cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Is Selective Therapy of Recurrent Nephrolithiasis Possible

We evaluated, in 128 patients with recurrent nephrolithiasis, the efficacy of special treatment programs for some of the common causes of nephrolithiasis, chosen on the basis of their ability to correct underlying physicochemical and physiologic derangements. Therapy included sodium cellulose phosphate for 18 patients with absorptive hypercalciuria, thiazide diuretics for 27 patients with absorptive hypercalciuria and for 10 with renal hypercalciuria, orthophosphate for eight patients with hypophosphatemic absorptive hypercalciuria, allopurinol for 21 patients with hyperuricosuric calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis, thiazide and allopurinol for 26 patients with absorptive hypercalciuria with hyperuricosuria, and high fluid intake and/or low calcium diet for 22 patients with normocalciuric nephrolithiasis. Patients in all seven groups had a significant reduction in stone formation during 1.70 to 3.37 years of treatment, as compared with the pretreatment period of three years. Remission was found in 70 to 91 percent of patients and reduced stone formation rate was encountered in 88 to 100 percent. Each treatment program produced a significant decline in stone formation rate from 1.90 to 2.28 stones per year to 0.09 to 0.55 stones per year. The actual number of stones formed during treatment was significantly lower than the number predicted from the pretreatment frequency of stone formation (less than 26 percent). The results provide evidence supporting a selective approach to therapy of nephrolithiasis.
Reduced Immunogenicity of Rat Renal Allografts After Photochemical Donor Pretreatment and Passive Transfer of Graft Protection

Photochemical pretreatment of the kidney donor (Sprague-Dawley rats/SD) with 8-methoxypsoralen (8-MOP) and ex vivo longwave ultraviolet (UVA) irradiation of the kidney graft (PUVA therapy) significantly prolonged survival in allogeneic recipients (BD IX rats). After more than 100 days 7 long-term surviving PUVA-pretreated SD kidneys were retransplanted into BD IX rats. Seven out of 7 secondary recipients survived for more than 100 days. Twenty BD IX recipients of normal SD kidneys were treated at the time of transplantation with serum (1 ml i.v.) and/or spleen lymphocytes (1x107 i.v.) obtained from the PUVA-treated long-term survivors. A prolonged graft survival was achieved in 7 our of 20 rats, among them 4 out of 8 recipients of the serum-treated group. In conclusion, the long-term survival of PUVA-treated rat renal allografts is associated with a strong reduction of graft immunogenicity and the development of graft protecting humoral as well as cellular effectors.
Prepubertal Testicular Torsion: Subsequent Fertility

Eighteen patients were reviewed 7 to 23 years after prolonged unilateral testicular torsion. They had all undergone surgical untwisting with replacement of the nonviable testis in the scrotum during prepubertal period. Five patients were now married and had fathered one or more children. Thirteen patients were unmarried. There was absence of testis on the affected side in 14 of 18 patients. Four patients had severe testicular atrophy on the affected side (testicular volume 25 mL). Seminal analysis was done in 13 unmarried men and it was completely normal in 10 patients. Two patients had low sperm density but normal semen volume and motility. One patient had pathologic semen analysis. IgG and IgA specific mixed agglutination reaction (MAR) test did not show evidence of sperm autoantibodies in any patient. Our clinical experience shows that, after prepubertal torsion, the contralateral testis undergoes normal development. Furthermore, torsion in the prepubertal male does not cause autosensitization and diminished fertility in adult life.
The Advanced Urine Chemistry Survey

A special urine chemistry survey was implemented by the College of American Pathologists during the year 1981. Ten analytes are included in this survey, including aldosterone, free catecholamines, total catecholamines, estriol, 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid, 17-ketogenic steroids, 17-ketosteroids, vanillylmandelic acid, cortisol, and metanephrines. Data obtained from 1981 and 1982 was derived from 398 subscriptions. Inadequacies in quantitative analytic methods for aldosterone, 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid, 17-ketogenic steroids, and urinary free cortisol were demonstrated. Some screening methods for 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid yielded false results.
Oral Phentolamine in Nonspecific Erectile Insufficiency

Excerpt In patients with erectile insufficiency, it is often difficult to find a definite cause for the problem when clinical vascular disease, neurologic deficiency, obvious psychological problems...
A Rationale for the Routine Use of Transverse Abdominal Incisions in Infants and Children

