The aim of the study was to compare the acute effects of traditional resistance training and superset training on training duration, training volume and different perceptive measures. Twenty-nine resistance-trained participants performed a whole-body workout traditionally and as supersets of exercises targeting different muscle groups, in a randomized-crossover design. Each session was separated by 4–7 days, and consisted of eight exercises and three sets to failure. Training duration and number of repetitions lifted were recorded during the sessions. Rate of perceived exertion (...) for effort, rate of perceived exertion for discomfort, session displeasure/pleasure, and exercise enjoyment were measured 15 min after each session. Forty-eight hours after the final session participants reported which session they preferred. The superset session led to significantly higher values for RPE and RPD and tended to be higher for sPDF, i.e., more pleasurable, compared to the traditional session. There was no difference in EES. The traditional session led to significantly increased training volume and lasted 23 min longer than the superset session. Eighteen of the participants preferred the superset session, while 11 preferred the traditional session. In conclusion, performing a whole-body workout as a superset session was more time-efficient, but reduced the training volume and was perceived with greater exertion for effort and discomfort than a traditional workout. (shrink)

Addressing fatigue is useful in a variety of scenarios and activities. Fatigue has recently been studied from a psychophysiological standpoint. As a result, the expression and impact of peripheral and central fatigue has been evaluated. Driving is one occupation where tiredness has disastrous consequences. BAlert is a smartphone app that approaches exhaustion with psychophysiological measures. More specifically, it evaluates the level of fatigue via heart rate variability data and the cognitive compromise via Stroop effect. The goal of this study is (...) to determine if there are gender differences in fatigue levels among professional drivers using the BAlert app. Statistically significant differences were found in the number of hours awake, in different parameters of HRV, in the level of stress, as well as in the cognitive response evaluated through the app. The results are discussed and their implications for the management of work fatigue are presented. (shrink)

Mining time series data is of great significance in various areas. To efficiently find representative patterns in these data, this article focuses on the definition of a valid dissimilarity measure and the acceleration of partitioning clustering, a common group of techniques used to discover typical shapes of time series. Dissimilarity measure is a crucial component in clustering. It is required, by some particular applications, to be invariant to specific transformations. The rationale for using the angle between two (...) class='Hi'>time series to define a dissimilarity is analyzed. Moreover, our proposed measure satisfies the triangle inequality with specific restrictions. This property can be employed to accelerate clustering. An integrated algorithm is proposed. The experiments show that angle-based dissimilarity captures the essence of time series patterns that are invariant to amplitude scaling. In addition, the accelerated algorithm outperforms the standard one as redundancies are pruned. Our approach has been applied to discover typical patterns of information diffusion in an online social network. Analyses revealed the formation mechanisms of different patterns. (shrink)

Here, we show that one may "time travel" in Gödel spacetime with less total acceleration than was previously known. This answers a question posed by Malament.

In this note, I provide an axiomatic characterization of the relative utilitarian bargaining solution to Nash bargaining problems. The solution is obtained when Nash’s independence of irrelevant alternatives axiom is replaced by the weak linearity axiom, while retaining the other three axioms. RU maximizes the sum of proportional gains, or, equivalently, minimizes the sum of proportional losses. RU is scale invariant and compared to the Nash and Kalai and Smorodinsky solutions, it is ex ante efficient when the bargaining problem is (...) considered as a lottery of future bargaining problems. (shrink)

Does mere passage of time have causal powers ? Are properties like "being n days past" causally efficient ? A pervasive intuition among metaphysicians seems to be that they don't. Events and/or objects change, and they cause or are caused by other events and/or objects; but one does not see how just the mere passage of time could cause any difference in the world. In this paper, I shall discuss a case where it seems that mere passage of (...) time does have causal powers : Sydney Shoemaker's (1969) possible world where temporal vacua (allegedly) take place. I shall argue that Shoemaker's thought-experiment doesn't really aim at teaching us that there can be time without change, but rather that if such a scenario is plausible at all (as I think it is) it provides us with good reasons to think that mere passage of time can be directly causally efficient. (shrink)

