The Impact Of Parenting On Stress And Stress Coping In Asian American Youth: A Qualitative Study

Abstract Exposure to high academic achievement pressure and parent-child conflict is associated with poor psychological adjustments among Asian American Youth. Analyzing qualitative interview data of COEAA project, this study explored how parenting is related to youth’s internalizing the high achievement motivation and impact youth perceived stress and stress coping strategy among families of East Asian origin. Participants consisted of 15 youth aged 15-24 who were born in US or have been living in US since 4th grade and 7 parents who identified themselves as first generation immigrants from East Asian counties and had children aged 14-24; Results: Findings revealed that 1) parents instilled utility value of high academic achievement and youth acceptance parents sharing ownership of their study and perceived need to paying back to parents help children to internalize high academic achievement motivation. 2) Parental “setting career path for children” “sheltering children from making mistakes” “when parents say no, the communication is closed” are identified themes about parenting behaviors supporting/suppressing youth autonomy; “Hesitate to give positive feedback” and “lack of clear and consistent rules” are identified themes about parenting behaviors supporting/suppressing youth competence; 3) cross case analysis revealed that youth whose perspectives suppressed by parenting behaviors in communication reported more source of stress, didn’t perceived support from parents and reported using predominantly passive coping strategy compared to youth whose parents taking their perspectives in communication. Parents’ stress coping style also impact youth’ support seeking behaviors. Implications for interventions that help Asian American youth to develop resilience to stress are discussed. Keywords: Asian American youth. Psychological adjustments. Autonomy. Competence. Parenting. Stress. Stress- Coping

Unsupervised Polychromatic Neural Representation for CT Metal Artifact Reduction

Emerging neural reconstruction techniques based on tomography (e.g., NeRF, NeAT, and NeRP) have started showing unique capabilities in medical imaging. In this work, we present a novel Polychromatic neural representation (Polyner) to tackle the challenging problem of CT imaging when metallic implants exist within the human body. The artifacts arise from the drastic variation of metal's attenuation coefficients at various energy levels of the X-ray spectrum, leading to a nonlinear metal effect in CT measurements. Reconstructing CT images from metal-affected measurements hence poses a complicated nonlinear inverse problem where empirical models adopted in previous metal artifact reduction (MAR) approaches lead to signal loss and strongly aliased reconstructions. Polyner instead models the MAR problem from a nonlinear inverse problem perspective. Specifically, we first derive a polychromatic forward model to accurately simulate the nonlinear CT acquisition process. Then, we incorporate our forward model into the implicit neural representation to accomplish reconstruction. Lastly, we adopt a regularizer to preserve the physical properties of the CT images across different energy levels while effectively constraining the solution space. Our Polyner is an unsupervised method and does not require any external training data. Experimenting with multiple datasets shows that our Polyner achieves comparable or better performance than supervised methods on in-domain datasets while demonstrating significant performance improvements on out-of-domain datasets. To the best of our knowledge, our Polyner is the first unsupervised MAR method that outperforms its supervised counterparts.Comment: 19 page

Automated Generation of Masked Nonlinear Components: From Lookup Tables to Private Circuits

Masking is considered to be an essential defense mechanism against side-channel attacks, but it is challenging to be adopted for hardware cryptographic implementations, especially for high security orders. Recently, Knichel et al. proposed an automated tool called AGEMA that enables the generation of masked implementations in hardware for arbitrary security orders using composable gadgets. This accelerates the construction and practical application of masking schemes. This article proposes a new automated tool named AGMNC that can generate masked nonlinear components with much better performance. The effectiveness of AGMNC is evaluated in several case studies. The evaluation results show a significant performance improvement, particularly for the first-order secure SKINNY S-box: saving 41$\%$ area, 25$\%$ latency, and 49$\%$ dynamic power. We achieve such a good result by integrating three key techniques: a new composable AND-XOR gadget, an optimization strategy based on the latency asymmetry feature of the AND-XOR gadget, and an implementation optimization for synchronization. Besides, we use the formal verification tool SILVER and FPGA-based practical experiments to confirm the security of the masked implementations generated by AGMNC

