780 research outputs found
Spatial Privacy Pricing: The Interplay between Privacy, Utility and Price in Geo-Marketplaces
A geo-marketplace allows users to be paid for their location data. Users
concerned about privacy may want to charge more for data that pinpoints their
location accurately, but may charge less for data that is more vague. A buyer
would prefer to minimize data costs, but may have to spend more to get the
necessary level of accuracy. We call this interplay between privacy, utility,
and price \emph{spatial privacy pricing}. We formalize the issues
mathematically with an example problem of a buyer deciding whether or not to
open a restaurant by purchasing location data to determine if the potential
number of customers is sufficient to open. The problem is expressed as a
sequential decision making problem, where the buyer first makes a series of
decisions about which data to buy and concludes with a decision about opening
the restaurant or not. We present two algorithms to solve this problem,
including experiments that show they perform better than baselines.Comment: 10 pages, SIGSPATIAL'2
Fonctionnement et bilan hydrologique du lac de Guiers en 1991
Le bilan hydrique du Lac de Guiers est établi pour l'année 1991. Les composantes essentielles sont d'ordre purement physique : les apports en eau sont tributaires de la crue fluviale (87,3 %). Les composantes secondaires sont de nature anthropique et liées à l'action de l'homme soit pour les apports aux rejets de la CSS (6,3 %), soit au chapitre des pertes par les prélÚvements de la CSS (3,8 %), de la SONEES (2,2 %) ou encore de la SAED (1,4 %). (Résumé d'auteur
Parents\u27 School-related Concerns and Perceived Strengths in Youth with Spina Bifida
BackgroundAlthough the academic difficulties of children with spina bifida (SB) are well-documented, there is limited literature on parents\u27 views of their children\u27s school experiences and school-related supportive services. Thus, the current study examined parents\u27 school-related concerns, as well as perceived areas of strength, among children with SB.MethodsUsing a mixed-methods approach, 30 families (29 mothers and 19 fathers) of children with SB (ages 8â15âyears) completed questionnaires and interviews. Content analysis was used to generate themes from interview data about parents\u27 school-related concerns and perceptions of their child\u27s strengths.ResultsOverall, six themes emerged when assessing both parents\u27 concerns and perceived strengths. Some parents did not endorse school concerns or strengths for their child. However, other parents described concerns related to academic performance, cognitive abilities, lack of school support, missed school and/or class time and disengagement, as well as strengths such as academic skills, cognitive abilities, persistence, self-advocacy and agreeableness. Despite parents\u27 concerns about their children\u27s academic performance, quantitative data revealed that less than 50% of children had received a neuropsychological evaluation and/or academic accommodations; additional quantitative data supported the qualitative findings.ConclusionsThe mixed-methods approach used in this study provides a richer understanding of parents\u27 experiences in the school setting when they have a child with SB. Results can inform clinical practice, identifying a need to improve academic support for children with SB and help parents manage education-related stressors
Analytic Metaphysics versus Naturalized Metaphysics: The Relevance of Applied Ontology
The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman & Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French & McKenzie have argued in defense of analytic metaphysics that it develops tools that could turn out to be useful for philosophy of physics. In this article, we show first that this heuristic defense of metaphysics can be extended to the scientific field of applied ontology, which uses constructs from analytic metaphysics. Second, we elaborate on a parallel by French & McKenzie between mathematics and metaphysics to show that the whole field of analytic metaphysics, being useful not only for philosophy but also for science, should continue to exist as a largely autonomous field
Prioritized training on points that are learnable, worth learning, and not yet learned
We introduce Goldilocks Selection, a technique for faster model training
which selects a sequence of training points that are "just right". We propose
an information-theoretic acquisition function -- the reducible validation loss
-- and compute it with a small proxy model -- GoldiProx -- to efficiently
choose training points that maximize information about a validation set. We
show that the "hard" (e.g. high loss) points usually selected in the
optimization literature are typically noisy, while the "easy" (e.g. low noise)
samples often prioritized for curriculum learning confer less information.
