Exposure to Community Violence, Psychopathology, and Personality Traits in Russian Youth

Previous research with the US inner-city youth demonstrated the hazardous effects of community violence exposure. It remains unclear, however, whether these findings are generalizable to other cultures and populations. Furthermore, the role of factors influencing the processing of traumatic events such as personality has not been investigated. Two groups of Russian adolescents (community youth (N = 546) and male delinquents (N = 352)) completed questionnaires assessing their exposure to community violence, conduct problems, internalizing psychopathology and personality. The study demonstrates that the relationships between exposure to violence and psychopathology are similar across different populations within the same culture (community youth and juvenile delinquents), suggesting similar mechanisms behind this phenomenon. The patterns of these relationships were also similar for boys and girls, suggesting similarities in the mechanisms across gender. Hence, the effects of community violence exposure are generalizable to other cultures outside the US. The associations between personality traits and specific types of behaviors also tend to be similar across different populations. Higher levels of novelty seeking were related to more severe problem behaviors and to higher levels of witnessing and victimization, whereas higher levels of harm avoidance were related to higher levels of depression and posttraumatic stress

Dysfunction of Modern Russian Institutes of State Awards in the Sphere of Education and Science

The purpose of the study is to analyze the main dysfunctions of the Russian premium institutes in the field of education and science, and to find out its leveling instruments, by examining the experience of foreign countries; to identify the basic requirements for the novitiate for state awards to employees of education and science in modern Russia in comparison with foreign countries. Methods. Neo institutional approach is used by the author. Methods involve comparative analysis, cross-national analysis, and classification. The original solution of tasks associated with the use of a single system-approach to the sociological study of state awards in the sphere of education and science, is extrapolated from institutional economics. Results. The basic approaches to the determination of the nature and functions of awards institutions in the field of education and science are considered; its relationship with other social, economic and political trends of contemporary politics in Russia is noted. The basic conditions of non-material motivation of workers of scientifically-educational area in modern Russia in comparison with other countries, including the post-Soviet territory states are defined. Both officially established rules and other requirements to candidates on reception of the state honourable distinctions, observed with the Soviet period are considered. The study identifies the main factors that influence the perception of the role of changes in modern society awards, offers solutions to the identified problems. Scientific novelty. The critical analysis of working rules of the Russian legislation regulating an order (procedures) of rewarding has allowed to reveal major disadvantages of the Russian institute of the state awards: opacity of estimated judgements considering the work of the applicant for the award; absence of accurate hierarchy of the state awards and quantity indicators at measurement of merits and results of activity; value of awards loss in the opinion of a society and separate citizens, etc. Ways of the solution of the revealed problems are offered. In particular, the author points out that it is necessary to create an incentive system intended not only for remote prospect (for example, upon reaching a pension age), but also for the current labour period; material remuneration should be a sufficient impulse for professionals and based on a recognition of achievements, first of all, by colleagues (of the same profession), not unauthorized people. It is necessary to work out quantity indicators for an estimation of activity of educators and academics. Introduction of the structured requirements to this activity is to make objective process of representation to the state awards and will generate professional work standards. Moreover, it is necessary to lower qualifications on presence of the certain experience and to remove some other restrictions for the state recognition. Practical significance. According to the author’s analysis, the reduction of dysfunctions of the Russian premium institutes will allow to return retention feature in the sphere of education and sciences of the most valuable personnel; to involve «a fresh creative power» in the given field of work; to create reference points of professional growth for working teachers and scientists; to generate the potential workers concepts of high social value and the importance of professional work in an educational sphere and science Цели статьи – анализ основных дисфункций наградных институтов России в сфере образования и науки и поиск инструментов их нивелирования, в том числе на основе опыта зарубежных стран. Методика и методы. Автор использовал адаптированный из экономики неоинституциональный подход к решению рассматриваемой проблемы, методы сравнительного и кросс-национального анализа и классификации. Результаты. Представлены итоги социологического изучения системы государственных наград в сфере образования и науки. Определены основные условия нематериального поощрения работников научно-образовательной области в современной России в сравнении с другими странами, в том числе с государствами постсоветского пространства. Рассмотрены как официально установленные правила, так и иные требования к кандидатам на получение государственных знаков отличия, соблюдающиеся с советского периода. Перечислены функции наградных институтов и основные факторы, влияющие на восприятие наград в современном обществе. Научная новизна. Критический анализ действующих норм отечественного законодательства, регулирующих порядок (процедуры) награждения позволил выявить основные недостатки отечественного института государственных наград: размытость оценочных суждений при рассмотрении деяний претендента на награду, отсутствие четкой иерархии государственных наград и количественных показателей при измерении заслуг и результатов деятельности, утрату ценности наград в глазах общества и отдельных граждан и др. Предложены пути решения выявленных проблем. В частности, автор считает, что необходимо создание системы стимулов, рассчитанных не только на отдаленную перспективу (например, по достижении пенсионного возраста), но и на текущий трудовой период; причем вознаграждения должны быть достаточным импульсом для профессионалов и основываться на признании достижений в первую очередь коллегами (внутри самой профессии), а не посторонними. Нужна разработка количественных показателей для оценки деятельности работников образования и науки. Введение структурированных требований к деятельности сделает объективным процесс представления к государственным наградам и сформирует эталоны профессиональной деятельности. Следует снизить цензы по наличию определенного стажа и снять некоторые другие ограничения для государственных поощрений. Практическая значимость. Устранение дисфункций российских наградных институтов позволит вернуть им функцию удержания в сфере образования и науки наиболее ценных кадров, привлечь в данную область деятельности свежие творческие силы, создать ориентиры профессионального роста для работающих педагогов и ученых, сформировать в сознании потенциальных работников представления о высокой социальной ценности и значимости профессиональной деятельности в сфере образования и науки

