cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Measuring content overlap during handoff communication using distributional semantics: An exploratory study.

Abstract Objective We develop and evaluate a methodological approach to measure the degree and nature of overlap in handoff communication content within and across clinical professions. This extensible, exploratory approach relies on combining techniques from conversational analysis and distributional semantics. Materials and methods We audio-recorded handoff communication of residents and nurses on the General Medicine floor of a large academic hospital (n = 120 resident and n = 120 nurse handoffs). We measured semantic similarity, a proxy for content overlap, between resident-resident and nurse-nurse communication using multiple steps: a qualitative conversational content analysis; an automated semantic similarity analysis using Reflective Random Indexing (RRI); and comparing semantic similarity generated by RRI analysis with human ratings of semantic similarity. Results There was significant association between the semantic similarity as computed by the RRI method and human rating (ρ = 0.88). Based on the semantic similarity scores, content overlap was relatively higher for content related to patient active problems, assessment of active problems, patient-identifying information, past medical history, and medications/treatments. In contrast, content overlap was limited on content related to allergies, family-related information, code status, and anticipatory guidance. Conclusions Our approach using RRI analysis provides new opportunities for characterizing the nature and degree of overlap in handoff communication. Although exploratory, this method provides a basis for identifying content that can be used for determining shared understanding across clinical professions. Additionally, this approach can inform the development of flexibly standardized handoff tools that reflect clinical content that are most appropriate for fostering shared understanding during transitions of care.
Doch keine einfache Radiuskopffraktur

Zusammenfassung. Radiuskopffrakturen sind zwar sehr haufige Verletzungen, heilen meist aber relativ schnell und unkompliziert aus. Mit dieser Haufigkeit und «Einfachheit» geht jedoch eine gewisse Bagatellisierung einher. Aber selbst bei den einfachsten Radiuskopffrakturen liegt in bis zu 18 % der Falle eine Begleitverletzung der Weichteile vor. Werden diese ubersehen und/oder nicht behandelt, konnen sie schwere Folgeschaden verursachen. In Anbetracht dieser Problematik sollte der klinische Verlauf bei diesen Patienten genau verfolgt werden. Ein Ausbleiben der Schmerzlinderung nach zwei Wochen konservativer Therapie sollte eine weitere Abklarung nach sich ziehen.
Making History: Fostering Democratic Imagination Through Community-Engaged Social Movement Scholarship

The study of social movement history is rich terrain from which to examine the structures of inequities and the processes by which collective struggles dismantle them. The purpose of this chapter is to describe efforts to foster students’ democratic imagination through a course on the multiracial social movement history of the San Francisco Bay Area. The centerpiece of the course is a research assignment where students work collaboratively with local activists to document insufficiently known social histories of the Bay Area and publish them within the popular community history website FoundSF. The author compares two iterations of the course in order to reveal how different approaches to facilitating student-community collaborations result in different learning implications for all involved.
Breastfeeding among women with physical disabilities in the United States.

Background:The benefits of breastfeeding are well established, and breastfeeding is now widely practiced in the United States. Although increasing numbers of women with physical disabilities are ha...
Pregnancy unshackled: Increasing equity through implementation of perinatal depression screening, shared decision making, and treatment for incarcerated women.

Background Perinatal depression (PD) is one of the most common medical complications of pregnancy. The prevalence of women in correctional settings has grown eight-fold in the last 30 years. A quarter of these women were either pregnant or within a year postpartum when entering custody. Recommendations to screen and treat all pregnant women for PD are being implemented nationwide. Local problem In 2016, 71% of pregnant women entering Milwaukee County Jail had minimal or no prenatal care and significant rates of high-risk medical and social risk factors. The jail system was not screening for PD. Methods The Plan-Do-Study-Act method of quality improvement (QI), with four rapid cycles, was utilized. Patient tracer interviews and refusal rates were collected for baseline data two months preceding implementation. Data was analyzed using run charts to evaluate the impact of interventions on outcomes. Intervention PD screening was implemented with the Edinburgh Perinatal Depression Scale, and if scored positive, the Healthwise shared decision-making tool was utilized for therapy options and treatment initiated. Results A total of 101 women were seen, 93 were offered screening, 76 were screened, 43 were positive, and 37 started treatment within the facility. That is, 46% to 57 % of this aggregate of women who screen positive for PD and a decrease in patient refusal rates was seen throughout the process. Conclusion Rapid cycle QI was effective in standardizing PD screening and treatment. Replication of this project across correctional systems would help to bridge a gap of equitable care for incarcerated women.
Optical oxygen sensor using fluorescence lifetime measurement.

