cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Autophagy regulates lipolysis and cell survival through lipid droplet degradation in androgen-sensitive prostate cancer cells.

BACKGROUND Androgen deprivation therapy, one of the standard treatments for prostate cancer (PCa) induces apoptosis, as well as autophagy in androgen-responsive PCa cells. As autophagy can promote either cell survival or death, it is important to understand its role in PCa treatment. The objective of this study was to elucidate the function of autophagy in lipid droplet (LD) homeostasis and survival in androgen-sensitive PCa cells. METHODS To produce androgen deprivation, charcoal filtered serum or the androgen inhibitor casodex were used in LNCaP and LAPC4 cells. Autophagy was monitored by immunofluorescence/confocal microscopy and immunoblot analysis. Levels of intracellular LDs and triacyglycerols after the inhibition of autophagy by 3-methyladenine, bafilomycin A1, or si-ATG5 were quantified by three independent methods, Oil Red O staining, triacyglycerols lipase assay, and nuclear magnetic resonance. RESULTS Androgen deprivation induced autophagy and the depletion of LDs in both of the androgen-sensitive PCa cell lines examined, whereas the blockage of autophagy by pharmacological or genetic means inhibited LD degradation and therefore lipolysis and cell growth. In addition, under androgen deprivation, increased colocalization of LDs and autophagic vesicles was observed in LNCaP cells, which can be further enhanced by blocking the autophagic flux. CONCLUSION Autophagy mediates LD degradation and lipolysis in androgen-sensitive PCa cells during androgen deprivation which aids the survival of PCa cells during hormone therapy. Prostate 72:1412–1422, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Requirement for nonprotonated drug molecules in the direct lethal action of miconazole against Candida albicans

At ≥10−5 M, miconazole (MCZ) can exert a direct physicochemical cell-damaging lethal action against logarithmic phase yeasts of Candida albicans. The imidazole moiety of MCZ has a pKa ∼ 6.5. Thus, in media of pH >6.5 most drug molecules are nonprotonated (MCZ∘). Conversely, at pH < 6.5 the majority are protonated and carry a positive charge (MCZH+). Our earlier work suggesting that MCZ∘ is required for direct lethal action was tested further. In support of such a requirement, we established a minimal lethal concentration of MCZ∘ (i.e. 5×10−6 M) that was relatively independent of pH, MCZ concentration, and MCZ∘∶MCZH+ ratio.
Midst Anthropology's Problems

In Les Mots et les choses (1966) Michel Foucault identified three arenas of discourse that in their (unstable and incomplete) coalescence at the end of the Classical Age constituted the object called man (I'homme). This figure emerges at the intersection of three domains-life, labor, and language-unstably unified around (and constituting) a would-be sovereign subject. The doubling of a transcendental subject and an empirical object and their dynamic and unstable relations defined the form of this being. In 1966 Foucault held an epochal view of man and of modernity. In his conclusion, Foucault intimated the imminent coming of a new configuration of language about to sweep the figure of man away like "a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea" (1966:398, my translation). It now appears that this presage was miscast: In the ensuing decades, language (in its modality as poiesis) has not turned out to be the site of radical formal transformations through which this being, man, would either disappear entirely, as Foucault intimated, or would transmute into a new type of being as predicted by Gilles Deleuze (1988). Although Foucault did not directly return to his diagnosis of the "end of man," he did modify his understanding of modernity as an epoch. In his essay "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault posed the challenge of inventing a new philosophic relationship to the present; one in which modernity was taken up not through the analytic frame of the epoch but instead through a practice of inquiry grounded in an ethos of present-orientation, of contingency, of form-giving. Perhaps today one significant challenge of forging a modern ethos lies in thinking about how to relate to the issue of anthropos. Such a task may present different types of challenges to philosophical thinkers, such as Foucault, than to the anthropologist. Regardless of how one approaches those questions (an issue to which we return in the conclusion), what if we took up recent changes in the Logoi of life, labor, and language, not as indicating an epochal shift with a totalizing coherence (sovereignty, man), but rather as fragmented and sectorial changes that pose problems-both in and of themselves, as well as for attempts to make sense of what form(s) anthropos is currently being given?
Nearly all surveyed reproductive urologists feel a prospective varicocelectomy trial is important and worthwhile

Controversy exists whether varicocelectomy improves pregnancy rates in couples with male infertility. Unfortunately, the majority of data come from retrospective, poorly controlled studies (1), resulting in inadequate evidence regarding the efficacy of this procedure in improving semen quality (2–3). In addition, results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are conflicting and methodologically of poor quality because of heterogeneous inclusion criteria, limited enrollment, and high drop-out rates.
Low‐angle x‐ray scattering from crazes and fracture surfaces in polystyrene

