Emerging technologies to measure neighborhood conditions in public health: Implications for interventions and next steps

Adverse neighborhood conditions play an important role beyond individual characteristics. There is increasing interest in identifying specific characteristics of the social and built environments adversely affecting health outcomes. Most research has assessed aspects of such exposures via self-reported instruments or census data. Potential threats in the local environment may be subject to short-term changes that can only be measured with more nimble technology. The advent of new technologies may offer new opportunities to obtain geospatial data about neighborhoods that may circumvent the limitations of traditional data sources. This overview describes the utility, validity and reliability of selected emerging technologies to measure neighborhood conditions for public health applications. It also describes next steps for future research and opportunities for interventions. The paper presents an overview of the literature on measurement of the built and social environment in public health (Google Street View, webcams, crowdsourcing, remote sensing, social media, unmanned aerial vehicles, and lifespace) and location-based interventions. Emerging technologies such as Google Street View, social media, drones, webcams, and crowdsourcing may serve as effective and inexpensive tools to measure the ever-changing environment. Georeferenced social media responses may help identify where to target intervention activities, but also to passively evaluate their effectiveness. Future studies should measure exposure across key time points during the life-course as part of the exposome paradigm and integrate various types of data sources to measure environmental contexts. By harnessing these technologies, public health research can not only monitor populations and the environment, but intervene using novel strategies to improve the public health

Context matters: Construct framing in measures of physical activity engagement among African American women

Assessment of psychosocial factors influencing health behavior typically privileges conceptual consistency (framing constructs similarly across contexts) over conceptual specificity (context-specific framing). Modest statistical relationships between these factors and health behaviors, and persistent racial disparities in health outcomes raise questions about whether conceptually consistent framing fully captures relevant predictors. Ethnographic studies suggest not - that perceptions influencing health behaviors are multifaceted and contextual. To test this, we added items querying contextualized predictors of intention to engage in leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) to a Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)-based survey and examined the psychometrics of the adapted subscales. We measured internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) and construct validity (exploratory factor analysis using polychoric correlations for ordinal data). Participants were a convenience sample of 200 African American women in a Midwestern, suburban University-affiliated family medicine practice. Reliability of the adapted subscales was notably lower than the original subscales. A two-factor model fit best for the attitudes subscale, but explained slightly less than 50% of the variance. The new items loaded strongly on one factor. A three-factor model best fit the norms subscale and accounted for around 57% of the variance. Two of the three new items loaded strongly on one factor. Factor analysis for the perceived control subscale was not possible due to low number of items; however, two of the three new items were highly correlated (.73). Including context-specific factors may improve assessment of intention to engage in LTPA. Further study of this question with a larger, representative sample is warranted

Faster linearizability checking via PP-compositionality

Linearizability is a well-established consistency and correctness criterion for concurrent data types. An important feature of linearizability is Herlihy and Wing's locality principle, which says that a concurrent system is linearizable if and only if all of its constituent parts (so-called objects) are linearizable. This paper presents $P$-compositionality, which generalizes the idea behind the locality principle to operations on the same concurrent data type. We implement $P$-compositionality in a novel linearizability checker. Our experiments with over nine implementations of concurrent sets, including Intel's TBB library, show that our linearizability checker is one order of magnitude faster and/or more space efficient than the state-of-the-art algorithm.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Impact of internalized stigma on HIV prevention behaviors among HIV-infected individuals seeking HIV care in Kenya

In general, an initial diagnosis of HIV is likely to be correlated with the onset of HIV stigma. HIV-positive individuals are likely to internalize stigma, may suffer from psychosocial issues, or engage in maladaptive behaviors to cope with the diagnosis. Internalized stigma stems from fear of stigmatization also known as felt stigma. The current study examined the impact of HIV felt stigma on overall health and success of HIV prevention behaviors among 370 participants living with HIV and receiving care at an urban HIV clinic in Kenya. An 18-item instrument was cross culturally adapted to measure felt stigma. Descriptive and logistic regression analyses examined the data. Findings indicate that 25.9% (n=96) of participants who reported experiencing high levels of felt stigma related to other people's attitudes toward their condition, ostracizing, and a disruption of their personal life, were likely to not adhere to prescribed HIV medication and not disclose their HIV serostatus to one other person. Those who also experienced felt stigma related to a disruption of their personal lives while mediated by depression were likely to report poor overall health. Findings support having HIV clinics and interventions develop relevant HIV prevention strategies that focus on the emerging dimensions of felt stigma which can significantly impact disclosure of serostatus, medication adherence, and overall health