The industry standard for oxygen measurement, the modified Clark electrode has now been available for more than three decades (Clark, L. C., 1956), and is still being constantly modified and perfected. It is a membrane covered electrode that encloses a platinum cathode, a silver anode and a KCl or Ag/AgCl electrolyte. Oxygen diffusing from the surrounding medium through the membrane gets reduced at the surface of the cathode. The magnitude of the negative bias on the platinum electrode (-0.8 to -1 V) is maintained such that the electrode operates under conditions of membrane controlled diffusion. Since the diffusive flux is a function of the partial pressure of oxygen in the fluid, it is possible to calibrate the electrode current versus oxygen tension. Clark electrodes are calibrated by equilibrating a sample with nitrogen to read zero and followed with either air or oxygen to read 100%. The readings are usually expressed as a percentage of air saturation.
Myocardial Augmentation Using Skeletal Muscle

The development of intractable congestive heart failure occurs in nearly 400,000 people annually, 1.2 and has a 35% one year mortality.3 An estimated 35,000 people per year could benefit from cardiac transplantation, yet less than 2000 donor hearts are available annually.4 In the remaining 33,000 patients there is a 50% one year mortality rate.5 For these patients, the alternative is an artificial heart, an intra-aortic balloon pump, or different variations of ventricular assist devices, however at this point these devices are temporary. Furthermore, they require percutaneous tubes or wires for transmission of energy from an external power source. Although experiments with a totally implantable assist device are planned for 1992, 6 problems with coagulopathy, strokes and infection still need to be solved.
Sociocultural Processes in the Development of Thinking

Abstract This chapter discusses the development of thinking from a sociocultural perspective. It describes several areas of contemporary psychological research that provide a conceptual foundation for this approach, including Super and Harkness' notion of the developmental niche, the cultural practice approach to cognition, Soviet Activity Theory, and Cole's sociohistoncal and cultural perspective. Four cultural processes that may play a role in organizing and directing cognitive development are presented and illustrated with research. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the pragmatic and conceptual challenges of this approach.
Analysis of Mechanical Damage Detection in Gas Pipeline Inspection

In the context of gas pipeline inspection, mechanical damage means dents or gouges in the pipe wall, usually caused by equipment operating near the pipeline. Such defects are the principal cause of pipeline failure, which makes their early detection and characterization a major concern of the industry.
Vitamin D deficiency and graft-versus-host disease in hematopoietic stem cell transplant population

Vitamins are the organic compounds that have long been known to play a significant role in our body by functioning as hormones and antioxidants. Vitamin D, a fat-soluble vitamin, is the main regulator of calcium hemostasis in our body. At the same time, it is also known to show its potential effects on the immune system by modulating the differentiation, activation, and proliferation of T and B lymphocytes. The immunomodulatory properties of vitamin D are also known to have a crucial role in the prevention and treatment of graft-versus-host disease. Patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation are particularly at risk of vitamin D deficiency. This review article expands our understanding of vitamin D, its immunomodulatory effects, and its role in prevention and treatment of graft-versus-host disease.
Quantum well capture and base carrier lifetime in light emitting transistor

We carry out the physical modeling of the light emitting transistor (LET) operation with the focus on the carrier lifetime in the base, which is a key factor in the device speed performances. Our model is based on the observation of the degradation of the base transport factor caused by the LET heavy base doping and its variation with the base current. We revise the conventional charge control model of the bipolar junction transistor to account for these features and assess the concentration of the base minority carriers captured in the quantum wells (QWs). Our approach based on the Zhang and Leburton (Z-L) rate equation model enables us to obtain the device microscopic parameters, such as the capture time, the base lifetime and the base transit time in terms of the LET emitter current and the base current, as well as the design parameters such as the doping concentration, the base width, the QW width and number, and their location. Whereas the base recombination lifetime can be estimated to be of the order of a fraction of a nanosecond, the QW capture time is found to be of the order of a picosecond or less. Our simulation results agree well with the LET optical frequency response obtained experimentally.We carry out the physical modeling of the light emitting transistor (LET) operation with the focus on the carrier lifetime in the base, which is a key factor in the device speed performances. Our model is based on the observation of the degradation of the base transport factor caused by the LET heavy base doping and its variation with the base current. We revise the conventional charge control model of the bipolar junction transistor to account for these features and assess the concentration of the base minority carriers captured in the quantum wells (QWs). Our approach based on the Zhang and Leburton (Z-L) rate equation model enables us to obtain the device microscopic parameters, such as the capture time, the base lifetime and the base transit time in terms of the LET emitter current and the base current, as well as the design parameters such as the doping concentration, the base width, the QW width and number, and their location. Whereas the base recombination lifetime can be estimated to be of the ord...
Personal Fabrication as an Operational Strategy: Value of Delegating Production to Customer

