particles

Reactions carried out with diphenylgermane (DPG) and trioctylphosphine-tellurium (TOP-Te) in supercritical hexane at 460 °C at 13.6 MPa yielded faceted GeTe particles. When octanol was added to the reactions, the GeTe particles formed with arrays of aligned Te nanorods extending off their surfaces. These GeTe/Te heterostructures also formed when other additives such as oleic acid and isoprene were present in the reactions, but the addition of thiols quenched Te nanorod growth. These surfactant additives appear to influence reactant decomposition, deposition, and crystallization kinetics. Careful crystallographic analyses revealed that the Te nanorods extend epitaxially from the faceted GeTe surfaces and that this epitaxial interfacing determined the growth direction of the Te nanorods. This system provides an example of how the lattice mismatch between a deposited material and an underlying substrate can lead to formation of an array of nanowires.
Relating Fashion Change to Social Change: A Methodological Approach

Fashion authorities recognize that social changes and fashion changes are related. How ever, their observations are largely speculative, rather than being based upon empirical testing. This research was designed to determine whether patterns of stability and change in attire coincide with periods of societal stability and change. A data recording form was developed and a method to quantify the data for likelihood ratio tests was designed. A sample of 112 costumes, either photographs of portraits or fashion illustrations, was used to pilot test the methodology. Eight male and eight female costumes were spaced throughout each of seven of the traditional historic periods between 1715 and 1914 in France. Political and institutional stability and change do not always coincide. Therefore, for hypothesis testing, the traditional periods were classified as periods of institutional stability or change or political stability or change. Two hypotheses concerning patterns of change in dress fashions, one related to institutional change and one related to political change, were rejected when the composite silhouette data were subjected to maximum likelihood ratio tests with the data pooled by sex and by stability and change periods.
Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Treat Infertility Stress

Abstract Women and men diagnosed with infertility experience a variety of infertility-related stressors, including changes to their family and social networks, strain on their sexual relationship, and difficulties and unexpected challenges in their relationship. Infertility stress is linked with depression and psychological distress, and can lead to premature dropout from medical treatments and unresolved feelings of loss and grief. The current study examined the effectiveness of treating infertility stress using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a promising new behavior therapy that targets experiential avoidance through mindfulness, acceptance strategies, and value-directed action. This single-case study followed a couple experiencing infertility-related stress following a failed in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure. The couple completed 6 self-report measures at 7 time points, including a second failed IVF attempt and a 1-year follow-up. Measures included both distress-focused instruments and therapy process-related questionnaires. The female participant reported higher pretreatment stress and depression scores compared to her partner. She reported significant decreases in global infertility stress, social infertility stress, sexual infertility stress, psychological distress, and depression from pretherapy to 1-year follow-up. She also reported a decrease in infertility stress following her second failed in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempt. The male participant reported significant decreases in sexual infertility stress. The study suggests that acceptance-based therapy shows promise in treating infertility stress in patients experiencing infertility who undergo medical treatments. The data from this preliminary case study also suggest that ACT may be helpful for couples following IVF treatment failure. Treatment gains were maintained 1-year posttherapy, indicating that an ACT approach to treating infertility has the potential to produce lasting change.
Problems in the study of rodent aggression

Laboratory research has produced detailed descriptions of aggression and defense patterns in the rat, mouse, and hamster, showing strong similarities, but also some differences, across these species. Research on target sites for attack, in conjunction with analyses of the situational antecedents of attack behaviors and of responsivity of these to conditions that elicit fear, has also provided a strong basis for analysis of offensive and defensive aggression strategies and for identification of combinations of these modalities such as may occur in maternal aggression. These patterns have been empirically differentiated from phenomena such as play fighting or predation and compared for laboratory rodents and their wild ancestors. An array of tasks, suitable for use with pharmacological and experimental manipulations, is available for analysis of both aggression and defense. These developments should produce a firm basis for research using animal models to analyze a broad array of aggression-related phenomena, including systematic approaches to understanding the normal antecedents and consequences of each of several differentiable types of aggressive behavior. Despite this strong empirical and analytic background, laboratory animal aggression research has been in a period of decline, spanning several decades, relative to comparable research focusing on areas such as sexual behavior or stress. Problems that may have contributed to the relative neglect of aggression research include confusion about the interpretation of different tasks for eliciting aggression; difficulties and labor intensiveness of observational measures needed for an adequate differentiation of offensive and defensive behaviors; analytic difficulties stemming from the sensitivity of offensive aggression to the inhibitory effects of fear or defensiveness; lack of a clear relationship between categories of aggressive behavior as defined in animal studies and those used in human aggression research; and the social and political difficulties undermining support for research on a topic that, when applied to humans, provides a stigmatizing label. While all of these provide some rationale for eschewing aggression research, aggression remains a serious social, economic, health, and political problem. The neglect of research in this area contributes to an ongoing failure to understand the degree of similarity across mammalian species in the antecedents, neural systems, behavioral expression, and outcomes of aggression. This failure, in turn, hinders analyses of normal and abnormal forms of aggression and of the appropriate roles of the former in society, reducing the possibility of sensitive and effective approaches to control inappropriate human aggressive behaviors.
Sorting Out the FACS: A Devil in the Details