Although transverse abdominal incisions (TAI) are valued for their excellent exposure in the newborn, infant, and child, measurements to support this clinical impression have been lacking. The abdomens of 80 infants and children and 11 premature infants were measured and evaluated and correlated with growth. It was demonstrated that the younger the child, the relatively larger the abdominal cavity and wall. Because of the anatomical differences between the abdomen of adults and small children, the cavity of the latter resembles a horizontally oriented ellipsoid; accordingly, TAI give greater exposure. The younger the child, the larger proportionately was the costoiliac space, allowing easier lateral extension of the incision, if necessary. The umbilicus is low in infants and small children and the transverse supraumbilical incision may be placed over the anatomical center of the abdominal cavity. The conclusion drawn was that the younger the child, the greater the rationale for routinely employing transverse abdominal incisions.
An In-Depth Look at Quotient Modules

The coset G-space of a finite group and a subgroup is a fundamental module of study of Schur and others around 1930; for example, its endomorphism algebra is a Hecke algebra of double cosets. We study and review its generalization Q to Hopf subalgebras, especially its tensor powers up to similarity as modules, or Morita equivalence of the endomorphism algebras. We prove that Q has a nonzero integral if and only if the modular function restricts to the modular function of the Hopf subalgebra. We also study Q and its tensor powers in terms of annihilator ideals, sigma categories, trace ideals, Burnside ring formulas, and if over a semisimple Hopf algebra, the depth of Q in terms of the McKay quiver and the Green ring.
Expansion of Rebellion: From Periphery to Heartland

Why do some rebellions expand gradually as rebel groups challenge in sequence, whereas other rebellions explode instantaneously as rebel groups challenge in unison? To address this question, we develop a dynamic and spatial model of rebellion that illustrates patterns of war fought between a hegemon (government) and its challengers (rebel groups). Our model incorporates three features into the standard coordination game: (a) potential rebel groups (players) are uncertain about the government’s strength; (b) battle outcomes are unpredictable; (c) these groups can be heterogeneous in terms of resolve and strength. In contrast to what existing theories commonly presume, our theory suggests that the sequence and timing of challenges are determined endogenously, depending on rebel groups’ resolve and strength. Through equilibrium analyses, we demonstrate that while simultaneous challenges are likely when rebel groups are relatively homogeneous, sequential challenges may emerge when one group is outstanding in ...
On the Convergence Time of Dual Subgradient Methods for Strongly Convex Programs

This paper studies the convergence time of dual gradient methods for general (possibly nondifferentiable) strongly convex programs. For general convex programs, the convergence time of dual subgradient/gradient methods with simple running averages (running averages started from iteration 0) is known to be $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon ^{2}})$ . This paper shows that the convergence time for general strongly convex programs is $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon })$ . This paper also considers a variation of the average scheme, called the sliding running averages, and shows that if the dual function of the strongly convex program is locally quadratic then the convergence time of the dual gradient method with sliding running averages is $O(\log (\frac{1}{\epsilon }))$ . The convergence time analysis is further verified by numerical experiments.
Characteristics of the cAMP response unit.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the characteristics of the cyclic AMP (cAMP) response unit. cAMP regulates a striking number of physiological processes, including intermediary metabolism, cellular proliferation, and neuronal signaling, by altering basic patterns of gene expression. In the liver, cAMP stimulates glucose production in part by inducing the transcription of the gene for phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase (PEPCK), which is a rate-limiting gluconeogenic enzyme, more than 15-fold. Cellular effects of cAMP occur via cAMP-dependent protein kinase. Phosphorylation is the most likely mechanism by which cAMP would regulate gene expression. In a study described in the chapter, by using DNase I protection assay, CRE-binding (CREB) activity was detected in nuclear extracts of PC12 cells. Experiments showing that the dimerization and transcriptional efficacy of CREB are each stimulated by phosphorylation at distinct sites and suggest that this activity is regulated by multiple kinases in vivo. Nuclear extracts prepared from cAMP-treated PC12 cells appear to be identical to untreated cells in both DNA-binding and transcriptional activity, but the absence of detectable changes in these parameters might arise from the liberation of kinases during extract preparation, which causes extensive phosphorylation of CREB and subsequently deregulates the extract, or the loss of other nuclear factors required for transcriptional regulation by cAMP.
Polysaccharide-mediated synthesis of melanins from serotonin and other 5-hydroxy indoles

Aim: As a continuation of our research on the melanin formation from catecholamines, we studied the polysaccharide-mediated oxidation of serotonin and other 5-hydroxy indoles into melanin-like materials. As for the catecholamines, we observed that many polysaccharides promote the oxidation of such compounds, particularly in the presence of Cu2+. Methodology: The reactions were monitored using reverse phase-HPLC and size-exclusion chromatography techniques. Melanin-like materials were purified through dialysis and characterized using UV-Vis and Fourier transform IR spectroscopic techniques. Results: One such material, synthesized from chondroitin sulfate type A and serotonin in the presence of Cu2+ was found to affect the release of IL-1β and IL-6 cytokines from immune cells.
A tale of fat tails