Problem definition: There is a growing interest in the industry around 3D printing. A related phenomenon is personal fabrication (PF) in which a firm sells products' design and lets the customers personalize and manufacture the product using 3D printing services. In this paper, we characterize the market and operational conditions that make PF an attractive operational strategy. Methodology/results: We propose a cylindrical market model capturing customer heterogeneity in taste (horizontal) and quality (vertical) dimensions while allowing the market to be skewed with high vs low valuation customers. We identify three key ways PF strategy can be beneficial and characterize their respective market and operational conditions. Firstly, the PF strategy can improve firm profitability through personalization. Personalization benefits the firm the most when the market is vertically concentrated but horizontally dispersed. Secondly, the PF strategy can help the firm through postponement of product positioning. Thirdly, the PF strategy enables easier design adjustments and the firm can invest in Design for Manufacturability (DFM) to improve customers' cost-to-quality trade-off. Then, we show that the feasibility of partial PF strategy --delegating only a proportion of the product for customer production-- critically depends on the cost evolution of 3D printing. Firms need to wait for technological maturity and cost competitiveness for benefiting from a smaller delegation. PF strategy can also be used for market entry. Under high cost disadvantage levels, the entrant will focus exclusively on the high-end market. When the cost disadvantage reduces, the entrant will compete for the whole market. Managerial Implications: Our results characterize the attractiveness of PF strategy based on the nature of personalization, market composition, demand uncertainty, and IP/liability restrictions of the product.
Decentralized Optimal Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles in a Corridor

In earlier work, we established a decentralized optimal control framework for coordinating online connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in specific transportation segments, e.g., urban intersections, merging roadways, roundabouts, and speed reduction zones. In this paper, we address coordination of CAVs in a corridor with multiple such scenarios and derive a closed-form analytical solution that includes interior boundary conditions. We evaluate the effectiveness of the solution through simulation in VISSIM. The proposed approach reduces significantly both fuel consumption and travel time for the CAVs compared to the baseline scenario where traditional human-driven vehicles without control are considered.
Facile synthesis of NFL-ZnWO4 for pseudocapacitor applications

In this report, NFL-ZnWO4 was synthesized by a hydrothermal route and investigated for application in supercapacitors for the first time. The physical and chemical characterizations of the prepared nanomaterial were analyzed by SEM, EDS, XRD and XPS, respectively. Supercapacitors study of CV, GCD and EIS revealed that NFL-ZnWO4 exhibits good electrochemical properties. The high specific capacitance value of 107.7 F g-1 was achieved at 5 mV s−1 . These findings demonstrated that ZnWO4 could be a promising electrode material candidate and highly desirable for application of high property supercapacitors in the future.
MP02-16 UROLOGIC INJURY AND FISTULA FOLLOWING HYSTERECTOMY FOR BENIGN INDICATIONS

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES:Genitourinary injury and vaginal fistula formation are rare but devastating complications following hysterectomy. The literature regarding this topic is limited and gene...
Higher-order Network for Action Recognition

Capturing spatiotemporal dynamics is an essential topic in video recognition. In this paper, we present learnable higher-order operations as a generic family of building blocks for capturing spatiotemporal dynamics from RGB input video space. Similar to higher-order functions, the weights of higher-order operations are themselves derived from the data with learnable parameters. Classical architectures such as residual learning and network-in-network are first-order operations where weights are directly learned from the data. Higher-order operations make it easier to capture context-sensitive patterns, such as motion. Self-attention models are also higher-order operations, but the attention weights are mostly computed from an affine operation or dot product. Learnable higher-order operations can be more generic and flexible. Experimentally, we show that on the task of video recognition, our higher-order models can achieve results on par with or better than the existing state-of-the-art methods on Something-Something (V1 and V2), Kinetics and Charades datasets.
Care and the Nonhuman Politics of Veteran Drunk Driving

Military veteran drunk driving is a field of pathologized behavior in which traces of military excess meet the surveillance and banality of home-front safety. In communities with significant veteran populations, drunk driving blurs the lines between battlefield dangers and more familiar modes of domestic disorderliness, and the deployment of special mechanisms for dealing with law-breaking veterans gives rise to novel combinations of dangerous and deserving, criminal and cared-for. This article recognizes and questions the production of knowledge that is as ambivalent as the scenes of life from which it emerges.
Cannabis use during pregnancy in the United States: The role of depression.

Abstract Background Cannabis use is increasing in the United States. Prior work suggests tobacco use in pregnancy is much more common among those with depression. It is not known whether cannabis use is also more common among this especially vulnerable group. Identifying those at highest risk for cannabis use is required to direct prevention and intervention efforts. Methods Data were drawn from the 2005–2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), an annual, cross-sectional sample of persons ages 12 and older representative of the US. The prevalence of past-30-day cannabis use by depression status (past-12-month) and by sociodemographic factors and perception of risk associated with cannabis use was estimated among pregnant women. Results Cannabis use was significantly more common among pregnant women with, compared to without, depression (12.7 % vs. 3.7 %; odds ratio (OR) = 3.8 (95 % confidence interval 2.8, 5.0)). This was the case across all sociodemographic subgroups. The relationship between depression and cannabis use was significantly stronger among those who perceived moderate-great risk (OR = 6.9 (3.7, 13.0)) compared with no risk (OR = 1.6 (1.1, 2.4); Pint = 0.0003) associated with regular use. Conclusions Women with depression are more than three times more likely to use cannabis during pregnancy. Disparities in cannabis use among pregnant women by depression status appear to be echoing trends in tobacco use. Education about risks associated with cannabis use in pregnancy and prevention, akin to those for prenatal tobacco use, may be needed among pregnant women who are depressed to stem this increase and potentially growing disparity.
Online Resource Allocation with Personalized Learning

