cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
"Game Over" for the Climate: The Keystone XL Pipeline on TV News

The overwhelming consensus of the world's climate scientists is that we must rapidly reduce our greenhouse emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic and irreversible climate change. Yet the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil that emits three to four times the carbon emissions of conventional gasoline across the U.S., is supported by a solid majority of Americans. This level of support for a project a proposal that would dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions, pollute sensitive lands and water sources, and threaten the health and safety of communities along the way begs the question: what kind of information have Americans received about the pipeline? Relying on theoretical perspectives developed by scholars who examine power structures, ideology, and the political economy of the mass media, I analyze 177 national network and cable news broadcasts in order to determine what kind of information leading media sources provide to the public about the Keystone XL pipeline proposal and the context in which this information is presented. Content analysis of broadcast transcripts reveals that television news stations exhibit biased coverage that encourages viewers to support pipeline construction. Furthermore, television news stations marginalize environmental and social concerns and disproportionately rely on business and government sources for information. Finally, the dominant frame employed by the news media is informed by neoliberal ideology and offers no challenge to the preferences of corporate and government elites – including the continued dominance of the fossil fuel industry. This type of coverage affords viewers a very limited basis for understanding the environmental and ultimately social threats posed by Keystone XL.
Utilizing Ensemble, Data Sampling and Feature Selection Techniques for Improving Classification Performance on Tweet Sentiment Data

Sentiment analysis of tweets is a popular method of opinion mining social media. Many machine learning techniques exist that can improve the performance of classifiers trained to determine the sentiment or emotional polarity of a tweet, however, they are designed with different objectives and it is unclear which techniques are most beneficial. Additionally, these techniques may behave differently depending on quality of data issues, such as class imbalance, a common problem when using real world data. In an effort to determine which techniques are more important, we tested 12 techniques consisting of: eight feature selection techniques, bagging, boosting and data sampling with two post sampling class ratios. Using five base learners, we compare these techniques against each other and each base learners with no additional technique. We train and test each classifier on a balanced dataset and two imbalanced datasets with different class ratios. Additionally, we conduct statistical tests to determine if the differences observed between techniques are significant. Our results show that bagging and seven of the eight feature selection techniques significantly improve performance (compared to using no technique) on all three datasets, while boosting and data sampling are less beneficial for imbalanced tweet sentiment data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study comparing these three types of techniques on tweet sentiment data and the first to show that feature selection and ensemble techniques perform better than data sampling on tweet sentiment data.
Experimental Studies with a Solar Open-Cycle Liquid Desiccant Cooling System

ABSTRACT A nominal 3 ton (10.5 kW) open-cycle liquid desiccant cooling system has been designed, installed and operated at the Solar Energy Applications Laboratory, Colorado State University. Performance data for the regenerator, operated in a decoupled mode, were obtained for a variety of inlet conditions. Depending on the operating conditions, capacities of 1.4 – 3.0 refrigeration tons (4.9 –10.3 kW) were obtained in the regenerator. Liquid distribution in the regenerator was studied for two systems: a gravity tray liquid distributor and a spray nozzle manifold. Higher capacities (40–50% increase) in the regenerator were obtained with the spray nozzle system. Another advantage of the spray nozzle arrangement, as compared to the tray liquid distributor, was a reduction in pressure drop (by 30–40%) for the air flow across the regenerator. The independent variables affecting the capacity were correlated by statistical analysis of the data.
Parents' childhood socioeconomic circumstances are associated with their children's asthma outcomes.

Background Previous literature documents associations between low socioeconomic status (SES) and poor health outcomes, including asthma. However, this literature has largely focused on the effects of current family circumstances. Objective We sought to test an intergenerational hypothesis, that the childhood SES that parents experience will be associated with asthma outcomes in their children, independent of effects of current family SES. Second, we aimed to test whether this association is in part due to difficulties in current parent-child relationships. Methods This was an observational study, whereby 150 parents were interviewed about their childhood SES and their children (physician-diagnosed asthma, ages 9-17 years) were interviewed about current family stress. Asthma control was assessed by parent report and child report (primary outcome), and blood was collected from children to measure cytokine production relevant to asthma (secondary outcomes). Results To the degree that parents had lower childhood SES, their offspring showed worse asthma outcomes across multiple indicators. This included lower asthma control scores (parent and child report, P s H 2 and T H 1 cytokines by PBMCs ( P s Conclusions These results suggest the potential "long reach" of low SES across generations, and the importance of expanding theories of how the social environment can affect childhood asthma to include characteristics of earlier generations.
Complementary roles of interventional radiology and therapeutic endoscopy in gastroenterology.

