Privacy In The Smart Grid: An Information Flow Analysis

Project Final Report prepared for CIEE and California Energy Commissio

Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections

With the intention of assisting legislators, election officials and the public to make sense of recent literature on post-election audits and convert it into realistic audit practices, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California Berkeley) convened a blue ribbon panel (the "Audit Panel") of statisticians, voting experts, computer scientists and several of the nation's leading election officials. Following a review of the literature and extensive consultation with the Audit Panel, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Clinic make several practical recommendations for improving post-election audits, regardless of the audit method that a jurisdiction ultimately decides to adopt

Trustworthiness as a Limitation on Network Neutrality

The policy debate over how to govern access to broadband networks has largely ignored the objective of network trustworthiness-a set of properties (including security, survivability, and safety) that guarantee expected behavior. Instead, the terms of the network access debate have focused on whether imposing a nondiscrimination or network neutrality obligation on network providers is justified by the condition of competition among last-mile providers. Rules proposed by scholars and policymakers would allow network providers to deviate from network neutrality to protect network trustworthiness, but none of these proposals has explored the implications of such exceptions for either neutrality or trustworthiness. This Article examines the relationship between network trustworthiness and network neutrality and finds that providing a trustworthiness exception is a viable way to accommodate trustworthiness within a network neutrality rule. Network providers need leeway to block or degrade traffic within their own subnets, and trustworthiness exceptions can provide them with sufficient flexibility to do so. But, the Article argues, defining the scope of a trustworthiness exception is critically important to the network neutrality rule as a whole: an unduly narrow exception could thwart innovative network defenses, while a broad exception could allow trustworthiness to become a pretext that protects a wide range of discrimination that network neutrality advocates seek to prevent. Furthermore, monitoring network providers\u27 use of a trustworthiness exception is necessary to ensure that it remains an exception, rather than becoming a rule. The Article therefore proposes that network providers be required to disclose data regarding their use of a trustworthiness exception . It also offers a general structure for managing these disclosure

Patient-reported symptoms and discontinuation of adjuvant aromatase inhibitor therapy

BACKGROUND: Aromatase inhibitor (AI) therapy results in substantial survival benefits for patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. The rates of poor adherence and discontinuation of AI therapy are high, primarily because of treatment-related toxicities like musculoskeletal pain. Although pain-related symptoms may worsen during AI therapy, the authors hypothesized that nonpersistence with AI therapy was associated with symptoms that were present before treatment initiation. METHODS: Postmenopausal women initiating AI therapy who were enrolled in a prospective clinical trial completed questionnaires at baseline to assess sleep, fatigue, mood, and pain. Reasons for treatment discontinuation during the first year of treatment were recorded. Associations between baseline patient-reported symptoms and treatment discontinuation because of toxicity were identified using logistic regression. RESULTS: Four hundred forty-nine patients were evaluable. The odds of treatment discontinuation were higher in patients who reported a greater number of symptoms before AI initiation. Baseline poor sleep quality was associated with early treatment discontinuation, with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.91 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.26-2.89; P = .002). Baseline presence of tired feeling and forgetfulness had similar ORs for discontinuation (tired feeling: OR, 1.76; 95% CI, 1.15-2.67; P = .009; forgetfulness: OR, 1.66; 95% CI, 1.11-2.48; P = .015). An increasing total number of baseline symptoms was associated with an increased likelihood of treatment discontinuation, with an OR of 1.89 (95% CI, 1.20-2.96; P = .006) for 3 to 5 symptoms versus 0 to 2 symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Symptom clusters in breast cancer survivors that are present before the initiation of adjuvant AI therapy may have a negative impact on a patient's persistence with therapy. Interventions to manage these symptoms may improve breast cancer outcomes and quality of life

Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE)

Assessing the credibility of research claims is a central, continuous, and laborious part of the scientific process. Credibility assessment strategies range from expert judgment to aggregating existing evidence to systematic replication efforts. Such assessments can require substantial time and effort. Research progress could be accelerated if there were rapid, scalable, accurate credibility indicators to guide attention and resource allocation for further assessment. The SCORE program is creating and validating algorithms to provide confidence scores for research claims at scale. To investigate the viability of scalable tools, teams are creating: a database of claims from papers in the social and behavioral sciences; expert and machine generated estimates of credibility; and, evidence of reproducibility, robustness, and replicability to validate the estimates. Beyond the primary research objective, the data and artifacts generated from this program will be openly shared and provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine research credibility and evidence

Cortico–Cortical Connections of Primary Sensory Areas and Associated Symptoms in Migraine

