Expectations in the field of the Internet and health: an analysis of claims about social networking sites in clinical literature

This article adopts a critical sociological perspective to examine the expectations surrounding the uses of social networking sites (SNSs) articulated in the domain of clinical literature. This emerging body of articles and commentaries responds to the recent significant growth in SNS use, and constitutes a venue in which the meanings of SNSs and their relation to health are negotiated. Our analysis indicates how clinical writing configures the role of SNSs in health care through a range of metaphorical constructions that frame SNSs as a tool, a conduit for information and a traversable space. The use of such metaphors serves not only to describe the new affordances offered by SNSs but also posits distinct lay and professional practices, while reviving a range of celebratory claims about the Internet and health critiqued in sociological literature. These metaphorical descriptions characterise SNS content as essentially controllable by autonomous users while reiterating existing arguments that e-health is both inherently empowering and risky. Our analysis calls for a close attention to these understandings of SNSs as they have the potential to shape future online initiatives, most notably by anticipating successful professional interventions while marginalising the factors that influence users’ online and offline practices and contexts

Comparison of various configurations of CDC-type traps for the collection of \u3ci\u3ePhlebotomus papatasi\u3c/i\u3e Scopoli in southern Israel

We conducted two experiments to determine the best CDC-trap configuration for catching male and female Phlebotomus papatasi. First, visual features were evaluated. Standard CDC traps were modified to have black or white catch bags, black or white lids, or no lids and these were tried in different combinations. Significantly more male sand flies were caught by darker traps; significantly more females were captured by traps with either all black or a combination of black and white features. Attraction may be due to dark color or contrast in colors. CDC traps with suction and the following features were also evaluated: no light; incandescent light; ultraviolet (UV) light; combination of black color, heat and moisture; CO2 alone, or a combination of black color, heat, moisture, and CO2 simultaneously, all in upright and inverted positions, with the opening for insect entry always 50 cm above the ground. Significantly more females than males were caught by all traps (standard and inverted) except the control traps with suction only. Traps with CO2 caught more sand flies than traps without CO2. Traps with black color, heat and moisture captured significantly more sand flies than the control traps, but with the addition of CO2, these traps catch significantly more sand flies than the other traps evaluated. Inverting traps increased the catch for like traps by about two times

Une approche orientée aspect allant du modèle d'exigences au modèle de conception

National audienceDes approches orientées aspects sont aujourd'hui disponibles à chaque phase du développement d'un logiciel : analyse des exigences, conception, ou encore implémentation. Passer d'une phase à l'autre en conservant les aspects identifiés au préalable reste un défi majeur, pourtant peu étudié. Nous proposons dans un article publié à AOSD'11 une approche itérative et dirigée par les préoccupations, permettant de transformer un modèle d'exigences orienté aspect en un modèle de conception lui aussi orienté aspect, et ceci de manière automatique. Cette ap- proche est mise en œuvre en utilisant AoURN ("use case maps") pour le modèle d'exigence et Adore pour le modèle de conception (orchestrations SOA). Elle permet l'encapsula- tion continue des préoccupations identifiées lors des exigences, transformées en artefact de conception. Nous proposons de plus une boucle de rétro-action permettant de remonter dans les modèles d'exigences des défauts constatés dans le modèle de conception, supportant ainsi un processus de développement itératif

Estimating adaptive cruise control model parameters from on-board radar units

Two new methods are presented for estimating car-following model parameters using data collected from the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) enabled vehicles. The vehicle is assumed to follow a constant time headway relative velocity model in which the parameters are unknown and to be determined. The first technique is a batch method that uses a least-squares approach to estimate the parameters from time series data of the vehicle speed, space gap, and relative velocity of a lead vehicle. The second method is an online approach that uses a particle filter to simultaneously estimate both the state of the system and the model parameters. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy and computational performance of the methods relative to a commonly used simulation-based optimization approach. The methods are also assessed on empirical data collected from a 2019 model year ACC vehicle driven in a highway environment. Speed, space gap, and relative velocity data are recorded directly from the factory-installed radar unit via the vehicle's CAN bus. All three methods return similar mean absolute error values in speed and spacing compared to the recorded data. The least-squares method has the fastest run-time performance, and is up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than other methods. The particle filter is faster than real-time, and therefore is suitable in streaming applications in which the datasets can grow arbitrarily large.Comment: Accepted for poster presentation at the Transportation Research Board 2020 Annual Meeting, Washington D.

