nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Expanding the Isotopic Toolbox: Applications of Hydrogen and Oxygen Stable Isotope Ratios to Food Web Studies
Venue: Front. Ecol. Evol.

The measurement of stable carbon (d13C) and nitrogen (d15N) isotopes in tissues of organisms has formed the foundation of isotopic food web reconstructions, as these values directly reflect assimilated diet. In contrast, stable hydrogen (d2H) and oxygen (d18O) isotope measurements have typically been reserved for studies of migratory origin and paleoclimate reconstruction based on systematic relationships between organismal tissue and local environmental water. Recently, innovative applications using d2H and, to a lesser extent, d18O values have demonstrated potential for these elements to provide novel insights in modern food web studies. We explore the advantages and challenges associated with three applications of d2H and d18O values in food web studies. First, large d2H differences between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem end members can permit the quantification of energy inputs and nutrient fluxes between these two sources, with potential applications for determining allochthonous vs. autochthonous nutrient sources in freshwater systems and relative aquatic habitat utilization by terrestrial organisms. Next, some studies have identified a relationship between d2H values and trophic position, which suggests that this marker may serve as a trophic indicator, in addition to the more commonly used d15N values. Finally, coupled measurements of d2H and d18O values are increasing as a result of reduced analytical challenges to measure both simultaneously and may provide additional ecological information over single element measurements. In some organisms, the isotopic ratios of these two elements are tightly coupled, whereas the isotopic disequilibrium in other organisms may offer insight into the diet and physiology of individuals. Although a coherent framework for interpreting d2H and d18O data in the context of food web studies is emerging, many fundamental uncertainties remain. We highlight directions for targeted research that will increase our understanding of how these markers move through food webs and reflect ecological processes.
Explaining light vehicle demand evolution in interurban toll roads: a dynamic panel data analysis in Spain

Tolls have increasingly become a common mechanism to fund road projects in recent decades. Therefore, improving knowledge of demand behavior constitutes a key aspect for stakeholders dealing with the management of toll roads. However, the literature concerning demand elasticity estimates for interurban toll roads is still limited due to their relatively scarce number in the international context. Furthermore, existing research has left some aspects to be investigated, among others, the choice of GDP as the most common socioeconomic variable to explain traffic growth over time. This paper intends to determine the variables that better explain the evolution of light vehicle demand in toll roads throughout the years. To that end, we establish a dynamic panel data methodology aimed at identifying the key socioeconomic variables explaining changes in light vehicle demand over time. The results show that, despite some usefulness, GDP does not constitute the most appropriate explanatory variable, while other parameters such as employment or GDP per capita lead to more stable and consistent results. The methodology is applied to Spanish toll roads for the 1990 2011 period, which constitutes a very interesting case on variations in toll road use, as road demand has experienced a significant decrease since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008.
Dynamic evolution control strategies for fuel cell system
Venue: 2016 IEEE 1st International Conference on Power Electronics, Intelligent Control and Energy Systems (ICPEICES)

The electric vehicle offering the better performance as compared to an internal combustion engine. In this context, electric vehicle powered by the fuel cell is an interesting solution because of their higher efficiency and clean source of energy. Fuel cell is providing the continuous power to the load, so it is necessary to provide the control strategies for fuel cell system. This paper presents two control techniques for fuel cell. First control technique is used for controlling the fuel (H2 and O2) for controlling the fuel cell power. Second control technique is used to maintain the constant output voltage of the boost converter. The control technique have designed and implemented in MATLAB/Simulink. The performance of control technique is tested through simulation. Simulation results shows that the proposed technique are suitable for performance of fuel cell
Towards a generic non reflective characteristic boundary condition for aeroacoustic simulations

A blended zonal characteristic boundary condition is proposed following a quantitative investigation of the performance of several non reflective boundary conditions. Two test cases are considered that investigate the effects of acoustic and vortical plane waves impinging on the domain outflow region. A third test case investigates the effects of broadband turbulent flow impinging on a non reflective outflow boundary condition. From these studies, two non reflective boundary conditions based on a zonal characteristic method are found to provide a minimal acoustic response for impinging acoustic and vortical disturbances, respectively. These methods both make use of the transverse characteristic terms to improve performance, although each method uses a different inclusion of these terms. A final boundary condition is proposed that blends the performance of the two zonal characteristic methods. A blending function is used that switches the characteristic boundary condition smoothly between regions dominated by acoustic, or vortical, disturbances. The feasibility of this novel method is demonstrated on a test case where broadband turbulence impinges on a small section of an outflow region.
Oral lichen planus: a literature review and update
Venue: Archives of Dermatological Research