Both crazes and fracture surfaces in glassy polymers produce a low-angle scattering of x-rays. Scattering patterns are anisotropic and often show considerable streaking. In the one case (polystyrene) studied extensively so far, detalied analysis suggests that the craze is approximated as a collection of spheroidal or irregular-shaped voids surrounded by material with anisotropic density distribution arising from its orientation in the stress direction. The void dimension is about 90–115 A and the specific internal surface area about 170 m2/cm3 of craze. These results and those from electron microscopic studies are reasonably consistent.
Functional expression of the yeast FLP/FRT site-specific recombination system in Nicotiana tabacum

The FLP/FRT site-specific recombination system of Saccharomyces cerevisiae was expressed in stably transformed tobacco plants. The FLP protein efficiently catalyzes recombination between two directly repeated FLP recombination target (FRT) sites, deleting the sequence between them. In the constructs tested here, this deletion places the CaMV 35S promoter adjacent to a hygromycin resistance marker; transcriptional activation of the marker allows direct selection of recombination events. After crossing plants containing an integrated FLP expression construct with plants containing a FLP substrate, Fl seedlings can be selected directly for hygromycin resistance, indicating that recombination occurs at, or very early after zygote formation. Molecular analysis confirmed the expected recombination product.
Implementation of microprogrammed control in FPGAs

The microprogrammed approach to implementing control state machines has been widely used since the early 1960s and has the advantages of structured programming and fixed timing characteristics. This paper presents a microprogrammed control unit that has been tailored to implementation in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The microsequencer has a novel architecture which takes advantage of the enhancements existing in coarse-grained FPGAs to implement efficiently four basic functions: registers, multiplexers, adders, and counters. The sequencer supports both nested subroutines and nested loops, and can operate in both pipelined and nonpipelined modes. The pipelined mode of operation uses delayed branching in which one additional microinstruction always executes following any instruction that changes program flow. It is found that in a typical medium-sized (50 K gates) FPGA, the sequencer can be clocked at over 60 MHz nonpipelined and over 100 MHz pipelined while using less than 5% of the available FPGA logic resources. This leaves the bulk of the FPGA resources available for implementing other digital circuitry that is to be controlled by the microsequencer. While not attractive for a small number of states, the microprogrammed approach has some significant advantages for complex controllers with a large number of states.
Phenotype-environment correlations in longitudinal twin models.

Gene–environment correlation(rGE) exists both within andbetween families.Between families,accumulatingrGEhas beenused to explaindramatic changes in phenotypic means over time. The Dickens and Flynn model of increases in cognitive ability over generational time, for example, suggests that small changes in phenotype can lead to subsequent reallocation of environmental resources. This process sets up a reciprocal feedback loop between phenotype and environment, producing accumulating rGE that can cause large changes in the mean of ability, even though ability remains highly heritable in crosssectional data. We report simulations suggesting that similar processes may operate within twin and sibling pairs. Especially in dizygotic twins and siblings, small differences in phenotype can become associated with reallocations of environmental resources within families. We show that phenotype– environment effects can account for age-related increases in rGE, rapid differentiation of siblings raised together, and widely reported increases in the heritability of behavior during childhood and adolescence. All observable behavior results from gene–environment interplay. Inand of itself, thisisatrivialassertion. Nevertheless,acknowledgementof the ubiquityofgene–environment interplay creates an uncomfortable complication in psychological re
Observability-based consistent EKF estimators for multi-robot cooperative localization

In this paper, we investigate the consistency of extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based cooperative localization (CL) from the perspective of observability. We analytically show that the error-state system model employed in the standard EKF-based CL always has an observable subspace of higher dimension than that of the actual nonlinear CL system. This results in unjustified reduction of the EKF covariance estimates in directions of the state space where no information is available, and thus leads to inconsistency. To address this problem, we adopt an observability-based methodology for designing consistent estimators in which the linearization points are selected to ensure a linearized system model with observable subspace of correct dimension. In particular, we propose two novel observability-constrained (OC)-EKF estimators that are instances of this paradigm. In the first, termed OC-EKF 1.0, the filter Jacobians are calculated using the prior state estimates as the linearization points. In the second, termed OC-EKF 2.0, the linearization points are selected so as to minimize their expected errors (i.e., the difference between the linearization point and the true state) under the observability constraints. The proposed OC-EKFs have been tested in simulation and experimentally, and have been shown to significantly outperform the standard EKF in terms of both accuracy and consistency.
Ocular dominance predicts neither strength nor class of disparity selectivity with random-dot stimuli in primate V1.

