The relationship of feeding problems with the use of antiepileptic medication among persons with severe and profound mental retardation

Epilepsy and/or seizure activity are frequently occurring phenomena and a significant co-morbid condition for persons with severe to profound intellectual disability (Burke, McKee, Pathak, Donahue, Parasuraman & Baltenhorst, 1999). The majority of seizure activity leads to deficits across a number of social, physical,occupational, and personal variables, and if left untreated, may lead to death in these individuals. The treatment of this condition frequently utilizes anti-epileptic medication, but these medications are often associated with a variety of side effects such as dental complications and disturbed gait. Previous researchers have suggested that these side effects may be manifested in forms of maladaptive behaviors such as aggression and destructiveness (Matson, Mayville, Bamburg & Eckholdt, 2001), but studies have not yet been conducted to determine if side effects of antiepileptics may manifest as feeding problems in this population. Given that complications with feeding may incorporate some of the variables mentioned above (i.e., dental complications), a relationship between the two is likely. The purpose of this study was to evaluate feeding problems associated with the use of three different types of antiepileptic medications on individuals with severe to profound mental retardation as compared to their matched controls. Individuals across three groups (clients on carbamazepine, n = 20; clients on valproate, n = 18; and clients on phenytoin, n = 22) were compared to three separate control groups matched on age, gender, race, and level of MR. They were compared across items related to feeding problems on the Screening Tool of fEeding Problems (STEP). Implications of these data are discussed

Cryptographically Secure Information Flow Control on Key-Value Stores

We present Clio, an information flow control (IFC) system that transparently incorporates cryptography to enforce confidentiality and integrity policies on untrusted storage. Clio insulates developers from explicitly manipulating keys and cryptographic primitives by leveraging the policy language of the IFC system to automatically use the appropriate keys and correct cryptographic operations. We prove that Clio is secure with a novel proof technique that is based on a proof style from cryptography together with standard programming languages results. We present a prototype Clio implementation and a case study that demonstrates Clio's practicality.Comment: Full version of conference paper appearing in CCS 201

BMI and Risk of Serious Upper Body Injury Following Motor Vehicle Crashes: Concordance of Real-World and Computer-Simulated Observations

Shankuan Zhu and colleagues use computer crash simulations, as well as real-world data, to evaluate whether driver obesity is associated with greater risk of body injury in motor vehicle crashes

Analysis of environmental conditions and management in a compost-bedded pack barn with tunnel ventilation

Received: January 5th, 2021 ; Accepted: March 27th, 2021 ; Published: April 16th, 2021 ; Correspondence: [email protected] housing system based on compost-bedded pack for dairy cows is spreading rapidly in Brazil. Completely open buildings without curtains and simple roofs are usually provided. However, in the last years some new completely closed barns have been realized. This study aims to analyse one of these closed barns, located in the State of Minas Gerais. The two main sides of the facility are provided with polyethylene curtains of blue colour and five deflectors. The barn is equipped with an evaporative adiabatic cooling system, associated with the tunnel-style ventilation, realized with exhaust fans, continuously operating 24 hours a day. 85 lactating Holstein cows were housed in the barn during the trials carried out in the winter season 2019. Microclimatic data were collected continuously. Air speed, illuminance and bedding temperature were measured during the farm visits. Pack moisture was calculated. The results state the importance of bedding management and climatic conditions inside the barn. It emerges that the cows housed in this kind of closed barn, with forced ventilation, are in good thermal conditions, which are fairly constant. The average illumination of the barn can be considered acceptable (55.06 lx), even if some areas of the barn present values below the minimum ones reported in literature. The bedding temperature varies between a maximum of 36.33 °C and a minimum of 25.44 °C with an average of 31.26 °C. The values of bedding moisture are between a maximum of 64.36% and a minimum of 60.81% with an average of 62.48%

Circular and leakage resilient public-key encryption under subgroup indistinguishability (or: Quadratic residuosity strikes back)

30th Annual Cryptology Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, August 15-19, 2010. ProceedingsThe main results of this work are new public-key encryption schemes that, under the quadratic residuosity (QR) assumption (or Paillier’s decisional composite residuosity (DCR) assumption), achieve key-dependent message security as well as high resilience to secret key leakage and high resilience to the presence of auxiliary input information. In particular, under what we call the subgroup indistinguishability assumption, of which the QR and DCR are special cases, we can construct a scheme that has: • Key-dependent message (circular) security. Achieves security even when encrypting affine functions of its own secret key (in fact, w.r.t. affine “key-cycles” of predefined length). Our scheme also meets the requirements for extending key-dependent message security to broader classes of functions beyond affine functions using previous techniques of Brakerski et al. or Barak et al. • Leakage resiliency. Remains secure even if any adversarial low-entropy (efficiently computable) function of the secret key is given to the adversary. A proper selection of parameters allows for a “leakage rate” of (1 − o(1)) of the length of the secret key. • Auxiliary-input security. Remains secure even if any sufficiently hard to invert (efficiently computable) function of the secret key is given to the adversary. Our scheme is the first to achieve key-dependent security and auxiliary-input security based on the DCR and QR assumptions. Previous schemes that achieved these properties relied either on the DDH or LWE assumptions. The proposed scheme is also the first to achieve leakage resiliency for leakage rate (1 − o(1)) of the secret key length, under the QR assumption. We note that leakage resilient schemes under the DCR and the QR assumptions, for the restricted case of composite modulus product of safe primes, were implied by the work of Naor and Segev, using hash proof systems. However, under the QR assumption, known constructions of hash proof systems only yield a leakage rate of o(1) of the secret key length.Microsoft Researc

Extended Ensemble Theory, Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, and Phase Transitions

In this paper, we suppose a possible extension of Gibbs ensemble theory so that it can provide a reasonable description to phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The extension is founded on three hypotheses, and can be regarded as a microscopic edition of the Landau phenomenological theory of phase transitions. Within its framework, the state of a system is determined by the evolution of order parameter with temperature according to such a principle that the entropy of the system will reach its minimum in this state. The evolution of order parameter can cause change in representation of the system Hamiltonian, different phases will realize different representations. Physically, it turns out that phase transition originates from the automatic interference among matter waves as temperature is cooled down. Typical quantum many-body systems are studied with this extended ensemble theory. In particular, the theory predicts that the specific heat Cp of liquid He II will vanish linearly as T tends to zero, which is anticipating experimental verifications.Comment: 41 pages, 8 figures, content change