cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Local and renormalizable action from the gribov horizon

Abstract We derive a local, renormalizable action for non-abelian gauge theories, which expresses the restriction of the domain of the functional integral to the interior of the Gribov horizon, and show that the divergences may be absorbed by field and coupling constant renormalization. The condition that the euclidean functional integral extends up to the boundary of the classical configuration space provides an absolute normalization of the gauge field and eliminates the perturbative coupling constant g2 in favor of a dimensionful parameter γ. In D = 4 dimensions, with dimensional regularization, the coupling constant g2(ϵ) is found, in zeroth order, to vanish with ϵ = 4 − D, in accordance with asymptotic freedom. In consequence of the restriction of the classical configuration space, the poles of the gluon propagator are shifted, in zeroth order, to an unphysical location at p 2 = ±iγ 1 2 , but the glueball channel contains a physical cut with positive spectral function.
The amino acid sequence of the acidic subunit B-chain of crotoxin.

The B-chain of the acidic subunit of crotoxin proved refractory to Edman degradation. When subjected to sequence analysis using tandem mass spectrometry, pyroglutamate was found at the amino-terminal end, even though earlier attempts to de-block with pyroglutamate aminopeptidase were unsuccessful. The B-chain contained 35 amino acids and showed 91% amino acid identity with the corresponding segment from Mojave toxin, a homologous neurotoxin from Crotalus scutulatus scutulatus. The sequence of the last 24 residues of the B-chain is consistent with that previously published (Aird, S.D., Kaiser, I.I., Lewis, R.V. and Kruggel, W.G. (1985) Biochemistry 24, 7054-7058), except at position 20, where Edman degradation gave glycine and mass spectrometry gave glutamic acid.
Regulator curves and transient currents of double-way and double-wye rectifiers

CALCULATION of instantaneous and sustained current resulting from d-c faults on a power rectifier is extremely cumbersome. Certain idealized cases have been treated analytically, an important factor in establishing and understanding the circuit action. The analytical treatment also provides a necessary check on results obtained by other methods.
PriView: practical differentially private release of marginal contingency tables

We consider the problem of publishing a differentially private synopsis of a d-dimensional dataset so that one can reconstruct any k-way marginal contingency tables from the synopsis. Marginal tables are the workhorses of categorical data analysis. Thus, the private release of such tables has attracted a lot of attention from the research community. However, for situations where $d$ is moderate to large and k is beyond 3, no accurate and practical method exists. We introduce PriView, which computes marginal tables for a number of strategically chosen sets of attributes that we call views, and then use these view marginal tables to reconstruct any desired k-way marginal. In PriView, we apply maximum entropy optimization to reconstruct k-way marginals from views. We also develop a novel method to efficiently making all view marginals consistent while correcting negative entries to improve accuracy. For view selection, we borrow the concept of covering design from combinatorics theory. We conduct extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, and show that PriView reduces the error over existing approaches by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude.
Me, myself, and allies: Understanding the external sources of power

As far back as Thucydides, scholars have hypothesized that power affects the onset of conflict. Despite its importance, power remains a difficult concept to measure, and scholars have primarily rel...
Is Creativity Unidimensional or Multidimensional? Analyses of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

There is disagreement whether creativity is a unidimensional or multidimensional trait. The dimensionality of creativity is important to understand the mind's cognitive functioning; thus aiding the devel- opment of human potential. Much of this dimensionality debate is related to the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). Confirmatory factor analyses were thus conducted with data from 500 Grade-6 students, and several factor models were tested. The findings of this study show that the TTCT consists of 2 factors rather than a single factor, con- trary to the majority of research on this subject.
Assessment of teaching and learning in “literature-based” classrooms

Abstract This study explores the ways teachers in “literature-based” language arts programs keep track of and make sense of children's literate development and of their own professional effectiveness in teaching children to read and write. Extensive interviews were conducted with 25 teachers in elementary schools with high levels of poverty. Transcripts were analyzed inductively. Most of the teachers in this study were caught in conflicts among belief systems, and institutional structures, agendas, and values. The point of friction among these conflicts was assessment, which was associated with very powerful feelings of being overwhelmed, and of insecurity, guilt, frustration, and anger. These teachers expressed difficulty in keeping track of and having the language to talk about children's literate development. They also described pressure from external accountability testing. They differed in their assessment strategies and in the language they used to describe students' literacy development. Those who worked in highly controlling situations were inclined to use blaming language and tended to provide global, negative descriptive assessments in impersonal language. Their assessments were likely to be based on a simple, linear notion of literacy. The less controlling the situation the less this was likely to occur. This study suggests that assessment, as it occurs in schools, is far from a merely technical problem. Rather, it is deeply social and personal.
Minimal-overhead virtualization of a large scale supercomputer