We address two unresolved issues concerning the coding of binocular disparity in primary visual cortex. Experimental studies and theoretical models have suggested a relationship between a cell's oc...
LIPID OXIDATION IN MUTTON: SPECIES‐RELATED AND WARMED‐OVER FLAVORS

Effects of lipid oxidation in cooked mutton on species-related flavor and warmed-over flavor (WOF) intensities were studied using various additive treatments and post-cooking storage (versus no additive/no storage) as means to produce samples of varied lipid oxidation. Ground mutton was treated with 200 ppm sodium nitrite, 0.5% sodium tripolyphosphate, 0.05% sodium ascorbate, 3% sodium lactate, 0.002% propyl gallate, or water only (control), cooked to 74C, and aerobically stored at 4C for 0, 2, or 4 days. Nitrite-treated samples showed the least lipid oxidation as determined by the 2-thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) and had more intense species-related (muttony) flavor than all other treated samples. Some samples exhibited high TBARS after 4 days but were still rated “slight” for WOF intensity, probably due to the strong species-related flavor that could have made WOF less perceivable. Accordingly, correlations, although statistically significant, were low between TBARS and WOF intensity or between species flavor intensity and WOF intensity.
Cultural Holes: Beyond Relationality in Social Networks and Culture

A burgeoning literature spanning sociologies of culture and social network methods has for the past several decades sought to explicate the relationships between culture and connectivity. A number of promising recent moves toward integration are worthy of review, comparison, critique, and synthesis. Network thinking provides powerful techniques for specifying cultural concepts ranging from narrative networks to classification systems, tastes, and cultural repertoires. At the same time, we see theoretical advances by sociologists of culture as providing a corrective to network analysis as it is often portrayed, as a mere collection of methods. Cultural thinking complements and sets a new agenda for moving beyond predominant forms of structural analysis that ignore action, agency, and intersubjective meaning. The notion of “cultural holes” that we use to organize our review points both to the cultural contingency of network structure and to the increasingly permeable boundary between studies of culture and ...
The politics of Europe 2004: solidarity and integration

The process of European integration has reached the limits of European solidarity—both within the member states and between them. Increasingly, Europeans are demonstrating reluctance to accept common rules, to recognise common values, to protect common interests, or to promote common objectives. Instead, Europeans appear to be expressing many different and yet interrelated forms of disaffection. Voter abstention is high, security cooperation is weak, economic confidence is low, and support for either European enlargement or institutional reform is vanishing. To respond to this crisis, European politicians need to manage expectations better, they need to accept responsibility for public policy problems, they need to explain the limits of what Europe can do, and they need to search for new formulas to meet different national challenges with common European institutions.
Practitioner objections to the academic acceleration of gifted children.

Despite extensive recent reviews that fail to document harm from early admission and acceleration, many school districts are still reluctant to employ such educational techniques. This paper reports the results of a large, mailed survey of attitudes toward these practices as reported by coordinators of gifted, school psychologists, principals, and teachers (554 respondents) and a follow-up study that explored the origin of such attitudes. The major concern of all groups is the potential for harm to the social and emotional development of accelerants, though coordinators of programs for gifted and talented show significantly more positive views toward early admission and acceleration along every dimension. Personal experience (self or family member) with acceleration was most highly related to positive attitude toward the practice. Respondents viewed early admission and grade skipping as identical. This view, coupled with the prevalence of citations by practitioners of inadequately designed and inappropria...
Neurological Complications of Bariatric Surgery

Obesity has attained pandemic proportions, and bariatric surgery is increasingly being employed resulting in turn to more neurological complications which must be recognized and managed. Neurological complications may result from mechanical or inflammatory mechanisms but primarily result from micro-nutritional deficiencies. Vitamin B12, thiamine, and copper constitute the most frequent deficiencies. Neurological complications may occur at reasonably predictable times after bariatric surgery and are associated with the type of surgery used. During the early post-operative period, compressive or stretch peripheral nerve injury, rhabdomyolysis, Wernicke's encephalopathy, and inflammatory polyradiculoneuropathy may occur. Late complications ensue after months to years and include combined system degeneration (vitamin B12 deficiency) and hypocupric myelopathy. Bariatric surgery patients require careful nutritional follow-up with routine monitoring of micronutrients at 6 weeks and 3, 6, and 12 months post-operatively and then annually after surgery and multivitamin supplementation for life. Sustained vigilance for common and rare neurological complications is essential.
A chronology of the very early history of inhalation anaesthesia in Canada.