Conservative Safety Monitors of Stochastic Dynamical Systems

Generating accurate runtime safety estimates for autonomous systems is vital to ensuring their continued proliferation. However, exhaustive reasoning about future behaviors is generally too complex to do at runtime. To provide scalable and formal safety estimates, we propose a method for leveraging design-time model checking results at runtime. Specifically, we model the system as a probabilistic automaton (PA) and compute bounded-time reachability probabilities over the states of the PA at design time. At runtime, we combine distributions of state estimates with the model checking results to produce a bounded time safety estimate. We argue that our approach produces well-calibrated safety probabilities, assuming the estimated state distributions are well-calibrated. We evaluate our approach on simulated water tanks

Curating Naturally Adversarial Datasets for Trustworthy AI in Healthcare

Deep learning models have shown promising predictive accuracy for time-series healthcare applications. However, ensuring the robustness of these models is vital for building trustworthy AI systems. Existing research predominantly focuses on robustness to synthetic adversarial examples, crafted by adding imperceptible perturbations to clean input data. However, these synthetic adversarial examples do not accurately reflect the most challenging real-world scenarios, especially in the context of healthcare data. Consequently, robustness to synthetic adversarial examples may not necessarily translate to robustness against naturally occurring adversarial examples, which is highly desirable for trustworthy AI. We propose a method to curate datasets comprised of natural adversarial examples to evaluate model robustness. The method relies on probabilistic labels obtained from automated weakly-supervised labeling that combines noisy and cheap-to-obtain labeling heuristics. Based on these labels, our method adversarially orders the input data and uses this ordering to construct a sequence of increasingly adversarial datasets. Our evaluation on six medical case studies and three non-medical case studies demonstrates the efficacy and statistical validity of our approach to generating naturally adversarial dataset

Application of Hough transform to the recognitions problem of regular solutions of dynamical systems

In this work the investigations of the recognitions problem of regular solutions of autonomous dynamical systems are continued. As shown in [1], this problem reduces to the recognition of three-dimensional convex closed analytic curves constructed on the Poisson sphere by means the Poincaré sections [2], [3]. In some cases, these curves are circles which lie on the surface of sphere. For recognition of such curves in this paper a new algorithm was formulated. He is extending the Circle Hough Transform to three-dimensional case and is called a Generalized Circle Hough Transform. The computational complexity of this algorithm can be reduced to the computational complexity in the two-dimensional case.У цій роботі продовжуються дослідження задачі розпізнавання регулярних розв’язків автономних динамічних систем. Як показано в [1], ця задача зводиться до розпізнавання тривимірних опуклих замкнутих аналітичних кривих, побудованих на сфері Пуассона за допомогою перетину Пуанкаре [2], [3]. У деяких випадках ці криві є колами, які лежать на сфері. Для розпізнання таких кривих у цій роботі пропонується новий алгоритм. Запропонований метод узагальнює класичне перетворення Хафа на тривимірний випадок і називається сферичне узагальнене перетворення Хафа. У роботі показано, як обчислювальну складність цього алгоритму звести до обчислювальної складності двовимірного випадку.В этой работе продолжаются исследования задачи распознавания регулярных решений автономных динамических систем. Как показано в [1], эта задача сводится к распознаванию трехмерных выпуклых замкнутых аналитических кривых, построенных на сфере Пуассона с помощью сечения Пуанкаре [2], [3]. В некоторых случаях эти кривые являются окружностями, которые лежат на сфере. Для распознания таких кривых в этой работе предлагается новый алгоритм. Предложенный метод обобщает классическое преобразование Хафа на трехмерный случай и называется сферическое обобщенное преобразование Хафа. В работе показано, как вычислительную сложность этого алгоритма свести к вычислительной сложности двумерного случая

