nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Natural inhibitors of pancreatic lipase as new players in obesity treatment.

Obesity is a multifactorial disease characterized by an excessive weight for height due to an enlarged fat deposition such as adipose tissue, which is attributed to a higher calorie intake than the energy expenditure. The key strategy to combat obesity is to prevent chronic positive impairments in the energy equation. However, it is often difficult to maintain energy balance, because many available foods are high-energy yielding, which is usually accompanied by low levels of physical activity. The pharmaceutical industry has invested many efforts in producing antiobesity drugs; but only a lipid digestion inhibitor obtained from an actinobacterium is currently approved and authorized in Europe for obesity treatment. This compound inhibits the activity of pancreatic lipase, which is one of the enzymes involved in fat digestion. In a similar way, hundreds of extracts are currently being isolated from plants, fungi, algae, or bacteria and screened for their potential inhibition of pancreatic lipase activity. Among them, extracts isolated from common foodstuffs such as tea, soybean, ginseng, yerba mate, peanut, apple, or grapevine have been reported. Some of them are polyphenols and saponins with an inhibitory effect on pancreatic lipase activity, which could be applied in the management of the obesity epidemic.
American Economic Association Why Have Americans Become More Obese ?

I n the early 1960s, the average American adult male weighed 168 pounds. Today, he weighs nearly 180 pounds. Over the same time period, the average female adult weight rose from 143 pounds to over 155 pounds (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1977, 1996). In the early 1970s, 14 percent of the population was classified as medically obese. Today, obesity rates are two times higher (Centers for Disease Control, 2003). Weights have been rising in the United States throughout the twentieth century, but the rise in obesity since 1980 is fundamentally different from past changes. For most of the twentieth century, weights were below levels recommended for maximum longevity (Fogel, 1994), and the increase in weight represented an increase in health, not a decrease. Today, Americans are fatter than medical science recommends, and weights are still increasing. While many other countries have experienced significant increases in obesity, no other developed country is quite as heavy as the United States. What explains this growth in obesity? Why is obesity higher in the United States than in any other developed country? The available evidence suggests that calories expended have not changed significantly since 1980, while calories consumed have risen markedly. But these facts just push the puzzle back a step: why has there been an increase in calories consumed? We propose a theory based on the division of labor in food preparation. In the 1960s, the bulk of food preparation was done by families that cooked their own food and ate it at home. Since then, there has been a revolution in the mass preparation of food that is roughly comparable to the mass
A compact coupled-line forward coupler using composite right-/left-handed transmission lines

A novel coupled-line forward coupler using composite right-/left-handed transmission lines (CRLH TLs) is presented. Enhanced forward coupling is achieved with the coupled CRLH TLs which have a considerable difference of effective phase constants in the even/odd modes. A circuit model and a microstrip implementation of the proposed CRLH forward coupler are described. The 10-dB forward coupler is simulated and experimentally demonstrated in the S-band. Its coupled-line length is significantly reduced to half of the conventional right-handed forward coupler with the same coupling. The experimental results correspond with the simulated results.
An MDP Model of Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction at an Unsignalized Intersection

Though autonomous vehicles are currently operating in several places, many important questions within the field of autonomous vehicle research remain to be addressed satisfactorily. In this paper, we examine the role of communication between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles at unsignalized intersections. The nature of interaction between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles remains mostly in the realm of speculation currently. Of course, pedestrian’s reactions towards autonomous vehicles will gradually change over time owing to habituation, but it is clear that this topic requires urgent and ongoing study, not least of all because engineers require some working model for pedestrian-autonomous-vehicle communication. Our paper proposes a decision-theoretic model that expresses the interaction between a pedestrian and a vehicle. The model considers the interaction between a pedestrian and a vehicle as expressed an MDP, based on prior work conducted by psychologists examining similar experimental conditions. We describe this model and our simulation study of behavior it exhibits. The preliminary results on evaluating the behavior of the autonomous vehicle are promising and we believe it can help reduce the data needed to develop fuller models.
Sugars and dental caries 1 – 4