ALTHOUGH SEVERAL WELL DOCUMENTED ABTICLES 1-7 are available on the history of surgical anaesthesia in Canada, it has not been fully elucidated when information about ether anaesthesia was first brought from the United States to Canada. Furthermore, the available sources eontain conflicting reports as to who administered the first surgical anaesthetic with ether and chloroform, as well as the first obstetrical anaesthetic. Fuller 2 states that Dr. Almon was the first to use chloroform for surgical anaesthesia; yet Shields 5 attributes the first chloroform anaesthetic to Dr. A.F. Holmes. According to a recent article by Jacques, 6 Dr. Worthington was the first to administer both ether and chloroform during surgical operations. McKenzie 1 and Fuller 2 report that a chemist, Frazer, of Nova Scotia, administered chloroform to his wife during delivery and that consequently this was the first obstetrical anaesthetic. However, Heagerty 3 credits Dr. Holmes with its first use for parturition in Canada. Thus it is still unclear exactly when, where and who administered the first surgical and obstetrical anaesthetics with ether or chloroform in Canada. It seems appropriate therefore to provide a chronology of the history of early surgical anaesthesia in Canada, in the hope that this may be helpful to future historians.
Subcutaneous endoscopically assisted ligation (SEAL) of the internal ring for repair of inguinal hernias in children: report of a new technique and early results

Background Open inguinal hernia repair with high ligation is an excellent method of repair in the pediatric population. Advantages of endoscopic repairs include the ability to evaluate the contralateral side, avoidance of access trauma to the vas deferens and gonadal vessels, and decreased operative time. We now report our experience with subcutaneous endoscopically assisted ligation (SEAL), a novel technique that has proved to be a safe and effective in the treatment of inguinal hernia in the pediatric population.
Starting the conversation performance of a brief dietary assessment and intervention tool for health professionals.

Purpose: This report investigates the feasibility, validity, and sensitivity to change of the STC tool, a simplified screener instrument for assessment and counseling. Methods: Data from an ongoing practical efficacy study of type 2 diabetes patients in a diverse popula- tion (N463) were used to document STC validity, robustness, stability, and sensitivity to change from baseline to 4 months. Data were collected from 2008 to 2010, and they were analyzed for this report in 2010. Results: The eight STC items and summary score performed well. STC items and the summary score were moderately intercorrelated (r0.39 - 0.59, p0.05). The STC summary score was signif- icantly correlated with the NCI fat screener at baseline (r 0.39, p0.05), and change in the STC summary score correlated with reduction in percentage of calories from fat (r 0.22, p0.05) from baseline to 4 months. The STC was sensitive to the intervention, with intervention participants improving significantly more than controls on the summary score (M1.16 vs 0.46, p0.05). Conclusions: The brief STC is a relatively simple, valid, and efficient tool for dietary assessment and intervention in the clinical setting. It is available in English and Spanish and is in the public domain. Researchers and practitioners are encouraged to assess its utility in other settings and with other dietary interventions. (Am J Prev Med 2011;40(1):67-71) © 2011 American Journal of Preventive Medicine
Lipopolysaccharide challenge: immunological effects and safety in humans

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a constituent of the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria and an important microbial trigger that stimulates innate immunity. It is ubiquitous; it can be inoculated from the environment via inhalation of dust. The resultant inflammatory responses are essential to early host defense but may also contribute to later and/or chronic organ injury. LPS challenge either intravenously or by inhalation has been widely used for the evaluation of anti-inflammatory reagents as well as to address basic scientific questions. The acute inhalation of LPS is used as a model of acute bronchitis in human volunteers. LPS inhalation is considered a well-established method that is safe and tolerable and aids in the improved characterization of anti-inflammatory drugs in proof-of-concept studies. This article reviews immunogenicity and safety data pertaining to LPS administration, with a particular focus on LPS inhalation, which may facilitate the optimization of its use in human research.
Iteratively Locating Voronoi Vertices for Dispersion Estimation

We present a new sampling-based algorithm for iteratively locating Voronoi vertices of a point set in the unit cube Id= [0, 1]d. The algorithm takes an input sample and executes a series of transformations, each of which projects the sample to a new face of the Voronoi cell in which it is located. After d such transformations, the sample has been transformed into a Voronoi vertex. Locating Voronoi vertices has many potential applications for motion planning, such as estimating dispersion for coverage and verification applications, and providing information useful for Voronoi-biased or multiple-tree planning. We prove theoretical results regarding our algorithm, and give experimental results comparing it to naive sampling for the problem of dispersion estimation.
Theoretical Perspectives Guiding QOL Indicator Projects

Most of the theoretically based QOL indicators projects can be classified in terms of six major theoretical concepts: (a) socio-economic development (b) personal utility, (c) just society, (d) human development, (e) sustainability, and (f) functioning. I explain the core aspects of these six theoretical paradigms and show how they help guide QOL researchers to select and develop QOL indicators that are significantly and qualitatively distinct. A taxonomy of QOL indicators guided by a given theoretical concept is likely to be very different from others taxonomies guided by different theoretical concepts. Thus, the objective of this paper to explain these theoretical paradigms and show how they guide QOL researchers to select and develop QOL indicators that are significantly and qualitatively distinct.
Base Rates of “Impaired” Neuropsychological Test Performance Among Healthy Older Adults