Mesoscopic Transport of Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect in Sub-Micron Size Regime

The quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect has been demonstrated in two-dimensional topological insulator systems incorporated with ferromagnetism. However, a comprehensive understanding of mesoscopic transport in sub-micron QAH devices has yet been established. Here we fabricated miniaturized QAH devices with channel widths down to 600 nm, where the QAH features are still preserved. A back-scattering channel is formed in narrow QAH devices through percolative hopping between 2D compressible puddles. Large resistance fluctuations are observed in narrow devices near the coercive field, which is associated with collective interference between intersecting paths along domain walls when the device geometry is smaller than the phase coherence length $L_\phi$. Through measurement of size-dependent breakdown current, we confirmed that the chiral edge states are confined at the physical boundary with its width on the order of Fermi wavelength.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Kidney transplantation recovers the reduction level of serum sulfatide in ESRD patients via processes correlated to oxidative stress and platelet count

Sulfatide is a major component of glycosphingolipids in lipoproteins. Recently, we reported that a low serum level of sulfatide in hemodialysis patients might be related to the high incidence of cardiovascular diseases. However, the serum kinetics of sulfatide in kidney disease patients and the function of endogenous serum sulfatide are still unclear. To obtain novel knowledge concerning these issues, we investigated the serum kinetics of sulfatide in 5 adult kidney transplant recipients. We also analyzed the correlated factors influencing the serum sulfatide level, using multiple regression analysis. Kidney transplantation caused a dramatic increase of serum sulfatide without an alteration of its composition in all recipients in a time-dependent manner; however, the recovery speed was slower than that of the improvement of kidney function and the serum sulfatide reached a nearly normal level after 1 year. Multiple regression analysis showed that the significant correlated factor influencing the serum sulfatide level was log duration (time parameter) throughout the observation period, and the correlated factors detected in the stable phase were the decrease of serum concentration of malondialdehyde (an oxidative stress marker) as well as the elevation of platelet count. The current study results demonstrated the gradual but reliable recovery of the serum sulfatide level in kidney transplant recipients for the first time, suggesting a close correlation between serum sulfatide and kidney function. The recovery of serum sulfatide might derive from the attenuation of systemic oxidative stress. The normal level of serum sulfatide in kidney transplant recipients might affect platelet function, and contribute to the reduction of cardiovascular disease incidence.ArticleGLYCOCONJUGATE JOURNAL. 28(3-4):125-135 (2011)journal articl

Pushing the Limits: Searching for Implementations with the Smallest Area for Lightweight S-Boxes

The area is one of the most important criteria for an S-box in hardware implementation when designing lightweight cryptography primitives. The area can be well estimated by the number of gate equivalent (GE). However, to our best knowledge, there is no efficient method to search for an S-box implementation with the least GE. Previous approaches can be classified into two categories, one is a heuristic that aims at finding an implementation with a satisfying but not necessarily the smallest GE number; the other one is SAT-based focusing on only the smallest number of gates while it ignored that the areas of different gates vary. Implementation with the least gates would usually not lead to the smallest number of GE. In this paper, we propose an improved SAT-based tool targeting optimizing the number of GE of an S-box implementation. Given an S-box, our tool can return the implementation of this S-box with the smallest number of GE. We speed up the search process of the tool by bit-sliced technique. Additionally, our tool supports 2-, 3-, and 4-input gates, while the previous tools cover only 2-input gates. To highlight the strength of our tool, we apply it to some 4-bit and 5-bit S-boxes of famous ciphers. We obtain a better implementation of RECTANGLE\u27s S-box with the area of 18.00GE. What\u27s more, we prove that the implementations of S-boxes of PICCOLO, SKINNY, and LBLOCK in the current literature have been optimal. When using the DC synthesizer on the circuits produced by our tool, the area are much better than the circuits converted by DC synthesizers from the lookup tables (LUT). At last, we use our tool to find implementations of 5-bit S-boxes, such as those used in KECCAK and ASCON

