The role of socio-demographic factors on self-rated happiness: The case of Malaysia

This study examines the role of socio-demographic determinants on individual’s level of happiness. Primary survey data on Penang, Malaysia is used for analysis. Based on the findings, being married and Malay are associated with higher probability of feeling very happy or happy. Nevertheless, individuals who suffer from chronic diseases are more likely to have unhappy or very unhappy feelings. The rest of the factors such as income, education, age, gender, and employment status are found to have insignificant effects on happiness. Several policy implications can be recommended based on the outcomes.Education; Health; Happiness; Income; Malaysia; Well-being

SYSTEMS ANALYSIS OF SENSE AND STRIKE CAPABILITIES WITHIN AN ARMORED COMBAT UNIT IN AN OFFENSIVE URBAN OPERATION

This thesis analyzes the impact of deploying loitering munitions and tactical drones with a company-level armored combat team in an offensive urban operation, using Map Aware Non-Uniform Automata (MANA) as the simulation tool. An armored combat team of the Armored Brigade Combat Team (ABCT) was modelled as part of an offensive urban operation, as a baseline to understand the impacts of Raven RQ-11 and M109A6 Howitzer, subsequently replacing them with the loitering munitions and tactical drones. The design of experiment incorporates a total of seven performance parameters of loitering munitions and tactical drones, and utilized the Nearly Orthogonal and Balanced (NOB) method to generate a total of 256 design points with 350 replications each. JMP Pro 16 software was utilized to analyze the operational effectiveness of the loitering munitions and tactical drones, and assess the key performance parameters of the loitering munitions and tactical drones. It was observed that the significant factors in order of significance were loitering munition’s force structure, loitering munition’s classification range and tactical drone’s endurance, and indicated that the employment of loitering munitions and tactical drones enhanced the operational effectiveness of the armored company. This analysis would aid capability analysts in considering the procurement and deployment of sense and strike capabilities, with respect to potential inter-system interaction and key performance parameters.Outstanding ThesisMajor, Singapore ArmyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

High-Mobility Group Box 1 and Autophagy

High-mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) is an architectural chromosomal protein and stress sensor that plays a critical role in various physiological and pathological processes, including cell death and survival. Autophagy is the major pathway involved in the degradation of proteins and organelles, maintenance of cellular homeostasis, and promotion of survival during environmental stress. HMGB1 plays an important location-dependent role in the regulation of autophagy. Nuclear HMGB1 contributes to mitophagy by regulation of heat shock protein beta-1 (HSPB1) expression and cytoskeleton dynamics. Cytoplasmic HMGB1 is a novel coiled-coil myosin-like BCL2-interacting protein (BECN1)-binding protein in the induction of autophagosome formation. Extracellular-reduced HMGB1 triggers autophagy in an advanced glycosylation end product-specific receptor (AGER)-dependent manner. HMGB1-dependent autophagy promotes chemotherapy resistance, sustains the tumor metabolism requirement and T-cell survival, prevents polyglutamine aggregates and excitotoxicity, and protects against endotoxemia, bacterial infection, and ischemia-reperfusion injury in vitro or in animal studies. Targeting the HMGB1-mediated autophagy pathway may be required to address whether or not this approach is therapeutically advantageous in human disease

HMGB1 in Cell Death

High mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) is named for its electrophoretic mobility on polyacrylamide gels when it was first identified in calf thymus in 1973. HMGB1 plays a critical role in the stress response not only inside the cell as a DNA chaperone and cell death regulator, but also outside the cell as the prototypic damage-associated molecular pattern molecule. The physiological and pathological role of HMGB1 in health and disease has been widely studied for years. In this chapter, we will focus on the release and function of HMGB1 in cell death types such as apoptosis, autophagy, and necrosis