Base rates of deficient neuropsychological test performance were evaluated among 132 neurologically healthy older normal adults using a variety of measures commonly employed in the "flexible-battery"approach to neuropsychological assessment. Subjects were divided into three age groups (50 to 59, 60 to 69, and 70 to 79 years). Despite the healthy status of our sample, most tests yielded at least some proportion of subjects earning scores in the borderline and impaired ranges (1.3 and 2.0 standard deviations below the age-group mean, respectively). Across the battery of measures, 73% of subjects earned a borderline score on at least one measure, and 20% of subjects earned at least two scores in the impaired range on separate tests. The proportion of subjects consistently earning borderline or impaired scores across multiple measures within specific cognitive domains was generally lower. Results illustrate the problems in interpreting isolated low scores, and the need to consider false-positive base rates in drawing inferences from poor test performance.
The Use of Novel Camtasia Videos to Improve Performance of At-Risk Students in Undergraduate Physiology Courses

these concepts consume a large portion of class time. For this pilot study, it was hypothesized that online multimediaresources may improve student performance in a high-risk population and reduce the in-class workload. A narratedCamtasia video was created using PowerPoint slides of a cardiomyocyte action potential. Historically, studentperformance on an exam essay for this topic was very poor following a traditional didactic lecture (class avg. of64%). Replacement of lecture on the topic with an online video improved the class avg. on the essay by 6% and theclass median by 8% (n=198, 9 course sections). While this effect was not shown to be statistically significant(p=0.1, Student’s t-test) due to a large variability in scores, it nonetheless indicated a general positive effect onstudent performance. Furthermore, the video appeared to have a large influence on lower-performing students,reducing the percentage of failing students on the essay from 38% with traditional lecture to 24% with access to thevideo. Anonymous polling of the students indicated the video was helpful in visualizing the process and allowingrepetition of material. While creation of multimedia resources may require significant instructor preparation time,these results suggest that the time invested may be advantageous to student success, particularly for at-risk students.
The Global Financial Crisis: Lessons and Opportunities for International Political Economy

The global financial crisis that began in 2007 is a once-in-a-lifetime event with wide-ranging consequences for government policymaking. The crisis has prompted much soul-searching among economists and financial experts who failed to anticipate it, or whose warnings were not taken seriously by regulators and investors. Scholars of international political economy (IPE), however, are generally not in the business of predicting financial crises or recessions, and so the field is unlikely to see the crisis as a manifestation of scholarly failure. Yet the crisis may have an appreciable impact on the trajectory of IPE, just as the downfall of the Soviet Union shaped subsequent scholarship on international relations and great-power conflict and prompted a movement away from grand, and toward mid-range, theories. We discuss three categories of inquiry—or puzzles within the realm of global finance—that have received relatively little attention within the field of IPE, but which should receive greater scrutiny as a result of the crisis: the determinants of cross-national variation in financial regulation; patterns of cooperation and discord within global regulatory bodies and the involvement of emerging-market countries in these bodies; and the interplay between individual firms-as-political-actors and public policy outcomes.
Fuzzing the Rust Typechecker Using CLP (T)

Language fuzzing is a bug-finding technique for testing compilers and interpreters, its effectiveness depends upon the ability to automatically generate valid programs in the language under test. Despite the proven success of language fuzzing, there is a severe lack of tool support for fuzzing statically-typed languages with advanced type systems because existing fuzzing techniques cannot effectively and automatically generate well-typed programs that use sophisticated types. In this work we describe how to automatically generate well-typed programs that use sophisticated type systems by phrasing the problem of well-typed program generation in terms of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP). In addition, we describe how to specifically target the typechecker implementation for testing, unlike all existing work which ignores the typechecker. We focus on typechecker precision bugs, soundness bugs, and consistency bugs. We apply our techniques to Rust, a complex, industrial-strength language with a sophisticated type system.
On Philosophy in American Law: The Tasks of a Philosophy of Law

This short programmatic essay, written for a collection celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Karl Llewellyn's paper "On Philosophy in American Law," sketches the elements of an adequate philosophy of law today. It argues that an adequate philosophy of law must be empirical, interpretive, and critical. It suggests that the lines between philosophy and both anthropology and rhetorical studies will blur. Llewellyn was right in stressing the relative importance of legal practices in understanding what law is, but the early realists were without the relatively more adequate philosophies of human practice since developed and relatively greater range of social scientific findings on those practices since made. Because of its interpretive and normative aspects, jurisprudence will remain one of the humanities and will never be fully naturalized, but it may come to be better informed.
CASE STUDY FOR INTRODUCTORY MECHANICAL DESIGN COMPETITIONS