Abstract Migraine is a recurring, episodic neurological disorder characterized by headache, nausea, vomiting, and sensory disturbances. These events are thought to arise from the activation and sensitization of neurons along the trigemino–vascular pathway. From animal studies, it is known that thalamocortical projections play an important role in the transmission of nociceptive signals from the meninges to the cortex. However, little is currently known about the potential involvement of cortico–cortical feedback projections from higher-order multisensory areas and/or feedforward projections from principle primary sensory areas or subcortical structures. In a large cohort of human migraine patients (N = 40) and matched healthy control subjects (N = 40), we used resting-state intrinsic functional connectivity to examine the cortical networks associated with the three main sensory perceptual modalities of vision, audition, and somatosensation. Specifically, we sought to explore the complexity of the sensory networks as they converge and become functionally coupled in multimodal systems. We also compared self-reported retrospective migraine symptoms in the same patients, examining the prevalence of sensory symptoms across the different phases of the migraine cycle. Our results show widespread and persistent disturbances in the perceptions of multiple sensory modalities. Consistent with this observation, we discovered that primary sensory areas maintain local functional connectivity but express impaired long-range connections to higher-order association areas (including regions of the default mode and salience network). We speculate that cortico–cortical interactions are necessary for the integration of information within and across the sensory modalities and, thus, could play an important role in the initiation of migraine and/or the development of its associated symptoms

Mapping diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine coverage in Africa, 2000-2016: a spatial and temporal modelling study.

BACKGROUND: Routine childhood vaccination is among the most cost-effective, successful public health interventions available. Amid substantial investments to expand vaccine delivery throughout Africa and strengthen administrative reporting systems, most countries still require robust measures of local routine vaccine coverage and changes in geographical inequalities over time. METHODS: This analysis drew from 183 surveys done between 2000 and 2016, including data from 881 268 children in 49 African countries. We used a Bayesian geostatistical model calibrated to results from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017, to produce annual estimates with high-spatial resolution (5 ×    5 km) of diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) vaccine coverage and dropout for children aged 12-23 months in 52 African countries from 2000 to 2016. FINDINGS: Estimated third-dose (DPT3) coverage increased in 72·3% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 64·6-80·3) of second-level administrative units in Africa from 2000 to 2016, but substantial geographical inequalities in DPT coverage remained across and within African countries. In 2016, DPT3 coverage at the second administrative (ie, district) level varied by more than 25% in 29 of 52 countries, with only two (Morocco and Rwanda) of 52 countries meeting the Global Vaccine Action Plan target of 80% DPT3 coverage or higher in all second-level administrative units with high confidence (posterior probability ≥95%). Large areas of low DPT3 coverage (≤50%) were identified in the Sahel, Somalia, eastern Ethiopia, and in Angola. Low first-dose (DPT1) coverage (≤50%) and high relative dropout (≥30%) together drove low DPT3 coverage across the Sahel, Somalia, eastern Ethiopia, Guinea, and Angola. INTERPRETATION: Despite substantial progress in Africa, marked national and subnational inequalities in DPT coverage persist throughout the continent. These results can help identify areas of low coverage and vaccine delivery system vulnerabilities and can ultimately support more precise targeting of resources to improve vaccine coverage and health outcomes for African children. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models in basic and translational breast cancer research

Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of a growing spectrum of cancers are rapidly supplanting long-established traditional cell lines as preferred models for conducting basic and translational preclinical research. In breast cancer, to complement the now curated collection of approximately 45 long-established human breast cancer cell lines, a newly formed consortium of academic laboratories, currently from Europe, Australia, and North America, herein summarizes data on over 500 stably transplantable PDX models representing all three clinical subtypes of breast cancer (ER+, HER2+, and "Triple-negative" (TNBC)). Many of these models are well-characterized with respect to genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic features, metastatic behavior, and treatment response to a variety of standard-of-care and experimental therapeutics. These stably transplantable PDX lines are generally available for dissemination to laboratories conducting translational research, and contact information for each collection is provided. This review summarizes current experiences related to PDX generation across participating groups, efforts to develop data standards for annotation and dissemination of patient clinical information that does not compromise patient privacy, efforts to develop complementary data standards for annotation of PDX characteristics and biology, and progress toward "credentialing" of PDX models as surrogates to represent individual patients for use in preclinical and co-clinical translational research. In addition, this review highlights important unresolved questions, as well as current limitations, that have hampered more efficient generation of PDX lines and more rapid adoption of PDX use in translational breast cancer research