Complementary roles of interventional radiology and therapeutic endoscopy in gastroenterology
Influence of catastrophizing on pain intensity, disability, side effects, and opioid misuse among pain patients in primary care

There is increasing concern among primary care practitioners (PCPs) regarding medication misuse and noncompliance while attempting to effectively manage chronic pain patients prescribed opioids for pain. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect pain catastrophizing has on self-reported pain intensity, disability, side effects, and opioid misuse in chronic pain patients prescribed opioids within primary care. Fifty-six PCPs and 253 chronic pain patients prescribed opioids or considered for opioid therapy were recruited into the study. All patients completed baseline measures, including the Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS) and were followed for 6 months to monitor pain and opioid compliance. Patients were divided evenly based on median-split scores on the PCS and participated in phone interviews at 1 and 6 months. The subjects repeated the baseline measures and completed measures of opioid compliance at the end of the study period. Patients who scored high on catastrophizing reported significantly greater pain intensity, activity interference, negative affect, and a higher percentage of medication-related adverse effects compared with those lower on the Pain Catastrophizing Scale at the start of the study and over a 6-month period (p < .01). In addition, those chronic pain patients classified as high pain catastrophizers reported significantly higher opioid misuse (p < .01). This study demonstrates the important role of pain catastrophizing among chronic pain patients who are prescribed opioid medication for pain within primary care. These findings support the benefits of carefully monitoring patients who are prescribed opioids in primary care and possible benefits of offering interventions to reduce pain catastrophizing.
Minimal residual disease (MRD) status pre- and post- high-dose therapy/autologous stem (HDC/ASCT) cell transplantation for multiple myeloma (MM) in the era of novel agents.

8605 Background: MRD assayed by multi-parameter flow cytometer (MFC), has prognostic significance after HDT/ASCT for MM (Paiva et. al. 2008). The frequency of MRD negativity (-) after induction the...
Information-theoretic dataset selection for fast kernel learning

Kernel methods have been used to effectively tackle nonlinear or nonparametric machine learning problems. However, their computational and memory complexity grows at least quadratically with the number of training samples. This issue has made these methods difficult to use for medium to large-sized datasets and hindered practical applications. A common approach involves the use of only a selected subset of training data. This paper proposes an information-theoretic strategy for selecting a subset of the training samples that is most representative of the data structure. Using an information-theoretic measure to quantity the difference in the density estimated from the subset selected and the complete training set, the problem can be formulated in an error minimization sense and efficiently solved via the proposed algorithm. A major advantage of this approach is that the selected points automatically tradeoff accuracy with regard to the original data and diversity in the selected subset. Another major advantage is that, in contrast to previously proposed methods, our approach naturally suggests a stopping criterion that can be intuitively interpreted in terms of information lost in the approximation of the distribution. Using this stopping criterion, the number of points to select is automatically determined in a data dependent manner.
Calorie Restriction in Humans: Impact on Human Health

Abstract Calorie restriction, without malnutrition, has been shown to increase longevity and delay the onset of chronic disease in various species. In this chapter, we review the different modalities which scientists and individuals have followed to achieve a sustained caloric deficit. These include traditional dietary restriction regimens of varying degrees, physical activity, alternate day fasting, and alternate day modified fasting. To evaluate the impact of these interventions on chronic disease risk and longevity, we critically evaluate the existing evidence concerning the physiological as well as the behavioral alterations induced by these interventions.
Evidence-based risk assessment and recommendations for physical activity clearance: diabetes mellitus and related comorbidities11This paper is one of a selection of papers published in this Special Issue, entitled Evidence-based risk assessment and recommendations for physical activity clearance, and has undergone the Journal’s usual peer review process.

Physical activity (PA) is one of the most powerful treatment options for persons with prediabetes or diabetes. However, some elevation in risk occurs with increased PA, at least initially, and certain precautions need to be made to lower these risks, particularly if these persons are unaccustomed to exercise. We conducted a standardized search of all ad- verse events associated with increased PA in persons with prediabetes or diabetes (type 1 or type 2) and provided evidence- based guidelines on PA screening in these apparently high-risk individuals. A systematic literature review was performed of all studies reporting on adverse events in persons with prediabetes or diabetes. Studies included were from all designs (retro- spective and prospective including randomized controlled trials) and were assessed according to evaluation criteria adapted by a consensus panel. A total of 47 studies, involving >8000 individuals, were deemed eligible. A number of these studies identified a range of mild to severe acute risks with exercise (musculoskeletal injury, hypoglycemia, foot ulceration, prolifer- ative retinopathy, hypotension, sudden death) but the overall prevalence was low. Based on several randomized controlled trials and prospective studies in which prescribed exercise was performed at a wide range of intensities, it appears that in- creased PA is a relatively safe procedure with no evidence of a loss of life. Based on our assessment of the available litera- ture, we provide a new PA risk algorithm for persons with prediabetes and diabetes and comment on the role of the patient, the qualified exercise professional, and the patient's physician in the risk screening process.
Compaction and sedimentary basin analysis on Mars