Document S1. Supplemental Experimental Procedures and Figure S1xDownload (.54 MB ) Document S1. Supplemental Experimental Procedures and Figure S1Document S2. Article plus Supplemental InformationxDownload (.7 MB ) Document S2. Article plus Supplemental Information
Human immunodeficiency virus encephalitis is the pathological correlate of dementia in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

While dementia has been observed in approximately one-fourth of terminally ill patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, it has been difficult to attribute this clinical disorder to a single neuropathological substrate. We used a simple and readily reproducible scale for estimating the burden of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the central nervous system (i.e., severity of HIV encephalitis) and compared this to autopsy neurological summaries of dementia. Like others, we found that multinucleated giant cells were present in only half of the dementia patients. However, all of the dementia patients had severe HIV encephalitis as assessed by measurements of intra-central nervous system viral burden. Additional patients had severe HIV encephalitis without clinical histories of dementia. We interpret these latter findings as evidence that HIV encephalitis exists for a period of time before the clinical symptomatology develops. Comparison of presence or absence of concurrent cytomegalovirus encephalitis showed no association with dementia.
Global dimension of rings of functions

This article deals with the global dimension of rings of functions. An improved lower bound for global dimension is proved for von Neumann regular rings. If Xis a compact, Hausdorff and zero-dimensional space, and its weight and independence character coincide, then the global dimension of (X), its Stone dual, can be calculated. The spaces for which these invariants agree are studied. Finally, it is shown that, except for P-spaces, the global dimension of C(X) is at least 3.
Facilitation of Hippocampal Potentials by Suramin

: The influence of suramin, a suggested purino-receptor antagonist, on the evoked synaptic potentials recorded from hippocampal slices was evaluated. The suramin induced a nondecremental, concentration-dependent amplification of the slope of excitatory postsynaptic potential and magnitude of the population spike (long-term potentiation, LTP). The effect of suramin was completely abolished by adenylimidodiphosphate, a nonhydrolyzable analogue of ATP, and markedly reduced by NMDA-receptor antagonists dl-2-amino-5-phosphonovaleric acid and MK-801. These results indicate that, in addition to acting as an antagonist of P2 receptors, suramin is also able to facilitate hippocampal potentials in a way that involves mechanisms participating in induction of LTP.
Modeling the decoherence of spacetime

The question of whether unobserved short-wavelength modes of the gravitational field can induce decoherence in the long-wavelength modes (``the decoherence of spacetime'') is addressed using a simplified model of perturbative general relativity, related to the Nordstr\"om-Einstein-Fokker theory, where the metric is assumed to be conformally flat. For some long-wavelength coarse grainings, the Feynman-Vernon influence phase is found to be effective at suppressing the off-diagonal elements of the decoherence functional. The requirement that the short-wavelength modes be in a sufficiently high-temperature state places limits on the applicability of this perturbative approach.
Aspects of Shear Layer Unsteadiness in a Three-Dimensional Supersonic Wake

The near wake of a blunt-base cylinder at 10° angle-of-attack to a Mach 2.46 free-stream flow is visualized at several locations to study unsteady aspects of its structure. In both side-view and end-view images, the shear layer flapping grows monotonically as the shear layer develops, similar to the trends seen in a corresponding axisymmetric supersonic base flow. The interface convolution, a measure of the tortuousness of the shear layer, peaks for side-view and end-view images during recompression. The high convolution for a septum of fluid seen in the middle of the wake indicates that the septum actively entrains fluid from the recirculation region, which helps to explain the low base pressure for this wake compared to that for a corresponding axisymmetric wake.
Sequential Analyses of Daily Symptoms in Women with Fibromyalgia Syndrome

