Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Screening for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Symptom-based self-rating measures were established to detect individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after specific traumatic events. The aim of the present study was to compare the diagnostic efficiency of the German version of the Trauma Screening Questionnaire (TSQ), the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS), and an 8-item subset of the PDS. Receiver-operating-characteristic analyses are determined in a treatment-seeking outpatient sample (N = 208) with mixed trauma type. The areas under the curve (AUC) for all measures were found to be moderate (AUC = 0.77–0.81); hence, measures did not differ in terms of their discriminatory abilities. Using the favored cutoff points, sensitivity (53–81%) and specificity (71–84%) values were at a level that was only moderate. Considering the high economic burden due to PTSD and the moderate specificity values, a two-stage screening approach might result in only moderate cost-efficiency for treatment-seeking outpatients. In addition, our results support .
Random projection and multiscale wavelet leader based anomaly detection and address identification in internet traffic

We present a new anomaly detector for data traffic, `SMS', based on combining random projections (sketches) with multiscale analysis, which has low computational complexity. The sketches allow `normal' traffic to be automatically and robustly extracted, and anomalies detected, without the need for training data. The multiscale analysis extracts statistical descriptors, using wavelet leader tools developed recently for multifractal analysis, without any need for timescales to be selected a priori. The proposed detector is illustrated using a large recent dataset of Internet backbone traffic from the MAWI archive, and compared against existing detectors.
Stealth attacks on ad-hoc wireless networks

We study two classes of attacks that can be mounted by manipulation of routing information and exhaustive power consumption. Our attacks allow an attacker to partition a network, reduce its goodput, hi-jack and filter traffic from and to victim nodes, and thereby eavesdrop and perform traffic analysis. The methods described are "stealth attacks" in that they minimize the cost to and visibility of the attacker. We introduce the notion of reputation based control, and suggest that it can be used to augment existing routing protocols in order to immunize these against stealth attacks.
Low density parity check codes over GF(q)

Binary low density parity check (LDPC) codes have been shown to have near Shannon limit performance when decoded using a probabilistic decoding algorithm. The analogous codes defined over finite fields GF(q) of order q>2 show significantly improved performance. We present the results of Monte Carlo simulations of the decoding of infinite LDPC codes which can be used to obtain good constructions for finite codes. We also present empirical results for the Gaussian channel including a rate 1/4 code with bit error probability of 10/sup -4/ at E/sub b//N/sub 0/=-0.05 dB.
Our Foreign President Barack Obama: The Racial Logics of Birther Discourses

This essay centers race in taking serious an often-dismissed movement, the Birthers, who question Barack Obama's citizenship and deem him as an illegitimate president. Through a historical and relational lens, I argue that the Birther rhetoric of constitutional protection relies on racial logics used in previous discourses about foreignness to delineate acceptable citizenship for the presidency and mark Obama as untrustworthy. By analyzing the Birthers.org website and two Birther movement-associated media figures, Orly Taitz and Donald Trump, Birther discourses manipulate rationality, reinforce a White racial state, and activate anxieties over an increasingly multi-racial and global society.
Mobile Cooperative Computing: Energy-Efficient Peer-to-Peer Computation Offloading

Scavenging the idling computation resources at the enormous number of mobile devices, ranging from small IoT devices to powerful laptop computers, can provide a powerful platform for local mobile cloud computing. The vision can be realized by peer-to-peer cooperative computing between edge devices, which is called co-computing and the theme of this paper. We consider a co-computing system where a user offloads computation of input-data to a helper. The helper controls the offloading process based on a predicted CPU-idling profile and the objective of minimizing the user’s energy consumption. Consider the scenario that the user has one-shot input-data arrival and the helper buffers offloaded bits. The derived solution for the optimal offloading control has an interesting graphical interpretation as follows. In the plane of user’s co-computable bits (by offloading) versus time, a so-called offloading feasibility tunnel can be constructed that constrains the range of offloaded bits at any time instant. The existence of the tunnel arises from the helper’s CPU-idling profile and buffer size. Given the tunnel, the optimal offloading is shown to be achieved by the well-known “string-pulling” strategy, graphically referring to pulling a string across the tunnel. Furthermore, we show that the problem of optimal data partitioning for offloading and local computing at the user is convex, admitting a simple solution using the sub-gradient method. Last, the developed design approach for co-computing is extended to the scenario of bursty data arrivals at the user. The approach is modified by defining a new offloading feasibility tunnel that accounts for bursty data arrivals. Index Terms Mobile cooperative computing, energy-efficient transmission, D2D communication, computation offloading, mobile-edge computing, fog computing. C. You and K. Huang are with the Dept. of EEE at The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (Email: csyou@eee.hku.hk, huangkb@eee.hku.hk). ar X iv :1 70 4. 04 59 5v 3 [ cs . I T ] 2 5 A pr 2 01 7
Modest Time-Dependent Misclassification in Recalling Age at First Use of Alcohol and Tobacco