Freshman/sophomore design projects provide students with hands-on experiences in conceptual design and manufacturing. For some of these courses, a design competition is used to teach the design and construction components. These competitions are often reused from semester to semester, so the students typically suffer from design fixation. When design competition tables are erected new every single semester, it requires advanced planning and high budgets. This paper discusses a case study of a different structure for introductory design courses and competitions at Harvard. We summarize a yearlong effort to improve an existing early design competition with more machine component elements and linkage design. The goal of a interchangeable design competition was to prevent design fixation while at the same time providing boundaries for students to successfully implement their robot designs, independent of their previous mechanical engineering exposure.Copyright © 2015 by ASME
Effectively Interacting with the Terminally III Patient

Effectively interacting with the terminally ill patient may be a new challenge for the nuclear medicine technologist. An understanding of chronic pain and the dying process is essential to meet this challenge successfully. The objectives of this paper are to provide the technologist with: 1. An understanding of the physical and emotional reactions associated with the label terminal illness. 2. An understanding of the physical and emotional impact of chronic pain. 3. Strategies to effectively interact with the terminally ill patient. 4. Strategies to successfully counteract the emotional impact associated with working with this patient population.
From Zero to Hero: How to Predict and Manage High Velocity Evolution

This paper explores the existence and role of high velocity evolution. Specifically, this paper posits that organizational evolution is not a monolithic process and that innovation is the source of high velocity evolution. The timing of the evolutionary process can be greatly accelerated under certain circumstances. This paper suggests that innovation, and the paces of the innovation adoption are strong determinants of rapid selection and high velocity evolution. This paper also suggests that four antecedents are present in a high velocity evolutionary model. Specifically, the functional value, hedonistic attributes, switching costs and satisfaction, all determined by the consumer, are antecedents to rapid innovation adoption causing high velocity evolution. The occurrence of high velocity evolution can propel a new venture or an existing firm into unimagined success, but the results of high velocity evolution enacted by a firm, while generally desirable, can have extreme effects on the firm, and in some ...
Encapsulation of particle ensembles in graphene nanosacks as a new route to multifunctional materials.

Hybrid nanoparticles with multiple functions are of great interest in biomedical diagnostics, therapies, and theranostics but typically require complex multistep chemical synthesis. Here we demonstrate a general physical method to create multifunctional hybrid materials through aerosol-phase graphene encapsulation of ensembles of simple unifunctional nanoparticles. We first develop a general theory of the aerosol encapsulation process based on colloidal interactions within drying microdroplets. We demonstrate that a wide range of cargo particle types can be encapsulated, and that high pH is a favorable operating regime that promotes colloidal stability and limits nanoparticle dissolution. The cargo-filled graphene nanosacks are then shown to be open structures that rapidly release soluble salt cargoes when reintroduced into water, but can be partially sealed by addition of a polymeric filler to achieve slow release profiles of interest in controlled release or theranostic applications. Finally, we demonst...
Imaging Ultrafast Dynamics Using Laser-Induced Electron Diffraction

A new imaging technique, laser-induced electron diffraction is applied to study the bond relaxation dynamics of oxygen molecule. The retrieved bond lengths at three wavelengths all shows a bond contraction of about 0.1 A within 4-6 fs after tunnel ionization.
A theoretical study of the electrochemical reduction of oxygen

Abstract Multi-dimensional potential energy surfaces have been constructed for the experimentally found most probable rate-determining step in electroreduction of oxygen on Pt(111) and Pt(100) using a combination of experimental data in Morse functions and ASED-MO (a semi-empirical quantum mechanical technique). The minimum energy path for the reaction has been extracted by Euler's single step method. In agreement with the position of Schmickler [W. Schmickler, Interfacial Electrochemistry, Oxford University Press, 1996] for atom transfer reactions, the Marcus continuum model (in which the Gibbs energy is related to rearrangements among the solvent molecules by means of quadratic expressions) has been avoided. Instead the interaction of the proton with the librating solvent molecules in its environments is described by model considerations (ion–dipole and ion–ion induced dipole interactions). A treatment of non-adiabacity has been made by means of Landau–Zener formalism and the quantum properties of the proton are taken into account using an Eckart barrier for the calculation of tunneling. On this basis, the kinetic parameters, e.g. the activation energies, entropies of activation, the symmetry factors and reaction rates of the model reaction, have been calculated.
Research and Design of M-learning Content Management System

Learning Content Management System (LCMS) is an important component of Learning Management Platform. On the basis of research and analysis on Content Management System, the architecture of Moodle Learning Management Platform and the characteristics of the M-learning resources, it proposes the framework of M-Learning Content Management based on MySQL, and probes the critical problems of it.
Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan

In 1959 Japan celebrated both the marriage of Crown Prince Akihito to commoner Shōda Michiko, dubbed the ‘people’s princess’, and the crowning of the first Japanese Miss Universe, Kojima Akiko. Jan...
Building a test environment component in VHDL for an infrared link access protocol (IrLAP) compliant ASIC interface

