Approximate Randomization of Quantum States With Fewer Bits of Key

Randomization of quantum states is the quantum analogue of the classical one-time pad. We present an improved, efficient construction of an approximately randomizing map that uses O(d/epsilon^2) Pauli operators to map any d-dimensional state to a state that is within trace distance epsilon of the completely mixed state. Our bound is a log d factor smaller than that of Hayden, Leung, Shor, and Winter (2004), and Ambainis and Smith (2004). Then, we show that a random sequence of essentially the same number of unitary operators, chosen from an appropriate set, with high probability form an approximately randomizing map for d-dimensional states. Finally, we discuss the optimality of these schemes via connections to different notions of pseudorandomness, and give a new lower bound for small epsilon.Comment: 18 pages, Quantum Computing Back Action, IIT Kanpur, March 2006, volume 864 of AIP Conference Proceedings, pages 18--36. Springer, New Yor

Degradation of Airway Secretory Cell Mucin Granules Is Dependent on Lysosome Activity

Inflammatory airway diseases (e.g. COPD and asthma) are associated with mucous cell metaplasia and mucin hypersecretion, resulting in symptoms such as shortness of breath and cough. However, how secretory cells remove excess mucin granules is poorly understood. Previous research suggests that intracellular degradation pathways, such as autophagy, are involved in the degradation of mucin granules during resolution of mucous cell metaplasia. We thus hypothesized that the elimination of excess mucin granules is dependent on lysosome-mediated degradation in airway secretory cells. Calu-3 cells, an airway epithelial cell line containing abundant mucin granules, were treated with inhibitors of lysosome acidification (Bafilomycin A1) and lysosome enzyme activity (Pepstatin E64d). We found statistically significant increases in the levels of secretory mucin, MUC5AC, by mucin blot, suggesting that the lysosome mediates the elimination of mucin granules. In addition, by immunoblot we observed an increase in the autophagosome markers, LC3-II and SQSTM1, with lysosome inhibition using Bafilomycin A1, indicating an accumulation of autophagosomes and a role for autophagy in the degradation of mucin granules. However, after transfecting Calu-3 cells with a ubiquitin-hemagglutinin tag plasmid to examine the role of the proteasome in the degradation of mucin granules, we observed that our transfection efficiency was low, making it difficult to detect the hemagglutinin epitope by immunoblots. Nevertheless, we found that MUC5AC levels preliminarily increase with the inhibition of the proteasome using MG-132, suggesting a potential role for the proteasome in the degradation of mucin granules. Thus, we can conclude that inhibition of the lysosome increases MUC5AC levels, demonstrating that the lysosome mediates the degradation of mucin granules in airway secretory cells. In addition, while we were not able to conclude that the proteasome is involved in the degradation of mucin granules with certainty, our preliminary data suggests that it is possible that the ubiquitin-proteasome system is involved in the degradation of mucin due to the observed increase in MUC5AC levels with MG-132.https://digitalcommons.unmc.edu/surp2022/1039/thumbnail.jp

Identifying Important Life Events from Twitter Using Semantic and Syntactic Patterns

Identifying global events from social media has been the focus of much research in recent years. However, the identification of personal life events poses new requirements and challenges that have received relatively little research attention. In this paper we explore a new approach for life event identification, where we expand social media posts into both semantic, and syntactic networks of content. Frequent graph patterns are mined from these networks and used as features to enrich life-event classifiers. Results show that our approach significantly outperforms the best performing baseline in accuracy (by 4.48% points) and F-measure (by 4.54% points) when used to identify five major life events identified from the psychology literature: Getting Married, Having Children, Death of a Parent, Starting School, and Falling in Love. In addition, our results show that, while semantic graphs are effective at discriminating the theme of the post (e.g. the topic of marriage), syntactic graphs help identify whether the post describes a personal event (e.g. someone getting married)