Compositional Probabilistic Analysis of Temporal Properties over Stochastic Detectors

Run-time monitoring is a vital part of safety-critical systems. However, early-stage assurance of monitoring quality is currently limited: it relies either on complex models that might be inaccurate in unknown ways, or on data that would only be available once the system has been built. To address this issue, we propose a compositional framework for modeling and analysis of noisy monitoring systems. Our novel 3-value detector model uses probability spaces to represent atomic (non-composite) detectors, and it composes them into a temporal logic-based monitor. The error rates of these monitors are estimated by our analysis engine, which combines symbolic probability algebra, independence inference, and estimation from labeled detection data. Our evaluation on an autonomous underwater vehicle found that our framework produces accurate estimates of error rates while using only detector traces, without any monitor traces. Furthermore, when data is scarce, our approach shows higher accuracy than non-compositional data-driven estimates from monitor traces. Thus, this work enables accurate evaluation of logical monitors in early design stages before deploying them

Causal Repair of Learning-enabled Cyber-physical Systems

Models of actual causality leverage domain knowledge to generate convincing diagnoses of events that caused an outcome. It is promising to apply these models to diagnose and repair run-time property violations in cyber-physical systems (CPS) with learning-enabled components (LEC). However, given the high diversity and complexity of LECs, it is challenging to encode domain knowledge (e.g., the CPS dynamics) in a scalable actual causality model that could generate useful repair suggestions. In this paper, we focus causal diagnosis on the input/output behaviors of LECs. Specifically, we aim to identify which subset of I/O behaviors of the LEC is an actual cause for a property violation. An important by-product is a counterfactual version of the LEC that repairs the run-time property by fixing the identified problematic behaviors. Based on this insights, we design a two-step diagnostic pipeline: (1) construct and Halpern-Pearl causality model that reflects the dependency of property outcome on the component's I/O behaviors, and (2) perform a search for an actual cause and corresponding repair on the model. We prove that our pipeline has the following guarantee: if an actual cause is found, the system is guaranteed to be repaired; otherwise, we have high probabilistic confidence that the LEC under analysis did not cause the property violation. We demonstrate that our approach successfully repairs learned controllers on a standard OpenAI Gym benchmark

Psychosocial predictors of sexual initiation and high-risk sexual behaviors in early adolescence

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This longitudinal study examined psychosocial factors associated with risky sexual behavior in early adolescence.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data were collected through a self-report survey, the Social and Health Assessment (SAHA), which was administered in three waves between 2001 and 2003 to a cohort of incoming sixth grade students in the public school system (149 classes at 17 middle and high schools, N = 1,175) of a small northeastern city in the United States.</p> <p>We first examined whether internalizing and externalizing problems in sixth grade, and the rate of change in these factors during middle school, were predictive of sexual initiation two years later, when most of the sample was in eighth grade. We then assessed whether internalizing and externalizing problems in sixth grade, and the rate of change in these factors during middle school, were predictive of engaging in high risk sexual behavior over the subsequent two years.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Externalizing factors are more predictive of sexual risk in early adolescence than are internalizing factors. Specifically, substance use and violent delinquency over the course of middle school were associated with higher, while anxiety with lower, sexual initiation rates during middle school. Additionally, increased substance use over the course of middle school was associated with greater likelihood of engaging in high risk sexual behavior.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>By identifying particular psychosocial risk factors among young adolescents, the findings of this study have implications for designing multi-dimensional programs aimed at preventing health-compromising sexual behavior among young teens.</p