Virtualization has the potential to dramatically increase the usability and reliability of high performance computing (HPC) systems. However, this potential will remain unrealized unless overheads can be minimized. This is particularly challenging on large scale machines that run carefully crafted HPC OSes supporting tightly-coupled, parallel applications. In this paper, we show how careful use of hardware and VMM features enables the virtualization of a large-scale HPC system, specifically a Cray XT4 machine, with
Hip replacement in the very elderly: selecting a suitable candidate

The selection of a suitable candidate for hip arthroplasty involves several important patient-specific considerations. Advanced age may be considered a relative contraindication for elective surgery, and may unfortunately cause a stereotypical dismissal of very elderly patients with a painful hip. However, several studies have demonstrated the exceptional safety and symptomatic benefits of hip arthroplasty in octogenarians and nonagenarians when appropriate medical precautions and preparations are utilized. The very elderly present specific social and medical scenarios that must be identified to establish an accurate risk assessment and achieve an optimal postoperative result. Although a greater likelihood of perioperative complications exists, the very elderly can expect to achieve highly significant pain relief and functional improvement after hip replacement. Future studies will focus on improvements in outcomes after hip replacement that may be realized with new advances in postoperative protocols.
Kaposi's Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus-Encoded Latency-Associated Nuclear Antigen Inhibits Lytic Replication by Targeting Rta: a Potential Mechanism for Virus-Mediated Control of Latency

Like other herpesviruses, Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV, also designated human herpesvirus 8) can establish a latent infection in the infected host. During latency a small number of genes are expressed. One of those genes encodes latency-associated nuclear antigen (LANA), which is constitutively expressed in cells during latent as well as lytic infection. LANA has previously been shown to be important for the establishment of latent episome maintenance through tethering of the viral genome to the host chromosomes. Under specific conditions, KSHV can undergo lytic replication, with the production of viral progeny. The immediate-early Rta, encoded by open reading frame 50 of KSHV, has been shown to play a critical role in switching from viral latent replication to lytic replication. Overexpression of Rta from a heterologous promoter is sufficient for driving KSHV lytic replication and the production of viral progeny. In the present study, we show that LANA down-modulates Rta's promoter activity in transient reporter assays, thus repressing Rta-mediated transactivation. This results in a decrease in the production of KSHV progeny virions. We also found that LANA interacts physically with Rta both in vivo and in vitro. Taken together, our results demonstrate that LANA can inhibit viral lytic replication by inhibiting expression as well as antagonizing the function of Rta. This suggests that LANA may play a critical role in maintaining latency by controlling the switch between viral latency and lytic replication.
MiNT-m: an autonomous mobile wireless experimentation platform

Limited fidelity of software-based wireless network simulations has prompted many researchers to build testbeds for developing and evaluating their wireless protocols and mobile applications. Since most testbeds are tailored to the needs of specific research projects, they cannot be easily reused for other research projects that may have different requirements on physical topology, radio channel characteristics or mobility pattern. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of MiNT-m, an experimentation platform devised specifically to support arbitrary experiments for mobile multi-hop wireless network protocols. In addition to inheriting the miniaturization feature from its predecessor MiNT [9], MiNT-m enables flexible testbed reconfiguration on an experiment-by-experiment basis by putting each testbed node on a centrally controlled untethered mobile robot. To support mobility and reconfiguration of testbed nodes, MiNT-m includes a scalable mobile robot navigation control subsystem, which in turn consists of a vision-based robot positioning module and a collision avoidance-based trajectory planning module. Further, MiNT-m provides a comprehensive network/experiment management subsystem that affords a user full interactive control over the testbed as well as real-time visualization of the testbed activities. Finally, because MiNT-m is designed to be a shared research infrastructure that supports 24x7 operation, it incorporates a novel automatic battery recharging capability that enables testbed robots to operate without human intervention for weeks.
Pilot evaluation of Scrambler therapy for the treatment of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy

Purpose Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN), a common side effect of chemotherapy, needs better effective treatments. Preliminary data support the use of Scrambler therapy, a device which treats pain via noninvasive cutaneous electrostimulation, for the treatment of CIPN. The current manuscript reports data from a pilot trial, performed to investigate the effect of Scrambler therapy for the treatment of established CIPN.
Polarized Raman study of molecular orientation in uniaxially stretched atactic polystyrene

Polarized Raman intensities have been obtained from thin films of uniaxially oriented atactic polystyrene. The study was made using the 623 cm−1 radial skeletal η6b vibration of the benzenering. Values of the fourth-order as well as second-order terms in the expansion of the orientation distribution were obtained for draw ratios between 1.5 and 7.7. Values for P2(cosθ) agree well with the values obtained from infrared dichroism.
The tribe Ehrlichieae and ehrlichial diseases.