Non-linear effects of tax changes on output: The role of the initial level of taxation

We estimate the effect of worldwide tax changes on output following the narrative approach developed for the United States by Romer and Romer (2010). We use a novel dataset on value-added taxes for 51 countries (21 industrial and 30 developing) for the period 1970–2014 to identify 96 tax changes. We then use contemporaneous economic records to classify such changes as endogenous or exogenous to current (or prospective) economic conditions. In line with theoretical distortionary and disincentive-based arguments – and using exogenous tax changes – we find that the effect of tax changes on output is highly non-linear. The tax multiplier is essentially zero under relatively low initial tax rate levels and more negative as the initial tax rate increases. Based on a global sample, these novel non-linear findings suggest that the recent consensus pointing to large negative tax multipliers in industrial countries, particularly in industrial Europe (e.g., Alesina, Favero, and Giavazzi, 2015) may represent a special case driven by high initial tax rates in these countries

Arbeitslosigkeit und Lebensqualität in Europa

Thema dieser Arbeit waren die Auswirkungen von Arbeitslosigkeit auf die Lebensqualität in Europa, wobei die Schwerpunkte auf den Zusammenhängen zwischen Arbeitslosigkeit und den Bewertungen unterschiedlicher Lebensqualitätskonzepte sowie den verschiedenen Lebensbereichen liegen. Darüberhinaus war ein weiterer zentraler Aspekt die Lebensqualität arbeitsloser Personen in Abhängigkeit von unterschiedlichen wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Systemen. Die empirischen Auswertungen wurden anhand einer Sekundärdatenanalyse durchgeführt, auf der Grundlage des Datensatzes des European Quality of Life Survey 2003. Die zentrale Erkenntnis der gewonnen Daten ist die, dass arbeitslose Personen in jedem durchgeführten Vergleich die niedrigsten Bewertungen der einzelnen Lebensqualitätskonzepte aufweisen, wobei sich hierbei auch klare Unterschiede zwischen den verschieden Konzepten von Lebensqualität feststellen lassen, was auch auf die Art der Erhebung zurückzuführen ist. Eine weitere wichtige Erkenntnis stellt die hohe Relevanz der Dauer der Arbeitslosigkeit dar, die vor allem durch den Vergleich zwischen Kurzzeit- und Langzeitarbeitslosen deutlich wird. In Bezug auf die Auswirkungen von Arbeitslosigkeit auf die Lebensbereiche konnte festgestellt werden, dass negative Effekte bei allen Life domains nachgewiesen werden konnten, wobei der gravierendste Einfluss auf die Bereiche „ökonomische Situation“, „soziale Kontakte“ und „Gesundheit“ beobachtet werden konnte. Hinsichtlich der Unterscheidung nach wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Systemen zeigte sich eine eindeutige Rangfolge in Bezug auf die Lebensqualität von arbeitslosen Personen, an deren Spitze sich die skandinavischen und an deren Ende sich die mediterranen Staaten wiederfinden.Topic of this paper was the effect of unemployment on quality of life in Europe, whereas on the on hand the effects of unemployment on the different quality of life concepts and on the multiple life domains were examined, on the other hand another central aspect was the correlation between the quality of life of unemployed people and the different welfare systems. The main part of this thesis is constituted by a data analysis based on the findings of the European Quality of Life Survey 2003. One of the main findings from these analysis was that unemployed people are showing lower scores in all the different quality of life evaluations whereas there have also been found differences between those quality of life concepts. Another important aspect concerns the duration of unemployment, because observations showed that the longer the unemployment lasts the lower the quality of life scores are which is pointed out as well by the difference between short term and long term unemployed people in regards to their assessments of quality of life. Furthermore it could be substantiated that unemployment has a detrimental effect on all life domains whereas the domains “economic situation”, “social contacts” and “health” are most affected. Regarding the differentiation according to the classification of welfare systems a clear rank order could be discovered which showed that unemployed people enjoy the highest quality of life scores in Scandinavian countries and the lowest in Mediterranean countries

The evolution of phenotypic correlations and “developmental memory”

Development introduces structured correlations among traits that may constrain or bias the distribution of phenotypes produced. Moreover, when suitable heritable variation exists, natural selection may alter such constraints and correlations, affecting the phenotypic variation available to subsequent selection. However, exactly how the distribution of phenotypes produced by complex developmental systems can be shaped by past selective environments is poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolution of a network of recurrent nonlinear ontogenetic interactions, such as a gene regulation network, in various selective scenarios. We find that evolved networks of this type can exhibit several phenomena that are familiar in cognitive learning systems. These include formation of a distributed associative memory that can “store” and “recall” multiple phenotypes that have been selected in the past, recreate complete adult phenotypic patterns accurately from partial or corrupted embryonic phenotypes, and “generalize” (by exploiting evolved developmental modules) to produce new combinations of phenotypic features. We show that these surprising behaviors follow from an equivalence between the action of natural selection on phenotypic correlations and associative learning, well-understood in the context of neural networks. This helps to explain how development facilitates the evolution of high-fitness phenotypes and how this ability changes over evolutionary time

Using rhythmic nonces for puzzle-based DoS resistance

To protect against replay attacks, many Internet proto-cols rely on nonces to guarantee freshness. In practice, the server generates these nonces during the initial hand-shake, but if the server is under attack, resources con-sumed by managing certain protocols can lead to DoS vulnerabilities. To help alleviate this problem, we pro-pose the concept of rhythmic nonces, a cryptographic tool that allows servers to measure request freshness with minimal bookkeeping costs. We explore the impact of this service in the context of a puzzle-based DoS re-sistance scheme we call “SYN puzzles”. Our preliminary results based on mathematical analysis and evaluation of a prototype suggests that our scheme is more resistant than existing techniques. 1