Joint online learning and resource allocation is a fundamental problem inherent in many applications. In a general setting, heterogeneous customers arrive sequentially, each of which can be allocated to a resource in an online fashion. Customers stochastically consume the resources, allocations yield stochastic rewards, and the system receives feedback outcomes with delay. We introduce a generic framework that judiciously synergizes online learning with a broad class of online resource allocation mechanisms, where the sequence of customer contexts is adversarial and the customer reward and the resource consumption are stochastic and unknown. First, we propose an online algorithm for a general resource allocation problem, called Personalized Resource Allocation while Learning with Delay (PRA-LD), which strikes a three-way balance between exploration, exploitation, and hedging against adversarial arrival sequence. We provide a performance guarantee for this online algorithm in terms of Bayesian regret. Next, we develop our second online algorithm for an advance scheduling problem, called Personalized Advance Scheduling while Learning with Delay (PAS-LD), and evaluate its theoretical performance. The PAS-LD algorithm has a more delicate structure and offers multi-day scheduling while accounting for the no-show behavior of customers. We demonstrate the practicality and efficacy of our PAS-LD algorithm using clinical data from a partner health system. Our results show that the proposed algorithm provides promising results compared to several benchmark policies.
Implications of the Vertical Distribution of Ozone in the Troposphere

Ozone observed within the troposphere, but above the planetary boundary layer, may arrive there by various routes-descent from the stratosphere, ascent from the surface, or descent from the stratosphere followed by ascent. Once ozone has left the lower stratosphere through a tropopause break it can be transported horizontally for several days before descending to the boundary layer. During this period it may remain as a discrete maximum within a dry, stable layer or undergo mixing with the surrounding air (which may include anthropogenic oxidant) producing an ozone concentration which is uniform with height, in a relatively moist layer. High amounts of stratospheric ozone existing within the troposphere can be expected within dry, stable layers which intersect low tropopauses. High concentrations of stratospheric ozone have been observed to accumulate above a subsidence inversion at the same time that anthropogenic oxidant produces smog below the inversion. Examples are given of the use of isentropic trajectories, ozone profiles, temperature-humidity soundings, and synoptic weather maps in the study of tropospheric ozone.
Strategies to Reimagine the Stadium Experience

Despite the challenges presented by seemingly limitless sports and entertainment options, increasing ticket cost, and transportation issues, Shields and Rein argue that the in-stadium sports experience is important and worth fighting for. To persuade fans to spend their time and money attending sporting events, they contend that sports organizations will need to rethink their core proposition. They offer four strategies to solve the problem of fan attendance in the future: First, introducing scarcity. Second, eventizing the sports calendar. The third and fourth strategies, making the stadium experience frictionless and utilizing satellite stadiums, respectively, will require leveraging new technology including augmented reality and virtual reality. Embracing these strategies may not be easy, but they will be essential to preserving and reinvigorating stadium attendance going forward.
Simplifying Chemical Reaction Network Implementations with Two-Stranded DNA Building Blocks

In molecular programming, the Chemical Reaction Network model is often used to describe real or hypothetical systems. Often, an interesting computational task can be done with a known hypothetical Chemical Reaction Network, but often such networks have no known physical implementation. One of the important breakthroughs in the field was that any Chemical Reaction Network can be physically implemented, approximately, using DNA strand displacement mechanisms. This allows us to treat the Chemical Reaction Network model as a programming language and the implementation schemes as its compiler. This also suggests that it would be useful to optimize the result of such a compilation, and in general to find effective ways to design better DNA strand displacement systems. We discuss DNA strand displacement systems in terms of "motifs", short sequences of elementary DNA strand displacement reactions. We argue that describing such motifs in terms of their inputs and outputs, then building larger systems out of the abstracted motifs, can be an efficient way of designing DNA strand displacement systems. We discuss four previously studied motifs in this abstracted way, and present a new motif based on cooperative 4-way strand exchange. We then show how Chemical Reaction Network implementations can be built out of abstracted motifs, discussing existing implementations as well as presenting two new implementations based on 4-way strand exchange, one of which uses the new cooperative motif. The new implementations both have two desirable properties not found in existing implementations, namely both use only at most 2-stranded DNA complexes for signal and fuel complexes and both are physically reversible. There are reasons to believe that those properties may make them more robust and energy-efficient, but at the expense of using more fuel complexes than existing implementation schemes.
Evaluation of a new chromogenic agar for the detection of environmental Enterococcus.