The tribe Ehrlichieae consists of gram-negative minute cocci that are obligate intracellular parasites classified in the family Rickettsiaceae. Although ehrlichial organisms have been observed in leukocytes for many years, only a few species have been cultured in quantities sufficient for biochemical and molecular analyses. Recents studies on 16S-rRNA sequence analysis and energy metabolism showed that the genus Ehrlichia is closely related to the genus Rickettsia. There is, however, no antigenic cross-reactivity between these genera. Ehrlichial organisms cause a disease called "ehrlichiosis," a noncontagious infectious disease known to be transmitted by a tick in several cases and by a fluke in one case. Ehrlichia spp. infect dogs, ruminants, horses, and humans. Recently, two new ehrlichial diseases, Potomac horse fever and human ehrlichiosis, were discovered in the United States. The etiologic agent of Potomac horse fever, Ehrlichia risticii, is closely related to the known human pathogen Ehrlichia sennetsu. The etiologic agent of human ehrlichiosis is related to Ehrlichia canis, a canine pathogen. In contrast to the genus Rickettsia, members of the tribe Ehrlichieae reside primarily in the cytoplasmic vacuoles of monocytes or granulocytes and cause hematologic abnormalities, lymphadenopathy, and other pathologic changes in the host. However, the actual mechanisms whereby Ehrlichia spp. infect leukocytes, multiply in them, and produce various forms of systemic disease have not been defined. Depending on the ehrlichial species involved, serologic or direct microscopic observation of stained blood smears is currently used to diagnose ehrlichial disease. Images
A basic limitation in interpreting field waveforms of lightning return strokes at a distant point

A calculation is made for the exact and dipole approximated fields of a return stroke model of a lightning discharge. It is shown that at ranges greater than 50 km, the waveform is determined by the dipole moment of the source. Thus, only limited confirmation of proposed discharge models is possible at such ranges. >
The Siting of Greek Theatres

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the orientation of buildings in ancient Greece received a great deal of scholarly attention; since that time, it has fallen from favour. In 1939, William Bell Dinsmoor made an ‘attempt to illustrate a method of obtaining more accurate information concerning the dates of Greek temples and certain details of religious practice through the application of an outmoded theory, that of “orientation”’. When this complex study, replete with trigonometric calculations of seasonal star positions met with little favour, orientation became a dead issue for several decades, only reviving in 1962 with the publication of Vincent Scully's The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Machine Learning for Intra-Fraction Tumor Motion Modeling with Respiratory Surrogates

Advances in radiation therapy for cancer have made it possible to deliver conformal doses to the tumor while sparing normal healthy tissues. However, one of the difficulties radiation oncologists face is targeting moving tumors, such as those in the lung, which can change position during normal respiration. Tumor motion can be determined by directly monitoring tumor position using continuous xray imaging or electromagnetic transponders placed in the tumor that emit a signal. These approaches require potentially unnecessary radiation to the patient or acquisition of expensive technology. Alternatively, one can image the patient intermittently to determine tumor location and external markers placed on the patient’s torso. The external surrogates can then be used to determine an inferential model that would determine the tumor position as a function of external surrogates. These external surrogates can be monitored continuously in order to determine the real-time position of the tumor. In this study, we evaluate a machine learning algorithm for inferring intra-fraction tumor motion from external markers using a database of Cyberknife Synchrony system.
LACK OF ENHANCEMENT OF DIMETHYLTRYPTAMINE FORMATION IN RAT BRAIN AND RABBIT LUNG IN VIVO BY METHIONINE OR S‐ADENOSYLMETHIONINE

In vivo conversion of intracisternally administered [14C]tryptamine to [14C]N,N-dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT) in rat brain, even in the presence of an excess of substrate and methyl donor appeared to be insignificant, although enzymatically synthesized [14C]DMT was recovered readily after intracranial injection. Authenticity of [14C]DMT was demonstrated by cocrystallization with authentic DMT and oxalic acid to constant specific radioactivity after chromatographic separation of [14C]DMT. In rabbit lung, the apparent Km for S-adenosylmcthionine (SAMe) (29 μM) with indolethylamine-N-methyltransferase was found to be close to endogenous levels of SAMe (34 μM) that are not likely to saturate the enzyme normally. Nevertheless. large doses of L-methioninc or SAMe failed to increase the in vivo conversion of [14C]N-methyltryptamine to [14C]DMT in this tissue. The production of [14]DMT was instead markedly irihihitrd by this treatment. possibly due to an effect of S-adeno-sylhomocysteine. Our results fail to support the hypothesis that psychotropic effects of methionine or SAMe are due to increased accumulations of pharmacologically active methylated indoleamines.
Possible refinement of the lognormal hypothesis concerning the distribution of energy dissipation in intermittent turbulence