A dynamic relation exists between sugars and oral health. Diet affects the integrity of the teeth; quantity, pH, and composition of the saliva; and plaque pH. Sugars and other fermentable carbohydrates, after being hydrolyzed by salivary amylase, provide substrate for the actions of oral bacteria, which in turn lower plaque and salivary pH. The resultant action is the beginning of tooth demineralization. Consumed sugars are naturally occurring or are added. Many factors in addition to sugars affect the caries process, including the form of food or fluid, the duration of exposure, nutrient composition, sequence of eating, salivary flow, presence of buffers, and oral hygiene. Studies have confirmed the direct relation between intake of dietary sugars and dental caries across the life span. Since the introduction of fluoride, the incidence of caries worldwide has decreased, despite increases in sugars consumption. Other dietary factors (eg, the presence of buffers in dairy products; the use of sugarless chewing gum, particularly gum containing xylitol; and the consumption of sugars as part of meals rather than between meals) may reduce the risk of caries. The primary public health measures for reducing caries risk, from a nutrition perspective, are the consumption of a balanced diet and adherence to dietary guidelines and the dietary reference intakes; from a dental perspective, the primary public health measures are the use of topical fluorides and consumption of fluoridated water. Am J Clin Nutr 2003;78(suppl):881S–92S.
Debulking Surgery for Elephantiasis Nostras With Large Ectatic Podoplanin-Negative Lymphatic Vessels in Patients With Lipo-Lymphedema

Elephantiasis nostras is a rare complication in advanced lipo-lymphedema. While lipedema can be treated by liposuction and lymphedema by decongestive lymphatic therapy, elephantiasis nostras may need debulking surgery.



We present 2 cases of advanced lipo-lymphedema complicated by elephantiasis nostras. After tumescent microcannular laser-assisted liposuction both patients underwent a debulking surgery with a modification of Auchincloss-Kim's technique. Histologic examination of the tissue specimen was performed.



The surgical treatment was well tolerated and primary healing was uneventful. After primary wound healing and ambulation of the patients, a delayed ulceration with lymphorrhea developed. It was treated by surgical necrectomy and vacuum-assisted closure leading to complete healing. Mobility of the leg was much improved. Histologic examination revealed massive ectatic lymphatic vessels nonreactive for podoplanin.



Debulking surgery can be an adjuvant technique for elephantiasis nostras in advanced lipo-lymphedema. Although delayed postoperative wound healing problems were observed, necrectomy and vacuum-assisted closure achieved a complete healing. Histologic data suggest that the ectatic lymphatic vessels in these patients resemble finding in podoplanin knockout mice. The findings would explain the limitations of decongestive lymphatic therapy and tumescent liposuction in such patients and their predisposition to relapsing erysipelas.
Attitudes and knowledge levels of nurses and residents caring for adolescents with an eating disorder.

Although the vast majority of youths with an eating disorder (ED) are treated as outpatients, some require treatment in an inpatient unit. The purpose of this study was to determine the attitudes of nurses and pediatric residents towards adolescents and young adults with ED.



Nursing questionnaires were distributed through a nurse manager and resident questionnaires were distributed in coordination with the chief residents.



A total of 82 individuals (32 nurses and 50 pediatric residents) completed the survey. Only two nurses and six residents had not worked with a patient with an ED in the previous year. The vast majority of nurses and residents recognized that fear of gaining weight, refusal to maintain body weight and, disturbed body image were frequent signs occurring in patients with an ED. Both nurses and residents believed that emotional problems, influence of friends and family, family pressure, influence of the media, and being self-induced were the most likely causes of EDs. Genetics and influence of other medical problems were deemed less likely causes. The majority of residents identified having different rules for different patients and poor communication as factors that make it difficult to take care of ED patients. More than half of all nurses and residents (58.2%) thought that ED patients were responsible for their disease "always" or "in most cases". Residents (68.8%) were more likely than nurses (45.2%) to frequently feel frustrated with ED patients (χ2, p<0.0370).



Adolescents with an ED provide a unique challenge to nurses and residents caring for them.
Combined anteversion technique for total hip arthroplasty.

Combined cup and stem anteversion in THA based on femoral anteversion has been suggested as a method to compensate for abnormal femoral anteversion. We investigated the combined anteversion technique using computer navigation. In 47 THAs, the surgeon first estimated the femoral broach anteversion and validated the position by computer navigation. The broach was then measured with navigation. The navigation screen was blocked while the surgeon estimated the anteversion of the broach. This provided two estimates of stem anteversion. The navigated stem anteversion was validated by postoperative CT scans. All cups were implanted using navigation alone. We determined precision (the reproducibility) and bias (how close the average test number is to the true value) of the stem position. Comparing the surgeon estimate to navigation anteversion, the precision of the surgeon was 16.8 degrees and bias was 0.2 degrees ; comparing the navigation of the stem to postoperative CT anteversion, the precision was 4.8 degrees and bias was 0.2 degrees , meaning navigation is accurate. Combined anteversion by postoperative CT scan was 37.6 degrees +/- 7 degrees (standard deviation) (range, 19 degrees -50 degrees ). The combined anteversion with computer navigation was within the safe zone of 25 degrees to 50 degrees for 45 of 47 (96%) hips. Femoral stem anteversion had a wide variability.