The prognostic value of deep earlobe creases in patients with acute ischemic stroke

Background and purposeData on earlobe crease (ELC) among patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) are limited. Here, we determined the frequency and characteristics of ELC and the prognostic effect of ELC among AIS patients.MethodsA total of 936 patients with acute AIS were enrolled during the period between December 2018 and December 2019. The patients were divided into those without and with ELC, unilateral and bilateral ELC, and shallow and deep ELC, according to the photographs taken of the bilateral ears. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the effect of ELC, bilateral ELC, and deep ELC on poor functional outcomes at 90 days (a modified Rankin Scale score ≥2) in AIS patients.ResultsAmong the 936 AIS patients, there were 746 (79.7%) patients with ELC. Among patients with ELC, there were 156 (20.9%) patients with unilateral ELC and 590 (79.1%) with bilateral ELC and 476 (63.8%) patients with shallow ELC and 270 (36.2%) with deep ELC. After adjusting for age, sex, baseline NIHSS score, and other potential covariates, patients with deep ELC were associated with a 1.87-fold [odds ratio (OR) 1.87; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.13–3.09] and 1.63-fold (OR 1.63; 95%CI, 1.14–2.34) increase in the risk of poor functional outcome at 90 days in comparison with those without ELC or shallow ELC.ConclusionELC was a common phenomenon, and eight out of ten AIS patients had ELC. Most patients had bilateral ELC, and more than one-third had deep ELC. Deep ELC was independently associated with an increased risk of poor functional outcome at 90 days

Universal conductance fluctuations in a MnBi2_2Te4_4 thin film

Quantum coherence of electrons can produce striking behaviors in mesoscopic conductors, including weak localization and the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Although magnetic order can also strongly affect transport, the combination of coherence and magnetic order has been largely unexplored. Here, we examine quantum coherence-driven universal conductance fluctuations in the antiferromagnetic, canted antiferromagnetic, and ferromagnetic phases of a thin film of the topological material MnBi$_2$Te$_4$. In each magnetic phase we extract a charge carrier phase coherence length of about 100 nm. The conductance magnetofingerprint is repeatable when sweeping applied magnetic field within one magnetic phase, but changes when the applied magnetic field crosses the antiferromagnetic/canted antiferromagnetic magnetic phase boundary. Surprisingly, in the antiferromagnetic and canted antiferromagnetic phase, but not in the ferromagnetic phase, the magnetofingerprint depends on the direction of the field sweep. To explain these observations, we suggest that conductance fluctuation measurements are sensitive to the motion and nucleation of magnetic domain walls in MnBi$_2$Te$_4$

New SAT-based Model for Quantum Circuit Decision Problem: Searching for Low-Cost Quantum Implementation

In recent years, quantum technology has been rapidly developed. As security analyses for symmetric ciphers continue to emerge, many require an evaluation of the resources needed for the quantum circuit implementation of the encryption algorithm. In this regard, we propose the quantum circuit decision problem, which requires us to determine whether there exists a quantum circuit for a given permutation f using M ancilla qubits and no more than K quantum gates within the circuit depth D. Firstly, we investigate heuristic algorithms and classical SAT-based models in previous works, revealing their limitations in solving the problem. Hence, we innovatively propose an improved SAT-based model incorporating three metrics of quantum circuits. The model enables us to find the optimal quantum circuit of an arbitrary 3 or 4-bit S-box under a given optimization goal based on SAT solvers, which has proved the optimality of circuits constructed by the tool, LIGHTER-R. Then, by combining different criteria in the model, we find more compact quantum circuit implementations of S-boxes such as RECTANGLE and GIFT. For GIFT S-box, our model provides the optimal quantum circuit that only requires 8 gates with a depth of 31. Furthermore, our model can be generalized to linear layers and improve the previous SAT-based model proposed by Huang et al. in ASIACRYPT 2022 by adding the criteria on the number of qubits and the circuit depth