Obukhov, Kolmogoroff and Yaglom, and in effect (independently) the geologist deWijs, have argued that energy dissipation in intermittent turbulence is lognormally distributed. However, this hypothesis will be shown to be probably untenable: depending upon the precise formulation chosen, it is either unverifiable or inconsistent.The present paper proposes a variant of the generating model leading to the lognormal.This variant is consistent, appears tractable, and for sufficiently small values of the parameter μ, (in Yaglom' s notation) it yields the lognormal hypothesis as a good approximation.As μ increases, the approximation worsens, and for high enough values of μ, turbulence ends by concentrating in very few huge “blobs”.Still other consistent alternative models of intermitt,ency yield distributions that diverge from the lognormal in the opposite direction; these various models in combination suggest several empirical tests.
The Colorado Parental Rights Amendment: how and why it failed.

language would, in practice, have serious unintended consequences, such as nullifying laws allowing minors to obtain confidential reproductive health care and other sensitive health services, disrupting school sex education and AIDS prevention activities, and impeding the removal of children from abusive homes. However, the outcome also appears to reflect a failure on the part of the amendment’s supporters to mount a serious campaign. “They thought Of The People’s deep pockets and the public’s perception that parents have rights were all it would take,” 6 observes Patrick Steadman, deputy campaign manager for Protect Our Children, the coalition that opposed the amendment. Steadman and others believe that the race might have been much closer if the proponents had mounted an effective campaign. This article, which is based in part on interviews conducted early in 1997 with key members of Protect Our Children, describes the strategies and tactics that opponents to the parental rights amendment used in their campaign to defeat it. Given that activists in other states have formulated similar measures (a parental rights bill similar to the Colorado amendment was subsequently defeated in the Virginia legislature), ballot initiatives and legislative proposals along these lines may resurface in other states in upcoming years. Background of the parental rights amend
The Evolution of an Online Approach to Preparing Young Students with Disabilities for College and Careers

This paper describes an initiative to address the underrepresentation of persons with disabilities (PwD) in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields using online educational methods. The objectives of the program are to build motivation for pursuing STEM careers among students with disabilities in middle school and early high school and to improve their preparation for postsecondary education. We first outline the problem of underrepresentation of PwD in STEM and present the underlying reasoning for targeting younger students and addressing the objectives using online methods. Next, we describe the development of online content designed to increase STEM career motivation and college readiness and the initial implementation of the program using a series of informal educational webcasts aimed at students with disabilities and their parents. In the final section of the paper, we identify some of the lessons-learned about online educational approaches from the original implementation, and describe a subsequent evolution of the program using multilevel web-based content designed to reach a wider range of problem stakeholders including teachers and rehabilitation counselors.
Achieving Safe Motherhood Addressing the Healthcare and Education Needs of the Mothers with Comorbidities; Reenvisioning Prenatal Care and Education

The health and wellness of mothers has been identified as the cornerstone of public health, and it is well documented in the literature that mothers define the health of the family [1-3]. Safe Motherhood has been described as practices, and guidelines that ensure all women receive the care they need for a safe and healthy pregnancy and childbirth (World Health Organization [4]. The safe motherhood initiative begun with discussions in the 1980s in order to address the growing need for women to progress through pregnancy and childbirth ensuring with little health risks and little to no short-term and long-term morbidities [5,6]. Historically safe motherhood was thought to be a public health concern in developing nations, however the United States ranks well below many developed nations [3]. The current rate of maternal and infant mortality is abysmal, with national rates greater than 27 other developed nations. The latest 2014 data reported that the infant mortality rates stood at 6.1 per 1,000 live births. An infant born in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Cuba has a greater chance of surviving past the first year of life than an infant born in the United States. More disconcerting is the fact that an infant born in Mississippi has the same chance of survival as an infant born in Bahrain or Botswana [7,8].
Dragomen and checkpoints

Humanistic studies of translation have often taken for granted that translational activity produces cultural understanding, which in turn leads to deeper human sympathy. However, the history of military translation in the US occupation of Iraq suggests that this model is inadequate on a number of accounts, including the ways in which translation theory privileges literary translation over other translational activities. This essay surveys the development of Arabic–English translation within US military strategic thinking and the adjunct role played by militarised interpreters in the US occupation of Iraq. It then considers Arabic–English translation in terms of the lives of translators, as opposed to the textual products produced by their labour. It concludes by sketching the nineteenth-century history of the Levantine dragoman in order to draw resemblances with more recent histories of military translation.
Diagnosing Sex Chromatin: A Binary for Every Cell

