Applicability of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network/Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer Guidelines for Prevention and Management of Chemotherapy-Induced Nausea and Vomiting in Southeast Asia: A Consensus Statement.

A meeting of regional experts was convened in Manila, Philippines, to develop a resource-stratified chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) management guideline. In patients treated with highly emetogenic chemotherapy in general clinical settings, triple therapy with a serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine-3 [5-HT3]) antagonist (preferably palonosetron), dexamethasone, and aprepitant is recommended for acute CINV prevention. In resource-restricted settings, triple therapy is still recommended, although a 5-HT3 antagonist other than palonosetron may be used. In both general and resource-restricted settings, dual therapy with dexamethasone (days 2 to 4) and aprepitant (days 2 to 3) is recommended to prevent delayed CINV. In patients treated with moderately emetogenic chemotherapy, dual therapy with a 5-HT3 antagonist, preferably palonosetron, and dexamethasone is recommended for acute CINV prevention in general settings; any 5-HT3 antagonist can be combined with dexamethasone in resource-restricted environments. In general settings, for the prevention of delayed CINV associated with moderately emetogenic chemotherapy, corticosteroid monotherapy on days 2 and 3 is recommended. If aprepitant is used on day 1, it should be continued on days 2 and 3. Prevention of delayed CINV with corticosteroids is preferred in resource-restricted settings. The expert panel also developed CINV management guidelines for anthracycline plus cyclophosphamide combination schedules, multiday cisplatin, and chemotherapy with low or minimal emetogenic potential, and its recommendations are detailed in this review. Overall, these regional guidelines provide definitive guidance for CINV management in general and resource-restricted settings. These consensus recommendations are anticipated to contribute to collaborative efforts to improve CINV management in Southeast Asia

Transforming meteorological data into linked data

This paper describes the process followed in order to make some of the public meterological data from the Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET, Spanish Meteorological Office) available as Linked Data. The method followed has been already used to publish geographical, statistical, and leisure data. The data selected for publication are generated every ten minutes by the 250 automatic stations that belong to AEMET and that are deployed across Spain. These data are available as spreadsheets in the AEMET data catalog, and contain more than twenty types of measurements per station. Spreadsheets are retrieved from the website, processed with Python scripts, transformed to RDF according to an ontology network about meteorology that reuses the W3C SSN Ontology, published in a triple store and visualized in maps with Map4rdf

ENIGMA and global neuroscience: A decade of large-scale studies of the brain in health and disease across more than 40 countries

This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of "big data" (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA's activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial factors

Plasma Dynamics

Contains reports on ten research projects split into two sections.National Science Foundation (Grant ENG77-00340)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract EY-76-S-02-2766)U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR-77-3143)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract ET-78-C-01-3019)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract ET-78-S-02-4681)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract ET-78-S-02-4682)U.S. Department of Energy (Grant EG-77-G-01-4107)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract ET-78-S-02-4714)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract ET-78-S-02-4886)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract ET-78-S-02-4690

Plasma Dynamics

Contains reports on eight research projects split into two sections.National Science Foundation (Grant ENG79-07047)U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR-77-3143D)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78ET-51013)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78ET-53073.AO02)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78ET-53074)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78ET-53076)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78ET-51002

Data mining, inference, and predictive analytics for the built environment with images, text, and WiFi data

Thesis: Ph. D. in Architecture Design and Computation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, June 2017.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "February 2017."Includes bibliographical references (pages 190-194).What can campus WiFi data tell us about life at MIT? What can thousands of images tell us about the way people see and occupy buildings in real-time? What can we learn about the buildings that millions of people snap pictures of and text about over time? Crowdsourcing has triggered a dramatic shift in the traditional forms of producing content. The increasing number of people contributing to the Internet has created big data that has the potential to 1) enhance the traditional forms of spatial information that the design and engineering fields are typically accustomed to; 2) yield further insights about a place or building from discovering relationships between the datasets. In this research, I explore how the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry can exploit crowdsourced and non-traditional datasets. I describe its possible roles for the following constituents: historian, designer/city administrator, and facilities manager - roles that engage with a building's information in the past, present, and future with different goals. As part of this research, I have developed a complete software pipeline for data mining, analyzing, and visualizing large volumes of crowdsourced unstructured content about MIT and other locations from images, campus WiFi access points, and text in batch/real-time using computer vision, machine learning, and statistical modeling techniques. The software pipeline is used for exploring meaningful statistical patterns from the processed data.by Rachelle B. Villalon.Ph. D. in Architecture Design and Computatio