Efficiency is an important value for all publicly funded healthcare systems. Limited resources need to be used prudently and wisely in order to ensure best possible outcomes and waste avoidance. Since 2010, the drive for efficiency, in the UK, has acquired a new impetus, as the country embarked on an ‘age of austerity’ purportedly to balance its books and reduce national deficit. Although the NHS did not suffer any direct budget cuts, the austerity policies imposed on the welfare (...) system, including social and mental healthcare, have had a direct and detrimental impact on the healthcare service. This paper draws from a qualitative study conducted in three A&E Departments in England to explore the effects of austerity policies on the everyday experiences of doctors and nurses working in Emergency Departments. It discusses the operationalisation of efficiency in A&E, in a climate of austerity, and its effects on the experiences and practices of healthcare professionals. It uses the empirical data as a springboard to highlight the role of structures and regulations, in this case targets and protocols, in how core healthcare ethical values, such as empathy, are exercised in practice. It provides an analysis of the normative role structures and regulations can play on the perception and practice of professional duties and obligations in healthcare. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 14-20, March‐April 2022.

Time Wars is for anyone who has ever wondered why, in a culture so obsessed with efficiency, we seem to have so little time we can call our own. A courageous, thought-provoking challenge to conventional wisdom.

The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez was an eminent philosopher and theologian whose _Disputationes Metaphysicae_ was first published in Spain in 1597 and was widely studied throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. The _Disputationes Metaphysicae_ had a great influence on the development of early modern philosophy and on such well-known figures as Descartes and Leibniz. This is the first time that Disputations 17, 18, and 19 have been translated into English. The _Metaphysical Disputations_ provide an excellent philosophical introduction to the (...) medieval Aristotelian discussion of efficient causality. The work constitutes a synthesis of monumental proportions: problematic issues are lucidly delineated and the various arguments are laid out in depth. Disputations 17, 18, and 19 deal explicitly with such issues as the nature of causality, the types of efficient causes, the prerequisites for causal action, causal contingency, human free choice, and chance. (shrink)

We used agent-based modelling to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of several management styles in biology, ranging from centralized to egalitarian ones. In egalitarian groups, all team members are connected with each other, while in centralized ones, they are only connected with the principal investigator. Our model incorporated time constraints, which negatively influenced weakly connected groups such as centralized ones. Moreover, our results show that egalitarian groups outperform others if the questions addressed are relatively simple or when the communication (...) among agents is limited. Complex epistemic spaces are explored best by centralized groups. They outperform other team structures because the individual members can develop their own ideas with less interference of the opinions of others. The optimal ratio between time spent on experimentation and dissemination varies between different organizational structures. Furthermore, if the evidence is shared only after a relevant degree of certainty is reached, all investigated groups epistemically profit. We discovered that the introduction of seminars to the model changes the epistemic performance in favour of weakly connected teams. Finally, the abilities of the principal investigator do not seem to outperform cognitive diversity, as group performances were not strongly influenced by the increase of her abilities. (shrink)

Due to the huge amount of data being generating from different sources, the analyzing and extracting of useful information from these data becomes a very complex task. The difficulty of dealing with big data optimization problems comes from many factors such as the high number of features, and the existing of lost data. The feature selection process becomes an important step in many data mining and machine learning algorithms to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization problems and increase the performance (...) of the classification or clustering algorithms. In this paper, a set of hybrid and efficient genetic algorithms are proposed to solve feature selection problem, when the handled data has a large feature size. The proposed algorithms use a new gene-weighted mechanism that can adaptively classify the features into strong relative features, weak or redundant features, and unstable features during the evolution of the algorithm. Based on this classification, the proposed algorithm gives the strong features high priority and the weak features less priority when generating new candidate solutions. In the same time, the proposed algorithm tries to more concentrate on unstable features that sometimes appear and sometimes disappear from the best solutions of the population. The performance of proposed algorithms is investigated by using different datasets and feature selection algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithms can outperform the other feature selection algorithms and effectively enhance the classification performance over the tested datasets. (shrink)

