Standardization and qualification of computer programs for circuit design

Study presents methods and initial procedures which may be obtained for development of more efficient uniform network analysis input language and theoretical tools to prove equivalence of data representations

Can small molecular inhibitors that stop de novo serine synthesis be used in cancer treatment?

To sustain their malignancy, tumour cells acquire several metabolic adaptations such as increased oxygen, glucose, glutamine, and lipids uptake. Other metabolic processes are also enhanced as part of tumour metabolic reprogramming, for example, increased serine metabolism. Serine is a non-essential amino acid that supports several metabolic processes that are crucial for the growth and survival of proliferating cells, including protein, DNA, and glutathione synthesis. Indeed, increased activity of D-3-phosphoglycerate dehydrogenase (PHGDH), the enzyme rate-limiting de novo serine synthesis, has been extensively reported in several tumours. Therefore, selective inhibition of PHGDH may represent a new therapeutic strategy for over-expressing PHGDH tumours, owing to its downstream inhibition of essential biomass production such as one-carbon units and nucleotides. This perspective article will discuss the current status of research into small molecular inhibitors against PHGDH in colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and Ewing's sarcoma. We will summarise recent studies on the development of PHGDH-inhibitors, highlighting their clinical potential as new therapeutics. It also wants to shed a light on some of the key limitations of the use of PHGDH-inhibitors in cancer treatment which are worth taking into account

Evidence for Model-based Computations in the Human Amygdala during Pavlovian Conditioning

Contemporary computational accounts of instrumental conditioning have emphasized a role for a model-based system in which values are computed with reference to a rich model of the structure of the world, and a model-free system in which values are updated without encoding such structure. Much less studied is the possibility of a similar distinction operating at the level of Pavlovian conditioning. In the present study, we scanned human participants while they participated in a Pavlovian conditioning task with a simple structure while measuring activity in the human amygdala using a high-resolution fMRI protocol. After fitting a model-based algorithm and a variety of model-free algorithms to the fMRI data, we found evidence for the superiority of a model-based algorithm in accounting for activity in the amygdala compared to the model-free counterparts. These findings support an important role for model-based algorithms in describing the processes underpinning Pavlovian conditioning, as well as providing evidence of a role for the human amygdala in model-based inference

Study on Doping Prevention: A map of Legal, Regulatory and Prevention Practice Provisions in EU 28

Historically, anti-doping efforts have focused on the detection and deterrence of doping in elite and competitive sport. There is, however, a growing concern that doping is occurring outside the organised sporting system; giving rise to the belief that the misuse of doping agents in recreational sport has become a societal problem and a public health issue that must be addressed. The EU Commission awarded a contract (EAC/2013/0617) to a Consortium to undertake this Study with the aim of developing the evidence-base for policies designed to combat doping in recreational sport. Fourteen internationally recognised experts shaped the Study which comprised (i) the collection of primary data through a structured survey, and (ii) secondary data through literature searches and website analysis. All 28 Member States participated in the information-gathering process. Specifically, this involved a systematic study of the ethical considerations, legal position, prevention research landscape, and current practise in relation to the prevention of doping in recreational sport. The Study provides a comprehensive overview of current practice and legislation as it applies to the prevention of doping and promotes and supports the sharing of best practices in the EU regarding the fight against doping in recreational sport. It concludes with seven recommendations for future action that focus on the need for a coordinated response in relation to the problems arising from doping in recreational sport

A Comparison of Approaches for Measuring Cross-Lingual Similarity of Wikipedia Articles