Human and Machine Speaker Recognition Based on Short Trivial Events

Trivial events are ubiquitous in human to human conversations, e.g., cough, laugh and sniff. Compared to regular speech, these trivial events are usually short and unclear, thus generally regarded as not speaker discriminative and so are largely ignored by present speaker recognition research. However, these trivial events are highly valuable in some particular circumstances such as forensic examination, as they are less subjected to intentional change, so can be used to discover the genuine speaker from disguised speech. In this paper, we collect a trivial event speech database that involves 75 speakers and 6 types of events, and report preliminary speaker recognition results on this database, by both human listeners and machines. Particularly, the deep feature learning technique recently proposed by our group is utilized to analyze and recognize the trivial events, which leads to acceptable equal error rates (EERs) despite the extremely short durations (0.2-0.5 seconds) of these events. Comparing different types of events, 'hmm' seems more speaker discriminative.Comment: ICASSP 201

Eye-Shield: Real-Time Protection of Mobile Device Screen Information from Shoulder Surfing

People use mobile devices ubiquitously for computing, communication, storage, web browsing, and more. As a result, the information accessed and stored within mobile devices, such as financial and health information, text messages, and emails, can often be sensitive. Despite this, people frequently use their mobile devices in public areas, becoming susceptible to a simple yet effective attack, shoulder surfing. Shoulder surfing occurs when a person near a mobile user peeks at the user's mobile device, potentially acquiring passcodes, PINs, browsing behavior, or other personal information. We propose Eye-Shield, a solution to prevent shoulder surfers from accessing or stealing sensitive on-screen information. Eye-Shield is designed to protect all types of on-screen information in real time, without any serious impediment to users' interactions with their mobile devices. Eye-Shield generates images that appear readable at close distances, but appear blurry or pixelated at farther distances and wider angles. It is capable of protecting on-screen information from shoulder surfers, operating in real time, and being minimally intrusive to the intended users. Eye-Shield protects images and text from shoulder surfers by reducing recognition rates to 24.24% and 15.91%. Our implementations of Eye-Shield, with frame rates of 24 FPS for Android and 43 FPS for iOS, effectively work on screen resolutions as high as 1440x3088. Eye-Shield also incurs acceptable memory usage, CPU utilization, and energy overhead. Finally, our MTurk and in-person user studies indicate that Eye-Shield protects on-screen information without a large usability cost for privacy-conscious users.Comment: Published at 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (2023) U.S. Pat. App. No. 63/468,650-Conf. #867

A rapamycin-sensitive signaling pathway contributes to long-term synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus

Many forms of long-lasting behavioral and synaptic plasticity require the synthesis of new proteins. For example, long-term potentiation (LTIP) that endures for more than an hour requires both transcription and translation. The signal-transduction mechanisms that couple synaptic events to protein translational machinery during long-lasting synaptic plasticity, however, are not well understood. One signaling pathway that is stimulated by growth factors and results in the translation of specific mRNAs includes the rapamycin-sensitive kinase mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR, also known as FRAP and RAFT-1). Several components of this translational signaling pathway, including mTOR, eukaryotic initiation factor-4E-binding proteins 1 and 2, and eukaryotic initiation factor-4E, are present in the rat hippocampus as shown by Western blot analysis, and these proteins are detected in the cell bodies and dendrites in the hippocampal slices by immunostaining studies. In cultured hippocampal neurons, these proteins are present in dendrites and are often found near the presynaptic protein, synapsin I. At synaptic sites, their distribution completely overlaps with a postsynaptic protein, PSD-95. These observations suggest the postsynaptic localization of these proteins. Disruption of mTOR signaling by rapamycin results in a reduction of late-phase LTP expression induced by high-frequency stimulation; the early phase of LTIP is unaffected. Rapamycin also blocks the synaptic potentiation induced by brain-derived neurotrophic factor in hippocampal slices. These results demonstrate an essential role for rapamycin-sensitive signaling in the expression of two forms of synaptic plasticity that require new protein synthesis. The localization of this translational signaling pathway at postsynaptic sites may provide a mechanism that controls local protein synthesis at potentiated synapses