Abstract We document the extent to which major macroeconomic series, used to inform linear DSGE models, can be characterized by power laws whose indices we estimate via maximum likelihood. Assuming data follow a linear recursion with multiplicative noise, low estimated indices suggest fat tails. We then ask whether standard DSGE models under constant gain learning can replicate those fat tails by an appropriate increase in the estimated gain and without much change in the transmission mechanism of shocks. We find that is largely the case via implementation of a minimum distance estimation method that eschews any allegiance to distributional assumptions.
Single Chip LIDAR with Discrete Beam Steering by Digital Micromirror Device

MEMS-based beam steering by Digital Micromirror Device illuminated by pulsed laser enables single-chip LIDAR. We demonstrate 48° field of view, 3.4k points/sec scan rate, and <1cm accuracy for 1.2 m distance across five steering angles.
Machine Learning Models that Remember Too Much

Machine learning (ML) is becoming a commodity. Numerous ML frameworks and services are available to data holders who are not ML experts but want to train predictive models on their data. It is important that ML models trained on sensitive inputs (e.g., personal images or documents) not leak too much information about the training data. We consider a malicious ML provider who supplies model-training code to the data holder, does \emph{not} observe the training, but then obtains white- or black-box access to the resulting model. In this setting, we design and implement practical algorithms, some of them very similar to standard ML techniques such as regularization and data augmentation, that "memorize" information about the training dataset in the model\textemdash yet the model is as accurate and predictive as a conventionally trained model. We then explain how the adversary can extract memorized information from the model. We evaluate our techniques on standard ML tasks for image classification (CIFAR10), face recognition (LFW and FaceScrub), and text analysis (20 Newsgroups and IMDB). In all cases, we show how our algorithms create models that have high predictive power yet allow accurate extraction of subsets of their training data.
Unintended RF energy coupling during endoscopy.

Endoscopy is a minimally invasive surgical procedure in which a long, thin tube is inserted directly into the natural openings of the body to observe and/or interact with an internal organ or tissue. Unfortunately, thermal injuries outside the surgeon's vision often occur during such surgical interventions, and may cause devastating complications. To date, the underlying mechanism of these thermal injuries has not yet been delineated. In this paper, we demonstrate for the first time that unintended RadioFrequency (RF) coupling occurs during endoscopy, and can be a major cause of thermal injuries. In-vivo tests in porcine models are performed, showing unintentional energy transfer to a breathing tube in close proximity to the endoscopy equipment.
Wavelength-selective switching: architecture and technology overview

Wavelength-selective switching is generally considered to be an essential element for building agile “all optical” mesh telecommunications networks. This paper will provide an overview of the various node architectures suitable for implementing such networks. It will also provide an overview of the various technologies, that have been developed for such networks, including integrated optical waveguide circuits and free-space optical devices. While these technologies were largely developed for telecommunications applications, they may also applicable for computer networks.
Quantitative PCR assays for detection of five arctic fish species: Lota lota, Cottus cognatus, Salvelinus alpinus, Salvelinus malma, and Thymallus arcticus from environmental DNA

The North Slope of Alaska contains arctic fish populations that are important for subsistence of local human populations, and are under threat from natural resource extraction and climate change. We designed and evaluated four quantitative PCR assays for the detection of environmental DNA from five Alaskan fish species present on the North Slope of Alaska: burbot (Lota lota), arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus), Dolly Varden (Salvelinus malma), arctic grayling (Thymallus arcticus), and slimy sculpin (Cottus cognatus). All assays were designed and tested for species specificity and sensitivity, and all assays detected target species from filtered water samples collected from the field. These assays will enable efficient and economical detection and monitoring of these species in lakes and rivers. This in turn will provide managers with improved knowledge of current distributions and future range shifts associated with climate and development threats, enabling more timely management.
Risk Management and Regulation