To investigate whether recall of age at first use of alcohol and tobacco is time dependent. Respondents aged 14–89 years from the 2001 and 2007 waves of the Australian National Drug Strategy Household Survey were considered as independent samples of the Australian population at two different time points. The means of reported age at first use of alcohol and age at first use of tobacco from the two surveys were compared for each birth cohort. The mean differences were generally small (< 1 year) across birth cohorts. Overall, the increase in mean age at first use from 2001 to 2007 was 0.31 years for alcohol and 0.33 years for tobacco, after controlling for birth cohort and gender effects. The time lag between actual onset of first use and subsequent survey recall can introduce a small systematic bias, but the error is unlikely to pose a threat to retrospective studies that rely on recall information to estimate cumulative exposure of alcohol and tobacco use.
Towards region-based memory management for Go

Region-based memory management aims to lower the cost of deallocation through bulk processing: instead of recovering the memory of each object separately, it recovers the memory of a region containing many objects. It relies on static analysis to determine the set of memory regions needed by a program, the program points at which each region should be created and removed, and, for each memory allocation, the region that should supply the memory. The concurrent language Go has features that pose interesting challenges for this analysis. We present a novel design for region-based memory management for Go, combining static analysis, to guide region creation, and lightweight runtime bookkeeping, to help control reclamation. The main advantage of our approach is that it greatly limits the amount of re-work that must be done after each change to the program source code, making our approach more practical than existing RBMM systems. Our prototype implementation covers most of the sequential fragment of Go, and preliminary results are encouraging.
The origin of the boson peak and thermal conductivity plateau in low-temperature glasses

We argue that the intrinsic glassy degrees of freedom in amorphous solids giving rise to the thermal conductivity plateau and the “boson peak” in the heat capacity at moderately low temperatures are directly connected to those motions giving rise to the two-level-like excitations seen at still lower temperatures. These degrees of freedom can be thought of as strongly anharmonic transitions between the local minima of the glassy energy landscape that are accompanied by ripplon-like domain wall motions of the glassy mosaic structure predicted to occur at Tg by the random first-order transition theory. The energy spectrum of the vibrations of the mosaic depends on the glass transition temperature, the Debye frequency, and the molecular length scale. The resulting spectrum reproduces the experimental low-temperature boson peak. The “nonuniversality” of the thermal conductivity plateau depends on kBTg/ℏωD and arises from calculable interactions with the phonons.
Optimal channel switching in the presence of stochastic signaling

Optimal channel switching and detector design is studied for M-ary communication systems in the presence of stochastic signaling, which facilitates randomization of signal values transmitted for each information symbol. Considering the presence of multiple additive noise channels (which can have non-Gaussian distributions in general) between a transmitter and a receiver, the joint optimization of the channel switching (timesharing) strategy, stochastic signals, and detectors is performed in order to achieve the minimum average probability of error. It is proved that the optimal solution to this problem corresponds to either (i) switching between at most two channels with deterministic signaling over each channel, or (ii) time-sharing between at most two different signals over a single channel (i.e., stochastic signaling over a single channel). For both cases, the optimal solutions are shown to employ corresponding maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detectors at the receiver. Numerical results are presented to investigate the proposed approach.
Coalitional Games with Overlapping Coalitions for Interference Management in Small Cell Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of cooperative interference management in an OFDMA two-tier small cell network. In particular, we propose a novel approach for allowing the small cells to cooperate, so as to optimize their sum-rate, while cooperatively satisfying their maximum transmit power constraints. Unlike existing work which assumes that only disjoint groups of cooperative small cells can emerge, we formulate the small cells' cooperation problem as a coalition formation game with overlapping coalitions. In this game, each small cell base station can choose to participate in one or more cooperative groups (or coalitions) simultaneously, so as to optimize the tradeoff between the benefits and costs associated with cooperation. We study the properties of the proposed overlapping coalition formation game and we show that it exhibits negative externalities due to interference. Then, we propose a novel decentralized algorithm that allows the small cell base stations to interact and self-organize into a stable overlapping coalitional structure. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm results in a notable performance advantage in terms of the total system sum-rate, relative to the noncooperative case and the classical algorithms for coalitional games with non-overlapping coalitions.
Accelerating Progress in Reducing Childhood Obesity Disparities: Exploring Best Practices of Positive Outliers