 See the Guidelines for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.
Statistical modelling of citation exchange between statistics journals

Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with scepticism by the scientific community. Part of the scepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of researchers. The paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care to avoid potential overinterpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's research assessment exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation 'export scores' within the discipline of statistics.
Characterizing structural relationships in scenes using graph kernels

Modeling virtual environments is a time consuming and expensive task that is becoming increasingly popular for both professional and casual artists. The model density and complexity of the scenes representing these virtual environments is rising rapidly. This trend suggests that data-mining a 3D scene corpus could be a very powerful tool enabling more efficient scene design. In this paper, we show how to represent scenes as graphs that encode models and their semantic relationships. We then define a kernel between these relationship graphs that compares common virtual substructures in two graphs and captures the similarity between their corresponding scenes. We apply this framework to several scene modeling problems, such as finding similar scenes, relevance feedback, and context-based model search. We show that incorporating structural relationships allows our method to provide a more relevant set of results when compared against previous approaches to model context search.
Fixed drug eruption at sites of ear piercing.

etretinate to PUVA was associated with better treatment response. In our patients with psoriasis, topical PUVA achieved improvement rates comparable with oral PUVA, with a mean cumulative UVA dose of 187.5 J ⁄ cm. Our study contradicts previous observations made in other studies on vitiligo and demonstrates that topical PUVA does have a limited therapeutic effect in vitiligo. Oral and topical PUVA showed low but equal efficacy in patients with vitiligo with a similar mean number of treatments to completion. Approximately one-quarter of our patients with vitiligo had discontinued PUVA therapy, which probably affected the outcome. It has been shown that at least 1 year of continuous and regular therapy with oral PUVA is needed to achieve a sufficient degree of repigmentation. Shorter periods were not found to be sufficient to observe clinical signs of repigmentation. Currently it is not known if the same holds true for topical PUVA. In conclusion, our results show that the efficacy of topical PUVA is comparable with that of oral PUVA, and favoured topical PUVA treatment especially in the eczema group with respect to cumulative UVA doses and success rates. Given the necessity for long-term treatment with local PUVA therapies, successful management requires maintenance of full patient compliance. Because of this, the results in this study should not only be attributed to the therapies. Because of its safety and the simplicity, topical PUVA should be considered as an alternative therapy to other phototherapy methods.
DIPPER: Description and Formalisation of an Information-State Update Dialogue System Architecture

The DIPPER architecture is a collection of software agents for prototyping spoken dialogue systems. Implemented on top of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA), it comprises agents for speech input and output, dialogue management, and further supporting agents. We define a formal syntax and semantics for the DIPPER information state update language. The language is independent of particular programming languages, and incorporates procedural attachments for access to external resources using OAA.
Time Series Segmentation to Discover Behavior Switching in Complex Physical Systems

An accurate and automated identification of operational behavior switching is critical to the autonomic management of complex systems. In this paper, we collect sensor readings from those systems, which are treated as time series, and propose a solution to discover switching behaviors by inferring the relationship changes among massive time series. The method first learns a sequence of local relationship models that can best fit the time series data, and then combines the changes of local relationships to identify the system level behavior switching. In the local relationship modeling, we formulate the underlying switching identification as a segmentation problem, and propose a sophisticated optimization algorithm to accurately discover different segments in time series. In addition, we develop a hierarchical optimization strategy to further improve the efficiency of segmentation. To unveil the system level behavior switching, we present a density estimation and mode search algorithm to effectively aggregate the segmented local relationships so that the global switch points can be captured. Our method has been evaluated on both synthetic data and datasets from real systems. Experimental results demonstrate that it can successfully discover behavior switching in different systems.
Data-driven robotic sampling for marine ecosystem monitoring