CHROMagar Enterococcus (CHR), a new chromogenic medium not yet available for commercial purchase, was evaluated for the isolation of Enterococcus from environmental water samples. Its performance was evaluated in comparison to commercially available media, Enterococcosel agar and m-Enterococcus agar. Three consecutive tests were conducted with each test being performed with a newer batch of the CHR medium with improved media composition per batch. The recovery rate, positive predictive value, and sensitivity of the CHR medium improved with the subsequent re-formulation of the media components from 93.9%, 63%, and 92.6%, respectively, with the first batch of CHR, to 96.2%, 97.4%, and 95.7%, respectively, with the newest batch of CHR. The results showed that the newer batches of CHR performed better than the previous versions and are comparable to the other two commercial media tested. The CHR medium has been developed to decrease the turnaround time to approximately 18 h and be read more easily due to bigger colony morphology. The superior growth of colonies on CHR compared with other media in a shorter period of time can aid in the early detection of enterococci and may offer a user-friendly alternative to other media for the isolation of enterococci.
A Comparative Quantitative Assessment of Human Exposure to Various Antimicrobial-Resistant Bacteria among U.S. Ground Beef Consumers.

ABSTRACT Consumption of animal-derived meat products is suspected as an important exposure route to antimicrobial resistance, as the presence of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria (ARB) along the beef supply chain is well documented. A retail-to-fork quantitative exposure assessment was established to compare consumers' exposure to various ARB due to the consumption of ground beef with and without "raised without antibiotics" claims and to inform potential exposure mitigation strategies related to consumer practices. The microbial agents evaluated included Escherichia coli, tetracycline-resistant (TETr) E. coli, third-generation cephalosporin-resistant E. coli,Salmonella enterica, TETrS. enterica, third-generation cephalosporin-resistant S. enterica, nalidixic acid-resistant S. enterica, Enterococcus spp., TETrEnterococcus spp., erythromycin-resistant Enterococcus spp., Staphylococcus aureus, and methicillin-resistant S. aureus. The final model outputs were the probability of exposure to at least 0 to 6 log CFU microorganisms per serving of ground beef at the time of consumption. It was estimated that tetracycline resistance was more prevalent in ground beef compared with other types of resistance, among which the predicted average probability of ingesting TETrEnterococcus was highest (6.2% of ingesting at least 0 log CFU per serving), followed by TETrE. coli (3.1%) and TETrSalmonella (0.0001%), given common product purchase preferences and preparation behaviors among beef consumers in the United States. The effectiveness of consumer-related interventions was estimated by simulating the differences in exposure as a result of changes in consumer practices in purchasing, handling, and preparing ground beef. The results indicated that proper use of recommended safe cooking and food preparation practices mitigates ARB exposure more effectively than choosing raised without antibiotics compared with conventional beef. HIGHLIGHTS
Binocular vs. monocular recovery experience differentially promote recovery from visual deficits in a mouse model of amblyopia

Abstract Altered visual experience during monocular deprivation (MD) profoundly changes in ocular dominance (OD) in the developing primary visual cortex (V1). MD-driven changes in OD are an experimental model of amblyopia, where early-life alterations in vision lead visual disruption in adulthood. Current treatments for amblyopia include patching of the dominant eye, and more recently-developed binocular therapies. However, the relative impact of monocular vs. binocular recovery experiences on recovery of function in V1 is not well understood. Using single-unit recording, we compared how binocular recovery [BR] or reverse occlusion [RO] of identical duration and content affects OD and visual response recovery in mouse binocular V1 after a period of MD. We also tested how BR and RO affected MD-driven alterations of parvalbumin expression, and visually-driven expression of cFos in parvalbumin-positive and negative neurons. Finally, we tested how BR and RO affected recovery of normal visual acuity for the two eyes in the context of visually-driven behavior. We find that BR is quantitatively superior with respect to normalization of V1 neurons’ OD, visually-driven cFos expression, and visual acuity for the two eyes. However, MD-driven changes in the firing rate and response properties of V1 principal neuron and fast-spiking interneuron populations do not recover fully after either BR or RO. Binocular matching of orientation preference also remains disrupted in V1 neurons after both forms of recovery experience. Thus BR and RO, analogs of differing treatment regimens for amblyopia, differentially impact various aspects of visual recovery in a mouse model for amblyopia. Significance Statement Amblyopia resulting from altered childhood eye function is a leading cause of lifelong vision loss. Treatment typically involves patching of the dominant eye (forcing monocular visual experience), and produces only partial recovery of vision. Using a well-established mouse model of amblyopia, we directly compared how two types of visual experiences influence recovery of visual function. Our findings suggest that binocular vs. monocular visual experience differentially effect restoration of normal visual responses in cortical neurons, visually-driven neuronal gene expression, and visual acuity. Understanding how the quality of recovery experience impacts visual system recovery in amblyopia should provide critical insights for clinical strategies for its treatment.
From Parallelization to Customization – Challenges and Opportunities