Abstract Many of the sedimentary basins of Mars show patterns of faults and off-horizontal layers that, if correctly understood, could serve as a key to basin history. Sediment compaction is a possible cause of these patterns. We quantified the possible role of differential sediment compaction for two Martian sedimentary basins: the sediment fill of Gunjur crater (which shows concentric graben), and the sediment fill of Gale crater (which shows outward-dipping layers). We assume that basement topography for these craters is similar to the present-day topography of complex craters that lack sediment infill. For Gunjur, we find that differential compaction produces maximum strains consistent with the locations of observed graben. For Gale, we were able to approximately reproduce the observed layer orientations measured from orbiter image-based digital terrain models, but only with a >3 km-thick donut-shaped past overburden. It is not immediately obvious what geologic processes could produce this shape.
New and Noteworthy: You Too, Can Prevent Librarian Burnout

Contrary to popular opinion, libraries present numerous challenges and stressors to their employees that can contribute to occupational burnout. This New and Noteworthy column presents recent resources including books, journal articles, and online resources discussing the unique issues of librarian burnout.
Theory of New Transients and Optical Phenomena in Spatially Dispersive Media

An integral representation for the linear transients of coupled propagating modes in a spatially dispersive medium is investigated. New “exciton precursors” are predicted as well as altered signal velocities. Numerical estimates are made for CdS and ZnSe.
The Affect of Social Networking Technology on Firm Opportunity Recognition

When do opportunities emerge? How do firms exploit opportunities? These questions remain foundational to strategy research. The existing debate centers on why opportunities evolve – through price discrepancies within a market, due to shocks in existing industries, or even through the creativity, hard work, or plain common luck of entrepreneurs themselves. Specifically, we want to understand how information and communication technology (e.g. social network technology) influences a new venture’s ability to recognize and exploit opportunities and at what point do the technology investments become a competitive advantage for new ventures.
Dissolution kinetics with feedback

Consider a solid particle composed of chemical A. the particle is in a solution of chemical B. As the particle dissolves, the A that enters the solution reacts with B to form chemical C. Then C diffuses back to the particle and adsorbs to the particle’s surface. The presence of C on the particle’s surface inhibits the dissolution, and ultimately shuts it down entirely. This process was recently modeled by Kam-Chuen Ng and David S. Ross from Eastman Kodak. The mathematical model is expressed as a Stefan problem for reaction-diffusion system. On May 7, 1993 David Ross presented the model, described some asymptotic analysis, both for large reaction rates and for small time. He concluded with several open problems regarding this system.
Predictors of enrollment in a smoking cessation clinical trial after eligibility screening.

Purpose A fraction of smokers considered eligible for pharmacotherapy treatment trials for nicotine dependence enrolled. Little is known about smokers not enrolling in a treatment trial or how these smokers differ from those who have enrolled. Procedures We screened 2257 individuals for a smoking cessation trial involving behavioral counseling and a novel medication. Findings Of those screened, 33% of callers were eligible for enrollment (N = 753). Of those eligible for the trial, 37% attended the subsequent enrollment session (N = 282). We compared the 282 attendees to the 471 smokers who were eligible for the trial but did not attend. Logistic regression indicated that African American smokers were about half as likely to enroll in the trial (odds ratio [OR], 0.55; 95% CI, 0.36-0.84); for every year increase in age, participants were 4% more likely to enroll (OR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02-1.06); and participants who were motivated to enroll in the trial for financial incentives were 42% less likely to enroll in the trial (OR, 0.58; 95% CI, 0.45-0.76). Conclusions These findings suggest the need to devise and test recruitment strategies directed toward African Americans and younger smokers to increase enrollment among eligible smokers to smoking cessation treatment trials.
Endothelin Signaling in the Cardiomyocyte

Ventricular and atrial cardiomyocytes are the cells responsible for the contractile activity of the heart. This chapter will relate mainly to the ventricular cardiomyocyte. When we discuss the atrial cardiomyocyte, this will be clearly indicated. The majority view is that postnatal mammalian ventricular cardiomyocytes, which constitute the bulk of the cardiac cell mass, are terminally differentiated cells incapable of undergoing complete cycles of cell division (i.e., both karyokinesis and cytokinesis). This has important consequences. Thus, cardiomyocytes respond to a requirement for increased power (such as when the hemodynamic load on the heart is increased) by enlarging and increasing their myofibrillar content in the absence of cytokinesis, a process known as hypertrophy. This response represents growth that is superimposed on normal cardiac growth in developing animals or on the steady-state heart in nongrowing animals. Cardiomyocyte hypertrophy contributes to the clinical condition of cardiac hypertrophy seen in vivo. Equally, the terminally differentiated nature of the cardiomyocyte renders the heart susceptible to myocyte loss such as may occur after myocardial infarction or in heart failure. In this situation, factors that increase cardiomyocyte survival may be crucial. However, the terminally differentiated nature of the cardiomyocyte means that it is essentially resistant to malignant transformation. Any potentially oncogenic mutation would affect only a single cell and the likelihood of clonal division of transformed cells is minimized.
The Origins and Diaspora of the India Pale Ale