Wikipedia has been used as a source of comparable texts for a range of tasks, such as Statistical Machine Translation and CrossLanguage Information Retrieval. Articles written in different languages on the same topic are often connected through inter-language-links. However, the extent to which these articles are similar is highly variable and this may impact on the use of Wikipedia as a comparable resource. In this paper we compare various language-independent methods for measuring cross-lingual similarity: character n-grams, cognateness, word count ratio, and an approach based on outlinks. These approaches are compared against a baseline utilising MT resources. Measures are also compared to human judgements of similarity using a manually created resource containing 700 pairs of Wikipedia articles (in 7 language pairs). Results indicate that a combination of language-independent models (char-ngrams, outlinks and word-count ratio) is highly effective for identifying cross-lingual similarity and performs comparably to language-dependent models (translation and monolingual analysis).The work of the first author was in the framework of the Tacardi research project (TIN2012-38523-C02-00). The work of the fourth author was in the framework of the DIANA-Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) and WIQ-EI IRSES (FP7 Marie Curie No. 269180) research projects.Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Paramita, ML.; Clough, P.; Rosso, P. (2014). A Comparison of Approaches for Measuring Cross-Lingual Similarity of Wikipedia Articles. En Advances in Information Retrieval. Springer Verlag (Germany). 424-429. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06028-6_36S424429Adafre, S., de Rijke, M.: Finding Similar Sentences across Multiple Languages in Wikipedia. In: Proc. of the 11th Conf. of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 62–69 (2006)Dumais, S., Letsche, T., Littman, M., Landauer, T.: Automatic Cross-Language Retrieval Using Latent Semantic Indexing. In: AAAI 1997 Spring Symposium Series: Cross-Language Text and Speech Retrieval, Stanford University, pp. 24–26 (1997)Filatova, E.: Directions for exploiting asymmetries in multilingual Wikipedia. In: Proc. of the Third Intl. Workshop on Cross Lingual Information Access: Addressing the Information Need of Multilingual Societies, Boulder, CO (2009)Levow, G.A., Oard, D., Resnik, P.: Dictionary-Based Techniques for Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Information Processing and Management: Special Issue on Cross-Language Information Retrieval 41(3), 523–547 (2005)Mcnamee, P., Mayfield, J.: Character N-Gram Tokenization for European Language Text Retrieval. Information Retrieval 7(1-2), 73–97 (2004)Mihalcea, R.: Using Wikipedia for Automatic Word Sense Disambiguation. In: Proc. of NAACL 2007. ACL, Rochester (2007)Mohammadi, M., GhasemAghaee, N.: Building Bilingual Parallel Corpora based on Wikipedia. In: Second Intl. Conf. on Computer Engineering and Applications., vol. 2, pp. 264–268 (2010)Munteanu, D., Fraser, A., Marcu, D.: Improved Machine Translation Performace via Parallel Sentence Extraction from Comparable Corpora. In: Proc. of the Human Language Technology and North American Association for Computational Linguistics Conf (HLT/NAACL 2004), Boston, MA (2004)Nguyen, D., Overwijk, A., Hauff, C., Trieschnigg, D.R.B., Hiemstra, D., de Jong, F.: WikiTranslate: Query Translation for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval Using Only Wikipedia. In: Peters, C., Deselaers, T., Ferro, N., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kurimo, M., Mandl, T., Peñas, A., Petras, V. (eds.) CLEF 2008. LNCS, vol. 5706, pp. 58–65. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)Paramita, M.L., Clough, P.D., Aker, A., Gaizauskas, R.: Correlation between Similarity Measures for Inter-Language Linked Wikipedia Articles. In: Calzolari, E.A. (ed.) Proc. of the 8th Intl. Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), pp. 790–797. ELRA, Istanbul (2012)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Anderka, M.: A Wikipedia-Based Multilingual Retrieval Model. In: Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., Plachouras, V., Ruthven, I., White, R.W. (eds.) ECIR 2008. LNCS, vol. 4956, pp. 522–530. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Simard, M., Foster, G.F., Isabelle, P.: Using Cognates to Align Sentences in Bilingual Corpora. In: Proc. of the Fourth Intl. Conf. on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation (1992)Steinberger, R., Pouliquen, B., Hagman, J.: Cross-lingual Document Similarity Calculation Using the Multilingual Thesaurus EUROVOC. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2002. LNCS, vol. 2276, pp. 415–424. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)Toral, A., Muñoz, R.: A proposal to automatically build and maintain gazetteers for Named Entity Recognition using Wikipedia. In: Proc. of the EACL Workshop on New Text 2006. Association for Computational Linguistics, Trento (2006

