The Contralateral Delay Activity Tracks the Sequential Loading of Objects into Visual Working Memory, Unlike Lateralized Alpha Oscillations

Visual working memory temporarily represents a continuous stream of task-relevant objects as we move through our environment performing tasks. Previous work has identified candidate neural mechanisms of visual working memory storage; however, we do not know which of these mechanisms enable the storage of objects as we sequentially encounter them in our environment. Here, we measured the contralateral delay activity (CDA) and lateralized alpha oscillations as human subjects were shown a series of objects that they needed to remember. The amplitude of CDA increased following the presentation of each to-be-remembered object, reaching asymptote at about three to four objects. In contrast, the concurrently measured lateralized alpha power remained constant with each additional object. Our results suggest that the CDA indexes the storage of objects in visual working memory, whereas lateralized alpha suppression indexes the focusing of attention on the to-be-remembered objects

Breakfast Consumption Patterns And Obesity Risk Among Students In New Haven Public Schools

Objectives. We examined breakfast consumption patterns in a longitudinal sample of fifth to seventh grade students and the relationship between the different consumption patterns and weight status over time. Methods. 1,534 fifth to seventh grade students from 12 randomly selected public schools in New Haven, Connecticut, completed school-based student surveys and physical measures during 2011 to 2013. We also identified students that participated in Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) program. Results. Using latent transition analysis, we identified four qualitatively different patterns of breakfast consumption: frequent skippers or infrequent eaters, non-skipping mixed eaters, regular home eaters, and regular school or double breakfast eaters. No evidence of association was found between double breakfast eaters and higher weight status, and there was no association between participating in BIC program and students\u27 body mass index. However, we found a 3-fold increased risk of overweight or obese in skippers compared with regular school or double breakfast eaters. Conclusion. Our findings support the current efforts to promote participation in school breakfast program. Regular breakfast consumption may have weight-gain prevention effect

VirtualIdentity: A Privacy-Preserving User Profiling Service

As more users are creating their own content on the web, there is a growing interest for companies to mine this data for user profiling, i.e., to automatically guess the gender, age, personality traits, and other characteristics of their users. In addition to myriad applications in e-commerce, there is a growing interest around user profiling in digital text forensics as well. These existing personalized digital forensic applications are websites where people input their personal information for fun – for example, to get insight into how old they look, how hot they look, etc. To do so, users have to send their personal data – such as their profile pictures and their social network status updates – to the server of those websites. People who care about their privacy are understandably concerned about sending their personal information like this. Although organizations that run this kind of services usually promise not to share or sell users’ information to other parties, they can still retain and use the information they gathered. People who work in those organizations will be able to review all the information, and even if it is forbidden to trace it back to their users, it can technically still be done. In this talk we present VirtualIdentity, a privacy-preserving user profiling service that employs cryptographic protocols to infer a user’s gender, age, and personality traits from profile pictures and status updates without actually seeing the picture or the text. One way to do so would be to run the machine learning models on the client side. The obvious drawback of that approach is that it requires exposing the models – which are often considered business secrets – to the clients. Traditional cryptography does not help us here, as data encrypted with usual techniques becomes useless, it cannot be processed. Therefore, we develop novel cryptographic techniques that not only protect private information but also enable one to perform mathematical operations on encrypted data. The personal information users upload is encrypted at the client side before being sent to the server. Then, by using our novel secure multi-party computations protocols, the server can still give out the correct prediction to users. Because of the underlying cryptographic protocols, users of VirtualIdentity do not have to worry about personal information being leaked while using our personalized digital forensic services. To the best of our knowledge this is the very first platform to compute personality prediction while preserving the privacy of the user’s data and keeping the prediction model secret as well

High Degree Cubature Federated Filter for Multisensor Information Fusion with Correlated Noises

This paper proposes an improved high degree cubature federated filter for the nonlinear fusion system with cross-correlation between process and measurement noises at the same time using the fifth-degree cubature rule and the decorrelated principle in its local filters. The master filter of the federated filter adopts the no-reset mode to fuse local estimates of local filters to generate a global estimate according to the scalar weighted rule. The air-traffic maneuvering target tracking simulations are performed between the proposed filter and the fifth-degree cubature federated filter. Simulations results demonstrate that the proposed filter not only can achieve almost the same accuracy as the fifth-degree cubature federated filter with independent white noises, but also has superior performance to the fifth-degree cubature federated filter while the noises are cross-correlated at the same time

Temperature dependence of Auger recombination in highly injected crystalline silicon

The Auger lifetime in crystalline silicon has been measured under high injection conditions using an injection- and temperature-dependent photoconductance apparatus, across a temperature range from 243 to 473 K (−30 to 200 °C). The corresponding ambipolar Auger coefficient was found to have a value of 1.6 × 10⁻³⁰ cm⁶/s at 303 K (30 °C) at an injection level of 5 × 10¹⁶ cm¯³. The Auger coefficient was found to decrease between 243 K and 303 K, and then remain approximately constant up to 473 K. An empirical parameterization of the measured ambipolar Auger coefficient is provided

On Stability of Critical Points for the High Dimensional Onsager Functional with Maier-Saupe Potential

We study the stability of the critical points of the Onsager energy functional with Maier-Saupe interaction potential in general dimensions. We show that the stable critical points must be axisymmetric, which solves a problem proposed by [H. Wang, P. Hoffman, Commun. Math. Sci. 6 (2008), 949--974] and further conjectured by [P. Degond, A. Frouvelle, J.-G. Liu, Kinetic and Related Models, 15(2022), 417--465]. The main ingredients of the proof include a suitable decomposition of the second variation around the critical points and a detailed analysis of the relation between the intensity of interaction and the order parameter characterizing the anisotropy of the solution

Green infrastructure practice and a sustainability key performance indicators framework for neighbourhood-level construction of sponge city programme

In recent years, the Sponge City program (SCP) of China, as a sustainable stormwater management approach, has been strengthened as a national strategic level program. The Green Infrastructure (GI), due to its multi-objective and multi-benefits, has been adopted as an important measure of this new nationwide initiative. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive quantitative evaluation system for neighbourhood scale SCP. Hence, in the process of GI plan optimization, selection of implementation methods to balance its multi-benefits has become one of the key obstacles in the practice of SCP. To support robust decision making on multi-objective GI planning and comprehensive assessment, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been used as a structural and systematic technique. In addition, a set of sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) including requisite dimensions is the foundation for neighbourhood scale sustainability. Hence, AHP-based evaluation system including selection, weighting and ranking of the KPIs, is defined as a key performance indicator framework (KPIF), which is still in need for further development. Taking the GI planning for the Liangnong, Siming Lake sponge node restoration as an example, this paper develops KPIF with a comprehensive evaluation system for high-quality “Sponge Node” transitional construction. This KPIF consists of three basic criteria: “Environmental Performance”, “Economic and Adaptability Performance”, and “Social-cultural Performance and Wellbeing Performance”. In addition, 15 weighted KPIs are concluded and amongst them, the followings were relatively high: weight of the ATRCR, the promotion of biodiversity, the construction cost saving, the maintenance cost saving, and the level of recreational and wellbeing improvements for all people. In addition, the developed KPIF provides a reference for similar program’s decision-making, not only for the Jiangnan area of China, but also for quantitatively comprehensive evaluations of SCP in other regions