The origins and spread of the India Pale Ale (IPA) has geographic themes of immigration, diffusion, and globalization. Flemish immigration to the Kent region of England during the 1500s shortly led to the cultivation of hops, inevitably changing British beers styles. Pale malts produced with advances in industrialization in the latter 1600s later incorporated high levels of hopping rates producing high gravity pale ales and October ales, the ancestors of the IPA. These bitter beers where preferred in Tropical India by British colonists to the sweet dark ales. Soon they spread throughout the British Empire and were imported into North America as well. IPAs became highly copied by breweries across the globe until the late 1880s. German immigration to the U.S. and the global distribution of lagers greatly reduced the IPA’s prominence as lagers were more preferred in tropical environments. The Temperance movement was an ideological act of globalization that discouraged the drinking of high gravity beers. The IPA declined as temperance and rationing for world wars made the high gravity IPAs less acceptable to drink over that of lagers. Later the U.S. would be the new home of the IPA, influenced by West Coast brewers. Citrusy American hops changed the IPA profile and further experimentation has led to hybrid IPAs that reflect a fusion of varying beer styles.
Status of corporate sustainability: a content analysis of Fortune 500 companies

In order to explore and extend our understanding of corporate sustainability definitions and frameworks, we performed a content analysis of a sample of (2013) Fortune 500 companies' standalone sustainability reports using the content analysis tool, Leximancer (http://leximancer.com). Leximancer is a powerful content analysis tool that performs both conceptual and thematic analysis. In addition, Leximancer displays the results of the analyses visually, thus providing a view of the conceptual and thematic structure of the text, and enabling a researcher to quantify and display the text structure. The results of our analyses demonstrate three common themes (Business, Employees and Energy/Environment) observable across eight of the nine industries in our sample. In addition, we observed significant differences in the relative emphasis for the three common themes across industries. We believe a deeper understanding of the themes that motivate firms' sustainability efforts can enhance future research that explores relationships between organizational sustainability efforts and organizational performance.
On the Generalized Degrees of Freedom of the MIMO Interference Channel With Delayed CSIT

The generalized degrees of freedom (GDoF) of the two-user multiple-input multiple-output interference channel is studied under the assumption of delayed channel state information at the transmitters. In particular, with $M$ antennas at each transmitter and $N$ antennas at each receiver, and in the non-trivial case when $M>N$ (with the case of $M\leq N$ not needing any CSIT), new lower and upper bounds on the symmetric GDoF are obtained that are parameterized by $\alpha $ , which links the interference-to-noise ratio (INR) and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at each receiver via $\mathrm {INR}=\mathrm {SNR}^{{\alpha }}$ . A new upper bound for the symmetric GDoF is obtained by maximizing a bound on the weighted sum rate, which in turn is obtained from a combination of genie-aided side-information and an extremal inequality. The maximum weighted sum rate in the high SNR regime is shown to occur when the transmit covariance matrix at each transmitter is full rank. An achievability scheme is developed that is based on block-Markov encoding and backward decoding, and which incorporates channel statistics through interference quantization and digital multicasting. This symmetric GDoF lower bound is maximized separately for different ranges of ${\alpha }$ , by optimizing the transmit power levels in the achievability scheme separately in the very weak $[0\leq {\alpha }\leq ({1}/{2})]$ , weak $[({1}/{2}) , and strong $({\alpha }>1)$ interference regimes. The lower and upper bounds coincide when ${\alpha }\geq [({{r}+1})/({{r}+2})]$ , where ${r}=\min (2,{M}/{N})$ , thus characterizing the symmetric GDoF completely for strong interference and a range of values of weak interference. It is also shown that treating interference as noise is strictly sub-optimal from a GDoF perspective even when the interference is very weak.
Survey on Designing of Electric Vehicle Instrument Cluster

Conventional vehicles has been responsible for increasing the pollution levels in entire world. Analysis of climate data has shown that formally stable glaciers have begun to melt which causes rise in sea-level and puts cities near coastline to greater risk of flooding. An environment-friendly substitute for gasoline vehicles is electric vehicles which runs through battery. As some of the control units of electric vehicles vary from gasoline vehicles, instrument cluster development for electric vehicle needs different techniques. There are embedded development boards and microcontrollers developed specifically to serve automobile applications. Also there exists software to develop graphical user interface which can run in embedded boards. This survey paper enlists various techniques in terms of hardware and software which can be implemented to design a digital instrument cluster for electric vehicles.
Optimal ETF Portfolios for Different Objectives and Horizons