In 1949, Canadian anatomist Murray Barr announced the discovery of a peculiar entity in the cell nucleus that was present in females and absent in males. The identity of this entity remained uncertain for a decade even though Barr hypothesized a relationship between it and the sex chromosomes and called it the “sex chromatin.” This hypothesis inspired the development of the chromatin into a technology that could indicate “chromosomal” or “genetic” sex, which supposedly established male and female sex difference as a binary and fundamental characteristic of humans and other animals at conception. Barr collaborated with other researchers and potential patients who applied the sex chromatin test, hoping that it could identify the “true” sex of intersexuals, homosexuals, and transsexuals. Ironically, the application of the test to intersexuals would lead to a revision of the identity of the sex chromatin itself. The history of the sex chromatin illuminates how the significance and essence of this laboratory object evolved with its use as a clinical and research tool. Researchers had hoped that the test would sort the intersex into just two categories, male and female. Instead, the sex chromatin helped to multiply categories of the intersex, distinguished them from inverts, underpinned psychosocial gender as a new dimension of sex difference, and in the process had its own identity refashioned. Today, we call it the Barr body and its story reminds us of the power and limit of biotechnologies to determine who we are.
Multipass encoding for reducing pulsing artifacts in cloud based video transcoding

Low latency video transcoding is an important feature in video sharing platforms. Typically this is achieved by splitting a clip into short segments, followed by parallel encoding of the segments. However, this introduces quality artifacts due to transients in encoder rate control. We present a model for more effectively predicting the behavior of the encoder in each encoding pass, which minimizes this problem. We learn the model using measurements from more than 500 video clips, hence ensuring reliable estimation. Finally, we show that the proposed multipass strategy delivers more stable reconstructed quality for parallel video transcoding frameworks.
Concordance of Pharmacist Assessment of Medication Nonadherence With a Self-Report Medication Adherence Scale

Objective:To evaluate the concordance of the Modified Morisky Scale (MMS) with a pharmacist assessment of medication adherence during a medication review.Methods:This retrospective study examined the electronic medical records (EMRs) of patients ≥18 years who received a medication review by a pharmacist from October 2008 to September 2009 at a homeless behavioral health clinic. In addition to the 6-item MMS, adherence was assessed using the first 4 items of the MMS, which comprise the original Morisky Scale. A final pharmacist assessment of adherence based upon the medication review was documented in the EMR. The McNemar test was used to assess the agreement between the MMS (6 and 4 items) and the pharmacist assessment of medication adherence.Results:A total of 288 patients were eligible for the study, which included 449 medication reviews. Nonadherence was identified in 61.7% and 49.7% of medication reviews using the 6 and 4 items of the MMS. The pharmacist assessment determined nonadherence in 23.8% of ...
Recentralization and the Left Turn in Latin America Diverging Outcomes in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela

Over the past decade, leftist presidents in Latin America have sought to recentralize authority by reversing the decentralizing reforms that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s. This article ex...
Surgery Clinical Challenge - A Rare Cause of Retroperitoneal Mass

A 52 year-old female with a past medical history of obesity and hypertension, presented to the surgical clinic after aretroperitoneal mass was found by computed tomography (CT). The patient reported right buttock pain and right-sided abdominal pain for six months prior to presentation. Physical exam revealed a non-tender abdomen without palpable masses or lymph adenopathy. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the pelvis with contrast revealed a smooth 8.5x9.5x5.7 cm mass in the right lower pelvis with subtle contrast enhancement (Figures 1 and 2). Enhancing solid components of the mass were inconsistent with a lipoma. The patient underwent an exploratory laparotomy that found a 12 cm retroperitoneal pelvic mass overlying the right iliacus muscle and extended into the right inguinal canal. The right ureter was identified early and prior to an en-bloc resection of the mass. The preliminary frozen section analysis of the mass was read as a lipoma. Permanent section did not corroborate the frozen section analysis.
Pesticide residues in the top soil of five West Alabama counties.

The types and levels of pesticide residues in soil samples from five west Alabama counties were determined. Soil samples were taken randomly from preselected sites in each county and were analyzed by gas chromatography. Pesticide residues were found in all samples examined, even soil samples from areas where records indicated that no pesticides had been applied directly. The most prevalent chlorinated hydrocarbons were benzene hexachloride and aldrin while the most abundant organophosphate was malathion.
Human natural killer (NK) cells: Requirements for cell proliferation and expansion of phenotypically novel subpopulations

