A Stress and Coping Model of Medication Adherence and Viral Load in HIV-Positive Men and Women on Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART).

The authors tested a structural model that incorporated age, time since diagnosis, social support, coping, and negative mood as predictors of medication adherence and HIV viral load on 188 men and 134 women on highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). The authors used psychosocial latent factors formed from baseline measures to predict latent factors of adherence, as assessed by electronic monitoring and self-report, and viral load defined by indicators assessed over a 15-month period. Results from the model indicate that greater negative mood and lower social support are related to greater use of avoidance-oriented coping strategies. Use of these coping strategies by patients on HAART is related to poorer medication adherence and, subsequently, higher viral load. This model advances researchers' understanding of the contribution of psychosocial variables in predicting treatment adherence and disease progression in HIV-positive men and women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An Experimental and Theoretical Comparison of Model Selection Methods

Machine Learning - We investigate the problem of model selection in the setting of supervised learning of boolean functions from independent random examples. More precisely, we compare methods for...     

Summative evaluation of the SINCGARS Tutor

In an earlier set of studies with a different Intelligently Coached Simulation (Orey, M.A., Fan, H., Park, J., Tzeng, S., & Gustafson, K. (1995). Evaluation of Device operator in a context of a coached simulation environment), we found a retention and a transfer problem. We tried to solve these problems while building a new Intelligently Coached Simulation (the SINCGARS Tutor). The solutions to the two problems were to use an interactive conceptual model for the retention problem and we used photographs of the equipment as the visuals of the simulation. We then tested this new tutor with a group of 22 officers who were not only required to know how to operate the SINCGARS radio, but would be responsible for teaching others in their unit when their training was complete. We had one group of officers train on the real equipment, in pairs, with one instructor available for guidance. The other group of 11 learned via the SINCGARS Tutor. The post test was to put an actual radio into operation while being observed by a trained observer. Results indicate that not only did the transfer problem go away, but officers trained on the computer performed the task more accurately both initially on the immediate post test and again on a surprise four-week delayed post test. The SINCGARS Tutor was found to be a very good training solution.     

Competitive analysis of incentive compatible on-line auctions

This paper studies auctions in a setting where the different bidders arrive at different times and the auction mechanism is required to make decisions about each bid as it is received. Such settings occur in computerized auctions of computational resources as well as in other settings. We call such auctions, on-line auctions.

We first characterize exactly on-line auctions that are incentive compatible, i.e. where rational bidders are always motivated to bid their true valuation. We then embark on a competitive worst-case analysis of incentive compatible on-line auctions. We obtain several results, the cleanest of which is an incentive compatible on-line auction for a large number of identical items. This auction has an optimal competitive ratio, both in terms of seller's revenue and in terms of the total social efficiency obtained.     

Lessons and Challenges from Mining Retail E-Commerce Data

The architecture of Blue Martini Software's e-commerce suite has supported data collection, data transformation, and data mining since its inception. With clickstreams being collected at the application-server layer, high-level events being logged, and data automatically transformed into a data warehouse using meta-data, common problems plaguing data mining using weblogs (e.g., sessionization and conflating multi-sourced data) were obviated, thus allowing us to concentrate on actual data mining goals. The paper briefly reviews the architecture and discusses many lessons learned over the last four years and the challenges that still need to be addressed. The lessons and challenges are presented across two dimensions: business-level vs. technical, and throughout the data mining lifecycle stages of data collection, data warehouse construction, business intelligence, and deployment. The lessons and challenges are also widely applicable to data mining domains outside retail e-commerce.     

TRADE‐OFF BETWEEN APPROXIMATION ACCURACY AND COMPLEXITY FOR TS FUZZY MODELS

This paper proposes a transformation method that serves the trade‐off between the modelling complexity and accuracy of multi‐variable Takagi‐Sugeno fuzzy inference operator‐based modelling (TS fuzzy modelling). The relation between the number of fuzzy rules and the modelling accuracy is defined in the paper. The proposed transformation method is capable of finding the minimal number of fuzzy rules for a given accuracy of a given TS fuzzy model. A case study, focusing on a benchmark problem of fault diagnosis, developed in the framework of EC‐founded Research Training Network DAMADICS, of an actuator in a sugar factory, is presented to provide feasibility of the proposed method.     

O2 and organic semiconductors: Electronic effects

Contact potential difference (CPD) measurements of the relative work functions of a range of organic semiconductor thin films show that oxygen causes effective p-type doping (with work functions increasing 0.1–0.3 eV). This doping effect is found to be reversible by exposure to high vacuum or heating in inert atmosphere. The mechanism of doping is explained by a model, based on a reversible formation of an O-substrate charge transfer state. Conductivity measurements of p-phthalocyanine films at variable temperatures support this doping model. The oxygen doping effect is consistent with filling of tail states in the gap, as shown by the increase of activation energy of hole transport with decreased O-doping, and by the good fit between experimental data and simulations of the in-gap density of states. A model hybrid solar cell configuration also shows the effect of doping by O₂ and corroborates the fact that O-doping fills the tail states in the system.     

Welding of Very Dissimilar Materials (Fe-Al)

Designers of transportation vehicles (air, land, or sea) continually seek ways to reduce vehicle weight in response to increasing fuel economy mandates, mission requirements, or other competitive pressures. One way to do this is by the selection of material types and their properties based on functional and structural requirements. While these material changes can help meet performance mandates, their implementation in a production environment relies on retaining economic competitiveness. This article traces the history of the various joining processes relevant to the current challenge in joining the very dissimilar families of steel (Fe) and aluminum (Al) alloys.     

Acoustic emission characterization of steel in H2S solution subjected to tensile load

Abstract

This paper investigates the characteristics of acoustic emission (AE) signals generated from hydrogen induced cracking (HIC) and sulfide stress corrosion cracking (SSCC) for a medium strength steel in hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) solution. The experiments performed in this study include the constant load test (CLT) and the constant extension rate test (CERT).

From the results of the CLT, the AE count rate caused by SSCC was found to be much higher than that resulted from the HIC; and the increase of the AE count rate was observed to be approximately proportional to the increase of the applied loading. In addition, the AE frequency distribution diagrams obtained from these tests were found to contain potential information for distinguishing the mechanisms of HIC and SSCC. From the results of CERT, the AE signals detected from the specimens tested in the H₂S solution were compared with those obtained from the specimens tested in the air. In addition, the AE count rate detected from the tensile specimens was studied according to the different deformation stages of the specimens. From this study, the variation of the AE count rate in each deformation stage was described.     

Lattice-based certificateless public-key encryption in the standard model

The notion of certificateless public-key encryption (CL-PKE) was introduced by Al-Riyami and Paterson in 2003 that avoids the drawbacks of both traditional PKI-based public-key encryption (i.e., establishing public-key infrastructure) and identity-based encryption (i.e., key escrow). So CL-PKE like identity-based encryption is certificate-free, and unlike identity-based encryption is key escrow-free. In this paper, we introduce simple and efficient CCA-secure CL-PKE based on (hierarchical) identity-based encryption. Our construction has both theoretical and practical interests. First, our generic transformation gives a new way of constructing CCA-secure CL-PKE. Second, instantiating our transformation using lattice-based primitives results in a more efficient CCA-secure CL-PKE than its counterpart introduced by Dent in 2008.