Lichen planus (LP) is a common chronic inflammatory condition that can affect skin and mucous membranes, including the oral mucosa. Because of the anatomic, physiologic and functional peculiarities of the oral cavity, the oral variant of LP (OLP) requires specific evaluations in terms of diagnosis and management. In this comprehensive review, we discuss the current developments in the understanding of the etiopathogenesis, clinical pathologic presentation, and treatment of OLP, and provide follow up recommendations informed by recent data on the malignant potential of the disease as well as health economics evaluations.
Etiology and pathogenesis of oral lichen planus: an overview.
Venue: Oral surgery, oral medicine, oral pathology and oral radiology

Oral lichen planus is a noninfectious, chronic inflammatory condition that involves the oral mucosal stratified squamous epithelium and the underlying lamina propria and may be accompanied by skin lesions. This overview describes the current understanding of the immunopathologic mechanisms implicated in oral lichen planus.
Lichen Sclerosus: Incidence and Risk of Vulvar Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Venue: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers Prevention

The association between lichen sclerosus and vulvar squamous cell carcinoma (VSCC) has long been recognized, but large epidemiologic studies are lacking.  Data of women diagnosed with vulvar pathology in the Netherlands were retrieved from the Dutch Pathology Registry. All vulvar pathology reports of this historical cohort were reviewed to construct a research database, including 3,038 women with lichen sclerosus diagnosed between 1991 and 2011. The incidence rate of lichen sclerosus and the cumulative incidence of VSCC among women with lichen sclerosus were estimated.  Between 1991 and 2011, the incidence rate of lichen sclerosus increased from 7.4 to 14.6 per 100,000 woman years. The median age at time of lichen sclerosus diagnosis was 59.8 years and the cumulative VSCC incidence was 6.7% The 10 year VSCC incidence in women with lichen sclerosus was associated with concurrent vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia (VIN; 18.8% in women with VIN and 2.8% in women without VIN) and age at time of lichen sclerosus diagnosis (5.9% in women of =70 years, 3% in women between 50 and 70 years, and 1.8% in women <50 years) The effects of presence of VIN and age remained significant in adjusted Cox regression analysis.  This historical cohort showed a nearly 100% increase in incidence of lichen sclerosus between 1991 and 2011. Concurrent VIN and age =70 years at time of lichen sclerosus diagnosis are important risk factors for vulvar cancer development.  The incidence of lichen sclerosus is rising and special attention is needed in particular in women with concurrent VIN because of their high risk of cancer. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 25(8) 1224 30. (c)2016 AACR.
Effects of bryophyte and lichen cover on permafrost soil temperature at large scale

Bryophyte and lichen cover on the forest floor at high latitudes exerts an insulating effect on the ground. In this way, the cover decreases mean annual soil temperature and can protect permafrost soil. Climate change, however, may change bryophyte and lichen cover, with effects on the permafrost state and related carbon balance. It is, therefore, crucial to predict how the bryophyte and lichen cover will react to environmental change at the global scale. To date, current global land surface models contain only empirical representations of the bryophyte and lichen cover, which makes it impractical to predict the future state and function of bryophytes and lichens. For this reason, we integrate a process based model of bryophyte and lichen growth into the global land surface model JSBACH (Jena Scheme for Biosphere Atmosphere Coupling in Hamburg) The model simulates bryophyte and lichen cover on upland sites. Wetlands are not included. We take into account the dynamic nature of the thermal properties of the bryophyte and lichen cover and their relation to environmental factors. Subsequently, we compare simulations with and without bryophyte and lichen cover to quantify the insulating effect of the organisms on the soil. We find an average cooling effect of the bryophyte and lichen cover of 2.7 K on temperature in the topsoil for the region north of 50deg N under the current climate. Locally, a cooling of up to 5.7 K may be reached. Moreover, we show that using a simple, empirical representation of the bryophyte and lichen cover without dynamic properties only results in an average cooling of around 0.5 K. This suggests that (a) bryophytes and lichens have a significant impact on soil temperature in high latitude ecosystems and (b) a process based description of their thermal properties is necessary for a realistic representation of the cooling effect. The advanced land surface scheme, including a dynamic bryophyte and lichen model, will be the basis for an improved future projection of land atmosphere heat and carbon exchange.
Strong Coresets for Hard and Soft Bregman Clustering with Applications to Exponential Family Mixtures
Venue: AISTATS