This study identifies optimal portfolios for investors with different objectives and horizons, usinginvestable exchange-traded funds of major asset classes. The optimal portfolios offer much higher Sharpe ratios than the market portfolio. Only three funds representing corporate bonds, NASDAQ 100 index, and gold contribute to the optimal portfolios. Since short investment horizons are examined, most of the optimal portfolios invest mainly in corporate bonds. However, the optimal portfolios with market volatility invest mostly in the NASDAQ 100 index. As the only asset with normally distributed returns, gold participates in optimal portfolios for investors concerned about negative skewness and excess kurtosis.
Improving Near‐Surface Retrievals of Surface Humidity Over the Global Open Oceans from Passive Microwave Observations

Ocean evaporative fluxes are a critical component of the Earth's energy and water cycle, but their estimation remains uncertain. Near-surface humidity is a required input to bulk flux algorithms that relate mean surface values to the turbulent fluxes. Several satellite-derived turbulent flux products have been developed over the last decade that utilize passive microwave imager observations to estimate the surface humidity. It is known, however, that these estimates tend to diverge from one another and from in situ observations. Analysis of current state-of-the-art satellite estimates provided herein reveals that regional-scale biases in these products remain significant. Investigations reveal a link between the spatial coherency of the observed biases to atmospheric dynamical controls of water vapor vertical stratification, cloud liquid water, and sea surface temperature. This information is used to develop a simple state-dependent bias correction that results in more consistent ocean surface humidity estimates. A principal conclusion is that further improvements to ocean near-surface humidity estimation using microwave radiometers requires incorporation of prior information on water vapor stratification and sea surface temperature.
Risks of Bariatric Surgery Among Patients With End-stage Renal Disease.

This study evaluates the perioperative safety of bariatric surgery in obsese patients with end-stage renal disease.
Doppler's shift on aircraft noise propagation in modern aircraft noise prediction tools

Doppler’s effect is an important factor in the prediction of the noise levels caused by en-route aircrafts. This study is focused on the influence of Doppler’s effect on the propagation of aircraft noise. The received sound pressure can be increased/decreased by Doppler’s effect depending on the relative location of the sound source and receiver. At the same time, the spectral shape of the noise is shifted by this effect which has an impact on the measured A-weighted noise levels. This influence is largely due to the fact that A-weighted correction factors of mid-frequency range are much larger than that those in the low-frequency regime. In this paper, a series of field trial was used to study the propagation effect of noise generated by a propeller-driven aircraft. Aviation Environment Design Tool (AEDT), a widely accepted noise prediction model of aircraft noise, is used to compare with the predictions according to a ray-based numerical model. The inclusion of Doppler’s effect in the noise prediction model has shown to have a better agreement with the field measurement results. The influence of Doppler’s effect on the noise-power-distance (NPD) curves of several different aircrafts is also presented. [Work sponsored by ASCENT, FAA Center of Excellence for Alternative Jet Fuels and Environment.]
Irradiation induces p53 loss of heterozygosity in breast cancer expressing mutant p53

Mutations in one allele of the TP53 gene in cancer early stages are frequently followed by the loss of the remaining wild-type allele (LOH) during tumor progression. However, the clinical impact of TP53 mutations and p53LOH, especially in the context of genotoxic modalities, remains unclear. Using MMTV;ErbB2 model carrying a heterozygous R172H p53 mutation, we report a previously unidentified oncogenic activity of mutant p53 (mutp53): the exacerbation of p53LOH after irradiation. We show that wild-type p53 allele is partially transcriptionally competent and enables the maintenance of the genomic integrity under normal conditions in mutp53 heterozygous cells. In heterozygous cells γ-irradiation promotes mutp53 stabilization, which suppresses DNA repair and the cell cycle checkpoint allowing cell cycle progression in the presence of inefficiently repaired DNA, consequently increases genomic instability leading to p53LOH. Hence, in mutp53 heterozygous cells, irradiation facilitates the selective pressure for p53LOH that enhances cancer cell fitness and provides the genetic plasticity for acquiring metastatic properties. Amr Ghaleb et al. find that, in an ErbB2 mouse model, irradiation of premalignant mammary lesions enhances tumorigenesis in tumours that are heterozygous for p53 containing a p53 R172H mutation. This is associated with loss of the wild-type p53 allele, stabilisation of mutant p53 protein and activation of mTOR signaling.
HIV and Anniversary Journalism: Susceptibility and Severity Messaging in News Coverage of World AIDS Day

The purpose of this study was to analyze the frequency of statements about population susceptibility and threat severity of HIV/AIDS. Using a coding scheme derived from the Extended Parallel Proces...
Atrial Fibrillation Detection During Sepsis: Study on MIMIC III ICU Data