In this longitudinal study we examined the stability of exploratory play in infancy and its relation to cognitive development in early childhood. We assessed infants' ( N = 130, mean age at enrollment = 12.02 months, SD = 3.5 months; range: 5–19 months) exploratory play four times over 9 months. Exploratory play was indexed by infants' attention to novelty, inductive generalizations, efficiency of exploration, face preferences, and imitative learning. We assessed cognitive development at the fourth visit for the full (...) sample, and again at age three for a subset of the sample ( n = 38). The only measure that was stable over infancy was the efficiency of exploration. Additionally, infants' efficiency score predicted vocabulary size and distinguished at-risk infants recruited from early intervention sites from those not at risk. Follow-up analyses at age three provided additional evidence for the importance of the efficiency measure: more efficient exploration was correlated with higher IQ scores. These results suggest that the efficiency of infants' exploratory play can be informative about longer-term cognitive development. (shrink)

Automatic incident detection plays a vital role among all the safety-critical applications under the parasol of Intelligent Transportation Systems to provide timely information to passengers and other stakeholders in smart cities. Moreover, accurate classification of these incidents with respect to type and severity assists the Traffic Incident Management Systems and stakeholders in devising better plans for incident site management and avoiding secondary incidents. Most of the AID systems presented in the literature are incident type-specific, i.e., either they are designed for (...) the detection of accident or congestion. While traveling along the road, one may come across different types of traffic incidents, such as accidents, congestion, and reckless driving. This necessitates that the AID system detects and classifies not only all the popular traffic incident types, but severity as well that is associated with these incidents. Therefore, this study aims to propose an efficient incident detection and classification framework for smart cities, by incorporating the efficacy of model stacking, to classify the incidents with respect to their types and severity levels. The experimental results showed that the proposed E-IDC framework achieved performance gains of 5%–56% in terms of incident severity classification and 1%–14% in terms of incident type classification when applied with different classifiers. We have also applied the Wilcoxon test to benchmark the performance of our proposed framework that reflects the significance of our approach over existing individual incident predictors in terms of severity and type classification. Moreover, it has been observed that the proposed E-IDC framework outperforms the existing ensemble technique, such as XGBoost used for the classification of incidents. (shrink)

Day-to-day lives are affected globally by the epidemic coronavirus 2019. With an increasing number of positive cases, India has now become a highly affected country. Chronic diseases affect individuals with no time identification and impose a huge disease burden on society. In this article, an Efficient Recurrent Neural Network with Ensemble Classifier is built using VGG-16 and Alexnet with weighted model to predict disease and its level. The dataset is partitioned randomly into small subsets by utilizing mean-based splitting method. (...) Various models of classifier create a homogeneous ensemble by utilizing an accuracy-based weighted aging classifier ensemble, which is a weighted model’s modification. Two state of art methods such as Graph Sequence Recurrent Neural Network and Hybrid Rough-Block-Based Neural Network are used for comparison with respect to some parameters such as accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and relative absolute error. As a result, it is found that the proposed ERNN-EC method accomplishes accuracy of 95.2%, precision of 91%, recall of 85%, F1-score of 83.4%, and RAE of 41.6%. (shrink)