Coresets are efficient representations of data sets such that models trained on the coreset are provably competitive with models trained on the original data set. As such, they have been successfully used to scale up clustering models such as K Means and Gaussian mixture models to massive data sets. However, until now, the algorithms and the corresponding theory were usually specific to each clustering problem. We propose a single, practical algorithm to construct strong coresets for a large class of hard and soft clustering problems based on Bregman divergences. This class includes hard clustering with popular distortion measures such as the Squared Euclidean distance, the Mahalanobis distance, KL divergence and Itakura Saito distance. The corresponding soft clustering problems are directly related to popular mixture models due to a dual relationship between Bregman divergences and Exponential family distributions. Our theoretical results further imply a randomized polynomial time approximation scheme for hard clustering. We demonstrate the practicality of the proposed algorithm in an empirical evaluation.
Formate adsorption on Pt nanoparticles during formic acid electro oxidation: insights from in situ infrared spectroscopy.
Venue: Chemical communications

Adsorbed formate is observed on a supported Pt nanoparticle for the first time during formic acid electro oxidation. Bands assigned to OCO stretching and CH bending reveal some OCO but little CH bond weakening on adsorption compared to the free anion. The formate potential dependence is similar to polycrystalline electrodes while adsorbed CO persists up to +1.2 V, 0.5 V higher than on polycrystalline Pt.
Building a Natural Language Processing Tool to Identify Patients With High Clinical Suspicion for Kawasaki Disease from Emergency Department Notes.
Venue: Academic emergency medicine official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine

Delayed diagnosis of Kawasaki disease (KD) may lead to serious cardiac complications. We sought to create and test the performance of a natural language processing (NLP) tool, the KD NLP, in the identification of emergency department (ED) patients for whom the diagnosis of KD should be considered.  We developed an NLP tool that recognizes the KD diagnostic criteria based on standard clinical terms and medical word usage using 22 pediatric ED notes augmented by Unified Medical Language System vocabulary. With high suspicion for KD defined as fever and three or more KD clinical signs, KD NLP was applied to 253 ED notes from children ultimately diagnosed with either KD or another febrile illness. We evaluated KD NLP performance against ED notes manually reviewed by clinicians and compared the results to a simple keyword search.  NLP identified high suspicion patients with a sensitivity of 93.6% and specificity of 77.5% compared to notes manually reviewed by clinicians. The tool outperformed a simple keyword search (sensitivity 41.0% specificity 76.3% CONCLUSIONS KD NLP showed comparable performance to clinician manual chart review for identification of pediatric ED patients with a high suspicion for KD. This tool could be incorporated into the ED electronic health record system to alert providers to consider the diagnosis of KD. KD NLP could serve as a model for decision support for other conditions in the ED.
The role of brain derived neurotrophic factor in learned fear processing: an awake rat fMRI study
Venue: Genes, brain, and behavior

Brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) signaling is implicated in the etiology of many psychiatric disorders associated with altered emotional processing. Altered peripheral (plasma) BDNF levels have been proposed as a biomarker for neuropsychiatric disease risk in humans. However, the relationship between peripheral and central BDNF levels and emotional brain activation is unknown. We used heterozygous BDNF knockdown rats (BDNF+ to examine the effects of genetic variation in the BDNF gene on peripheral and central BDNF levels and emotional brain activation as assessed by awake functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) BDNF+ and control rats were trained to associate a flashing light (conditioned stimulus; CS) with foot shock, and brain activation in response to the CS was measured 24 h later in awake rats using fMRI. Central and peripheral BDNF levels were decreased in BDNF+ rats compared with control rats. Activation of fear circuitry (amygdala, periaqueductal gray, granular insular) was seen in control animals; however, activation of this circuitry was absent in BDNF+ animals. Behavioral experiments confirmed impaired conditioned fear responses in BDNF+ rats, despite intact innate fear responses. These data confirm a positive correlation [r 0.86, 95% confidence interval (0.55, 0.96) P 0.0004] between peripheral and central BDNF levels and indicate a functional relationship between BDNF levels and emotional brain activation as assessed by fMRI. The results demonstrate the use of rodent fMRI as a sensitive tool for measuring brain function in preclinical translational studies using genetically modified rats and support the use of peripheral BDNF as a biomarker of central affective processing.
Threat and the Body: How the Heart Supports Fear Processing
Venue: Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Mental processes depend upon a dynamic integration of brain and body. Emotions encompass internal physiological changes which, through interoception (sensing bodily states) underpin emotional feelings, for example, cardiovascular arousal can intensify feelings of fear and anxiety. The brain is informed about how quickly and strongly the heart is beating by signals from arterial baroreceptors. These fire in bursts after each heartbeat, and are quiet between heartbeats. The processing of fear stimuli is selectively enhanced by these phasic signals, and these inhibit the processing of other types of stimuli including physical pain. Behavioural and neuroimaging studies detail this differential impact of heart signals on the processing of salient stimuli, and add to knowledge linking rhythmic activity in brain and body to perceptual consciousness.
Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions
Venue: Neuropsychologia