Cooperating Attackers in Neural Cryptography

A new and successful attack strategy in neural cryptography is presented. The neural cryptosystem, based on synchronization of neural networks by mutual learning, has been recently shown to be secure under different attack strategies. The advanced attacker presented here, named the ``Majority-Flipping Attacker'', is the first whose success does not decay with the parameters of the model. This new attacker's outstanding success is due to its using a group of attackers which cooperate throughout the synchronization process, unlike any other attack strategy known. An analytical description of this attack is also presented, and fits the results of simulations

Analysis of in Vivo Plant Stem Impedance Variations in Relation with External Conditions Daily Cycle

World population growth and desertification are the most severe issue to agricultural food production. Smart agriculture is a promising solution to ensure food security. The use of sensors to monitor crop production can help farmers improve the yield and reduce water consumption. Here we propose a study where the electrical impedance of green plants' stem is analyzed in vivo, along with environmental conditions. In particular, the variations associated with the daily cycle are highlighted. These analyses lead to the possibility of understanding plant status directly from stem impedance

On the Spectrum of Direct Gaugino Mediation

In direct gauge mediation, the gaugino masses are anomalously small, giving rise to a split SUSY spectrum. Here we investigate the superpartner spectrum in a minimal version of "direct gaugino mediation." We find that the sfermion masses are comparable to those of the gauginos - even in the hybrid gaugino-gauge mediation regime - if the messenger scale is sufficiently small.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures; V2: refs. adde

Antileukemic Activity of Nuclear Export Inhibitors that Spare Normal Hematopoietic Cells

Drugs that target the chief mediator of nuclear export, chromosome region maintenance 1 protein (CRM1) have potential as therapeutics for leukemia, but existing CRM1 inhibitors show variable potencies and a broad range of cytotoxic effects. Here, we report the structural analysis and antileukemic activity of a new generation of small-molecule inhibitors of CRM1. Designated selective inhibitors of nuclear export (SINE), these compounds were developed using molecular modeling to screen a small virtual library of compounds against the nuclear export signal (NES) groove of CRM1. The 2.2-Å crystal structure of the CRM1-Ran-RanBP1 complex bound to KPT-251, a representative molecule of this class of inhibitors, shows that the drug occupies part of the groove in CRM1 that is usually occupied by the NES, but penetrates much deeper into the groove and blocks CRM1-directed protein export. SINE inhibitors exhibit potent antileukemic activity, inducing apoptosis at nanomolar concentrations in a panel of 14 human acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cell lines representing different molecular subtypes of the disease. When administered orally to immunodeficient mice engrafted with human AML cells, KPT-251 had potent antileukemic activity with negligible toxicity to normal hematopoietic cells. Thus, KPT-SINE CRM1 antagonists represent a novel class of drugs that warrant further testing in AML patients

Secure Code Update for Embedded Devices via Proofs of Secure Erasure

Abstract. Remote attestation is the process of verifying internal state of a remote embedded device. It is an important component of many security protocols and applications. Although previously proposed re-mote attestation techniques assisted by specialized secure hardware are effective, they not yet viable for low-cost embedded devices. One no-table alternative is software-based attestation, that is both less costly and more efficient. However, recent results identified weaknesses in some proposed software-based methods, thus showing that security of remote software attestation remains a challenge. Inspired by these developments, this paper explores an approach that relies neither on secure hardware nor on tight timing constraints typi-cal of software-based technqiques. By taking advantage of the bounded memory/storage model of low-cost embedded devices and assuming a small amount of read-only memory (ROM), our approach involves a new primitive – Proofs of Secure Erasure (PoSE-s). We also show that, even though it is effective and provably secure, PoSE-based attestation is not cheap. However, it is particularly well-suited and practical for two other related tasks: secure code update and secure memory/storage erasure. We consider several flavors of PoSE-based protocols and demonstrate their feasibility in the context of existing commodity embedded devices.

A Light Stop with Flavor in Natural SUSY

The discovery of a SM-like Higgs boson near 125 GeV and the flavor texture of the Standard Model motivate the investigation of supersymmetric quiver-like BSM extensions. We study the properties of such a minimal class of models which deals naturally with the SM parameters. Considering experimental bounds as well as constraints from flavor physics and Electro-Weak Precision Data, we find the following. In a self-contained minimal model - including the full dynamics of the Higgs sector - top squarks below a TeV are in tension with b->s{\gamma} constraints. Relaxing the assumption concerning the mass generation of the heavy Higgses, we find that a stop not far from half a TeV is allowed. The models have some unique properties, e.g. an enhancement of the h-> b\bar{b},\tau\bar{{\tau}} decays relative to the h->\gamma{\gamma} one, a gluino about 3 times heavier than the stop, an inverted hierarchy of about 3-20 between the squarks of the first two generations and the stop, relatively light Higgsino neutralino or stau NLSP, as well as heavy Higgses and a W' which may be within reach of the LHC.Comment: LaTeX, 22 pages, 4 figures; V2: references adde