When natural time sequences were replaced by clocks, time became a measurable commodity and the ‘speedy use of time’ a virtue. In medical practice shorter consultations allow more patients to be seen, whereas longer consultations result in a better understanding of the patient and her problems. Crossing the line of time-efficiency and time-effectiveness compromises the balance between short-term turnover and long-term outcomes. The consultation has all the hallmarks of a complex adaptive system whose characteristics (...) are not determined by the characteristics of the components, but by the patterns of interaction among the components. Systems are dynamic and change over time; the dynamic nature is not incidental, but necessary as complex systems operate at conditions far from equilibrium. The central notion when we talk of time and complexity is that of ‘memory’. Memory is carrying something from the past over into the future. Memory is filtered/interpreted, separating noise from information. Memory therefore is not an instantaneous thing, it takes time to develop; it is slow. The dynamics between the participating agents in the consultation will create shared memories that live on to shape future interactions. Shared memories are stronger and contain more relevant knowledge if they are based on frequent interactions and ongoing doctor–patient relationships, leading to a better understanding of the whole person – a process that takes time. Sufficient time, that is, ‘a certain slowness’, is an essential element of the healing relationship in the consultation. It creates a sufficiently stable, but adaptive, environment that can withstand changing demands. Hence a more complete understanding of the consultation and its time demands will not only lead to more effective treatment, it will also humanize a situation which has become to a large extent purely instrumental. This process of humanization is important not only for the patient, but also for the doctor. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by the increasing popularity of efficient designs for stated choice experiments. The objective in efficient designs is to create a stated choice experiment that minimizes the standard errors of the estimated parameters. In order to do so, such designs require specifying prior values for the parameters to be estimated. While there is significant literature demonstrating the efficiency improvements of employing efficient designs, the bulk of the literature tests conditions where the priors used to generate the (...) efficient design are assumed to be accurate. However, there is substantially less literature that compares how different design types perform under varying degree of error of the prior. The literature that does exist assumes small fractions are used, which is in contrast to computer-aided surveys that readily allow for large fractions. Further, the results in the literature are abstract in that there is no reference point to provide clear insight on the magnitude of any issue. Our objective is to analyze the robustness of different designs within a typical stated choice experiment context of a trade-off between price and quality. We use as an example transportation mode choice, where the key parameter to estimate is the value of time. Within this context, we test many designs to examine how robust efficient designs are against a misspecification of the prior parameters. The simple mode choice setting allows for insightful visualizations of the designs themselves and also an interpretable reference point for the range in which each design is robust. Not surprisingly, the D-efficient design is most efficient in the region where the true population VOT is near the prior used to generate the design: the prior is $20/h and the efficient range is $10–$30/h. However, the D-efficient design quickly becomes the most inefficient outside of this range, and the estimation significantly degrades above $50/h. The orthogonal and random designs are robust for a much larger range of VOT. The robustness of Bayesian efficient designs varies depending on the variance that the prior assumes. Implementing two-stage designs that first use a small sample to estimate priors are also not robust relative to uninformative designs. Arguably, the random design performs as well as any design, and it will perform even better if data cleaning is done to remove choice tasks where one alternative dominates the other. (shrink)

This study introduces 'time-specific' analysis of economic processes. Economic processes are conventionally analysed from one point in time to another over a series of time units - days, weeks, or years. By contrast, these time-specific models focus on the temporal character of events within the unit time - their timing, duration, and sequence - utilizing the information that is lost in the macroscopic time perspective of standard economic theory. What time-specific analysis reveals are (...) economic and technological characteristics of goods and services - prices and cost behaviour and temporal mobility or immobility within the unit time - that affect capital productivity and its utilization, optimal schedules of production, work, and consumption, least-cost methods of producing time-shaped outputs, and efficient welfare-maximizing behavior in time-specific, including peak-load, markets. (shrink)

The concentration of high-frequency controls in a limited period of time constitutes an important feature of many law-enforcement policies around the world. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive investigation on the relative efficiency and effectiveness of various crackdown policies using a lab-in-the-field experiment with real passengers of a public transport service. We introduce a novel game, the daily public transportation game, where subjects have to decide, over many periods, whether to buy or not a ticket knowing that (...) there might be a control. Our results show that concentrated crackdowns are less effective and efficient than random controls; prolonged crackdowns reduce fare-dodging during the period of intense monitoring but induce a burst of fraud as soon as they are withdrawn; pre-announced controls induce more fraud in the periods without control. Overall, we also observe that real fare-dodgers fraud more in the experiment than non-fare-dodgers. (shrink)

Ockham’s razor is the principle that, all other things being equal, scientists ought to prefer simpler theories. In recent years, philosophers have argued that simpler theories make better predictions, possess theoretical virtues like explanatory power, and have other pragmatic virtues like computational tractability. However, such arguments fail to explain how and why a preference for simplicity can help one find true theories in scientific inquiry, unless one already assumes that the truth is simple. One new solution to that problem is (...) the Ockham efficiency theorem, which states that scientists who heed Ockham’s razor retract their opinions less often and sooner than do their non-Ockham competitors. The theorem neglects, however, to consider competitors following random strategies and in many applications random strategies are known to achieve better worst-case loss than deterministic strategies. In this paper, we describe two ways to extend the result to a very general class of random, empirical strategies. The first extension concerns expected retractions, retraction times, and errors and the second extension concerns retractions in chance, times of retractions in chance, and chances of errors. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss recent evidence from experimental economics on the impact of social preferences on workplace behavior. We focus on situations in which a single employer interacts with multiple employees. Traditionally, equity and efficiency have been seen as opposing aims in such work environments: individual pay-for-performance wage schemes maximize of efficiency but might lead to inequitable outcomes. We present findings from laboratory experiments that show under which circumstances partially incomplete contracts can create equitable work environments while (...) at the same time reaching surprisingly efficient outcomes. (shrink)