Levosimendan for the prevention of acute organ dysfunction in sepsis

BACKGROUND Levosimendan is a calcium-sensitizing drug with inotropic and other properties that may improve outcomes in patients with sepsis. METHODS We conducted a double-blind, randomized clinical trial to investigate whether levosimendan reduces the severity of organ dysfunction in adults with sepsis. Patients were randomly assigned to receive a blinded infusion of levosimendan (at a dose of 0.05 to 0.2 μg per kilogram of body weight per minute) for 24 hours or placebo in addition to standard care. The primary outcome was the mean daily Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score in the intensive care unit up to day 28 (scores for each of five systems range from 0 to 4, with higher scores indicating more severe dysfunction; maximum score, 20). Secondary outcomes included 28-day mortality, time to weaning from mechanical ventilation, and adverse events. RESULTS The trial recruited 516 patients; 259 were assigned to receive levosimendan and 257 to receive placebo. There was no significant difference in the mean (±SD) SOFA score between the levosimendan group and the placebo group (6.68±3.96 vs. 6.06±3.89; mean difference, 0.61; 95% confidence interval [CI], −0.07 to 1.29; P=0.053). Mortality at 28 days was 34.5% in the levosimendan group and 30.9% in the placebo group (absolute difference, 3.6 percentage points; 95% CI, −4.5 to 11.7; P=0.43). Among patients requiring ventilation at baseline, those in the levosimendan group were less likely than those in the placebo group to be successfully weaned from mechanical ventilation over the period of 28 days (hazard ratio, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.60 to 0.97; P=0.03). More patients in the levosimendan group than in the placebo group had supraventricular tachyarrhythmia (3.1% vs. 0.4%; absolute difference, 2.7 percentage points; 95% CI, 0.1 to 5.3; P=0.04). CONCLUSIONS The addition of levosimendan to standard treatment in adults with sepsis was not associated with less severe organ dysfunction or lower mortality. Levosimendan was associated with a lower likelihood of successful weaning from mechanical ventilation and a higher risk of supraventricular tachyarrhythmia. (Funded by the NIHR Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme and others; LeoPARDS Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN12776039.

Opportunities for emotion and mental health research in the resource-rationality framework

We discuss opportunities in applying the resource-rationality framework toward answering questions in emotion and mental health research. These opportunities rely on characterization of individual differences in cognitive strategies; an endeavor that may be at odds with the normative approach outlined in the target article. We consider ways individual differences might enter the framework and the translational opportunities offered by each

A Comprehensive Economic Stimulus for our Failing Economy

This paper presents a comprehensive plan to fix the ailing American economy, through a five-step approach. First, the Federal Reserve must continue to broaden the scope of monetary policy, by purchasing and selling long-term securities. Manipulating expectations through FOMC statements is another tool at the Federal Reserve’s disposal. Secondly, the government must enact fiscal stimulus to stabilize the economy in the short and medium runs, through investment in infrastructure projects, green technology, fusion technology, and science education. Additionally, the new fiscal policy must tackle the mortgage meltdown, which is weighing down the entire economy. Third, the regulatory system must be changed to reduce the likelihood of another financial collapse, starting with the nationalization of the ratings agencies. Ratings should be updated faster, with a numeric grading system rather than the pre-existing letter grades. Fourth, our globalized economy insures that a coordinated globalized response is necessary to recover. Global cooperation to reduce inflation and avoid protectionist policies is vital. Finally, the American bailout policy must be made clear, only giving bailouts to companies that are sound but financially strapped and those that are too big to fail