Music is often used to regulate emotions and mood. Typically, music conveys and induces emotions even when one does not attend to them. Studies on the neural substrates of musical emotions have, however, only examined brain activity when subjects have focused on the emotional content of the music. Here we address with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the neural processing of happy, sad, and fearful music with a paradigm in which 56 subjects were instructed to either classify the emotions (explicit condition) or pay attention to the number of instruments playing (implicit condition) in 4 s music clips. In the implicit vs. explicit condition, stimuli activated bilaterally the inferior parietal lobule, premotor cortex, caudate, and ventromedial frontal areas. The cortical dorsomedial prefrontal and occipital areas activated during explicit processing were those previously shown to be associated with the cognitive processing of music and emotion recognition and regulation. Moreover, happiness in music was associated with activity in the bilateral auditory cortex, left parahippocampal gyrus, and supplementary motor area, whereas the negative emotions of sadness and fear corresponded with activation of the left anterior cingulate and middle frontal gyrus and down regulation of the orbitofrontal cortex. Our study demonstrates for the first time in healthy subjects the neural underpinnings of the implicit processing of brief musical emotions, particularly in frontoparietal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and striatal areas of the brain.
The Impact of Multiparity on Uterine Gene Expression and Decidualization in Mice
Venue: Reproductive Sciences

It has been well established that a previous pregnancy exhibits a beneficial effect on the subsequent pregnancy. However, the underlying mechanisms have not been defined. We hypothesized that multiparity may affect decidualization process during early pregnancy. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed global gene changes associated with multiparity in the mouse uterus using RNA sequencing (RNA seq) We identified a total of 131 differentially expressed genes (fold change 2 and false discovery rate 0.05) of which 58 were downregulated and 73 genes were upregulated in the second pregnancy (SP) compared to the first pregnancy. Functional clustering analysis showed that genes involved in stress response were significantly enriched. Most importantly, a significant portion of differentially expressed genes, 14 genes or 10.7% overlapped with the gene list associated with decidualization. Quantitative reverse transcription (RT) polymerase chain reaction (qRT PCR) analysis confirmed a decreased expression of 4 genes (Klk1, kallikrein 1; H2 Eb1, histocompatibility 2 class II antigen E beta; Mmp7, matrix metallopeptidase 7; Pdpn, podoplanin) and an increase in expression of 2 genes (Thy1, thymus cell antigen 1; Ptgs2, prostaglandin endoperoxide synthase 2) in SP. Beyond protein coding genes, we also identified a differentially expressed long noncoding RNA AI506816. Our data provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying the beneficial effect of multiparity.
Paulo Freire's Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom: Promotion of Critica Thinking in South African English First Additional Language (FAL) Students

This study investigated the use of Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy in an English (FAL)classroom andits implications in order to promote students' critical thinking skills and to improve English (FAL) lecturers'teaching practice. A qualitative approach with open ended questionnaires and unstructured interviews were used tocollect data. The research population of this study included eight first year English (FAL) students and eight finalyearstudent teachers whose home language is Xhosa, Zulu or Sesotho, with English as their medium of instruction, as well as four lecturers with the home languages of Xhosa, Zulu or Sesotho, majored in English at teacher training.Results indicate that cooperative learning, students' questions, and problem posing methods as instructional cuesplay a significant role in stimulating students' participation in the discussion of the topic and problems related tothe content. This study recommends that lecturers should ensure that teaching and learning objectives manifestcollaborative activities inclined to a social constructivist approach.
On blended cement and geopolymer concretes containing palm oil fuel ash

This article discusses the utilization of palm oil fuel ash (POFA) in normal and geopolymer concrete. Malaysia, one of the world's largest producers of palm oil, produces more than 10 Mt/year of palm waste as ash, which is called POFA. Since 1989, extensive research has been conducted on its utilization in concrete. Several published studies have noted POFA's enormous potential as a partial replacement of cement in concrete. This paper describes the effects of using POFA on different fresh and hardened properties of concrete. The latest studies on the use of ground POFA revealed that concrete made from this material possesses better fresh properties and medium to higher strength than ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete. One of the major findings is that concrete that incorporates 20% fine POFA by weight of cement showed better durability properties than OPC concrete. Because limiting CO 2 emissions has become a matter of increasing importance in the construction industry, concrete that uses less cement in its production and utilizes an increased amount of waste, such as POFA, offers an environmentally viable solution. Moreover, 100% cement free geopolymer concrete can be produced using blended ash, such as POFA and fly ash.