Heterogeneous information networks can naturally simulate complex objects, and they can enrich recommendation systems according to the connections between different types of objects. At present, a large number of recommendation algorithms based on heterogeneous information networks have been proposed. However, the existing algorithms cannot extract and combine the structural features in heterogeneous information networks. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient recommendation algorithm based on heterogeneous information network, which uses the characteristics of graph convolution neural network to automatically learn node information (...) to extract heterogeneous information and avoid errors caused by the manual search for metapaths. Furthermore, by fully considering the scoring relationship between nodes, a calculation strategy combining heterogeneous information and a scoring information fusion strategy is proposed to solve the scoring between nodes, which makes the prediction scoring more accurate. Finally, by updating the nodes, the training scale is reduced, and the calculation efficiency is improved. The study conducted a large number of experiments on three real data sets with millions of edges. The results of the experiments show that compared with PMF, SemRec, and other algorithms, the proposed algorithm improves the recommendation accuracy MAE by approximately 3% and the RMSE by approximately 8% and reduces the time consumption significantly. (shrink)

In this article, we study a minimal change approach to preference dynamics. We treat a set of preferences as a special kind of theory, and define minimal change preference contraction and revision operations in the spirit of the Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson theory of belief revision. We characterise minimal contraction of preference sets by a set of postulates and prove a representation theorem. We also give a linear time algorithm which implements minimal contraction by a single preference. We then (...) define minimal contraction by a set of preferences, and show that the problem of a minimal contraction by a set of preferences is NP-hard. (shrink)

Rheumatoid arthritis is a progressive systemic autoimmune disease characterized by inflammation of the joints and surrounding tissues, which seriously affects the life of patients. The Sharp/van der Heijde method has been widely used in clinical evaluation for the RA disease. However, this manual method is time-consuming and laborious. Even if two radiologists evaluate a specific location, their subjective evaluation may lead to low inter-rater reliability. Here, we developed an efficient model powered by deep convolutional neural networks to solve these (...) problems and automated the overall scoring on hand X-rays. The depthwise separable convolution technique is used based on ResNet-50 due to the high resolution of hand X-rays. An inverted residual block is introduced to devise a ResNet-Dwise50 model to enhance the efficiency of the model. The model was trained and tested using bilateral posteroanterior images of 3818 patients. The experiment results show the ResNet-Dwise50 model achieved an MAE of 14.90 and RMSE of 22.01 while ensuring high efficiency. There was no statistical difference between the average scores given by two experienced radiologists and predicted scores from our model. (shrink)

Clique sizes for chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) grooming and for human conversation are compared in order to test Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis that human language is almost three times as efficient a bonding mechanism as primate grooming. Recalculation of the data provided by Dunbar et al. (1995) reveals that the average clique size for human conversation is 2.72 whereas that of chimpanzee grooming is shown to be 2.18. The efficiency of human conversation and actual chimpanzee grooming over Dunbar’s primate grooming model (...) (always one-to-one and a one-way interaction) is 1.27 and 1.25, respectively, when we take role alternation into account. Chimpanzees can obtain about the same efficiency as humans in terms of quantity of social interactions because their grooming is often mutual and polyadic. (shrink)

Assumed benefits from improved reputation are often used as motives to drive corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Are improved cost efficiencies among these reputation benefits? Cost efficiencies and cost management have become more relevant as revenue streams dry up in these tough economic times. Can a good reputation aid these efforts to develop cost efficiencies specifically when managing labor costs? Prior research hypothesizes that good reputation can create labor productivity and efficiency benefits. The purpose of this study is to (...) empirically investigate reputation's relationship with labor efficiency, labor productivity, and labor cost. Using a sample of highly reputable firms from Fortune's America's Most Admired Companies list and a corresponding matched sample of firms, we find that reputation is associated with improved labor efficiency and labor productivity. However, we do not find a significant association between reputation and reduced labor costs. Our study contributes to current research hypothesizing and finding efficiency benefits associated with good reputation. Documenting these potential reputation benefits has important implications for CSR activities and initiatives. It supports recent work that incorporates reputation into a more developed model of the relationship between CSR and performance (Vilanova et al.: 2009, Journal of Business Ethics 87, 57-69). This work is useful to businesses and supports strategies focused on "doing well by doing good" and maintaining healthy reputations. (shrink)

