A Miniscule Survey on Blockchain Scalability

With the rise of cryptocurrency and NFTs in the past decade, blockchain technology has been an area of increasing interest to both industry and academic experts. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of such systems through the lens of scalability. We also briefly dive into the security issues of such systems, as well as some applications, including healthcare, supply chain, and government applications

InstructHumans: Editing Animated 3D Human Textures with Instructions

We present InstructHumans, a novel framework for instruction-driven 3D human texture editing. Existing text-based editing methods use Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to distill guidance from generative models. This work shows that naively using such scores is harmful to editing as they destroy consistency with the source avatar. Instead, we propose an alternate SDS for Editing (SDS-E) that selectively incorporates subterms of SDS across diffusion timesteps. We further enhance SDS-E with spatial smoothness regularization and gradient-based viewpoint sampling to achieve high-quality edits with sharp and high-fidelity detailing. InstructHumans significantly outperforms existing 3D editing methods, consistent with the initial avatar while faithful to the textual instructions. Project page: https://jyzhu.top/instruct-humans .Comment: Project Page: https://jyzhu.top/instruct-human

TYK2 promotes malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor progression through inhibition of cell death

BACKGROUND: Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors (MPNSTs) are aggressive sarcomas that arise most commonly in the setting of the Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1) cancer predisposition syndrome. Despite aggressive multimodality therapy, outcomes are dismal and most patients die within 5 years of diagnosis. Prior genomic studies in our laboratory identified tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) as a frequently mutated gene in MPNST. Herein, we explored the function of TYK2 in MPNST pathogenesis. METHODS: Immunohistochemistry was utilized to examine expression of TYK2 in MPNSTs and other sarcomas. To establish a role for TYK2 in MPNST pathogenesis, murine and human TYK2 knockdown and knockout cells were established using shRNA and CRISPR/Cas9 systems, respectively. RESULTS: We have demonstrated that TYK2 was highly expressed in the majority of human MPNSTs examined. Additionally, we demonstrated that knockdown of Tyk2/TYK2 in murine and human MPNST cells significantly increased cell death in vitro. These effects were accompanied by a decrease in the levels of activated Stats and Bcl-2 as well as an increase in the levels of Cleaved Caspase-3. In addition, Tyk2-KD cells demonstrated impaired growth in subcutaneous and metastasis models in vivo. CONCLUSION: Taken together, these data illustrate the importance of TYK2 in MPNST pathogenesis and suggest that the TYK2 pathway may be a potential therapeutic target for these deadly cancers

Causal Inference Methods For Addressing Positivity Violations And Bias In Observational And Cluster-Randomized Studies

Observational data are increasingly used to evaluate the effects of treatments on health outcomes. Causal inference provides a framework for formulating estimands of interest in this setting; however, identifiability of these estimands relies on certain assumptions. One assumption is called positivity, which requires the probability of treatment to be bounded away from 0 and 1. That is, for every covariate combination, we should observe both treated and control subjects. If the positivity assumption is violated, population-level causal inference necessarily involves some extrapolation. Ideally, a greater amount of uncertainty around the causal effect estimate is reflected in areas of non-overlap. With that goal in mind, we construct a Gaussian process model for estimating treatment effects in the presence of practical violations of positivity. Our method does not rely on strong parametric assumptions, provides a cohesive model for estimating treatment effects, and incorporates more uncertainty in areas of the covariate space where there is less overlap. Our work also focuses on the causal analysis of cluster randomized trials (CRTs) with a small number of clusters and a rare binary outcome. While estimation and covariate adjustment via generalized estimating equations (GEE) can account for chance imbalances and increase statistical power, analytical challenges frequently arise in such settings. For example, traditional GEE models tend to produce negatively biased standard error estimates, and regression adjustment often fails to converge with a rare outcome. We evaluate the utility of propensity score weighting and regression adjustment both in conjunction with bias-corrected sandwich variance estimators to precisely estimate a causal odds ratio and to obtain valid inference. In each project, we assess the proposed approaches and compare with alternative methods through simulation studies and then demonstrate their implementation with real use cases, including an observational study of right heart catheterization in female patients and a CRT that tests a sedation protocol in 31 pediatric intensive care units

Efficacy of aerosol applications of methoprene and synergized pyrethrin against Tribolium castaneum adults and eggs

Citation: Tucker, Angela M., James F. Campbell, Frank H. Arthur, and Kun Yan Zhu. 2014. “Efficacy of Aerosol Applications of Methoprene and Synergized Pyrethrin Against Tribolium Castaneum Adults and Eggs.” Journal of Economic Entomology 107 (3): 1284–91. https://doi.org/10.1603/EC13507.Experiments were performed to determine the efficacy of a single aerosol application of the insecticides methoprene and piperonyl butoxide-synergized pyrethrin, alone or in combination, and the insecticide carrier, Isopar M, against Tribolium castaneum (Herbst), the red flour beetle. The initial test exposed adults to insecticide treatments and placed male/female pairs in flour. All adults exposed to synergized pyrethrin were knocked down for at least 24 h after exposure but they recovered. High adult survival and similar average numbers of living F1 progeny were produced regardless of treatment exposure. In a separate test, insecticide treatments were directly applied to newly laid eggs, which resulted in the suppression of egg hatch. Synergized pyrethrin was the most effective insecticide (P ≤ 0.001) for suppressing egg hatch. The effect of flour on insecticide activity to eggs and consequent insect development was also evaluated. An amount of 0.01 g of flour in the exposure arena, 62-cm2 area, was not sufficient for individuals to develop beyond the early larval stages, regardless of the treatment. As the flour amount in the arena increased from 1 to 5 g, the number of eggs that could develop to the adult stage increased, but this number was significantly lower in the insecticide treatments than in the control or carrier treatments. The results of the later tests indicate a high efficacy of the insecticides alone or in combination on T. castaneum egg hatch and development to the adult stage