The evolution of risk management has resulted from the interplay of financial crises, risk management practices, and regulatory actions. In the 1970s, research lay the intellectual foundations for the risk management practices that were systematically implemented in the 1980s as bond trading revolutionized Wall Street. Quants developed dynamic hedging, Value-at-Risk, and credit risk models based on the insights of financial economics. In parallel, the Basel I framework created a level playing field among banks across countries. Following the 1987 stock market crash, the near failure of Salomon Brothers, and the failure of Drexel Burnham Lambert, in 1996 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published the Market Risk Amendment to the Basel I Capital Accord; the amendment went into effect in 1998. It led to a migration of bank risk management practices toward market risk regulations. The framework was further developed in the Basel II Accord, which, however, from the very beginning, was labeled as being procyclical due to the reliance of capital requirements on contemporaneous volatility estimates. Indeed, the failure to measure and manage risk adequately can be viewed as a key contributor to the 2008 global financial crisis. Subsequent innovations in risk management practices have been dominated by regulatory innovations, including capital and liquidity stress testing, macroprudential surcharges, resolution regimes, and countercyclical capital requirements.
Impact of Angular Spread in Moderately Large MIMO Systems Under Pilot Contamination

Pilot contamination is known to be one of the main bottlenecks for massive multi-input multioutput (MIMO) networks. For moderately large antenna arrays (of importance to recent/emerging deployments) and correlated MIMO, pilot contamination may not be the dominant limiting factor in certain scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, a rigorous characterization of the achievable rates and their explicit dependence on the angular spread (AS) is not available in the existing literature for moderately large antenna array regime. In this paper, considering eigen-beamforming (EBF) precoding, we derive an exact analytical expression for achievable rates in multicell MIMO systems under pilot contamination, and characterize the relation between the AS, array size, and respective user rates. Our analytical and simulation results reveal that the achievable rates for both the EBF and the regularized zero-forcing precoders follow a nonmonotonic behavior for increasing AS when the antenna array size is moderate. We argue that knowledge of this nonmonotonic behavior can be exploited to develop effective user-cell pairing techniques.
E-CLoG: Counting edge-centric local graphlets

In recent years, graphlet counting has emerged as an important task in topological graph analysis. However, the existing works on graphlet counting obtain the graphlet counts for the entire network as a whole. These works capture the key graphical patterns that prevail in a given network but they fail to meet the demand of the majority of real-life graph related prediction tasks such as link prediction, edge/node classification, etc., which require to build features for an edge (or a vertex) of a network. To meet the demand for such applications, efficient algorithms are needed for counting local graphlets within the context of an edge (or a vertex). In this work, we propose an efficient method, titled E-CLOG, for counting all 3,4 and 5 size local graphlets with the context of a given edge for its all different edge orbits. We also provide a shared-memory, multi-core implementation of E-CLOG, which makes it even more scalable for very large real-world networks. In particular, We obtain strong scaling on a variety of graphs (14x-20x on 36 cores). We provide extensive experimental results to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. For instance, we show that E-CLOG is faster than existing work by multiple order of magnitudes; for the Wordnet graph E-CLOG counts all 3,4 and 5-size local graphlets in 1.5 hours using a single thread and in only a few minutes using the parallel implementation, whereas the baseline method does not finish in more than 4 days. We also show that local graphlet counts around an edge are much better features for link prediction than well-known topological features; our experiments show that the former enjoys between 10% to 45% of improvement in the AUC value for predicting future links in three real-life social and collaboration networks.
Ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC) in prepubertal girls and young women: an analysis of parents’ and patients’ decision-making

The purpose of this study was to explore the decision-making influences, perceived level of control over decision-making, and mood states of parents and patients who were offered OTC prior to gonadotoxic therapy. Parents and patients, at least 12 years old, who required gonadotoxic therapy and were offered OTC prior to therapy, were asked to complete questionnaires. Two validated instruments were also used: the Decision-Making Control Instrument (DMCI) and the Profile of Mood States (POMS). The factors that influenced decision-making were compared using Student’s t test, and the scores of DMCI and POMS were compared using the Mann-Whitney test. Thirty-six parents and 16 patients who elected ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC) completed questionnaires. Five parents who declined OTC also completed questionnaires. Accepters thought OTC was a good idea and that, in the future, science would enable cryopreserved ovarian tissue to be used to restore fertility (100% parents, 93.8% patients). Among accepters, the desire for genetically related children and prevention of the stress of infertility drove parents’ and patients’ decisions (90.9 and 100%, respectively). The desire to prevent the stress of infertility was important to parents, but patients were less likely to report that a desire to prevent the stress of infertility factored into their decision-making (66.7 vs. 50.0%; p < 0.001). All respondents felt in control of their decision and displayed low levels of mood disturbance. Though the decision to undergo experimental OTC is difficult and often urgent, this study suggests that families feel in control of their decision-making and report little emotional disturbance.
Liquidity management of U.S. global banks: Internal capital markets in the great recession

Abstract The recent crisis highlighted the importance of globally active banks in linking markets. One channel for this linkage is through how these banks manage liquidity across their entire banking organization. We document that funds regularly flow between parent banks and their affiliates in diverse foreign markets. We show that parent banks, when hit by a funding shock, reallocate liquidity in the organization according to a locational pecking order. Affiliate locations that are important for the parent bank revenue streams are relatively protected from liquidity reallocations in the organization, while traditional funding locations are more extensively used to buffer shocks to the parent bank balance sheets.
Estimating encounter rates as the first step of sexual selection in the lizard Anolis sagrei .