Previous studies established that the high density (resting) natural killer (NK) cell subset (R-NK) of peripheral blood NK cells is unresponsive to interleukin-2 (IL-2) but can be induced to proliferate when cultured with gamma-irradiated malignant melanoma (MM-170) cells or mitomycin-C-treated activated T cells in the presence of an IL-2-conditioned medium (IL-2-CM). This study has examined additional requirements of this activation process. The induction of proliferation was dependent on cell to cell contact with metabolically active stimulator cells, although no evidence was obtained that stimulation was effected by soluble factors produced by the stimulator cells. Compared with IL-2-CM, rIL-2 was an inefficient costimulator for the induction of NK cell proliferation, suggesting that factors in IL-2-CM were required in addition to IL-2, but rIL-2 was as efficient as IL-2-CM in maintaining the proliferation of activated NK cells. Under optimum culture conditions, NK growth of up to 3200-fold occurred during a proliferation cycle of 18 days. Phenotypic analysis of the culture-generated quiescent NK cells revealed novel heterogeneity in CD16 (Fc gamma RIII) and CD56 (N-CAM) expression. Some NK cells lacked expression of both CD16 and CD56 (as identified using currently available monoclonal antibodies), while other NK cells showed differential CD16 epitope expression. Since quiescent NK cells can be obtained in large numbers and high purity, they will be a convenient source of NK cells to study the molecular processes involved in initiating NK cell proliferation.
Preoperative Statin Use at the Time of Radical Prostatectomy Is Not Associated With Biochemical Recurrence or Pathologic Upgrading.

Objective To determine the association of statin use with oncological outcomes and risk of pathologic upgrading following radical prostatectomy. Materials and Methods Using a prospectively populated database of 3042 men who underwent open radical prostatectomy, patients were grouped according to reported statin use at the time of surgery. The primary outcome was time to biochemical recurrence. The secondary outcome was risk of pathologic upgrading among a subset of 1256 patients with Gleason pattern 3 + 3 = 6 on biopsy. A multivariable Cox model was used to assess risk of biochemical recurrence, and multivariable logistic regression was used to assess risk of pathologic upgrading. Results Eight hundred twenty-four men (27%) reported statin use at the time of radical prostatectomy. Statin users were older and had higher body mass index, higher Charlson Comorbidity Index, and lower pretreatment prostate-specific antigen values than statin nonusers. Over a median follow-up of 70 months (interquartile range: 36-107), a total of 455 men (15%) experienced biochemical recurrence. Statin use was not associated with biochemical recurrence (adjusted hazard ratio: 1.06, 95% confidence interval: 0.86-1.31). Of those men with biopsy Gleason 3 + 3 = 6 disease, 647 (52%) were upgraded to higher grade disease following radical prostatectomy; however, statin use was not associated with pathologic upgrading (adjusted odds ratio: 0.78, 95% confidence interval: 0.58-1.04). Conclusion Preoperative statin use at the time of radical prostatectomy was not associated with biochemical recurrence or risk of pathologic upgrading in this cohort. These data add to the existing body of literature suggesting that statin use is not associated with more favorable clinical outcomes following radical prostatectomy.
The struggle by Caenorhabditis elegans to maintain proteostasis during aging and disease.

The presence of only small amounts of misfolded protein is an indication of a healthy proteome. Maintaining proteome health, or more specifically, “proteostasis,” is the purview of the “proteostasis network.” This network must respond to constant fluctuations in the amount of destabilized proteins caused by errors in protein synthesis and exposure to acute proteotoxic conditions. Aging is associated with a gradual increase in damaged and misfolded protein, which places additional stress on the machinery of the proteostasis network. In fact, despite the ability of the proteostasis machinery to readjust its stoichiometry in an attempt to maintain homeostasis, the capacity of cells to buffer against misfolding is strikingly limited. Therefore, subtle changes in the folding environment that occur during aging can significantly impact the health of the proteome. This decline and eventual collapse in proteostasis is most pronounced in individuals with neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and Huntington’s Disease that are caused by the misfolding, aggregation, and toxicity of certain proteins. This review discusses how C. elegans models of protein misfolding have contributed to our current understanding of the proteostasis network, its buffering capacity, and its regulation. Reviewers: This article was reviewed by Luigi Bubacco, Patrick Lewis and Xavier Roucou.
Victory at St. Mihiel

Few battles in military history can be judged both tactical and strategic successes. The World War I Battle of St. Mihiel is one of these. Its success can be attributed to many reasons: the excellence of the battle plan, the leadership of the generals and field commanders, the enthusiasm of the American doughboys, and the lack of German will to hold the salient. But above all, its success depended on the great cooperation within the newly-instituted American Chief-of-Staff command, and within the recently-formed Allied command, both of which allowed for the powerful massing of troops and materials needed to defeat a determined enemy fighting a total war. Cooperation produced the massive army which formed for the first time at St. Mihiel - an army "nearly four times as large as Grant's Army of the Potomac at its maximum strength. three times Napoleon's Grand Army at Leipzig, nearly twice the German army at Sedan in 1870, and much larger than either the Japanese or Russian armies at Mukden, the largest on record before 1914." 1
Chapter 25 – Palinacousis