With large-scale deployment of FPGAs in both private and public clouds in the past a few years, customizable computing is transitioning from advanced research into mainstream computing. In this talk, I shall first showcase a few big data and machine learning applications that benefit significantly from customization. Next, I shall discuss the challenges of FPGA programming for the efficient accelerator designs, which presents a significant barrier to many software programmers, despite the recent advances in high-level synthesis. Then, I shall highlight our recent progress on automated compilation for customized archictectures, such as systolic arrays, stencils, and more general CPPs (composable parallel and pipelined) architectures. I shall also present our ongoing work on HeteroCL, a highly productive multi-paradigm programming framework targeting accelerator-rich heterogeneous architectures, and is being used as a focal point to integrate various optimizaiton techniques and support high-level domain-specific languages (DSL) such as Halide and Pytorch. Our goal is to “demacratize customizable computing” so that most (if not all) software programmers can design optimized accelerators on FPGAs.
Effect of Oral Azithromycin vs Placebo on COVID-19 Symptoms in Outpatients With SARS-CoV-2 Infection: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance Azithromycin has been hypothesized to have activity against SARS-CoV-2. Objective To determine whether oral azithromycin in outpatients with SARS-CoV-2 infection leads to absence of self-reported COVID-19 symptoms at day 14. Design, setting, and participants Randomized clinical trial of azithromycin vs matching placebo conducted from May 2020 through March 2021. Outpatients from the US were enrolled remotely via internet-based surveys and followed up for 21 days. Eligible participants had a positive SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test result (nucleic acid amplification or antigen) within 7 days prior to enrollment, were aged 18 years or older, and were not hospitalized at the time of enrollment. Among 604 individuals screened, 297 were ineligible, 44 refused participation, and 263 were enrolled. Participants, investigators, and study staff were masked to treatment randomization. Interventions Participants were randomized in a 2:1 fashion to a single oral 1.2-g dose of azithromycin (n = 171) or matching placebo (n = 92). Main outcomes and measures The primary outcome was absence of self-reported COVID-19 symptoms at day 14. There were 23 secondary clinical end points, including all-cause hospitalization at day 21. Results Among 263 participants who were randomized (median age, 43 years; 174 [66%] women; 57% non-Hispanic White and 29% Latinx/Hispanic), 76% completed the trial. The trial was terminated by the data and safety monitoring committee for futility after the interim analysis. At day 14, there was no significant difference in proportion of participants who were symptom free (azithromycin: 50%; placebo: 50%; prevalence difference, 0%; 95% CI, -14% to 15%; P > .99). Of 23 prespecified secondary clinical end points, 18 showed no significant difference. By day 21, 5 participants in the azithromycin group had been hospitalized compared with 0 in the placebo group (prevalence difference, 4%; 95% CI, -1% to 9%; P = .16). Conclusions and relevance Among outpatients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, treatment with a single dose of azithromycin compared with placebo did not result in greater likelihood of being symptom free at day 14. These findings do not support the routine use of azithromycin for outpatient SARS-CoV-2 infection. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04332107.
Characteristics of Methamphetamine-associated Cardiomyopathy and the Impact of Methamphetamine Use on Cardiac Dysfunction.

Methamphetamine-associated cardiomyopathy (MACM) in an increasingly prevalent disease yet presenting clinical characteristics have not been well studied. We studied consecutive patients with MACM presenting between June 2018 and March 2020 who were interviewed for drug use and medical history. We retrospectively identified an age- and gender-matched cohort of Non-MACM (NMACM) patients and compared clinical characteristics. 140 patients (70 MACM and 70 NMACM) were studied. MACM patients were young (49.6 ± 10 years) and predominantly male (94%). Compared to NMACM, MACM patients were more likely to be Caucasian (21% vs 6%, p = 0.007) and homeless (47% vs 7%, p = 0.001). MACM was characterized by lower left ventricular ejection fraction (EF) (p
Probing the Role of Chirality in Phospholipid Membranes.

Nucleotides, amino acids, sugars, and lipids are almost ubiquitously homochiral within individual cells on Earth. While oligonucleotides and proteins exist as one natural chirality throughout the tree of life, two stereoisomers of phospholipids have separately emerged in archaea and bacteria, an evolutionary divergence known as "the lipid divide". Within this review, we focus on the emergence of phospholipid homochirality and compare the stability of synthetic homochiral and heterochiral membranes in vitro. We discuss chemical probes designed to study the stereospecific interactions of lipid membranes in vitro. Overall, we aim to highlight studies that help elucidate the determinants of stereospecific interactions between lipids, peptides, and small molecule ligands. Continued work in understanding the drivers of favorable interactions between chiral molecules and biological membranes will lead to the design of increasingly selective chemical tools for bioorthogonal labeling of lipid membranes and safer membrane-associating pharmaceuticals.
Tax Reform in a Time of Crisis