Time is the greatest modern scarcity. What used to be considered signs of success--being busy, having many responsibilities, being involved in many projects or activities--are today being felt as afflictions. The bestselling author of Money and the Meaning of Life, philosopher Jacob Needleman, shows how to take a bold and unconventional approach to time. The aim: to get more out of it by breaking free of our illusions about it. Needleman dispenses with tricks and techniques that only serve (...) to make our obsessiveness more "efficient." Instead he shows how we can understand what our days are for. It's this understanding that allows time to finally begin to "breathe" in our lives. People can learn to experience time more purposefully and meaningfully. We need not be at time's mercy. Needleman rejects time-management techniques in order to reveal ancient and little-known modern practices for exploring one's internal clock. He reveals how time is experienced by the soul. Drawing on the wisdom literature that chronicles the ways of Buddhists, poets, and philosophers, one learns: What it could mean to chart one's real past, unclouded by emotions How memory can lie to us Why we need not be obsessed with the future How to experience time so that it is not an enemy robbing us of the joy of life How to have more "nonpsychological time," or "time of the heart [that] does not move," such as moments of ecstasy or joy in which time is cut off from the physical world How to experience the gifts of time. (shrink)

We model happiness as a measurement tool used to rank alternative actions. Evolution favors a happiness function that measures the individual’s success in relative terms. The optimal function, in particular, is based on a time-varying reference point –or performance benchmark –that is updated over time in a statistically optimal way in order to match the individual’s potential. Habits and peer comparisons arise as special cases of such updating process. This updating also results in a volatile level of happiness (...) that continuously reverts to its long-term mean. Throughout, we draw a parallel with a problem of optimal incentives, which allows us to apply statistical insights from agency theory to the study of happiness. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Entgegen häufig artikulierter Erwartungen ist die Erwerbstätigenquote in Sportvereinen noch immer gering und eine zunehmende Verberuflichung nicht zu beobachten. In Ergänzung vorliegender systemtheoretischer Erklärungsansätze wird ein produktionstheoretisches Modell entwickelt, das ehrenamtliche Arbeit als eine Form der Lohnspende auffasst und Entscheidungen des Sportvereins als Annäherung an eine minimale Kostenfunktion interpretiert. Aus dem Modell abgeleitete Hypothesen werden einer empirischen Prüfung aus den Daten einer Befragung aller rheinland-pfälzischen Sportvereine mit mehr als 750 Mitgliedern unterworfen. Es zeigt sich, dass sich die Hypothesen weitgehend (...) bewähren, sodass das Modell zur Erklärung geringer Ausbildungsintensität von Sportvereinen sowie zu den Bedingungen der Integration von Erwerbstätigkeit in die Produktionsfunktion von Sportvereinen beitragen kann. (shrink)

We introduce a notion of relative efficiency for axiom systems. Given an axiom system Aβ for a theory T consistent with S12, we show that the problem of deciding whether an axiom system Aα for the same theory is more efficient than Aβ is II2-hard. Several possibilities of speed-up of proofs are examined in relation to pairs of axiom systems Aα, Aβ, with Aα ⊇ Aβ, both in the case of Aα, Aβ having the same language, and in the (...) case of the language of Aα extending that of Aβ: in the latter case, letting Prα, Prβ denote the theories axiomatized by Aα, Aβ, respectively, and assuming Prα to be a conservative extension of Prβ, we show that if Aα — Aβ contains no nonlogical axioms, then Aα can only be a linear speed-up of Aβ; otherwise, given any recursive function g and any Aβ, there exists a finite extension Aα of Aβ such that Aα is a speed-up of Aβ with respect to g. (shrink)