Abstract Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is a chronic musculoskeletal pain disorder characterized by generalized pain, chronic fatigue, sleep disturbance, and a range of other symptoms having no definitive pathology. Consequently, patient evaluations rely on self-report. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) allows frequent real-time collection of self-report measures, removing recall bias and increasing external validity. We studied 81 females with FMS aged 18 to 42 years. Participants carried EMA devices (Palm Pilot M100) programmed to request ratings to 8 FMS symptoms/conditions 3 times daily for 30 days. Completeness of response rates varied across participants and over time. Controlling for immediately previous fatigue (ie, fatigue rating from the immediately preceding rating), unit increases in immediately previous pain and immediately previous emotional distress predicted 9 and 7% increases, respectively, in current fatigue. Controlling for immediately previous emotional distress, a unit increase in immediately previous pain predicted 7% increase in current emotional distress. Controlled for immediately previous pain, a unit increase in immediately previous fatigue predicted a 7% increase in current pain, enhanced by prior diurnal effects; immediately previous emotional distress was not significant. Collectively these results suggest an asymmetry in which emotional stress and pain may increase fatigue, fatigue but not emotional distress may increase pain, and pain but not fatigue may increase emotional distress. Despite small effects and person-to-person variability, these findings suggest that longitudinal data collection by EMA may reveal sequential or causal explanatory patterns with important clinical implications. Perspective Understanding how multiple symptoms covary in FMS is essential for optimal treatment planning. Our results show that small but significant temporal relations among pain, fatigue, and emotional distress. Our results also provide support for the use of EMA as a viable data collection method that allows longitudinal, real-time assessment of multiple FMS symptoms.
Electron temperatures of a late-phase solar active region from Yohkoh BCS and SXT observations

We deduce electron temperatures in a 2-3 month old active region from 1996 September and October, using soft X- ray Sxv spectra from the Bragg Crystal Spectrometer (BCS) and images from the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT), both on board the Yohkoh satellite. Our observations cover a full transit of the region, from before its appearance around the east limb until after it disappeared around the west limb. Over most of this transit the region is diffuse and extremely quiescent, with few strong X-ray intensity enhancements (microflares) seen in plots of the GOES flux. During the passage the region's temperature is roughly constant at 2:50:2 MK in Sxv and at1:90:1 MK from SXT, with emission measures of about10 48 cm 3 for both instruments. Temperatures obtained from SXT are consistently lower then the Sxv values, indicating a multithermal plasma. A high-temperature (> 5 MK) component, seen in younger ac- tive regions, is virtually absent in this mature active region. Our findings, combined with earlier work, provide a method for esti- mating Sxv temperatures of structures based on their intensity in SXT, even when these structures are not isolated on the Sun and hence not directly resolvable with the full-Sun BCS instru- ment. Our work also suggests that old active regions form a fundamental component of the quiet-Sun corona during periods of high solar activity.
Prevention of transmission of multidrug-resistant organisms during catheter exchange using antimicrobial catheters

Exchanging a central venous catheter (CVC) over a guide wire for a fresh uncoated CVC in the presence of bacteremia can result in cross-infection of the newly exchanged CVC. A recent retrospective clinical study showed that exchanging a catheter over a guide wire in the presence of bacteremia using an antimicrobial minocycline-rifampin (M/R) catheter may improve outcomes. To expand on this, we developed an in vitro cross-contamination model of exchange to evaluate the efficacy of different antimicrobial CVCs in preventing cross-contamination of multidrug-resistant organisms during exchange. Uncoated CVCs were allowed to form biofilm by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Candida albicans. After 24 h, the biofilm-colonized CVCs were placed in a glass tube containing bovine calf serum plus Mueller-Hinton broth, and each catheter was exchanged over a guide wire for a fresh uncoated or an M/R-, chlorhexidine-silver sulfadiazine (CHX/SS)-, or chlorhexidine-M/R (CHX-M/R)-coated CVC. Cross-contamination of exchanged catheters was enumerated by sonication and quantitative plating methods. The exchange of M/R CVCs completely prevented cross-contamination by MRSA biofilms compared to control exchanged CVCs (P < 0.0001). Exchange with CHX/SS CVCs reduced but did not completely prevent cross-contamination by MRSA (P = 0.005). Exchange with CHX-M/R CVCs completely prevented cross-contamination by MRSA, P. aeruginosa, and C. albicans biofilms (P < 0.0001). Furthermore, CHX-M/R CVCs were superior to M/R CVCs against P. aeruginosa and C. albicans (P = 0.003) and were superior to CHX/SS CVCs against MRSA and P. aeruginosa (P = 0.01). In conclusion, exchange with the novel CHX-M/R CVC was the only exchange effective in completely and concurrently preventing cross-contamination from bacteria and Candida.
Nudging Armed Groups: How Civilians Transmit Norms of Protection