Further, points with uncertain labels, typically targeted by active learning,
tend to be less relevant to the task. In contrast, Goldilocks Selection chooses
points that are "just right" and empirically outperforms the above approaches.
Moreover, the selected sequence can transfer to other architectures;
practitioners can share and reuse it without the need to recreate it
Tools for the high penetration of PV Systems in the EU electrical networks: results of PVCROPS Project
The Solar Energy Industrial Initiative established the objective of integrating PV into the grid to provide up to 12% of the EU electricity demand. The FP7 project PVCROPS has developed solutions to allow the high penetration of PV systems in EU electrical networks and to reduce its Levelized Cost (LCoE) increasing PV system performance. The solutions consist of documents like technical specifications and toolboxes for design, prediction, integration of batteries and automatic detection of performance failures. Six of them are on-line free tools and thirteen are marketable products. These tools allow reducing the LCoE up to 30%, increasing the Performance Ratio up to 9% and PV penetration of 30%. The tools developed by PVCROPS are detailed in www.pvcrops.e
Collybolide Is a Novel Biased Agonist of Îș-Opioid Receptors With Potent Antipruritic Activity
Among the opioid receptors, the Îș-opioid receptor (ÎșOR) has been gaining considerable attention as a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of complex CNS disorders including depression, visceral pain, and cocaine addiction. With an interest in discovering novel ligands targeting ÎșOR, we searched natural products for unusual scaffolds and identified collybolide (Colly), a nonnitrogenous sesquiterpene from the mushroom Collybia maculata. This compound has a furyl-ÎŽ-lactone core similar to that of Salvinorin A (Sal A), another natural product from the plant Salvia divinorum. Characterization of the molecular pharmacological properties reveals that Colly, like Sal A, is a highly potent and selective ÎșOR agonist. However, the two compounds differ in certain signaling and behavioral properties. Colly exhibits 10- to 50-fold higher potency in activating the mitogen-activated protein kinase pathway compared with Sal A. Taken with the fact that the two compounds are equipotent for inhibiting adenylyl cyclase activity, these results suggest that Colly behaves as a biased agonist of ÎșOR. Behavioral studies also support the biased agonistic activity of Colly in that it exhibits âŒ10-fold higher potency in blocking nonâhistamine-mediated itch compared with Sal A, and this difference is not seen in pain attenuation by these two compounds. These results represent a rare example of functional selectivity by two natural products that act on the same receptor. The biased agonistic activity, along with an easily modifiable structure compared with Sal A, makes Colly an ideal candidate for the development of novel therapeutics targeting ÎșOR with reduced side effects
Collapse of superconductivity in a hybrid tin-graphene Josephson junction array
When a Josephson junction array is built with hybrid
superconductor/metal/superconductor junctions, a quantum phase transition from
a superconducting to a two-dimensional (2D) metallic ground state is predicted
to happen upon increasing the junction normal state resistance. Owing to its
surface-exposed 2D electron gas and its gate-tunable charge carrier density,
graphene coupled to superconductors is the ideal platform to study the
above-mentioned transition between ground states. Here we show that decorating
graphene with a sparse and regular array of superconducting nanodisks enables
to continuously gate-tune the quantum superconductor-to-metal transition of the
Josephson junction array into a zero-temperature metallic state. The
suppression of proximity-induced superconductivity is a direct consequence of
the emergence of quantum fluctuations of the superconducting phase of the
disks. Under perpendicular magnetic field, the competition between quantum
fluctuations and disorder is responsible for the resilience at the lowest
temperatures of a superconducting glassy state that persists above the upper
critical field. Our results provide the entire phase diagram of the disorder
and magnetic field-tuned transition and unveil the fundamental impact of
quantum phase fluctuations in 2D superconducting systems.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure
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