Palinacousis is derived from the Greek words palin, which means again or anew, and acousis, meaning hearing. It was first described by Jacobs et al. (1971), who defined the phenomenon as “an auditory illusion of perseveration or persistence of sound impressions for seconds, minutes, or hours after the cessation of auditory stimulation.” The auditory perseveration does not occur spontaneously but is triggered by something in the environment. A limited number of cases have been described in the literature. This chapter describes the anatomic abnormalities that may cause this phenomenon, the clinical characteristics that define palinacousis, differential diagnosis and potential etiologies.
Explaining Distributed Neural Activations via Unsupervised Learning

Recent work has demonstrated the emergence of semantic object-part detectors in activation patterns of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but did not account for the distributed multi-layer neural activations in such networks. In this work, we propose a novel method to extract distributed patterns of activations from a CNN and show that such patterns correspond to high-level visual attributes. We propose an unsupervised learning module that sits above a pre-trained CNN and learns distributed activation patterns of the network. We utilize elastic non-negative matrix factorization to analyze the responses of a pretrained CNN to an input image and extract salient image regions. The corresponding patterns of neural activations for the extracted salient regions are then clustered via unsupervised deep embedding for clustering (DEC) framework. We demonstrate that these distributed activations contain high-level image features that could be explicitly used for image classification.
Antibody-Based Therapeutics Targeting CD33, CD45, and CD66

Targeted therapy of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) has thus far been mostly directed at CD33, CD45, and CD66. The notion that some AMLs may predominantly or entirely involve committed CD33+ myeloid precursors provided the rationale for eradicating underlying stem cells with anti-CD33 antibodies. Emerging data demonstrating efficacy of the anti-CD33 immunoconjugate, gemtuzumab ozogamicin, in acute promyelocytic leukemia and other favorable- and intermediate-risk AMLs validate CD33 as drug target. Unlike CD33, CD45 and CD66 are noninternalizing antigens and have primarily been targeted to deliver radionuclides to sites of hematopoietic tissue, particularly to augment pre-transplant conditioning regimens. Early studies document the feasibility of this approach in selected patients, although future controlled studies will need to assess whether this strategy indeed leads to improved outcomes. Given this encouraging clinical experience, the use of MoAbs is likely expanding significantly in the future with identification of additional AML (stem) cell-associated antigens.
Biologically Active Peptides in the Mammalian Central Nervous System

The ancient Greeks believed that the brain functioned, among other ways, by secreting proteinaceous material (pituita) via the hypophyseal stalk into the nasal cavity (Singer and Underwood, 1962; Abel, 1924). Hundreds of years passed before it was demonstrated conclusively that certain central neurons—neurosecretory neurons—do, make small proteins (peptides) and release them into the periphery, where they act on such structures as the pituitary. Between the Greeks’ time and our own, people who were trying to understand the nature and function of peptides secreted by the CNS made many false starts and collected a great deal of uninterpretable data. Thus, it is difficult to summarize their work in a neat and concise way.
Opioid Dose- and Route-Dependent Efficacy of Oxycodone and Heroin Vaccines in Rats

Heroin and oxycodone abuse occurs over a wide range of drug doses and by various routes of administration characterized by differing rates of drug absorption. The current study addressed the efficacy of a heroin vaccine [morphine hapten conjugated to keyhole limpet hemocyanin (M-KLH)] or oxycodone vaccine [oxycodone hapten conjugated to keyhole limpet hemocyanin (OXY-KLH)] for reducing drug distribution to brain after intravenous heroin or oxycodone, or subcutaneous oxycodone. Rats immunized with M-KLH or keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH) control received an intravenous bolus dose of 0.26 or 2.6 mg/kg heroin. Vaccination with M-KLH increased retention of heroin and its active metabolites 6-acetylmorphine (6-AM) and morphine in plasma compared with KLH controls, and reduced total opioid (heroin + 6-AM + morphine) distribution to brain but only at the lower heroin dose. Immunization also protected against respiratory depression at the lower heroin dose. Rats immunized with OXY-KLH or KLH control received 0.22 or 2.2 mg/kg oxycodone intravenously, the molar equivalent of the heroin doses. Immunization with OXY-KLH significantly reduced oxycodone distribution to brain after either oxycodone dose, although the magnitude of effect of immunization at the higher oxycodone dose was small (12%). By contrast, vaccination with OXY-KLH was more effective when oxycodone was administered subcutaneously rather than intravenously, reducing oxycodone distribution to brain by 44% after an oxycodone dose of 2.3 mg/kg. Vaccination also reduced oxycodone-induced antinociception. These data suggest that the efficacy of OXY-KLH and M-KLH opioid vaccines is highly dependent upon opioid dose and route of administration.
Chirally Extended Quantum Chromodynamics

Abstract We propose a chirally extended Quantum Chromodynamics (XQCD) Lagrangian in which the fermions are coupled to elementary scalar fields through a Yukawa coupling which preserves chiral invariance. Our principle motivation is to find a new lattice formulation for QCD which avoids the source of critical slowing down usually encountered as the bare quark mass is tuned to the chiral limit. The phase diagram and the weak coupling limit for XQCD support our conjecture that the continuum limit of XQCD is in the same universality class as conventional lattice QCD. The large N solution of a toy model for XQCD is studied and here it is shown that the mass of the spurious pion and σ resonance go to infinity with the cut-off. Numerical simulations are being pursued to investigate further the possible benefits of XQCD in extracting useful QCD predictions.
Differences Between New and Long-Standing US Gun Owners: Results From a National Survey.