This paper presents the experiences of the Texas Instruments Bus Solutions ASIC design team in its efforts to create and use a component written in VHDL which was embedded into the test environment for an ASIC. The VHDL component described had to be: dynamically controllable; able to accept and check a wide range of expected results from the ASIC design; able to stimulate the design in every action which was compliant with the IrLAP specification; and able to inject several different kinds of errors into the stimulus flow under user control. Embedding this level of stimulus strength, self-checking and user control was a challenge, but completing the component allowed the ASIC design team to field a fully verified interface which has needed no changes since its release to silicon.
Abstract TP329: Patient Transfer Check Off Decreases Fall Rate on Stroke Unit

Background and Issues: Protecting stroke patients from falls and injury is fundamental to providing exceptional care. An increased risk for falls has been recognized among persons with diagnoses of stroke and other neurological disorders. Our Stroke Unit’s comprehensive fall prevention program, while helpful, did not adequately identify stroke patients who would fall. While instituting video monitoring of patients at high risk for falls provided a 20% reduction in fall rate, stroke patients evaluated at low and moderate risk continued to fall. Purpose: The purpose of our practice change was to determine if implementing high risk measures on all patients admitted to a stroke unit until demonstration of five safe transfers would decrease the number of patient falls. Methods: Utilizing a shared responsibility model, our Stroke Unit engaged all staff members in the falls prevention program. Each patient was evaluated using the current falls risk assessment tool. If the patient was scored high risk, full falls prevention measures were maintained. For patients scoring low to moderate risk, a safe patient transfer check off procedure was implemented. Each patient was monitored five times to ensure independent demonstration of all aspects of transfer without support. Upon five safe transfers, the patient’s bed alarm could be shut off and general fall preventative measures maintained. Unit secretaries checked the bed alarm system twice a day to monitor proper activation of alarms. A report was created representing the retrieved information for the charge nurse. The charge nurse followed up with nurses whose patient alarms were not on and ensured proper activation. Results: Since implementation of the safe patient transfer check off, we have seen an additional 33% reduction in fall rate compared to our post-implementation of video monitoring rate (3.48/1000 patient days compared to 5.20/1000 patient days). There were zero falls for patients who were successfully checked off on safe transfers. Conclusion: Implementing a safe transfer check off for mild to moderate fall risk patients on a Stroke Unit may be a successful strategy to prevent falls and fall related injuries. Engaging all staff members in the program increased awareness of the importance of falls prevention.
Characterization of wavefront errors in mouse cranial bone using second-harmonic generation.

Optical aberrations significantly affect the resolution and signal-to-noise ratio of deep tissue microscopy. As multiphoton microscopy is applied deeper into tissue, the loss of resolution and signal due to propagation of light in a medium with heterogeneous refractive index becomes more serious. Efforts in imaging through the intact skull of mice cannot typically reach past the bone marrow (∼150 μm of depth) and have limited resolution and penetration depth. Mechanical bone thinning or optical ablation of bone enables deeper imaging, but these methods are highly invasive and may impact tissue biology. Adaptive optics is a promising noninvasive alternative for restoring optical resolution. We characterize the aberrations present in bone using second-harmonic generation imaging of collagen. We simulate light propagation through highly scattering bone and evaluate the effect of aberrations on the point spread function. We then calculate the wavefront and expand it in Zernike orthogonal polynomials to determine the strength of different optical aberrations. We further compare the corrected wavefront and the residual wavefront error, and suggest a correction element with high number of elements or multiconjugate wavefront correction for this highly scattering environment.
Nonlinear Antiswing Control for Crane Systems With Double-Pendulum Swing Effects and Uncertain Parameters: Design and Experiments

In practical applications, industrial cranes may exhibit double-pendulum swing effects, due to many factors, such as large payload scales and non-negligible hook masses. Currently, for double-pendulum cranes, most available methods are open-loop controllers designed based on linearized crane dynamics; even for existing closed-loop approaches, they are also mostly developed using linearized dynamics and require the exact knowledge of system parameters, which makes them sensitive to parametric uncertainties. To handle these issues, we present an adaptive antiswing control strategy for crane systems with double-pendulum swing effects and uncertain/unknown parameters, which can make the trolley accurately reach the target position with reduced overshoots and effectively eliminate the double-pendulum swing angles at the same time. A complete stability analysis, based upon the full nonlinear dynamics (i.e., without linearizing the dynamics), is included to support the theoretical derivations. We present hardware experimental results to demonstrate that the proposed controller achieves better performance than existing ones and exhibits good robustness. Note to Practitioners —This paper is motivated by the issue of controlling a crane system when double-pendulum swing effects are excited and present. The double-pendulum effects can happen in many practical scenarios and make the crane manual operation very challenging. Moreover, most existing crane control approaches are developed based upon single-pendulum crane models and they may not work normally in the presence of the double-pendulum phenomenon. In addition, usually, the model parameters, including rope length and trolley/hook/payload masses, are not exactly known in practice, which may badly degrade the performance of the control approaches requiring exact model knowledge. Toward this end, we suggest a new control method for cranes suffering from double-pendulum effects to achieve satisfactory performance. The presented control method is robust against parametric uncertainties and it can suppress the double-pendulum swing, reduce the trolley overshoots, and improve the efficiency. Preliminary physical experiments carried out on a double-pendulum crane hardware test bed indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In our future work, we will apply the suggested control approach to industrial crane systems to improve their working efficiency.
Determination of the topological charge of complex light beams by shearing interference from a wedged optical flat

