Body and Self-Image

After interviewing my three respondents and after analyzing their interview data to find an issue to compare and contrast between the three, it was very apparent that all three of them have had very different, yet interesting experiences regarding their body and self image, and much of these experiences have resulted from the country they grew up in and the culture that surrounded them. In my paper, I will firstly introduce my respondents and give a brief description of their experience with body and self image. I will then compare and contrast their experiences, and attempt to analyze how they vary based on the impact of culture and the different countries they grew up in

A Survey of Television Utilization in Teacher Education with Suggested Applications for the Republic of China

The purpose of this study is (1) to survey the problems of the utilization of closed-circuit television in the teacher-education programs in the United States, (2) to organize this information, and (3) to relate the information to the needs of other developing countries, particularly the Republic of China

Improving the time complexity of message-optimal distributed algorithms for minimum-weight spanning trees

A distributed algorithm is presented that constructs the minimum-weight spanning tree of an undirected connected graph with distinct node identities. Initially, each node knows only the weight of each of its adjacent edges. When the algorithm terminates, each node knows which of its adjacent edges are edges of the tree. For a graph with n nodes and e edges, the total number of messages required by this algorithm is at most 5n log n + 2e, where each message contains at most one edge weight plus 3 + log n bits. Although the algorithm presented here has the same message complexity as the previously known algorithm due to R.G. Gallager, P.A. Humblet, and P.M. Spira, the time complexity of the algorithm presented improves from Gallager's O(n log n) to O(n log n) time units, where log k is the number of times the log function must be applied to k to obtain a result less than or equal to one. A worst case of Ω(n log n) is also possible. In addition, when the network is synchronous, the algorithm presented is modified further to solve the same problem with the same message complexity but in O(n) time.published_or_final_versio

The Role of Gut Microbiota Urease in the Host With Liver Disease

Significant metabolic interactions exist between the gut microbiota and the mammalian host, one prime example of which is nitrogen metabolism. In the colon, bacterial urease hydrolyzes host-derived urea into carbon dioxide and ammonia. Colonic ammonia can subsequently be absorbed by the host or utilized by the gut microbiota for additional nitrogen metabolism. In patients with liver disease such as cirrhosis and congenital urea cycle disorders, hepatic abnormalities prevent the normal processing of ammonia, leading to hyperammonemia and hepatic encephalopathy (HE). Although circulating ammonia levels are correlated with damage to the central nervous system, the pathogenesis of HE is complex and not fully elucidated, hindering progress in treatment. Current treatment options including antibiotics, lactulose, and a low protein diet (LPD) are complicated by issues such as side effects, concerns of safety and efficacy in long-term use, and poor adherence. Our goal is to develop a safe, durable, and efficacious treatment for HE through the inoculation of a urease-free bacterial consortium. We show that we are able to engineer the gut microbiota to reduce fecal urease activity and ammonia levels in mice. Depletion of the endogenous gut microbiota followed by transplantation with Altered Schaedler Flora (ASF), a defined consortium of eight murine gut commensal bacteria with minimal urease gene content, established a persistent new community that exhibited long-term reduction in fecal urease activity and fecal ammonia production. ASF transplantation was associated with a decrease in morbidity and mortality in the thioacetamide (TAA) murine model of hepatic injury and fibrosis. Although the ASF consortium demonstrated reduced resilience in response to dietary stress, ASF transplantation led to further reductions in fecal ammonia on a LPD without exacerbating host metabolic dysfunction. These findings point to the potential use of a human urease-free bacterial consortium to alter clinical management and outcome in HE. Furthermore, they provide proof of concept that microbiota transplantation with a defined microbial consortium can lead to durable metabolic changes with therapeutic utility

Detection of Early-Stage Enterprise Infection by Mining Large-Scale Log Data

Recent years have seen the rise of more sophisticated attacks including advanced persistent threats (APTs) which pose severe risks to organizations and governments by targeting confidential proprietary information. Additionally, new malware strains are appearing at a higher rate than ever before. Since many of these malware are designed to evade existing security products, traditional defenses deployed by most enterprises today, e.g., anti-virus, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, often fail at detecting infections at an early stage. We address the problem of detecting early-stage infection in an enterprise setting by proposing a new framework based on belief propagation inspired from graph theory. Belief propagation can be used either with "seeds" of compromised hosts or malicious domains (provided by the enterprise security operation center -- SOC) or without any seeds. In the latter case we develop a detector of C&C communication particularly tailored to enterprises which can detect a stealthy compromise of only a single host communicating with the C&C server. We demonstrate that our techniques perform well on detecting enterprise infections. We achieve high accuracy with low false detection and false negative rates on two months of anonymized DNS logs released by Los Alamos National Lab (LANL), which include APT infection attacks simulated by LANL domain experts. We also apply our algorithms to 38TB of real-world web proxy logs collected at the border of a large enterprise. Through careful manual investigation in collaboration with the enterprise SOC, we show that our techniques identified hundreds of malicious domains overlooked by state-of-the-art security products