How individuals move through their environment dictates which other individuals they encounter, determining their social and reproductive interactions and the extent to which they experience sexual selection. Specifically, females rarely have the option of mating with all males in a population-they can only choose among the males they encounter. Further, quantifying phenotypic differences between the males that females encounter and those that sire females' offspring lends insight into how social and reproductive interactions shape male phenotypes. We used an explicitly spatio-temporal Markov chain model to estimate the number of potential mates of Anolis sagrei lizards from their movement behaviour, and used genetic paternity assignments to quantify sexual selection on males. Females frequently encountered and mated with multiple males, offering ample opportunity for female mate choice. Sexual selection favoured males that were bigger and moved over larger areas, though the effect of body size cannot be disentangled from last-male precedence. Our approach corroborates some patterns of sexual selection previously hypothesized in anoles based on describing them as territorial, whereas other results, including female multiple mating itself, are at odds with territorial polygyny, offering insight into discrepancies in other taxa between behavioural and genetic descriptions of mating systems.
Fentanyl related overdose in Indianapolis: Estimating trends using multilevel Bayesian models.

Abstract Introduction The opioid epidemic has been largely attributed to changes in prescribing practices over the past 20 years. Although current overdose trends appear driven by the opioid fentanyl, heroin has remained the focus of overdose fatality assessments. We obtained full toxicology screens on lethal overdose cases in a major US city, allowing more accurate assessment of the time-course of fentanyl-related deaths. Methods We used coroner data from Marion County, Indiana comprising 1583 overdose deaths recorded between January 1, 2010 and April 30, 2017. Bayesian multilevel models were fitted to predict likelihood of lethal fentanyl-related overdose using information about the victim's age, race, sex, zip code, and date of death. Results Three hundred and seventy-seven (23.8%) overdose deaths contained fentanyl across the seven-year period. Rates rose exponentially over time, beginning well below 15% from 2010 through 2013 before rising to approximately 50% by 2017. At the beginning of the study period, rates of fentanyl overdose were lowest among Black persons but increased more rapidly, eventually surpassing Whites. Currently, White females are at particularly low risk of fentanyl overdose whereas Black females are at high risk. Rates were highest for younger and middle-aged groups. Over time, fentanyl was more likely detected without the presence of other opioids. Conclusions Fentanyl has increasingly been detected in fatal overdose deaths in Marion County. Policy and program responses must focus on education for those at highest risk of fentanyl exposure and death. These responses should also be tailored to meet the unique needs of high-risk demographics.
Sexual dimorphism in the neural impact of stress and alcohol.

Abstract Alcohol use disorder is a widespread mental illness characterized by periods of abstinence followed by recidivism, and stress is the primary trigger of relapse. Despite the higher prevalence of alcohol use disorder in males, the relationship between stress and behavioral features of relapse, such as craving, is stronger in females. Given the greater susceptibility of females to stress-related psychiatric disorders, understanding sexual dimorphism in the relationship between stress and alcohol use is essential to identifying better treatments for both male and female alcoholics. This review addresses sex differences in the impact of stressors on alcohol drinking and seeking in rodents and humans. As these behavioral differences in alcohol use and relapse originate from sexual dimorphism in neuronal function, the impact of stressors and alcohol, and their interaction, on molecular adaptations and neural activity in males and females will also be discussed. Together, the data reviewed herein, arising from a symposium titled “Sex matters in stress-alcohol interactions” presented at the Fourth Volterra Conference on Stress and Alcohol, will highlight the importance of identifying sex differences to improve treatments for comorbid stress and alcohol use disorder in both sexes.
The Discrete-Logarithm Problem with Preprocessing

This paper studies discrete-log algorithms that use preprocessing. In our model, an adversary may use a very large amount of precomputation to produce an “advice” string about a specific group (e.g., NIST P-256). In a subsequent online phase, the adversary’s task is to use the preprocessed advice to quickly compute discrete logarithms in the group. Motivated by surprising recent preprocessing attacks on the discrete-log problem, we study the power and limits of such algorithms.
The length of lunar crater rays explained using secondary crater scaling

