Combining causal model and focus group discussions experiences learned from a socio-anthropological research on the differing perceptions of caretakers and health professionals on children's health (Bolivia/Peru)

The paper discusses the utility of constructing causal models in focus groups. This was experienced as a complement to an in-depth ethnographic research on the differing perceptions of caretakers and health professionals on child's growth and development in Peru and Bolivia. The rational, advantages, difficulties and necessary adaptations of combining the two techniques are discussed on the basis of concrete examples. Authors conclude that the building of a causal model in a focus group session can be useful in comparing lay etiologies of diseases as perceived by different categories of caretakers and health professionals and in identifying specific health risks faced by children. Causal model building in a focus group can help renew discussions and participants'interest but its use is only justified when the study concerns the perception of the causality of a given phenomenon

Dynamics versus replicas in the random field Ising model

In a previous article we have shown, within the replica formalism, that the conventional picture of the random field Ising model breaks down, by the effect of singularities in the interactions between fields involving several replicas, below dimension eight. In the zero-replica limit several coupling constants have thus to be considered, instead of just one. As a result we had found that there is no stable fixed point in the vicinity of dimension six. It is natural to reconsider the problem in a dynamical framework, which does not require replicas, although the equilibrium properties should be recovered in the large time limit. Singularities in the zero-replica limit are a priori not visible in a dynamical picture. In this note we show that in fact new interactions are also generated in the stochastic approach. Similarly these interactions are found to be singular below dimension eight. These critical singularities require the introduction of a time origin $t_0$ at which initial data are given. The dynamical properties are thus dependent upon the waiting time. It is shown here that one can indeed find a complete correspondence between the equilibrium singularities in the $n=0$ limit, and the singularities in the dynamics when the initial time $t_0$ goes to minus infinity, with $n$ replaced by $-\frac{1}{t_0}$. There is thus complete coherence between the two approaches.Comment: 8 pages, latex, no figur

Wave polarizations for a beam-like gravitational wave in quadratic curvature gravity

We compute analytically the tidal field and polarizations of an exact gravitational wave generated by a cylindrical beam of null matter of finite width and length in quadratic curvature gravity. We propose that this wave can represent the gravitational wave that keep up with the high energy photons produced in a gamma ray burst (GRB) source.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, minor corrections, to appear in CQ

Twist Free Energy in a Spin Glass

The field theory of a short range spin glass with Gaussian random interactions, is considered near the upper critical dimension six. In the glassy phase, replica symmetry breaking is accompanied with massless Goldstone modes, generated by the breaking of reparametrization invariance of a Parisi type solution. Twisted boundary conditions are thus imposed at two opposite ends of the system in order to study the size dependence of the twist free energy. A loop-expansion is performed to first order around a twisted background. It is found, as expected but it is non trivial, that the theory does renormalize around such backgrounds, as well as for the bulk. However two main differences appear, in comparison with simple ferromagnetic transitions : (i) the loop expansion yields a (negative) anomaly in the size dependence of the free energy, thereby lifting the lower critical dimension to a value greater than two given by $d_c = 2-\eta(d_c)$ (ii) the free energy is lowered by twisting the boundary conditions. This sign may reflect a spontaneous spatial non-uniformity of the order parameter.Comment: 15 pages, latex, no figur

Twist Free Energy

One may impose to a system with spontaneous broken symmetry, boundary conditions which correspond to different pure states at two ends of a sample. For a discrete Ising-like broken symmetry, boundary conditions with opposite spins in two parallel limiting planes, generate an interface and a cost in free energy per unit area of the interface. For continuum symmetries the order parameter interpolates smoothly between the end planes carrying two different directions of the order parameter. The cost in free energy is then proportional to $L^{d-2}$ for a system of characteristic size L. The power of $L$ is related to the lower critical dimension, and the coefficient of this additional free energy vanishes at the critical temperature. In this note it is shown within a loop expansion that one does find the expected behavior of this twist free energy. This is a preamble to the study of situations where the broken continuum symmetry is believed to be more complex, as in Parisi's ansatz for the Edwards-Anderson spin glass.Comment: 15 pages, latex, no figur

Controlled Data Sharing for Collaborative Predictive Blacklisting

Although sharing data across organizations is often advocated as a promising way to enhance cybersecurity, collaborative initiatives are rarely put into practice owing to confidentiality, trust, and liability challenges. In this paper, we investigate whether collaborative threat mitigation can be realized via a controlled data sharing approach, whereby organizations make informed decisions as to whether or not, and how much, to share. Using appropriate cryptographic tools, entities can estimate the benefits of collaboration and agree on what to share in a privacy-preserving way, without having to disclose their datasets. We focus on collaborative predictive blacklisting, i.e., forecasting attack sources based on one's logs and those contributed by other organizations. We study the impact of different sharing strategies by experimenting on a real-world dataset of two billion suspicious IP addresses collected from Dshield over two months. We find that controlled data sharing yields up to 105% accuracy improvement on average, while also reducing the false positive rate.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in DIMVA 2015. This is the full version. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1403.212

Elastic-Net Regularization in Learning Theory

Within the framework of statistical learning theory we analyze in detail the so-called elastic-net regularization scheme proposed by Zou and Hastie for the selection of groups of correlated variables. To investigate on the statistical properties of this scheme and in particular on its consistency properties, we set up a suitable mathematical framework. Our setting is random-design regression where we allow the response variable to be vector-valued and we consider prediction functions which are linear combination of elements ({\em features}) in an infinite-dimensional dictionary. Under the assumption that the regression function admits a sparse representation on the dictionary, we prove that there exists a particular ``{\em elastic-net representation}'' of the regression function such that, if the number of data increases, the elastic-net estimator is consistent not only for prediction but also for variable/feature selection. Our results include finite-sample bounds and an adaptive scheme to select the regularization parameter. Moreover, using convex analysis tools, we derive an iterative thresholding algorithm for computing the elastic-net solution which is different from the optimization procedure originally proposed by Zou and HastieComment: 32 pages, 3 figure