The Impact of Boundary Spanning Scholarly Publications and Patents

Human knowledge and innovation are recorded in two media: scholarly publication and patents. These records not only document a new scientific insight or new method developed, but they also carefully cite prior work upon which the innovation is built.We quantify the impact of information flow across fields using two large citation dataset: one spanning over a century of scholarly work in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and second spanning a quarter century of United States patents.We find that a publication's citing across disciplines is tied to its subsequent impact. In the case of patents and natural science publications, those that are cited at least once are cited slightly more when they draw on research outside of their area. In contrast, in the social sciences, citing within one's own field tends to be positively correlated with impact

Mobile DNA elements in T4 and related phages

Mobile genetic elements are common inhabitants of virtually every genome where they can exert profound influences on genome structure and function in addition to promoting their own spread within and between genomes. Phage T4 and related phage have long served as a model system for understanding the molecular mechanisms by which a certain class of mobile DNA, homing endonucleases, promote their spread. Homing endonucleases are site-specific DNA endonucleases that initiate mobility by introducing double-strand breaks at defined positions in genomes lacking the endonuclease gene, stimulating repair and recombination pathways that mobilize the endonuclease coding region. In phage T4, homing endonucleases were first discovered as encoded within the self-splicing td, nrdB and nrdD introns of T4. Genomic data has revealed that homing endonucleases are extremely widespread in T-even-like phage, as evidenced by the astounding fact that ~11% of the T4 genome encodes homing endonuclease genes, with most of them located outside of self-splicing introns. Detailed studies of the mobile td intron and its encoded endonuclease, I-TevI, have laid the foundation for genetic, biochemical and structural aspects that regulate the mobility process, and more recently have provided insights into regulation of homing endonuclease function. Here, we summarize the current state of knowledge regarding T4-encoded homing endonucleases, with particular emphasis on the td/I-TevI model system. We also discuss recent progress in the biology of free-standing endonucleases, and present areas of future research for this fascinating class of mobile genetic elements

30-Day morbidity and mortality of bariatric metabolic surgery in adolescence during the COVID-19 pandemic – The GENEVA study

Background: Metabolic and bariatric surgery (MBS) is an effective treatment for adolescents with severe obesity. Objectives: This study examined the safety of MBS in adolescents during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Methods: This was a global, multicentre and observational cohort study of MBS performed between May 01, 2020, and October 10,2020, in 68 centres from 24 countries. Data collection included in-hospital and 30-day COVID-19 and surgery-specific morbidity/mortality. Results: One hundred and seventy adolescent patients (mean age: 17.75 ± 1.30 years), mostly females (n = 122, 71.8%), underwent MBS during the study period. The mean pre-operative weight and body mass index were 122.16 ± 15.92 kg and 43.7 ± 7.11 kg/m2, respectively. Although majority of patients had pre-operative testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (n = 146; 85.9%), only 42.4% (n = 72) of the patients were asked to self-isolate pre-operatively. Two patients developed symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection post-operatively (1.2%). The overall complication rate was 5.3% (n = 9). There was no mortality in this cohort. Conclusions: MBS in adolescents with obesity is safe during the COVID-19 pandemic when performed within the context of local precautionary procedures (such as pre-operative testing). The 30-day morbidity rates were similar to those reported pre-pandemic. These data will help facilitate the safe re-introduction of MBS services for this group of patients

30-day morbidity and mortality of sleeve gastrectomy, Roux-en-Y gastric bypass and one anastomosis gastric bypass: a propensity score-matched analysis of the GENEVA data

Background: There is a paucity of data comparing 30-day morbidity and mortality of sleeve gastrectomy (SG), Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB), and one anastomosis gastric bypass (OAGB). This study aimed to compare the 30-day safety of SG, RYGB, and OAGB in propensity score-matched cohorts. Materials and methods: This analysis utilised data collected from the GENEVA study which was a multicentre observational cohort study of bariatric and metabolic surgery (BMS) in 185 centres across 42 countries between 01/05/2022 and 31/10/2020 during the Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. 30-day complications were categorised according to the Clavien–Dindo classification. Patients receiving SG, RYGB, or OAGB were propensity-matched according to baseline characteristics and 30-day complications were compared between groups. Results: In total, 6770 patients (SG 3983; OAGB 702; RYGB 2085) were included in this analysis. Prior to matching, RYGB was associated with highest 30-day complication rate (SG 5.8%; OAGB 7.5%; RYGB 8.0% (p = 0.006)). On multivariate regression modelling, Insulin-dependent type 2 diabetes mellitus and hypercholesterolaemia were associated with increased 30-day complications. Being a non-smoker was associated with reduced complication rates. When compared to SG as a reference category, RYGB, but not OAGB, was associated with an increased rate of 30-day complications. A total of 702 pairs of SG and OAGB were propensity score-matched. The complication rate in the SG group was 7.3% (n = 51) as compared to 7.5% (n = 53) in the OAGB group (p = 0.68). Similarly, 2085 pairs of SG and RYGB were propensity score-matched. The complication rate in the SG group was 6.1% (n = 127) as compared to 7.9% (n = 166) in the RYGB group (p = 0.09). And, 702 pairs of OAGB and RYGB were matched. The complication rate in both groups was the same at 7.5 % (n = 53; p = 0.07). Conclusions: This global study found no significant difference in the 30-day morbidity and mortality of SG, RYGB, and OAGB in propensity score-matched cohorts

Tomographic clustering to visualize blog communities as mountain views

Blogs have created a fast growing social network on the Internet. However ranking solutions are not sufficient to capture relationships between important blogs and between communities. In our paper, we combine blog rankings with their social connections to provide a framework to understand multiple blog communities. A novel mountain view visualization is provided to explore different communities of interest in blogspace. The mountain views are generated using a tomographic clustering algorithm on the blog social network. The mountain view shows mountains of communities consisting of connected blogs. Peaks and valleys of the mountain view depict representative blogs as community authorities and community connectors, respectively. We developed a retrieval and exploratory system to illustrate this framework, and perform initial experiments to validate the results

Perceptual Adaptive Quantization Of Stereoscopic Video Coding Using MPEG-2's Temporal Scalability Structure

Significant perceptual improvements can be gained in the coding of stereoscopic videos, as is illustrated here by modifying the adaptive quantization of an MPEG-2 codec. Applying human visual properties to MPEG-2's temporal scalability framework, a perceptual adaptive quantization approach to stereoscopic video coding is presented. To optimize the perceived picture quality of the reconstructed stereo images, binocular visibility of stereo coding artifacts is investigated, including image fusion and visual masking. Four normalized indicators are introduced to account for 3D visual artifacts, and are incorporated to determine the quantization parameters. They are (1) prediction accuracy, (2) prediction correlation, (3) fusion indicator, and (4) texture intensity. Simulations indicate the importance of perceptual stereo coding, with improvements in overall stereo quality and reductions in binocular artifacts. 1. INTRODUCTION Motivated by the idea of a combination 3D system and HDTV, we ..

Modal keywords, ontologies, and reasoning for video understanding

Abstract. We proposed a novel framework for video content understanding that uses rules constructed from knowledge bases and multimedia ontologies. Our framework consists of an expert system that uses a rule-based engine, domain knowledge, visual detectors (for objects and scenes), and metadata (text from automatic speech recognition, related text, etc.). We introduce the idea o

Video collaborative annotation forum: Establishing ground-truth labels on large multimedia datasets

We developed a new version of The VideoAnnEx, a.k.a. IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool, for collaborative multimedia annotation task in a distributed environment. The VideoAnnEx assists authors in the task of annotating video sequences with MPEG-7 metadata. Each shot in the video sequence can be annotated with static scene descriptions, key object descriptions, event descriptions, and other lexicon sets. The annotated descriptions are associated with each video shot or regions in the keyframes, and are stored as MPEG-7 XML file. We proposed a forum to collaboratively annotate semantic labels to the NIST TRECVID 2003 development set. From April to July 2003, 111 researchers from 23 institutes worked together to associate 198K of ground-truth labels (433K after hierarchy propagation) to 62.2 hours of videos. This large set of valuable ground-truth data is publicly available to the research community, especially for multimedia indexing and retrieval, semantic understanding, and supervised machine learning fields. 1