Abstract The relationship between the length of crater rays and primary crater radius is still poorly understood. In this study we mapped the ray systems of 27 lunar craters, ranging from 10 m to 84 km in diameter. For each ray system, we measured the number, length, and optical maturity index (OMAT) of the rays. Our mapping effort shows that ray length scales to primary crater radius (R) with a power-law of R1.22, except for the smallest and freshest rays (
Microstructural Materials Design Via Deep Adversarial Learning Methodology

Identifying the key microstructure representations is crucial for Computational Materials Design (CMD). However, existing microstructure characterization and reconstruction (MCR) techniques have limitations to be applied for materials design. Model-based MCR approaches do not have parameters that can serve as design variables, while MCR techniques that rely on dimension reduction tend to lose important microstructural information. In this work, we present a deep adversarial learning methodology that overcomes the limitations of existing MCR techniques. In the proposed methodology, generative adversarial networks (GAN) are trained to learn the mapping between latent variables and microstructures. Thereafter, the low-dimensional latent variables serve as design variables, and a Bayesian optimization framework is applied to obtain microstructures with desired material property. Due to the special design of the network architecture, the proposed methodology is able to identify the latent (design) variables with desired dimensionality, as well as minimize the information loss even for complex material microstructures. The validity of the proposed methodology is tested numerically on a synthetic microstructure dataset and its effectiveness for materials design is evaluated through a case study of optimizing optical performance for energy absorption. In addition, the scalability and transferability of proposed methodology are also demonstrated in this work. Specifically, the proposed methodology is scalable to generate arbitrary sized microstructures, and it can serve as a pre-trained model to improve the performance of a structure-property predictive model via transfer learning.
Preparing Emergency Medicine Residents as Teachers: Clinical Teaching Scenarios

Introduction Preparing residents for supervision of medical students in the clinical setting is important to provide high-quality education for the next generation of physicians and is mandated by ...
Complicit: On Being a WGSS Program Director in the Neoliberal University

The notion of our complicity in an oppressive and unjust system is deep. It’s important to crack this idea open and ask: ‘How can women’s and gender studies scholars (maybe all faculty focused on social justice) do the work they need to do to add to knowledge through teaching and research? How do they do this without compromising their values? How can they do this without contributing to a flawed and unjust system?’ Probably they can’t. The complicity comes with the deal.
The validity of open-source data when assessing jail suicides.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Deaths in Custody Reporting Program is the primary source for jail suicide research, though the data is restricted from general dissemination. This study is the first to examine whether jail suicide data obtained from publicly available sources can help inform our understanding of this serious public health problem. Of the 304 suicides that were reported through the DCRP in 2009, roughly 56 percent (N = 170) of those suicides were identified through the open-source search protocol. Each of the sources was assessed based on how much information was collected on the incident and the types of variables available. A descriptive analysis was then conducted on the variables that were present in both data sources. The four variables present in each data source were: (1) demographic characteristics of the victim, (2) the location of occurrence within the facility, (3) the location of occurrence by state, and (4) the size of the facility. Findings demonstrate that the prevalence and correlates of jail suicides are extremely similar in both open-source and official data. However, for almost every variable measured, open-source data captured as much information as official data did, if not more. Further, variables not found in official data were identified in the open-source database, thus allowing researchers to have a more nuanced understanding of the situational characteristics of the event. This research provides support for the argument in favor of including open-source data in jail suicide research as it illustrates how open-source data can be used to provide additional information not originally found in official data. In sum, this research is vital in terms of possible suicide prevention, which may be directly linked to being able to manipulate environmental factors.
Feedback-mediated signal conversion promotes viral fitness.

A fundamental signal-processing problem is how biological systems maintain phenotypic states (i.e., canalization) long after degradation of initial catalyst signals. For example, to efficiently replicate, herpesviruses (e.g., human cytomegalovirus, HCMV) rapidly counteract cell-mediated silencing using transactivators packaged in the tegument of the infecting virion particle. However, the activity of these tegument transactivators is inherently transient—they undergo immediate proteolysis but delayed synthesis—and how transient activation sustains lytic viral gene expression despite cell-mediated silencing is unclear. By constructing a two-color, conditional-feedback HCMV mutant, we find that positive feedback in HCMV’s immediate-early 1 (IE1) protein is of sufficient strength to sustain HCMV lytic expression. Single-cell time-lapse imaging and mathematical modeling show that IE1 positive feedback converts transient transactivation signals from tegument pp71 proteins into sustained lytic expression, which is obligate for efficient viral replication, whereas attenuating feedback decreases fitness by promoting a reversible silenced state. Together, these results identify a regulatory mechanism enabling herpesviruses to sustain expression despite transient activation signals—akin to early electronic transistors—and expose a potential target for therapeutic intervention.
Associative Prediction of Visual Shape in the Hippocampus.