Sepsis is defined by life-threatening organ dysfunction during infection and is one of the leading causes of critical illness. During sepsis, there is high risk that new-onset of atrial fibrillation (AF) can occur, which is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. As a result, computer aided automated and reliable detection of new-onset AF during sepsis is crucial, especially for the critically ill patients in the intensive care unit (ICU). In this paper, a novel automated and robust two-step algorithm to detect AF from ICU patients using electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is presented. First, several statistical parameters including root mean square of successive differences, Shannon entropy, and sample entropy were calculated from the heart rate for the screening of possible AF segments. Next, Poincare plot-based features along with P-wave characteristics were used to reduce false positive detection of AF, caused by the premature atrial and ventricular beats. A subset of the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) III database containing 198 subjects was used in this study. During the training and validation phases, both the simple thresholding as well as machine learning classifiers achieved very high segment-wise AF classification performance. Finally, we tested the performance of our proposed algorithm using two independent test data sets and compared the performance with two state-of-the-art methods. The algorithm achieved an overall 100% sensitivity, 98% specificity, 98.99% accuracy, 98% positive predictive value, and 100% negative predictive value on the subject-wise AF detection, thus showing the efficacy of our proposed algorithm in critically ill sepsis patients. The annotations of the data have been made publicly available for other investigators.
Risk-stratified analysis of pasireotide for patients undergoing pancreatectomy.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Pasireotide was shown in a randomized trial to decrease the rate of postoperative pancreatic fistula (POPF). However, retrospective series from other centers have failed to confirm these results. METHODS Patients who underwent pancreatoduodenectomy or distal pancreatectomy between January 2014 and February 2019 were included. Patients treated after November 2016 routinely received pasireotide and were compared to a retrospective cohort. Multivariate analysis was performed for the outcome of clinically relevant POPF (CR-POPF), with stratification by fistula risk score (FRS). RESULTS Ninety-nine of 300 patients received pasireotide. The distribution of high, intermediate, low, and negligible risk patients by FRS was comparable (P = .487). There were similar rates of CR-POPF (19.2% pasireotide vs 14.9% control, P = .347) and percutaneous drainage (12.1% vs 10.0%, P = .567), with greater median number of drain days in the pasireotide group (6 vs 4 days, P < .001). Multivariate modeling for CR-POPF showed no correlation with operation or pasireotide use. Adjustment with propensity weighted models for high (OR, 1.02, 95% CI, 0.45-2.29) and intermediate (OR, 1.02, CI, 0.57-1.81) risk groups showed no correlation of pasireotide with reduction in CR-POPF. CONCLUSIONS Pasireotide administration after pancreatectomy was not associated with a decrease in CR-POPF, even when patients were stratified by FRS.
Opportunities for Materials Design of the Next Generation Thermal Barrier Coatings

The possibilities of identifying new classes of oxides having lower thermal conductivity at high temperatures is approaching the theoretical minimum value. At the same time, the drive for higher engine efficiency requires higher gas temperatures, increasing the radiative heat flux incident on the turbine blades. The significance of radiative heat transfer in the selection of materials is examined. It is concluded that as well as having the lowest thermal conductivity, future TBC oxide coatings must also be optically opaque to minimize radiative heating through a coating. This can be achieved by a combination of doping and scattering.
Pan-cancer analysis reveals unique molecular patterns associated with age

Abstract Older age is a strong risk factor for several diseases, including cancer. In cancer, older age is also frequently associated with a more aggressive, treatment-refractory tumor phenotype. The etiology and biology of age-associated differences among cancers are poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, we sought to delineate the differences in tumor molecular characteristics between younger and older patients across a variety of tumor types. We found that tumors in younger and older patients exhibit widespread molecular differences. First, we observed that tumors in younger individuals, unlike those in older ones, exhibit an accelerated molecular aging phenotype associated with some hallmarks of premature senescence. Second, we found that tumors from younger individuals are enriched for driver gene mutations resulting in homologous recombination defects. Third, we observed a trend towards a decrease in immune infiltration and function in older patients and found that, immunologically, young tumor tissue resembles aged healthy tissue. Taken together, we find that tumors from young individuals possess unique characteristics compared to tumors in older individuals, which can potentially be leveraged for differential therapeutic strategies.
Estimation of the Time Needed to Deliver the 2020 USPSTF Preventive Care Recommendations in Primary Care.