On January 17, 2014, Pepperdine University School of Law and Tax Analysts sponsored a symposium in Malibu, California, at which 21 of the nation’s leading tax academics, practitioners, and journalists discussed the prospects for tax reform as it is affected by two crises facing Washington, D.C.: dangerously misaligned spending and tax policies, which have resulted in a crippling $17.4 trillion national debt; and the IRS’s alleged targeting of conservative political organizations. This introduction to the symposium summarizes the keynote (Joe Bankman) and luncheon (Bruce Bartlett) addresses and the three panels.Symposium participants:Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.)Joseph Bankman (Stanford)Bruce Bartlett (former Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary) Joshua Blank (NYU)Thomas Bost (Pepperdine)Dorothy Brown (Emory)Karen Brown (George Washington)Paul Caron (Pepperdine)Miranda Perry Fleischer (San Diego)Khrista Johnson (Pepperdine)Edward Kleinbard (USC)Donald Korb (Sullivan & Cromwell; former IRS Chief Counsel)Ruth Mason (Virginia)Robert Popovich (Pepperdine)James Repetti (Boston College)Nancy Staudt (USC)Joseph Thorndike (Tax Analysts)Donald Tobin (Ohio State)Richard Winchester (Thomas Jefferson)George Yin (Virginia)Eric Zolt (UCLA)
Chapter 5 Adaptive Eye-Hand Coordination: Implications of Prism Adaptation for Perceptual-Motor Organization

Publisher Summary Perceptual-motor adaptability is certainly one of the more salient and important human capacities. The most obvious example of such adaptability is skilled performance, ranging from primitive athletic and linguistic abilities to more modern skills, such as machine control and performance in alien work environments. Less obvious, but in many ways more fundamental, is the ability to recover from systematic encoding dysfunctions arising from growth, pathology, or drift that misrepresent stimulus information and therefore, specify inappropriate responses. The study of such perceptual adaptation is commonly called “prism adaptation.” Skill learning and perceptual adaptation seem to be fundamentally different processes. The chapter illustrates a system analysis comparison of the two processes. The stimulus for skill learning is an objective change or temporal sequence of changes in the distal stimulus while the stimulus for perceptual adaptation is a systematic distortion such that the relationship between distal and proximal stimuli is changed in some important respect. Skill learning consists in determining the parameters of the changing stimulus (perceptual learning) and modifying motor programs (motor learning) such that the response becomes spatially congruent with the stimulus.
Nutrient Contributions from Alluvial Soils Associated with the Restoration of Shallow Water Habitat in the Lower Missouri River

The Missouri River has been extensively altered as the result of channelization, bank stabilization, and the construction of six main stem reservoirs. In response to the resultant habitat loss, the US Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with restoring approximately 8100 ha of shallow water habitat (SWH), in part, for the benefit of the endangered pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus). Construction of off-channel habitats involves the removal and disposal of excavated alluvium either by direct discharge into the river or by secondary erosion, which raised concerns regarding the introduction of sediment and associated nutrients into the Missouri River. Soils from nine side-channel chutes were sampled to represent nutrient concentrations from habitat restoration activities. Soils from 12 historically undisturbed sites were also sampled to represent reference conditions in the Missouri River flood plain. The results of this study indicate that nutrient characteristics of soils from selected SWH locations generally are similar to those of historically undisturbed soils. The estimated mass of total phosphorus from chutes accounted for 1.9% of Missouri River and 0.5% of Mississippi River total phosphorus loads during the 1993–2012 analysis period. The mass of nitrate, the constituent most closely related to gulf hypoxia, was 0.01% or less of the Missouri and Mississippi River nitrate loads. Sediment volumes from the chutes accounted for 3.1 and 1.5% of total suspended loads from the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Overall, the introduced sediment from side-channel chute construction associated with SWH restoration accounts for a small portion of total nutrient and sediment transport in the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Published 2014. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. River Research and Applications published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A reporter gene analysis of penicillin biosynthesis gene expression in Penicillium chrysogenum and its regulation by nitrogen and glucose catabolite repression.

Abstract Vectors which possess a truncated niaD gene encoding nitrate reductase were developed to allow targeted gene integration during transformation of an niaD mutant Penicillium chrysogenum host. The Penicillium genes pcbC and penAB are immediately adjacent to each other and are divergently transcribed, with an intergenic control region serving as their promoters. Gene fusions were constructed with a reporter gene, uidA, which encodes beta-glucuronidase. The pcbC-penAB intergenic region was fused to the uidA gene in both orientations so that regulated expression of each structural gene could be investigated. These fusion genes were targeted to the chromosomal site of the niaD locus of P. chrysogenum, and their expression was examined under different growth conditions. The expression of each of these penicillin biosynthesis genes was found to be regulated by nitrogen repression, glucose repression, and growth stage control.
EVOLUTIONARY RELATIONSHIPS AMONG ABC TRANSPORTERS