Perception can be cast as a process of inference, in which bottom-up signals are combined with top-down predictions in sensory systems. In line with this, neural activity in sensory cortex is strongly modulated by prior expectations. Such top-down predictions often arise from cross-modal associations, such as when a sound (e.g., bell or bark) leads to an expectation of the visual appearance of the corresponding object (e.g., bicycle or dog). We hypothesized that the hippocampus, which rapidly learns arbitrary relationships between stimuli over space and time, may be involved in forming such associative predictions. We exposed male and female human participants to auditory cues predicting visual shapes, while measuring high-resolution fMRI signals in visual cortex and the hippocampus. Using multivariate reconstruction methods, we discovered a dissociation between these regions: representations in visual cortex were dominated by whichever shape was presented, whereas representations in the hippocampus reflected only which shape was predicted by the cue. The strength of hippocampal predictions correlated across participants with the amount of expectation-related facilitation in visual cortex. These findings help bridge the gap between memory and sensory systems in the human brain. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The way we perceive the world is to a great extent determined by our prior knowledge. Despite this intimate link between perception and memory, these two aspects of cognition have mostly been studied in isolation. Here we investigate their interaction by asking how memory systems that encode and retrieve associations can inform perception. We find that upon hearing a familiar auditory cue, the hippocampus represents visual information that had previously co-occurred with the cue, even when this expectation differs from what is currently visible. Furthermore, the strength of this hippocampal expectation correlates with facilitation of perceptual processing in visual cortex. These findings help bridge the gap between memory and sensory systems in the human brain.
On Erasure Broadcast Channels with Hard Deadlines

This paper considers packet scheduling over a broadcast channel with packet erasures to multiple receivers with different messages (multiple uni-cast) each with possibly different hard deadline constraints. A novel metric is proposed and evaluated: the global deadline outage probability, which gives the probability that the hard communication deadline is not met for at least one of the receivers. The cut-set upper bound is derived and a scheduling policy is proposed to determine which receiver's packets should be sent in each time slot. This policy is shown to be optimal among all scheduling policies, i.e., it achieves all boundary points of cut-set upper bounds when the transmitter knows the erasure patterns for all the receivers ahead of making the scheduling decision. An expression for the global deadline outage probability is obtained for two receivers and is plotted and interpreted for various system parameters. These plots are not Monte-Carlo simulations, and hence the obtained expression may be used in the design of future downlink broadcast networks. Future extensions to per-user deadline outage probabilities as well as to scenarios with causal knowledge of the channel states are briefly discussed.
A spin-1 representation for dual-funnel energy landscapes.

The interconversion between the left- and right-handed helical folds of a polypeptide defines a dual-funneled free energy landscape. In this context, the funnel minima are connected through a continuum of unfolded conformations, evocative of the classical helix-coil transition. Physical intuition and recent conjectures suggest that this landscape can be mapped by assigning a left- or right-handed helical state to each residue. We explore this possibility using all-atom replica exchange molecular dynamics and an Ising-like model, demonstrating that the energy landscape architecture is at odds with a two-state picture. A three-state model—left, right, and unstructured—can account for most key intermediates during chiral interconversion. Competing folds and excited conformational states still impose limitations on the scope of this approach. However, the improvement is stark: Moving from a two-state to a three-state model decreases the fit error from 1.6 kBT to 0.3 kBT along the left-to-right interconversion pathway.The interconversion between the left- and right-handed helical folds of a polypeptide defines a dual-funneled free energy landscape. In this context, the funnel minima are connected through a continuum of unfolded conformations, evocative of the classical helix-coil transition. Physical intuition and recent conjectures suggest that this landscape can be mapped by assigning a left- or right-handed helical state to each residue. We explore this possibility using all-atom replica exchange molecular dynamics and an Ising-like model, demonstrating that the energy landscape architecture is at odds with a two-state picture. A three-state model—left, right, and unstructured—can account for most key intermediates during chiral interconversion. Competing folds and excited conformational states still impose limitations on the scope of this approach. However, the improvement is stark: Moving from a two-state to a three-state model decreases the fit error from 1.6 kBT to 0.3 kBT along the left-to-right interconversion...
Tracking error learning control for precise mobile robot path tracking in outdoor environment