Objectives. To reexamine the time required to provide the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF)–recommended preventive services to a nationally representative adult patient panel of 2500.Metho...
Single-Cell RNA Sequencing of Ovarian Cancer: Promises and Challenges

Ovarian cancer remains the leading cause of death from gynecologic malignancy in the Western world. Tumors are comprised of heterogeneous populations of various cancer, immune, and stromal cells; it is hypothesized that rare cancer stem cells within these subpopulations lead to disease recurrence and treatment resistance. Technological advances now allow for the analysis of tumor genomes and transcriptomes at the single-cell level, which provides the resolution to potentially identify these rare cancer stem cells within the larger tumor.In this chapter, we review the evolution of next-generation RNA sequencing techniques, the methodology of single-cell isolation and sequencing, sequencing data analysis, and the potential applications in ovarian cancer. We also summarize the current published work using single-cell sequencing in ovarian cancer.By utilizing this novel technique to characterize the gene expression of rare subpopulations, new targets and treatment pathways may be identified in ovarian cancer to change treatment paradigms.
Imaging through a scattering medium: the Fisher information and the generalized Abbe limit.

Enhanced-resolution imaging in complex scattering media is revisited from a parameter estimation perspective. A suitably defined Fisher information is shown to offer useful insights into the limiting precision of parameter estimation in a scattering environment and, hence, into the limiting spatial resolution that can be achieved in imaging-through-scattering settings. The Fisher information that defines this resolution limit via the Cramer–Rao lower bound is shown to scale with the number of adaptively controlled space–time modes of the probe field, suggesting a physically intuitive generalization of the Abbe limit to the spatial resolution attainable for complex scattering systems. In a conventional, direct-imaging microscopy setting, this bound is shown to converge to the canonical Abbe limit.
Underwater image segmentation in the wild using deep learning

Image segmentation is an important step in many computer vision and image processing algorithms. It is often adopted in tasks such as object detection, classification, and tracking. The segmentation of underwater images is a challenging problem as the water and particles present in the water scatter and absorb the light rays. These effects make the application of traditional segmentation methods cumbersome. Besides that, to use the state-of-the-art segmentation methods to face this problem, which are based on deep learning, an underwater image segmentation dataset must be proposed. So, in this paper, we develop a dataset of real underwater images, and some other combinations using simulated data, to allow the training of two of the best deep learning segmentation architectures, aiming to deal with segmentation of underwater images in the wild. In addition to models trained in these datasets, fine-tuning and image restoration strategies are explored too. To do a more meaningful evaluation, all the models are compared in the testing set of real underwater images. We show that methods obtain impressive results, mainly when trained with our real dataset, comparing with manually segmented ground truth, even using a relatively small number of labeled underwater training images.
Daycare Book-a-thon: Preservice Teachers Enhancing the Reading Experience of Preschool Children

Daycare Book-a-thon is a project that targets at-risk preschoolers, providing them with books their parents can share with them at home. Preservice teachers in a children's literature class donate the books and prepare bookmarks, which highlight ways that parents can read and extend the books with their children. Through this activity, preservice teachers come to understand the diverse student population and learn ways they can help young children to prepare for schools.
Benefits to Environment Glen Canyon to Hoover Dams

Most spectacular are the changes affected at Lake Mead, whose useful life is being greatly extended by retention of sediment in her sister, 27,000,000 acre-ft Lake Powell, formed 370 river miles upstream by Glen Canyon Dam. Cold water releases from the depths of Lake Powell for power generation at Glen Canyon Power Plant arrive at Lake Mead about 5-1/2°F cooler than the former unregulated flows. Annual rates of surface evaporation at Lake Mead are being reduced approx 10% (8 in in depth) with a substantial water savings of 75,000 to 100,000 acre-ft annually. The water savings could supply 90 gal per person per day to 1,000,000 people. These positive benefits, incident to the fundamental purpose and operation of the Glen Canyon Dam, improve for mankind the environment of the Colorado River system between Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams. Such benefits are too often overlooked by those critics of the builders and operators of large dams.
Excitation Function of O 16 ( t , n ) F 18

The excitation function of the reaction ${\mathrm{O}}^{16}(t, n){\mathrm{F}}^{18}$ has been measured for triton bombarding energies of 0.680 to 2.130 Mev. The half-life of the ${\mathrm{F}}^{18}$ beta decay has been measured to be 111\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1 min.
Cellular Deoxyribonucleic Acid Synthesis and Loss of Contact Inhibition in Irradiated and Contact-Inhibited Cell Cultures Infected with Fibroma Virus

Cultural changes that follow infection of rabbit kidney cells with fibroma virus were studied. Characteristic alterations of cell morphology and development of multilayered piles and cords of cells were found to occur in infected cultures in which cell division was blocked by gamma radiation or by cell crowding and serum deprivation, thus indicating no dependence upon cell division. Fibroma virus infection did not remove blocks to cell division, but it did exert distinct effects upon nuclear deoxyribonucleic acid synthesis in cells blocked by radiation or cell crowding. Use of tritium-labeled thymidine and autoradiography demonstrated that after infection initial inhibition of nuclear incorporation was followed by sharply increased nuclear labeling at a time that coincided with beginning alterations of cell morphology and development of cell piling.
Development of a Virosome Vaccine Against Avian Metapneumovirus Subtype C for Protection in Turkeys