Publisher Summary The adenosine triphosphate-binding cassette (ABC) transporters represent a fascinating superfamily of proteins that transports a wide range of substrates across a variety of biological membranes. ABC transporters or traffic ATPases comprise a superfamily of proteins that translocates a wide range of substrates across a variety of cellular membranes. The substrates transported include sugars, amino acids, peptides, proteins, metals, inorganic ions, toxins, and antibiotics. This family of proteins is defined by a functional transport unit that includes two adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-binding domains and two hydrophobic domains, each containing five to eight membrane spanning regions. The identification of the structural elements that account for the direction of translocation and subcellular localization remains elusive. The fundamental question of how the substrates move across membranes is unknown.
Graph Structure of the Web: A Survey

The subject of this survey is the directed graph induced by the hyperlinks between Web pages; we refer to this as the Web graph. Nodes represent static html pages and hyperlinks represent directed edges between them. Recent estimates [5] suggest that there are several hundred million nodes in the Web graph; this quantity is growing by several percent each month. The average node has roughly seven hyperlinks (directed edges) to other pages, making for a total of several billion hyperlinks in all.
Evidence for the Presence of RNA in the Purified Virions of Vaccinia Virus

Vaccinia virus, strain WR, was propagated in HeLa cells, L mouse fibroblats, or primary chicken embryo fibroblasts in the presence of [5- (3)H]uridine. Carefully purified virions were found to contain significant amounts of labeled trichloroacetic acid-precipitable material which was rendered acid soluble when digested with pancreatic RNase or hydrolyzed in alkali. Controlled degradation of virions with Nonidet P-40 and 2-mercaptoethanol demonstrated that 65 to 80% of the [5- (3)H]uridine-labeled molecules resided in the viral core. When the total nucleic acids were extracted from viral cores prepared from virions propagated in HeLa cells, 30 to 50% of the total incorporated [5- (3)H]uridine was found in RNA; in L mouse fibroblasts, 40 to 50%; in primary chicken embryo fibroblasts, 50 to 60%. The RNA molecules do not appear to be covalently linked to the viral DNA genome but sediment in sodium dodecyl sulfate-sucrose gradients as 8 to 10S species relative to ribosomal RNA.
Consequentialism, Metaphysical Realism and the Argument from Cluelessness

Lenman's ‘argument from cluelessness’ against consequentialism is that a significant percentage of the consequences of our actions are wholly unknowable, so that when it comes to assessing the moral quality of our actions, we are without a clue. I distinguish the argument from cluelessness from traditional epistemic objections to consequentialism. The argument from cluelessness should be no more problematic for consequentialism than the argument from epistemological scepticism should be for metaphysical realism. This puts those who would reject consequentialism on the ground of cluelessness in an awkward philosophical position.
Sensors, Surface Acoustic Wave Sensors

Surface acoustic wave microsensors are microchips that usually have a sensing film applied to the substrate surface. They differ from silicon-based microcircuits that form the basis for most integrated circuit technology today, in that they are based on piezoelectric versus semiconductor substrates and are usually much less complex. Microsensors are usually defined as sensors of micron dimensions or are made by the same fabrication techniques that are used for integrated circuits. Microsensors have several advantages over older sensor technologies, including small size, low cost, and typically better performance. The relatively rapid development of surface acoustic wave (SAW) microsensors has resulted from the demand for low-cost, high-performance sensors to measure such things as hazardous gases, biological pathogens, chemical and biological weapons, automotive emissions, and indoor air quality. Additionally, there is strong interest in developing an electronic nose for both industrial and laboratory applications. As a result of these advantages and the strong demand, the development of SAW microsensors has grown rapidly during the last twenty years. Keywords: Surface Acoustic Wave (SAM) microsensors; Experimental surface cleaning; surface energy; Dew point measurement; Temperature measurement procedures; Applications; Polymer film
Human Milk Glycosaminoglycans Inhibit HIV Glycoprotein gp120 Binding to its Host Cell CD4 Receptor

The binding of the HIV envelope glycoprotein, gp120, to its host cell receptor, CD4, is inhibited in a solid phase assay by a glycosaminoglycan of human milk; this binding is the essential first step in HIV infectivity. The human milk glycosaminoglycans were identified in this study. Pooled, fractionated human milk contained dermatan sulfate, heparin, heparan sulfate, and chondroitin sulfate. The ability of this glycosaminoglycan fraction to inhibit binding was unaffected by digestion with lytic enzymes specific for heparin, heparan sulfate and dermatan sulfate, but was lost when the milk fraction was treated with lytic enzymes specific for chondroitin sulfate. Furthermore, a purified milk fraction with high specific inhibitory activity contained chondroitin sulfate but not other glycosaminoglycans. This indicates that the ability of human milk to inhibit gp 120 binding to CD4 may be attributed to chondroitin sulfate or to a chondroitin sulfate-like moiety rather than to other components of human milk. We speculate that this human milk glycosaminoglycan could limit the rate of postnatal vertical transmission of HIV in breast-fed infants of HIV-infected mothers