Childhood obesity rates may have plateaued in some U.S. population subgroups, yet overall rates remain high and racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities appear to be widening. Successful strategies and best practices to inform obesity interventions and accelerate progress in reducing disparities in childhood obesity can be found among people who can be categorized as positive outliers, i.e., individuals who have succeeded, where many others have not, in changing their health behaviors, reducing their body mass index, and developing resilience in the context of adverse built and social environments. In this commentary, we discuss the central premise of a positive outlier approach and how successful strategies learned from positive outliers can be generalized and promoted to accelerate progress in childhood obesity.
Quantum algorithms for some hidden shift problems

Almost all of the most successful quantum algorithms discovered to date exploit the ability of the Fourier transform to recover subgroup structure of functions, especially periodicity. The fact that Fourier transforms can also be used to capture shift structure has received far less attention in the context of quantum computation.In this paper, we present three examples of "unknown shift" problems that can be solved efficiently on a quantum computer using the quantum Fourier transform. We also define the hidden coset problem, which generalizes the hidden shift problem and the hidden subgroup problem. This framework provides a unified way of viewing the ability of the Fourier transform to capture subgroup and shift structure.
Discriminative Feature Extraction Based on Self-Adaptive Frequency Warping for Robust Speaker Identification

This paper presents a new discriminative feature based on self-adaptive frequency warping. We analyze the discrimination power between frequency components and individual characteristics and quantify this dependency. This new feature is extracted by nonuniform sub-band filters designed according to self-adaptive frequency warping in different frequency bands. Furthermore, in order to overcoming the acoustics mismatch between training and testing data in the noise environment, we adopted pre-enhancement prior to feature extracted module. Using a series of controlled experiments, it is shown that the theory of this feature is reasonable and understandable, which is insensitive to spoken content and thus more discriminative and robust in comparison to the conventional Mel frequency cepstral coefficients. The experimental results demonstrate that combining pre-enhancement and discriminative feature leads to noticeable improvement on speaker recognition rate and robustness.
Spatial input device structure and bimanual object manipulation in virtual environments

Complex 3D interaction tasks require the manipulation of a large number of input parameters. Spatial input devices can be constructed such that their structure reflects the task at hand. As such, somatosensory cues that a user receives during device manipulation, as well as a users expectations, are consistent with visual cues from the virtual environment. Intuitively, such a match between the device's spatial structure and the task at hand would seem to allow for more natural and direct interaction. However, the exact effects on aspects like task performance, intuitiveness, and user comfort, are yet unknown.The goal of this work is to study the effects of input device structure for complex interaction tasks on user performance. Two factors are investigated: the relation between the frame of reference of a user's actions and the frame of reference of the virtual object being manipulated, and the relation between the type of motion a user performs with the input device and the type of motion of the virtual object.These factors are addressed by performing a user study using different input device structures. Subjects are asked to perform a task that entails translating a virtual object over an axis, where the structure of the input device reflects this task to different degrees. First, the action subjects need to perform to translate the object is either a translation or a rotation. Second, the action is performed in the same frame of reference of the virtual object, or in a fixed, separately located, frame of reference.Results show that task completion times are lowest when the input device allows a user to make the same type of motion in the same coordinate system as the virtual object. In case either factor does not match, task completion times increase significantly. Therefore, it may be advantageous to structure an input device such that the relation between its frame of reference and the type of action matches the corresponding frame of reference and motion type of the virtual object being manipulated.
THE DYNAMICS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE CHANGE FROM THE OLD ERA TO THE DIGITAL AGE

Abstract: This article attempts to discuss why and how English has changed, tracing from particular features such as spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and meaning from Old English era until Modern English, how the people’s attitude toward the changes, and whether these changes ruin or contribute to the development of English as a global language. As a final remark, this article will also offer a few suggestions on how the phenomenon of language change should be treated particularly on the relation with English language teaching and learning. Key words: language change, form, meaning, attitude
First isolation and genomic characterization of enterovirus A71 and coxsackievirus A16 from hand foot and mouth disease patients in the Lao PDR

Enterovirus A71 (EV-A71) and coxsackievirus A16 (CV-A16) are major aetiological agents of hand, foot and mouth disease in Asia. We established the first genomic characterization of strains isolated in 2011 from Lao patients. Isolates were related to EV-A71 genotype C4 and CV-A16 genotype B1a that circulated in neighbouring countries during the same period. This confirms the regional character of hand, foot and mouth disease epidemiology and makes plausible the occurrence of severe disease in the Lao population.
Bending sensor with tilted fiber Bragg grating interacting with multimode fiber