Identifying Prominent Life Events on Twitter

Social media is a common place for people to post and share digital reflections of their life events, including major events such as getting married, having children, graduating, etc. Although the creation of such posts is straightforward, the identification of events on online media remains a challenge. Much research in recent years focused on extracting major events from Twitter, such as earthquakes, storms, and floods. This paper however, targets the automatic detection of personal life events, focusing on five events that psychologists found to be the most prominent in people lives. We define a variety of features (user, content, semantic and interaction) to capture the characteristics of those life events and present the results of several classification methods to automatically identify these events in Twitter. Our proposed classification methods obtain results between 0.84 and 0.92 F1-measure for the different types of life events. A novel contribution of this work also lies in a new corpus of tweets, which has been annotated by using crowdsourcing and that constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available dataset for the automatic identification of personal life events from Twitter

Use of RE-AIM to develop a multi-media facilitation tool for the patient-centered medical home

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Much has been written about how the medical home model can enhance patient-centeredness, care continuity, and follow-up, but few comprehensive aids or resources exist to help practices accomplish these aims. The complexity of primary care can overwhelm those concerned with quality improvement.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The RE-AIM planning and evaluation model was used to develop a multimedia, multiple-health behavior tool with psychosocial assessment and feedback features to facilitate and guide patient-centered communication, care, and follow-up related to prevention and self-management of the most common adult chronic illnesses seen in primary care.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The <it>Connection to Health </it>Patient Self-Management System, a web-based patient assessment and support resource, was developed using the RE-AIM factors of reach (<it>e.g</it>., allowing input and output via choice of different modalities), effectiveness (<it>e.g</it>., using evidence-based intervention strategies), adoption (<it>e.g</it>., assistance in integrating the system into practice workflows and permitting customization of the website and feedback materials by practice teams), implementation (<it>e.g</it>., identifying and targeting actionable priority behavioral and psychosocial issues for patients and teams), and maintenance/sustainability (<it>e.g</it>., integration with current National Committee for Quality Assurance recommendations and clinical pathways of care). <it>Connection to Health </it>can work on a variety of input and output platforms, and assesses and provides feedback on multiple health behaviors and multiple chronic conditions frequently managed in adult primary care. As such, it should help to make patient-healthcare team encounters more informed and patient-centered. Formative research with clinicians indicated that the program addressed a number of practical concerns and they appreciated the flexibility and how the <it>Connection to Health </it>program could be customized to their office.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This primary care practice tool based on an implementation science model has the potential to guide patients to more healthful behaviors and improved self-management of chronic conditions, while fostering effective and efficient communication between patients and their healthcare team. RE-AIM and similar models can help clinicians and media developers create practical products more likely to be widely adopted, feasible in busy medical practices, and able to produce public health impact.</p

Automatic Identification of Personal Life Events in Twitter

New social media has led to an explosion in personal digital data that encompasses both those expressions of self chosen by the individual as well as reflections of self provided by other, third parties. The resulting Digital Personhood (DP) data is complex and for many users it is too easy to become lost in the mire of digital data. This paper studies the automatic detection of personal life events in Twitter. Six relevant life events are considered from psychological research including: beginning school; first full time job; falling in love; marriage; having children and parent's death. We define a variety of features (user, content, semantic and interaction) to capture the characteristics of those life events and present the results of several classification methods to automatically identify these events in Twitter