The topological charge (l) is the parameter that defines the amount of orbital angular momentum (OAM) of beams carrying optical vortices. In this article we expand on a robust experimental method to determine the topological charge that we previously developed [B. Khajavi & E. J .Galvez, Opt. Lett. 42, 1516-1519 (2017)]. This method consist of using a pair of confocal lenses and a wedged optical flat as a shearing interferometer. The interference pattern produced by a pure OAM mode directly reveals the magnitude and sign of the topological charge: two conjoined forks with |l| + 1 number of tines pointing away from (towards) one another for l > 0 (l < 0). Superpositions of two modes with the same value of |l| but with the opposite sign produce shearing interference patterns that can be used the infer the value of l and the relative weight of the component modes.
The Influence of Dopamine on Cognitive Flexibility Is Mediated by Functional Connectivity in Young but Not Older Adults.

Dopaminergic signaling in striatum is strongly implicated in executive functions including cognitive flexibility. However, there is a paucity of multimodal research in humans defining the nature of...
Earwitnessing (In)Equity: Tracing the Intra-Active Encounters of ‘Being-in-Resonance-With’ Sound and the Social Contexts of Education

This chapter discusses sound and its modal intensities by refuting ocular-centric notions of seeing phenomena in educational research. It shows that earwitnessing (in)equity, a process where the so-called hearer becomes an ethical listener/witness, is a process that is always already emergent. Its goal is to add to the sonorous sensibilities and sonic possibilities of orienting researchers within their environments, connecting them with affective stimuli, and opening their bodies up to sonic foundations of schooling. Whether earwitnessing the sounds of inequity in a digital media classroom or participating in the production of an auditory performance piece investigating improvisation, sound is always already an action of “becoming-in-resonance with”. Stories, juxtaposed and told from an array of perspectives, modes, and locales, are stacked to evoke possibilities of earwitnessing (in)equity in educational research. Earwitnessing (in)equity and becoming-in-resonance-with promotes an ethics of listening, one that acknowledges who gets heard and what gets silenced. Earwitnessing (in)equity is never finite but always already in process.
Mobile Devices in Programming Contexts: A Review of the Design Space and Processes

"What design innovations can the ubiquity and features of mobile devices bring to the programming realm?" has been a long-standing topic of interest within the human-computer interaction community. Yet, the important design considerations for using mobile devices in programming contexts have not been analyzed systematically. Towards this goal, we review a sample of the existing research work on this topic and present a design space covering (i) the target contexts for the designed programming tools, (ii) the types of programming functionality supported, and (iii) the key design decisions made to support the programming functionality on the mobile devices. We also review the design processes in the existing work and discuss objectives for future research with respect to (i) the trade-offs in enabling programming support given the constraints of mobile devices and (ii) applying human-centered methods particularly in the design and evaluation of programming tools on mobile devices.
The impact of peripheral mechanisms on the precedence effect

When two similar sounds are presented from different locations, with one (the lead) preceding the other (the lag) by a small delay, listeners typically report hearing one sound near the location of the lead sound source-this is called the precedence effect (PE). Several questions about the underlying mechanisms that produce the PE are asked. (1) How might listeners' relative weighting of cues at onset versus ongoing stimulus portions affect perceived lateral position of long-duration lead/lag noise stimuli? (2) What are the factors that influence this weighting? (3) Are the mechanisms invoked to explain the PE for transient stimuli applicable to long-duration stimuli? To answer these questions, lead/lag noise stimuli are presented with a range of durations, onset slopes, and lag-to-lead level ratios over headphones. Monaural, peripheral mechanisms, and binaural cue extraction are modeled to estimate the cues available for determination of perceived laterality. Results showed that all three stimulus manipulations affect the relative weighting of onset and ongoing cues and that mechanisms invoked to explain the PE for transient stimuli are also applicable to the PE, in terms of both onset and ongoing segments of long-duration, lead/lag stimuli.