This paper presents a Tracking-Error Learning Control (TELC) algorithm for precise mobile robot path tracking in off-road terrain. In traditional tracking error-based control approaches, feedback and feedforward controllers are designed based on the nominal model which cannot capture the uncertainties, disturbances and changing working conditions so that they cannot ensure precise path tracking performance in the outdoor environment. In TELC algorithm, the feedforward control actions are updated by using the tracking error dynamics and the plant-model mismatch problem is thus discarded. Therefore, the feedforward controller gradually eliminates the feedback controller from the control of the system once the mobile robot has been on-track. In addition to the proof of the stability, it is proven that the cost functions do not have local minima so that the coefficients in TELC algorithm guarantee that the global minimum is reached. The experimental results show that the TELC algorithm results in better path tracking performance than the traditional tracking error-based control method. The mobile robot controlled by TELC algorithm can track a target path precisely with less than 10 cm error in off-road terrain.
Advising the whole student: eAdvising analytics and the contextual suppression of advisor values

Institutions are applying methods and practices from data analytics under the umbrella term of “learning analytics” to inform instruction, library practices, and institutional research, among other things. This study reports findings from interviews with professional advisors at a public higher education institution. It reports their perspective on their institution’s recent adoption of eAdvising technologies with prescriptive and predictive advising affordances. The findings detail why advisors rejected the tools due to usability concerns, moral discomfort, and a belief that using predictive measures violated a professional ethical principle to develop a comprehensive understanding of their advisees. The discussion of these findings contributes to an emerging branch of educational data mining and learning analytics research focused on social and ethical implications. Specifically, it highlights the consequential effects on higher education professional communities (or “micro contexts”) due to the ascendancy of learning analytics and data-driven ideologies.
Facilitating Citizens' Voice and Process Reengineering Using a Cloud-Based Mobile App

ABSTRACT Recently, the City of Boston implemented a mobile, cloud-based app. Originally called “Citizens Connect,” but now called “Bos:311,” the app allows citizens to report issues related to the ...
What's a Little Leakage Between Friends?

This paper introduces a new attack on recent messaging systems that protect communication metadata. The main observation is that if an adversary manages to compromise a user's friend, it can use this compromised friend to learn information about the user's other ongoing conversations. Specifically, the adversary learns whether a user is sending other messages or not, which opens the door to existing intersection and disclosure attacks. To formalize this compromised friend attack, we present an abstract scenario called the exclusive call center problem that captures the attack's root cause, and demonstrates that it is independent of the particular design or implementation of existing metadata-private messaging systems. We then introduce a new primitive called a private answering machine that can prevent the attack. Unfortunately, building a secure and efficient instance of this primitive under only computational hardness assumptions does not appear possible. Instead, we give a construction under the assumption that users can place a bound on their maximum number of friends and are okay leaking this information.
Representer Point Selection for Explaining Deep Neural Networks

We propose to explain the predictions of a deep neural network, by pointing to the set of what we call representer points in the training set, for a given test point prediction. Specifically, we show that we can decompose the pre-activation prediction of a neural network into a linear combination of activations of training points, with the weights corresponding to what we call representer values, which thus capture the importance of that training point on the learned parameters of the network. But it provides a deeper understanding of the network than simply training point influence: with positive representer values corresponding to excitatory training points, and negative values corresponding to inhibitory points, which as we show provides considerably more insight. Our method is also much more scalable, allowing for real-time feedback in a manner not feasible with influence functions.
Inference on Causal and Structural Parameters using Many Moment Inequalities

This article considers the problem of testing many moment inequalities where the number of moment inequalities, denoted by p, is possibly much larger than the sample size n. There is a variety of economic applications where solving this problem allows to carry out inference on causal and structural parameters; a notable example is the market structure model of Ciliberto and Tamer (2009) where p=2m+1 with m being the number of firms that could possibly enter the market. We consider the test statistic given by the maximum of p Studentized (or t-type) inequality-specific statistics, and analyse various ways to compute critical values for the test statistic. Specifically, we consider critical values based upon (1) the union bound combined with a moderate deviation inequality for self-normalized sums, (2) the multiplier and empirical bootstraps, and (3) two-step and three-step variants of (1) and (2) by incorporating the selection of uninformative inequalities that are far from being binding and a novel selection of weakly informative inequalities that are potentially binding but do not provide first-order information. We prove validity of these methods, showing that under mild conditions, they lead to tests with the error in size decreasing polynomially in n while allowing for p being much larger than n; indeed p can be of order exp(nc) for some c>0. Importantly, all these results hold without any restriction on the correlation structure between p Studentized statistics, and also hold uniformly with respect to suitably large classes of underlying distributions. Moreover, in the online supplement, we show validity of a test based on the block multiplier bootstrap in the case of dependent data under some general mixing conditions.