Abstract An avian metapneumovirus (aMPV) virosome vaccine was prepared and tested for protection of turkeys by aMPV challenge. The vaccine was produced using a detergent-based (Triton X-100) extraction of aMPV subtype C followed by detergent removal with SM2 Bio-Beads. Western blot and virus-neutralization analysis confirmed that the aMPV virosomes contained both the fusion and attachment glycoproteins. Specific-pathogen-free turkeys were immunized either intranasally (IN) or intramuscularly (IM) with two doses of the aMPV virosome vaccine. Vaccination decreased clinical signs of disease following virulent challenge, and IN vaccination was superior to IM vaccination in reducing clinical signs. Decreases in viral load in the respiratory tract were observed in turkeys receiving IN vaccination with aMPV virosomes compared to unvaccinated poults. Increased virus-neutralizing antibody levels against aMPV were observed in birds vaccinated with virosomes. These results demonstrate that immunization of turkeys wi...
A host-based security assessment architecture for Industrial Control systems

Computerized control systems perform vital functions across many critical infrastructures throughout the nation. These systems can be vulnerable to a variety of attacks leading to devastating consequences like loss of production, interruption in distribution of public utilities and most importantly endangering public safety. This calls for an approach to halt attacks in their tracks before being able to do any harm to these systems. Vulnerability assessment performed on these systems can identify and assess potential vulnerabilities in a control system network, before they are exploited by malicious intruders. An effective vulnerability assessment architecture should assimilate security knowledge from multiple sources to uncover all the vulnerabilities present on a host. Legitimate concerns arise since host-based security scanners typically need to run at administrative privileges, and takes input from external knowledge sources for the analysis making it imperative that the scanner be trustworthy. Intentionally or otherwise, ill-formed input may compromise the scanner and the whole system if the scanner is susceptible to, or carries one or more vulnerability itself. We have implemented the scanning architecture in the context of an enterprise-level security analyzer.The analyzer finds security vulnerabilities present on a host according to the third-party security knowledge specified in Open Vulnerability Assessment Language(OVAL). This paper presents an architecture where a host-based security scanner's code base can be minimized to an extent where its correctness can be verified by adequate vetting. Moreover, the architecture also allows for leveraging third-party security knowledge efficiently and supports various higher-level security analysis.
Predicting sentinel node status in AJCC stage I/II primary cutaneous melanoma.

BACKGROUND. Sentinel lymph node (SLN) status is an important prognostic factor for survival for patients with primary cutaneous melanoma. To address the issue of selecting patients at high and low risk for a positive SLN, prognostic factors were sought that predict SLN involvement by examining characteristics of both the primary tumor and the patient within the context of a biological model of melanoma progression. METHODS. The study included 682 patients with primary vertical growth phase (VGP) melanoma and no clinical evidence of metastatic disease who underwent SLN biopsy (1995–2003). Logistic regression and classification tree analyses were used to investigate the association between SLN positivity and Breslow thickness, Clark level, tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL), ulceration, mitotic rate (MR), lesion site, gender, and age. RESULTS. In all, 88 of the 682 patients had � 1 positive SLN (12.9%). In the multivariate analysis, MR, TIL, and thickness were found to be independent prognostic factors for SLN positivity. In the classification tree, four different risk groups were defined, ranging from minimal risk (2.1%) to high risk (40.4%). In lesions � 2.0 mm, MR was important in risk-stratifying patients, and in lesions >2.0 mm TIL was important. CONCLUSION. By incorporating biologically based variables such as VGP, TIL, and MR along with thickness into a prognostic model, both patients at high risk and minimal risk for SLN positivity can be identified. If validated, this model can be used in patient management and trial design to select patients to undergo or be spared SLN biopsy. Cancer 2006;107:2436–45. � 2006 American Cancer Society.
MOOCs From the Viewpoint of the Learner A Response to Perna et al. (2014)

This response to Perna et al. provides an alternate approach to research on massive open online courses (MOOCs). We argue that a student-centered, theory-driven conceptualization and methodological approaches allow us to move beyond descriptive statistics and into a deeper understanding of MOOC learners. Examples using a teacher development MOOC are presented.
Distributed Inversion in Timed Discrete Event Systems

We consider a discrete event system (DES) modeled by a timed automaton with partial state and event observations. We view the system as an input-output system, where the input is a sequence of event lifetimes, and the output is the resulting sequence of events, states, and transition epochs. We consider the problem of extracting event lifetimes (input) from observations of the output trajectory, which we callinversion. We give necessary and sufficient conditions forinvertibility, and an algorithm that extracts event lifetimes from any given output observation of an invertible system. We describe a distributed timed DES model based on the prioritized synchronous product of subsystems, and study the inversion problem in this framework. We show that invertibility in the subsystems implies invertibility in the global system. To illustrate our results, we provide an example of a tandem network.