Employment-Based Preferences Categories: An Effort to Simplify Has Resulted in More Paperwork

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 19901 ( the Act ), employment-based and family-sponsored immigration underwent sweeping and dramatic reforms. By implementing new criteria for both these areas of immigration, the Act sought to realize its new policy of strengthening American competitiveness in the global economy and to reinforce its prior policy of favoring family reunification. The Act, which was signed into law by President Bush on November 29, 1990, and went into effect on October 1, 1991, represents the culmination of a decade-long reform process that began with the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1979. The resulting legislation represents the most comprehensive revision of United States immigration law in sixty-six years, and like previous attempts at immigration reform, the goals of the 1990 Act may be difficult to carry into practice

Political Will Needed to Effectively and Efficiently Conserve and Manage Water in India

Dr. Mansee Bal Bhargava, a research entrepreneur at the Environment Design Consultants (EDC), Ahmedabad, and a former Fulbright scholar at Centre for Behaviour, Institutions, and Environment, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe (2016-17) — has written an open letter on behalf of water allied researchers, educators, consultants, and enthusiasts*, titled “Water Matters: Appeal for Election 2019 Onward”

Visualization of Wormholes in Sensor Networks

Several protocols have been proposed to defend against wormholes in ad hoc networks by adopting positioning devices, synchronized clocks, or directional antennas. In this paper, we propose a mechanism, MDS-VOW, to detect wormholes in a sensor network. MDS-VOW first reconstructs the layout of the sensors using multi-dimensional scaling. To compensate the distortions caused by distance measurement errors, a surface smoothing scheme is adopted. MDS-VOW then detects the wormhole by visualizing the anomalies introduced by the attack. The anomalies, which are caused by the fake connections through the wormhole, bend the reconstructed surface to pull the sensors that are faraway to each other. Through detecting the bending feature, the wormhole is located and the fake connections are identified. The contributions of MDS-VOW are: (1) it does not require the sensors to be equipped with special hardware, (2) it adopts and combines the techniques from social science, computer graphics, and scientific visualization to attack the problem in network security. We examine the accuracy of the proposed mechanism when the sensors are deployed in a circle area and one wormhole exists in the network. The results show that MDS-VOW has a low false alarm ratio when the distance measurement errors are not large

Plasma Corticotropin-Releasing Factor Receptors and B7-2⁺ Extracellular Vesicles in Blood Correlate with Irritable Bowel Syndrome Disease Severity.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are composed of bilayer membranes that are released by different cell types and are present in bodily fluids, such as blood, urine, and bile. EVs are thought to play a key role in intracellular communication. Based on their size and density, EVs are classified into small, medium, or large EVs. Cargo composition in EVs reflects physiological changes in health and disease. Patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) exhibit visceral hypersensitivity and mood disorders. Stressful episodes often precede disease symptoms in IBS patients. Stress-induced symptoms include, but are not limited to, abdominal pain and mood swings. Perceived stress responses are mediated by two known G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), corticotropin-releasing factor receptor 1 and 2 (CRFRs). CRFRs belong to the Class B secretin receptor family of GPCRs. Here, we show that CRFRs were present in human and murine plasma, and in EVs purified from mouse serum. CRFRs were present in plasma from IBS patients and healthy controls. EVs secreted from immune cells influence both adaptive and innate immune responses via exchange of EVs between different immune cell types. B7-2 (CD86), a plasma membrane antigen-presenting protein, is present on EVs secreted from dendritic, B-, and mast cells, whereas CD9 is present on EVs secreted from dendritic and intestinal epithelial cells. We found that plasma CRFR levels positively correlated with B7-2+ EVs (R = 0.8597, p < 0.0001), but no association was seen with CD9+ EVs. Plasma CRFRs expression negatively correlated with IBS severity scores. Our data suggests that plasma EVs from immune cells carry CRFRs as cargos and influence cell-cell communication in health and disease

Cryptanalysis of an MPEG-Video Encryption Scheme Based on Secret Huffman Tables

This paper studies the security of a recently-proposed MPEG-video encryption scheme based on secret Huffman tables. Our cryptanalysis shows that: 1) the key space of the encryption scheme is not sufficiently large against divide-and-conquer (DAC) attack and known-plaintext attack; 2) it is possible to decrypt a cipher-video with a partially-known key, thus dramatically reducing the complexity of the DAC brute-force attack in some cases; 3) its security against the chosen-plaintext attack is very weak. Some experimental results are included to support the cryptanalytic results with a brief discuss on how to improve this MPEG-video encryption scheme.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure