Phase II Proof-of-Concept Trial of the Orexin Receptor Antagonist Filorexant (MK-6096) in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder.

BackgroundWe evaluated the orexin receptor antagonist filorexant (MK-6096) for treatment augmentation in patients with major depressive disorder.MethodsWe conducted a 6-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, Phase II, proof-of-concept study. Patients with major depressive disorder (partial responders to ongoing antidepressant therapy) were randomized 1:1 to once-daily oral filorexant 10 mg or matching placebo.ResultsDue to enrollment challenges, the study was terminated early, resulting in insufficient statistical power to detect a prespecified treatment difference; of 326 patients planned, 129 (40%) were randomized and 128 took treatment. There was no statistically significant difference in the primary endpoint of change from baseline to week 6 in Montgomery Asberg Depression Rating Scale total score; the estimated treatment difference for filorexant-placebo was -0.7 (with negative values favoring filorexant) (P=.679). The most common adverse events were somnolence and suicidal ideation.ConclusionsThe interpretation of the results is limited by the enrollment, which was less than originally planned, but the available data do not suggest efficacy of orexin receptor antagonism with filorexant for the treatment of depression. (Clinical Trial Registry: clinicaltrials.gov: NCT01554176)

Otterbein Towers June 1940 Commencement

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Monitor Newsletter Monthly, October 2004

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June 1940 Otterbein Towers

Otterbein Towers: Last Issue Until Septemberhttps://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/alumni_towersold/1013/thumbnail.jp

OmniLocalRF: Omnidirectional Local Radiance Fields from Dynamic Videos

Omnidirectional cameras are extensively used in various applications to provide a wide field of vision. However, they face a challenge in synthesizing novel views due to the inevitable presence of dynamic objects, including the photographer, in their wide field of view. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called Omnidirectional Local Radiance Fields (OmniLocalRF) that can render static-only scene views, removing and inpainting dynamic objects simultaneously. Our approach combines the principles of local radiance fields with the bidirectional optimization of omnidirectional rays. Our input is an omnidirectional video, and we evaluate the mutual observations of the entire angle between the previous and current frames. To reduce ghosting artifacts of dynamic objects and inpaint occlusions, we devise a multi-resolution motion mask prediction module. Unlike existing methods that primarily separate dynamic components through the temporal domain, our method uses multi-resolution neural feature planes for precise segmentation, which is more suitable for long 360-degree videos. Our experiments validate that OmniLocalRF outperforms existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative metrics, especially in scenarios with complex real-world scenes. In particular, our approach eliminates the need for manual interaction, such as drawing motion masks by hand and additional pose estimation, making it a highly effective and efficient solution

Breaking the Information Blockade: Labor, the Internet, Social Media and Communication Technology

Labor’s lack of engagement with media, and particularly its failure to create its own media to get its’ message out, to support workers in their struggles, and to educate working people on various issues affecting them have been a major impediment to people’s struggles in this country and elsewhere. Examples are been provided to illustrate some of the things that could be done if aggressively pursued, with a special look at the 2010 lockout of USW workers in Metropolis, Illinois, and these workers’ skillful use of the media

Progressively Optimized Local Radiance Fields for Robust View Synthesis

We present an algorithm for reconstructing the radiance field of a large-scale scene from a single casually captured video. The task poses two core challenges. First, most existing radiance field reconstruction approaches rely on accurate pre-estimated camera poses from Structure-from-Motion algorithms, which frequently fail on in-the-wild videos. Second, using a single, global radiance field with finite representational capacity does not scale to longer trajectories in an unbounded scene. For handling unknown poses, we jointly estimate the camera poses with radiance field in a progressive manner. We show that progressive optimization significantly improves the robustness of the reconstruction. For handling large unbounded scenes, we dynamically allocate new local radiance fields trained with frames within a temporal window. This further improves robustness (e.g., performs well even under moderate pose drifts) and allows us to scale to large scenes. Our extensive evaluation on the Tanks and Temples dataset and our collected outdoor dataset, Static Hikes, show that our approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art.Comment: Project page: https://localrf.github.io

The Global Encounter as Communitas: Inter-Pilgrim Musicking Along the Contemporary Camino de Santiago

In an effort to provide new ways of theorising pilgrimages as global encounters (White, 2012) and sites of cosmopolitan interactions, I offer a sound-centred investigation into inter-pilgrim musical events that occurred along the Camino de Santiago (Camino), a historically Catholic pilgrimage in northern Spain. This ethnomusicological perspective on the Camino highlights contemporary pilgrim rituals and artistic practices that are frequently overlooked in other Camino scholarship, which tends to focus on historical musics or the tangible arts. On the Camino, music primarily facilitates cross-cultural encounters for pilgrims, though at varied levels of mis/understandings. This paper explores the ways that participatory musicking (Small, 1998) connects international pilgrims who otherwise would not have come in contact with one another and reinforces the Camino’s Catholic heritage, despite the recent rise in non-religious walkers. The study is based on participant observation and autoethnographic engagement with musical rituals that occurred in two religious albergues (lodging for pilgrims) during the summer of 2019. Due to increased levels of fleeting global-local interactions between pilgrims, the twenty-first century Camino has become a site for cosmopolitan communal formations, although they are often constructed on the basis of language or nationality. Throughout my research, the religious albergues were significant social spaces for interactions across these barriers, as they emphasised communal evenings and activities involving Western popular or Catholically inspired musics after full days of walking alone. I argue that these participatory rituals utilised assumed cosmopolitan musical knowledges and religious backgrounds in order to create idealised senses of heightened community, conceptualised here in terms of Turnerian communitas. These encounters heavily relied on Western musical aesthetics in order to be meaningful for the pilgrims, and at the same time, national distinctions were constructed and broken down in order to create the feeling of a global pilgrim community. Communitas was only achievable after essentialised difference was first sounded, which it often occurred at the cost of excluding particular groups of pilgrims