Objectives. To quantify the proportion of current US gun owners who are new to owning firearms and compare new versus long-standing gun owners with respect to their firearms and firearm-related behaviors.Methods. We performed a cross-sectional analysis of a nationally representative probability-based online survey conducted in 2015 in the United States. We defined new gun owners as current firearm owners who acquired all of their firearms within the past 5 years, but who lived in a home without a gun at some time over the past 5 years. We defined long-standing firearm owners as all other current gun owners.Results. New gun owners represented 10% of all current US adult gun owners. In addition to being younger than long-standing gun owners, new gun owners were more likely to be liberal, own fewer guns, own handguns, own guns only for protection, and store guns in a safe manner.Conclusions. Gun ownership is dynamic, with approximately 1 million Americans becoming new gun owners each year.Public Health Impli...
The Initial Phases of Sic-SiO2 Interface Formation by Low-Temperature (300 ºC) Remote Plasma-Assisted Oxidation of Si and C Faces on Flat and Vicinal 6H SiC

The initial stages of SiC-Si02 interface formation by low temperature (300 oC) remote plasma assisted oxidation (RPAO) have been studied by on-line Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) for flat and vicinal 6H SiC(0001) wafers with Si(0001) and C faces (0001). The paper focuses on i) interfacial bonding and ii) oxidation rates for thickness to about 2 nm. Plasma-assisted oxidation of 6H SiC is compared with i) thermal oxidation of SiC and ii) plasma-assisted oxidation of flat and vicinal Si(111).
Impurity Distribution in Helium Droplets

Helium clusters are unique bosonic, fully quantum, finite hound state systems that can span the range from a. few-particle hound state to the bulk liquid limit. They are therefore an excellent laboratory for the study of finite-size dependence of physical properties of a many-body system such as superfluidity or the excitation spectrum. However, despite many theoretical predictions concerning their ground and excited states (see Ref. 1 and references therein), they have remained difficult to study experimentally. Recent work2-4 on doping helium droplets with atomic and molecular impurities has opened up the possibility that their ground state structures can be probed by monitoring the changes in the impurities’ excitation spectrum. An essential first step toward this goal is to understand the distribution of impurities inside the droplet.
The Impact of Civilian Aggravating Circumstances on the Military Death Penalty: Another Chapter in the Resistance of the Armed Forces to the Civilianization of Military Justice, 1984-2005

In 1984 the U.S. Armed Forces adopted a capital punishment system modeled after those prevailing in over 30 states. This empirical study of charging and sentencing decisions in 104 death eligible military murders from 1984-2005 analyzes the extent to which the administration of the military death penalty has followed the civilian model required by military law or whether practice has overridden the law and rejected the intended civilianizing influence. After a brief period between 1986 and 1990, the charging decisions of commanders and the sentencing decisions of court martial members (jurors) transformed the military death penalty system into a dual system that treats two classes of death eligible murder quite differently and essentially nullified the 1984 changes. Since 1990 a soldier accused of a murder with a direct impact on the ability of military commanders to run an effective and disciplined military is significantly more likely to face a capital court martial and be sentenced to death than a similarly situated soldier accused of a murder connected to the military only by the identity of the defendant. While many in the military have worked to incorporate the protections of the Bill of Rights such as those present in the 1984 reforms into military criminal justice, others have resisted each such change as unnecessary and a direct threat to the ability to run an efficient and effective military. This study documents contemporary resistance as manifest in charging and sentencing decisions. We conclude that a limitation of death eligible murder to those directly impacting military command and control could reduce the risk of arbitrariness in the administration of the military death penalty. While this study has important implications for the military criminal justice system and adds to the work of others calling for limiting the reach of the military criminal justice system to crimes directly impacting the ability of military leaders to run an efficient and effective military, its value extends beyond the realm of military justice. It documents the power of individual decision makers to overrule the written law and to do so without disclosure or public debate. As such, it is a study of the law in action and the importance of context in understanding the influence of written law.
The matching principle revisited

Reexamination of anomalous data from an old study sheds new light on statistical learning theory and deterministic assumptions about human behavior.