What are the varying roles that norms play to either enable or constrain violence in armed conflict settings? The article examines this question by drawing on experiences from com munities and armed groups in Colombia and Syria. It begins by presenting an explanation of how norms of violence and nonviolence may arise within communities and influence the behavior of civilian residents, reducing the chances of them becoming involved with armed groups. It then considers how civilian communities can transmit those same norms, shared understandings, and patterns of interaction to the ranks of illegal armed groups and subsequently shape their decisions about the use of violence against civilians. The author argues that civilians may be better positioned to promote the principles codified in International Humanitarian Law than international humanitarian organizations because they have closer contact with irregular armed actors and are viewed with greater legitimacy. The analysis illustrates that to better understand civilian protection mechanisms it is essential to study the interactions between communities and armed actors.
Investigation of Two-Phase Transport Phenomena in Microchannels using a Microfabricated Experimental Structure

Abstract Microchannels (0.05–1 mm) improve gas routing in proton exchange membrane fuel cells, but add to the complexities of water management. This work microfabricates experimental structures with distributed water injection as well as with heating and temperature sensing capabilities to study water formation and transport. The samples feature optical access to allow visualization and distributed thermometry for investigation of two-phase flow transport phenomena in the microchannels. The temperature evolution along the channel is observed that the temperature downstream of the distributed water injection decreases as the pressure drop increases. As the water injection rate is lower than 200 μl/min, there exists a turning point where temperature increases as the pressure drop increases further. These micromachined structures with integrated temperature sensors and heaters are key to the experimental investigation as well as visualization of two-phase flow and water transport phenomena in microchannels for fuel cell applications.
Integrating Sustainability Into Capital Markets: Bloomberg LP And ESG's Quantitative Legitimacy

The rise in prominence of environmental, social, and governance data has been driven in large part by a growing interest among investors who seek to gain an edge through the incorporation of such data in their investment decision-making. There are, however, several significant obstacles to the integration of ESG data into mainstream investing analysis. Perhaps most important, while finance today is a fundamentally quantitative discipline, ESG is often qualitative. Moreover, the ESG data that is available is incomplete and inconsistent, due largely to a reliance on voluntary reporting by individual companies. In short, ESG has not yet earned its quantitative legitimacy in the eyes of the investor community. Nevertheless, recent work in the area of stranded asset values has provided Bloomberg LP, a leading provider of financial data and analytics, an opportunity to 'bridge theory and practice' by translating the stranded assets framework into a first-cut valuation tool designed for mainstream financial analysts. The tool offers a quantitative introduction to an ESG issue that the authors believe will eventually become an important focus of many investment decision-makers' analysis. While the tool continues to evolve in analytical sophistication, the authors 'preview' it here in its early form as one step towards Bloomberg's broader vision of 'sustainable finance,' and the company's role in supporting the quantitative maturation of ESG through the twin engines of standardization and disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Epistemic Agency and the Intellectual Virtues

Dans le cadre d'une epistemologie fondee sur l'existence de vertus intellectuelles, l'A. interroge la possibilite d'une explication de l'action epistemique en termes de vertus. Definissant un principe schematique comme critere ou analyse de la connaissance, l'A. ouvre la voie a une theorie accomplie de l'action epistemique fondee sur la responsabilite du chercheur.
In Situ Alignment Calibration of Attitude and Doppler Sensors for Precision Underwater Vehicle Navigation: Theory and Experiment

This paper reports the development and experimental evaluation of two in situ least squares techniques for estimating the alignment matrix of Doppler sonars commonly used for precision navigation of oceanographic submersibles. Most previously reported methods addressed the problem of single degree-of-freedom heading alignment using bottom-lock Doppler sonar data and global positioning system (GPS) navigation data. This paper reports and evaluates two techniques for three degree-of-freedom calibration of attitude and Doppler sonar sensors using sensor data available to vehicles at full ocean depth. The first technique provides a general linear least squares estimate of the alignment matrix. The second technique results in a least squares alignment matrix estimate constrained to the group of rotation matrices. The performance of these estimates is evaluated with a laboratory remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and a field-deployed autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Experimental results are reported which demonstrate that Doppler navigation employing the reported alignment calibration techniques significantly improves navigation precision. The experiments show that the latter technique provides calibration estimates that improve Doppler navigation precision not only on the calibration data set itself, but also provide improved precision over a wide variety of vehicle trajectories other than the calibration data set.
Copper(I)‐Catalyzed Photocycloaddition: 3,3‐Dimethyl‐cis‐bicyclo[3.2.0]heptan‐2‐one