Radio source calibration for the VSA and other CMB instruments at around 30 GHz

Accurate calibration of data is essential for the current generation of CMB experiments. Using data from the Very Small Array (VSA), we describe procedures which will lead to an accuracy of 1 percent or better for experiments such as the VSA and CBI. Particular attention is paid to the stability of the receiver systems, the quality of the site and frequent observations of reference sources. At 30 GHz the careful correction for atmospheric emission and absorption is shown to be essential for achieving 1 percent precision. The sources for which a 1 percent relative flux density calibration was achieved included Cas A, Cyg A, Tau A and NGC7027 and the planets Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. A flux density, or brightness temperature in the case of the planets, was derived at 33 GHz relative to Jupiter which was adopted as the fundamental calibrator. A spectral index at ~30 GHz is given for each. Cas A,Tau A, NGC7027 and Venus were examined for variability. Cas A was found to be decreasing at $0.394 \pm 0.019$ percent per year over the period March 2001 to August 2004. In the same period Tau A was decreasing at $0.22\pm 0.07$ percent per year. A survey of the published data showed that the planetary nebula NGC7027 decreased at $0.16\pm 0.04$ percent per year over the period 1967 to 2003. Venus showed an insignificant ($1.5 \pm 1.3$ percent) variation with Venusian illumination. The integrated polarization of Tau A at 33 GHz was found to be $7.8\pm 0.6$ percent at pa $= 148^\circ \pm 3^\circ$.}Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, submitted to MNRA

Lordship and Environmental Change in Central Highland Scotland c.1300–c.1400

Whilst there has been an increasing recognition of the infl uence of natural agency on human society in Scotland in the medieval period, conventional historiography has generally presented the wholesale reconfi guration of structures of secular lordship in the Scottish central Highlands in the 14th century as an essentially political consequence of the sociopolitical dislocation associated with the Anglo-Scottish wars that occurred after 1296. The establishment within the region of militarised Gaelic kindreds from the West Highlands and Hebrides of Scotland has come to be regarded as either a symptom of efforts by externally based regional lords to bolster their authority, or an opportunistic territorial aggrandisement by newly dominant neighbouring lords. Feuding and predatory raiding associated with these kindreds is recognised as competition for resources but generally in a context of projection of superior lordship over weaker neighbours. Evidence for long-term changes in climate extrapolated from North Atlantic proxy data, however, suggests that the cattle-based economy of Atlantic Scotland was experiencing protracted environmentally induced stress in the period c.1300–c.1350. Using this evidence, we discuss whether exchange systems operating within traditional lordship structures could offset localised and short-term pressures on the livestock-based regime, but could not be sustained long-term on the reduced fodder and contracting herd sizes caused by climatic deterioration. Territorial expansion and development of a predatory culture, it is argued, were responses to an environment-triggered economic crisis

Single-cell sphingosine kinase activity measurements in primary leukemia

Sphingosine kinase (SK) is a promising therapeutic target in a number of cancers, including leukemia. Traditionally, SK has been measured in bulk cell lysates, but this technique obscures the cellular heterogeneity present in this pathway. For this reason, SK activity was measured in single cells loaded with a fluorescent sphingosine reporter. An automated capillary electrophoresis (CE) system enabled rapid separation and quantification of the phosphorylated and nonphosphorylated sphingosine reporter in single cells. SK activity was measured in tissue-cultured cells derived from chronic myelogenous leukemia (K562), primary peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from three patients with different forms of leukemia, and enriched leukemic blasts from a patient with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Significant intercellular heterogeneity existed in terms of the degree of reporter phosphorylation (as much as an order of magnitude difference), the amount of reporter uptake, and the metabolites formed. In K562 cells, the average amount of reporter converted to the phosphorylated form was 39 ± 26% per cell. Of the primary PBMCs analyzed, the average amount of phosphorylated reporter was 16 ± 25%, 11 ± 26%, and 13 ± 23% in a chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patient, an acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patient, and a B-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia (B-ALL) patient, respectively. These experiments demonstrated the challenge of studying samples comprised of multiple cell types, with tumor blasts present at 5 to 87% of the cell population. When the leukemic blasts from a fourth patient with AML were enriched to 99% of the cell population, 19 ± 36% of the loaded sphingosine was phosphorylated. Thus the diversity in SK activity remained even in a nearly pure tumor sample. These enriched AML blasts loaded significantly less reporter (0.12 ± 0.2 amol) relative to that loaded into the PBMCs in the other samples (≥1 amol). The variability in SK signaling may have important implications for SK inhibitors as therapeutics for leukemia and demonstrates the value of single-cell analysis in characterizing the nature of oncogenic signaling in cancer