A new type fiber bending sensor based on a tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) interacting with a multimode fiber (MMF) is presented. The sensing head is formed by insertion of a small section of MMF between single-mode fiber (SMF) and the TFBG. The reflection light from this sensor head includes two parts, i.e., the reflected Bragg mode and cladding modes. The latter were first coupled from the core mode to counter-propagating cladding modes by the TFBG and then coupled back into the core as a function of the MMF. The power of the cladding modes changes as the fiber is bent while the Bragg one keeps unchanged. The average reflective power in the cladding modes decreased with the increase of curvature. The measurement range of the curvature from 0m−1 to 2.5m−1 with a measurement sensitivity of −802.4nW/m−1 is achieved.
Self-consistent theory of transcriptional control in complex regulatory architectures

Individual regulatory proteins are typically charged with the simultaneous regulation of a battery of different genes. As a result, when one of these proteins is limiting, competitive effects have a significant impact on the transcriptional response of the regulated genes. Here we present a general framework for the analysis of any generic regulatory architecture that accounts for the competitive effects of the regulatory environment by isolating these effects into an effective concentration parameter. These predictions are formulated using the grand-canonical ensemble of statistical mechanics and the fold-change in gene expression is predicted as a function of the number of transcription factors, the strength of interactions between the transcription factors and their DNA binding sites, and the effective concentration of the transcription factor. The effective concentration is set by the transcription factor interactions with competing binding sites within the cell and is determined self-consistently. Using this approach, we analyze regulatory architectures in the grand-canonical ensemble ranging from simple repression and simple activation to scenarios that include repression mediated by DNA looping of distal regulatory sites. It is demonstrated that all the canonical expressions previously derived in the case of an isolated, non-competing gene, can be generalised by a simple substitution to their grand canonical counterpart, which allows for simple intuitive incorporation of the influence of multiple competing transcription factor binding sites. As an example of the strength of this approach, we build on these results to present an analytical description of transcriptional regulation of the lac operon.
Four-element series-fed antenna subarray for high-frequency antenna applications

A novel microstrip antenna array consisting of four radiating elements has been proposed. A series feeding technique has been applied in order to minimize losses within the feeding network. A radiating element has been proposed in which strong coupling between input and output feeding lines can be achieved by adjusting the connection position of the output transmission line. A recently developed 'through-element' coupled patches have been used to achieve proper excitations of the two center radiating elements. Both techniques have been combined to achieve proper amplitude distribution across a four-element antenna array. A 4 times 1 antenna array operating within 24 GHz frequency band has been designed. The measured results validate the proposed concept.
Recreational physical activity and risk of Parkinson's disease

The purpose of this study was to investigate associations between recreational physical activity and Parkinson's disease (PD) risk. We prospectively followed 143,325 participants in the Cancer Prevention Study II Nutrition Cohort from 1992 to 2001 (mean age at baseline = 63). Recreational physical activity was estimated at baseline from the reported number of hours per week on average spent performing light intensity activities (walking, dancing) and moderate to vigorous intensity activities (jogging/running, lap swimming, tennis/racquetball, bicycling/stationary bike, aerobics/calisthenics). Incident cases of PD (n = 413) were confirmed by treating physicians and medical record review. Relative risks (RR) were estimated using proportional hazards models, adjusting for age, gender, smoking, and other risk factors. Risk of PD declined in the highest categories of baseline recreational activity. The RR comparing the highest category of total recreational activity (men ≥ 23 metabolic equivalent task‐hours/week [MET‐h/wk], women ≥ 18.5 MET‐h/wk) to no activity was 0.8 (95% CI: 0.6, 1.2; P trend = 0.07). When light activity and moderate to vigorous activity were examined separately, only the latter was found to be associated with PD risk. The RR comparing the highest category of moderate to vigorous activity (men ≥ 16 MET‐h/wk, women ≥ 11.5 MET‐h/wk) to the lowest (0 MET‐h/wk) was 0.6 (95% CI: 0.4, 1.0; P trend = 0.02). These results did not differ significantly by gender. The results were similar when we excluded cases with symptom onset in the first 4 years of follow‐up. Our results may be explained either by a reduction in PD risk through moderate to vigorous activity, or by decreased baseline recreational activity due to preclinical PD. © 2007 Movement Disorder Society