Copper(I)-catalyzed photocycloaddition: 3,3-Dimethyl-cis-bicyclo[3.2.0]heptan-2-one intermediate: 2,2-dimethyl-4-pentenal intermediate: 4,4-dimethyl-1,6-heptadien-3-ol intermediate: 3,3-dimethyl-cis-bicyclo[3.2.0]heptan-2-ol product: 3,3-dimethyl-cis-bicyclo[3.2.0]heptan-2-one intermediate: 3,3-dimethyl-endo-cis-bicyclo[3.2.0]heptan-2-ol intermediate: 3,3-dimethyl-exo-cis-bicyclo[3.2.0]heptan-2-ol Keywords: addition, to CO; alkylation, C-alkylation; annulation, carbocyclic-[M,N]; cyclization, cycloaddition; Grignard and related reactions; oxidation, CHOH CO; photochemical reactions; rearrangements; circulating bath, refrigerated; photochemical apparatus
Sports Commentators and Late Monopoly Capitalist Indoctrination in the United States

This Marxist-oriented ideological study describes how sports commentary ‘layered’ on top of team sporting events serves as a capitalist mass indoctrination method in the United States of America. Despite a general mass consensus to the contrary, popular team sporting events which employ sports commentators are not politically neutral events. The mass media and corporations use sports commentators to politically charge sporting events in order to subtly program the viewing population into accepting capitalist ideological tenets and norms. Capitalist indoctrination embedded within modern sports commentary is particularly effective because of its subtle nature. Capitalist norms are taught within the context and framework of particular sporting events and superimposed over events occurring on the field of play. The majority of the conservative ideology embedded within sports commentary is related to the glorification and maintenance of extreme social stratification based on held or achieved power.
Bacterial endotoxin lipopolysaccharide modulates synthesis of the 70 kDa heat stress protein family.

Murine bacillus Calmette-Guerin activated macrophages release several monokines when triggered by the bacterial endotoxin lipopolysaccharide (LPS); this has recently been reported to be strongly influenced by the sequence of hyperthermic and LPS treatments. In the work reported here, it was found that LPS treatment markedly modulated the rate of synthesis of proteins in the heat stress protein (HSP) 70 family in these macrophages. The rate of synthesis of the HSP 70 family was slightly reduced if the cells were incubated with LPS 4 h prior to heating at 43 C for 1 h, but was greatly reduced as the triggering time approached the initiation of heating and was nearly completely abrogated if the LPS triggering immediately preceded or followed heating. Near-normal rates of HSP 70 synthesis occurred if the triggering was delayed until 1–2 h after the heating ended. The LPS-triggered release of tumour necrosis factor (TNF) was also reduced as the time of LPS addition approached the heating time, but this depress...
Atwater and USDA nutrition research and service: a prologue of the past century.

A century of scientific investigations into the ways that air reacts with carbon, led to the discov ery of the conservation of mass and the energy equiv alence of foods. Atwater synthesized existing knowl edge, most of it based on his own investigations, to define the caloric equivalence of protein, fat, and car bohydrates; 4, 8.9, 4 per gram. His work was a contin uation of a series of government research investments. This year we recognize the Centennial of the first such investment by the United States. The AœSDA supported research which resulted in Atwater's discovery of en ergy equivalence continues to guide today's applied able; and fire was sharp, weak, and movable (Singer 1941). The concept of the four elements derived by Peripatetic reasoning lasted 2,000 years. It was ac cepted by medieval alchemists who attempted to link chemistry with metaphysics during their efforts to turn lead into gold, dissolve all matter, and discover the elixir of life. During the late Renaissance, Paracelsus (1493- 1541), a physician, studied a new field of chemistry associated with the assay of metals present in mineral ores. Paracelsus combined his new knowledge of chemistry in medical therapy; influenced by metallur gical chemists, he identified and named three elemen tal principles: combustible (sulfur), volatile (mercury), and incombustible (ash). Paracelsus maintained a metaphysical belief in an essence of life, "archaeus,"
Circuit dynamics of adaptive and maladaptive behaviour