Reasonable computing for architectural fabrication

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-64).The use of digital fabrication tools in the architecture industry serve a particular group of individuals whose familiarity of the tools are by trade skill. Machines lack the understanding of people in its ability to objectify common knowledge. This thesis describes the Adeon system, a software agent for implementation at the initial design stages whereupon the designer conceptualizes about a particular building component while the Adeon system serves to bridge the gap between design and construction knowledge, fusing the two regions to ultimately inform the designer about particular construction, design, and cost analysis constraints and opportunities upon the design proposal. The system adapts to different design situations and delivers pertinent information lending to its capacity to understand design moves and translate it to machine readable instructions for direct digital fabrication.by Rachelle B. Villalon.S.M

Democratization and the Diffusion of Shari'a Law: Comparative Insights from Indonesia

The democratization of politics has been accompanied by a rise of Islamic laws in many Muslim-majority countries. Despite a growing interest in the phenomenon, the Islamization of politics in democratizing Muslim-majority countries is rarely understood as a process that unfolds across space and time. Based on an original dataset established during years of field research in Indonesia, this article analyzes the spread of shari’a regulations across the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy since 1998. The article shows that shari’a regulations in Indonesia diffused unevenly across space and time. Explanations put forward in the literature on the diffusion of morality policies in other countries such as geographic proximity, institutions, intergovernmental relations and economic conditions did not explain the patterns in the diffusion of shari’a regulations in Indonesia well. Instead, shari’a regulations in Indonesia were most likely to spread across jurisdictions where local Islamist groups situated outside the party system had an established presence. In short, the Islamization of politics was highly contingent on local conditions. Future research will need to pay more attention to local Islamist activists and networks situated outside formal politics as potential causes for the diffusion of shari’a law in democratizing Muslim-majority countries

Plasma Dynamics

Contains reports on ten research projects divided into two sections.National Science Foundation (Grant ENG79-07047)U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR-77-3143)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78ET51013)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ASO2-78ET53073.AO02)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract ET-78-S-02-4682)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-AS02-78ET53074)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ASO2-78ET53050)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-AS02-78ET51002)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ASO2-78ET53076

An improved inhaled mucolytic to treat airway muco-obstructive diseases

Rationale: Airways obstruction with thick, adherent mucus is a pathophysiologic and clinical feature of muco-obstructive respiratory diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and cystic fibrosis (CF). Mucins, the dominant biopolymer in mucus, organize into complex polymeric networks via the formation of covalent disulfide bonds, which govern the viscoelastic properties of the mucus gel. For decades, inhaled N-acetylcysteine (NAC) has been used as a mucolytic to reduce mucin disulfide bonds with little, if any, therapeutic effects. Improvement of mucolytic therapy requires the identification of NAC deficiencies and the development of compounds that overcome them. Objectives: Elucidate the pharmacological limitations of NAC and test a novel mucin-reducing agent, P3001, in preclinical settings. Methods: The study used biochemical (e.g., Western blotting, mass spectrometry) and biophysical assays (e.g., microrheology/macrorheology, spinnability, mucus velocity measurements) to test compound efficacy and toxicity in in vitro and in vivo models and patient sputa. Measurements and Main Results: Dithiothreitol and P3001 were directly compared with NAC in vitro and both exhibited superior reducing activities. In vivo, P3001 significantly decreased lung mucus burden in bENaC-overexpressing mice, whereas NAC did not (n = 6–24 mice per group). In NAC-treated CF subjects (n = 5), aerosolized NAC was rapidly cleared from the lungs and did not alter sputum biophysical properties. In contrast, P3001 acted faster and at lower concentrations than did NAC, and it was more effective than DNase in CF sputum ex vivo. Conclusions: These results suggest that reducing the viscoelasticity of airway mucus is an achievable therapeutic goal with P3001 class mucolytic agents