Robotic sampling is attractive in many field robotics applications that require persistent collection of physical samples for ex-situ analysis. Examples abound in the earth sciences in studies involving the collection of rock, soil, and water samples for laboratory analysis. In our test domain, marine ecosystem monitoring, detailed understanding of plankton ecology requires laboratory analysis of water samples, but predictions using physical and chemical properties measured in real-time by sensors aboard an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) can guide sample collection decisions. In this paper, we present a data-driven and opportunistic sampling strategy to minimize cumulative regret for batches of plankton samples acquired by an AUV over multiple surveys. Samples are labeled at the end of each survey, and used to update a probabilistic model that guides sampling during subsequent surveys. During a survey, the AUV makes irrevocable sample collection decisions online for a sequential stream of candidates, with no knowledge of the quality of future samples. In addition to extensive simulations using historical field data, we present results from a one-day field trial where beginning with a prior model learned from data collected and labeled in an earlier campaign, the AUV collected water samples with a high abundance of a pre-specified planktonic target. This is the first time such a field experiment has been carried out in its entirety in a data-driven fashion, in effect ‘‘closing the loop’’ on a significant and relevant ecosystem monitoring problem while allowing domain experts (marine ecologists) to specify the mission at a relatively high level.
Banking on the Financial Supply Chain

FX&MM MAY ISSUE 2010 To subscribe online visit: www.fx-mm.com REVERSE FACTORING – BENEFITS FOR ALL A growing number of transaction banks are implementing supplier finance programmes for their large credit-worthy customers who wish to support their supply chain partners. Reverse factoring is the most popular model, enabling banks to provide suppliers with finance at a lower cost than they would normally achieve through direct credit facilities. The credit arbitrage is achieved by the bank securing an undertaking from the buyer (who has a higher credit rating than the suppliers) to settle all invoices at maturity. By financing the buyer’s approved payables, the bank mitigates transaction and fraud risk. In addition to the lower borrowing costs and the off balance sheet treatment of these receivables purchase programmes, a further attraction for suppliers invoicing in foreign currencies is that by taking early payment they protect themselves against foreign exchange fluctuations. In return, the buyer ensures a more stable and robust supply chain, can choose to negotiate lower costs of goods and extend Days Payable Outstanding, improving working capital. Given the compelling benefits of reverse factoring, the market challenge is to drive these new programmes into mainstream acceptance.
Adaptive user interface for higher education based on web technology

We present an Adaptive User Interface (AUI) for online courses in higher education as a method for solving the challenges posed by the different knowledge levels in a heterogeneous group of students. The scenario described in this paper is an online beginners' course in Mathematics which is extended by an adaptive course layout to better fit the needs of every individual student. The course offers an entry-level test to check each student's prior knowledge and skills. The results are used to automatically determine which parts of the course are relevant for the student and which ones can be hidden, based on parameters set by the course teachers. Initial results are promising; the new adaptive learning platform in mathematics is leading to higher student satisfaction and better performance.
Crystal structure of the pregnane X receptor-estradiol complex provides insights into endobiotic recognition.

The human nuclear pregnane X receptor (PXR) responds to a wide variety of xenobiotic and endobiotic compounds, including pregnanes, progesterones, corticosterones, lithocholic acids, and 17beta-estradiol. In response to these ligands, the receptor controls the expression of genes central to the metabolism and excretion of potentially harmful chemicals from both exogenous and endogenous sources. Although the structural basis of PXR's interaction with small and large xenobiotics has been examined, the detailed nature of its binding to endobiotics, including steroid-like ligands, remains unclear. We report the crystal structure of the human PXR ligand-binding domain (LBD) in complex with 17beta-estradiol, a representative steroid ligand, at 2.65 A resolution. Estradiol is found to occupy only one region of PXR's expansive ligand-binding pocket, leaving a notable 1000 A3 of space unoccupied, and to bridge between the key polar residues Ser-247 and Arg-410 in the PXR LBD. Positioning the steroid scaffold in this way allows it to make several direct contacts to alphaAF of the receptor's AF-2 region. The PXR-estradiol complex was compared with that of other nuclear receptors, including the estrogen receptor, in complexes with analogous ligands. It was found that PXR's placement of the steroid is remarkably distinct relative to other members of the nuclear receptor superfamily. Using the PXR-estradiol complex as a guide, the binding of other steroid- and cholesterol-like molecules was then considered. The results provide detailed insights into the manner in which human PXR responds to a wide range of endobiotic compounds.
SoCIN: A Parametric and Scalable Network-on-Chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) interconnection architectures to be used in future billion-transistor Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) meet the major communication requirements of these systems, offering, at the same time, reusability, scalability and parallelism in communication. Furthermore, they cope with other issues like power constraints and clock distribution. Currently, there is a number of research works which explore different features of NoCs. In this paper, we present SoCIN, a scalable network based on a parametric router architecture to beused in the synthesis of customized low cost NoCs. The architecture of SoCIN and its router are described, and some synthesis results are presented.