Dynamics of Vibrated Granular Monolayers

We study statistical properties of vibrated granular monolayers using molecular dynamics simulations. We show that at high excitation strengths, the system is in a gas state, particle motion is isotropic, and the velocity distributions are Gaussian. As the vibration strength is lowered the system's dimensionality is reduced from three to two. Below a critical excitation strength, a gas-cluster phase occurs, and the velocity distribution becomes bimodal. In this phase, the system consists of clusters of immobile particles arranged in close-packed hexagonal arrays, and gas particles whose energy equals the first excited state of an isolated particle on a vibrated plate.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figs, revte

A convex formulation for semi-supervised multi-label feature selection

Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Explosive growth of multimedia data has brought challenge of how to efficiently browse, retrieve and organize these data. Under this circumstance, different approaches have been proposed to facilitate multimedia analysis. Several semi-supervised feature selection algorithms have been proposed to exploit both labeled and unlabeled data. However, they are implemented based on graphs, such that they cannot handle large-scale datasets. How to conduct semi-supervised feature selection on large-scale datasets has become a challenging research problem. Moreover, existing multi-label feature selection algorithms rely on eigen-decomposition with heavy computational burden, which further prevent current feature selection algorithms from being applied for big data. In this paper, we propose a novel convex semi-supervised multi-label feature selection algorithm, which can be applied to large-scale datasets. We evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm over five benchmark datasets and compare the results with state- of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised feature selection algorithms as well as baseline using all features. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm consistently achieve superiors performances

Truth-telling to the patient, family, and the sexual partner: a rights approach to the role of healthcare providers in adult HIV disclosure in China.

Patients' rights are central in today's legislation and social policies related to health care, including HIV care, in not only Western countries but around the world. However, given obvious socio-cultural differences it is often asked how or to what extent patients' rights should be respected in non-Western societies such as China. In this paper, it is argued that the patients' rights framework is compatible with Chinese culture, and that from the perspective of contemporary patient rights healthcare providers have a duty to disclose truthfully the diagnosis and prognosis to their patients, that the Chinese cultural practice of involving families in care should - with consent from the patient - be promoted out of respect for patients' rights and well-being, and that healthcare providers should be prepared to address the issue of disclosing a patient's HIV status to sexual partner(s). Legally, the provider should be permitted to disclose without consent from the patient but not obliged to in all cases. The decision to do this should be taken with trained sensitivity to a range of ethically relevant considerations. Post-disclosure counseling or psychological support should be in place to address the concerns of potentially adverse consequences of provider-initiated disclosure and to maximize the psychosocial and medical benefits of the disclosure. There is an urgent need for healthcare providers to receive training in ethics and disclosure skills. This paper concludes also with some suggestions for improving the centerpiece Chinese legislation, State Council's "Regulations on AIDS Prevention and Control" (2006), to further safeguard the rights and well-being of HIV patients