The recent development of technologies for investigating specific components of intact biological systems has allowed elucidation of the neural circuitry underlying adaptive and maladaptive behaviours. Investigators are now able to observe and control, with high spatio-temporal resolution, structurally defined intact pathways along which electrical activity flows during and after the performance of complex behaviours. These investigations have revealed that control of projection-specific dynamics is well suited to modulating behavioural patterns that are relevant to a broad range of psychiatric diseases. Structural dynamics principles have emerged to provide diverse, unexpected and causal insights into the operation of intact and diseased nervous systems, linking form and function in the brain.
Power scaling by removal of negative differential conversion efficiencies for THz generation in InP

By removing negative differential conversion efficiencies for THz generation, observed on InP, we have increased the THz output power by one order of magnitude, making InP comparable to ZnTe and InAs as highly efficient emitter.
Bit Stuff Encoding for (0, G/I) Constraints

(0,G/I) constraints arise in magnetic recording systems that use partial-response equalization with maximum-likelihood sequence detection (PRML). In this paper, we present simple variable-rate and fixed-rate encoding algorithms for (0,G/I) constraints that come quite close to the constraint capacity. Both algorithms are based on the concept of bit stuffing. We first describe the variable-rate encoding algorithm, and discuss rate computations based on a Markov chain model. The average encoding rates for 1 les G les 15 and 14 les I les 10 are tabulated. It is seen that the variable-rate bit stuff algorithm generates greater than 99% efficiency (0,G/I) codes for a wide range of the values of G and I. Then we present a fixed-rate version of the variable-rate stuff algorithm, and tabulate required parameters for the design of fixed-rate (0,G/I) codes with rate close to 100/101 and 200/201
The Use of the Polymerase Chain Reaction to Predict for Subsequent Relapse in Unrelated Marrow Transplantation for Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia

Disease relapse is one of the causes of treatment failure in patients who undergo allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Emerging data suggest that accepted therapies for patients who relapse such as interferon and donor lymphocyte infusions may be more efficacious and potentially less toxic if given to patients with minimal disease burdens. The effective application of this strategy may therefore be dependent on the early detection of relapse posttransplant using sensitive assays such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the presence of the bcr/abl transcript. To that end, we have been interested in determining the predictive value of PCR for subsequent relapse in unrelated marrow transplants for CML. In this review, we update our experience in a cohort of 57 patients transplanted with T cell depleted unrelated marrow grafts who were subsequently followed for relapse by PCR.
Measurement of Oxidation‐Related Changes in Proteins of Freeze‐Dried Meats

A new methodology for detection of lipid oxidation in freeze-dried meats, using myoglobin, has been developed. Fresh, cold beef was ground, freeze-dried and stored aerobically at 37°C. Samples, taken at different time intervals, were reconstituted and “meat extract” obtained. Extent of myoglobin insolubilization was determined by absorbance intensity at isobestic point (525 nm). Oxidation of oxymyoglobin to metmyoglobin in meat extract was quantified by measuring α peak intensity of metmyoglobin at 630 nm. Myoglobin polymerization was determined by isolation of myoglobin dimers and monomers from meat extract using gel filtration chromatography. Dimer/monomer ratio was calculated from Soret band absorption intensity at 409 – 415 nm. The three myoglobin-based oxidative indicators correlate well with each other and can be used to detect extent of lipid oxidation in freeze-dried meat products.
Molecular Analysis of Sorghum Resistance to the Greenbug (Homoptera: Aphididae)

Chromosomal regions of sorghum, Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench, conferring resistance to greenbug, Schizaphis graminum (Rondani), biotypes C, E, I, and K from four resistance sources were evaluated by restriction fragment-length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis. At least nine loci, dispersed on eight linkage groups, were implicated in affecting sorghum resistance to greenbug. The nine loci were named according to the genus of the host plant (Sorghum) and greenbug (Schizaphis graminum). Most resistance loci were additive or incompletely dominant. Several digenic interactions were identified, and in each case, these nonadditive interactions accounted for a greater portion of the resistance phenotype than did independently acting loci. One locus in three of the four sorghum crosses appeared responsible for a large portion of resistance to greenbug biotypes C and E. None of the loci identified were effective against all biotypes studied. Correspondingly, the RFLP results indicated resistance from disparate sorghums may be a consequence of allelic variation at particular loci. To prove this, it will be necessary to fine map and clone genes for resistance to greenbug from various sorghum sources.