Chaos distributes with a covert method to condense the dynamic of complexity and satisfies the security requirements of a cryptographic system. This study gives an ability online/offline ID-based short signature scheme using conformable fractional chaotic maps. Furthermore, we establish its security under IBSS existential unforgeability of identity-based short signature under chosen message attack in the random oracle model. Some of the stimulating preparations of obtainable processes are that they give a multiperiod application of the offline storage, which licenses the agent (...) to recycle the offline pre-registered data in time series, rather than one-period usage in all past IBSS processes. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough the peer review process is believed to ensure scientific rigor, enhance research quality, and improve manuscript clarity, many investigators are concerned that the process is too slow, too expensive, too unreliable, and too static. In this feasibility study, we sought to survey corresponding authors of recently published clinical research studies on the speed and efficiency of the publication process.MethodsWeb-based survey of corresponding authors of a 20% random sample of clinical research studies in MEDLINE-indexed journals with Ovid MEDLINE entry (...) dates between December 1 and 15, 2016. Survey addressed perceived manuscript importance before first submission, approximate first submission and final acceptance dates, and total number of journal submissions, external peer reviews, external peer reviewers, and revisions requested, as well as whether authors would have considered publicly sharing their manuscript on an online platform instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal.ResultsOf 1780 surveys distributed, 27 corresponding authors opted out or requested that we stop emailing them and 149 emails failed (e.g., emails that bounced n = 64, returned with an away from office message n = 70, or were changed/incorrect n = 15), leaving 1604 respondents, of which 337 completed the survey (21.0%). Respondents and non-respondents were similar with respect to study type and publication journals’ impact factor, although non-respondent authors had more publications (p = 0.03). Among respondents, the median impact factor of the publications’ journal was 2.7 (interquartile range (IQR), 2.0–3.6) and corresponding authors’ median h-index and number of publications was 9 (IQR, 3–20) and 27 (IQR, 10–77), respectively. The median time from first submission to journal acceptance and publication was 5 months (IQR, 3–8) and 7 months (IQR, 5–12), respectively. Most respondents (62.0%, n = 209) rated the importance of their research as a 4 or 5 (5-point scale) prior to submission. Median number of journal submissions was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviews was 1 (IQR, 1–2), external peer reviewers was 3 (IQR, 2–4), and revisions requested was 1 (IQR, 1–1). Sharing manuscripts to a public online platform, instead of submitting to a peer-reviewed journal, would have been considered by 55.2% (n = 186) of respondents.ConclusionCorresponding authors have high perceptions of their research and reported requiring few manuscript submissions prior to journal acceptance, most commonly by lower impact factor journals. (shrink)

In any age, at any given time, there are leaders who fail to lead by example. The desires which motivate them, and the means they deploy to cover for this fact, can weave paths of destruction with social costs borne by those who can least afford them—including within the academy. Taking the right steps—both professionally and spiritually—at least theoretically make this avoidable. This article addresses select topics in light of ancient perspectives and recent phenomena alike, including those of: the (...) harmony of Thomistic personalism with stakeholder theory and transformational leadership, respectively; the relationship of Augustinian realism to cognitive dissonance theory and the composition of boards. (shrink)

One of my fellow graduate students at MIT had access to the Pentagon Papers at a time when they were still classified, and he was writing a dissertation on aspects of the American involvement in Vietnam. One morning over breakfast he discovered that he had been preempted by the New York Times. Every scholar recently working on the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe must understand that student’s sensation that morning. By now, they must face newspapers with a mixture (...) of hope and foreboding. Events outrun the most radical predictions. Not only has the Wall crumbled, with pieces of it being sold as souvenirs, but Albania has established telephone connections to the world not long after westerners came to believe Albania had been the only nation in modem times to succeed in disappearing. (shrink)

What are the common denominators for success when we consider increasing gas efficiency and enhancing creativity in organizations? As an analogy, the principles of increasing gas efficiency are applicable to enhancing creativity in organizations: Plan activities in advance, allocate sufficient time, resources, and set a SMART goal with clear priority and focus. Identify talent in ourselves and others and do not fall into the temptation of following others. Big ideas take time. Maintain momentum, avoid interruptions, incorporate (...) new technologies, information, and feedback, and modify action to achieve goals. We have 100% control of our thoughts and action. Stop idling, take action, and do it now. If everyone contributes just a little, the cumulative effect over time can be huge. If we have the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) for doing the right things that will benefit humanity and the whole world, but fail to do them, is this ethical? We, the managers, need to focus on what we have done and what we have failed to do, change our thinking, change our behavior, and accomplish our goals. (shrink)

In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data‐hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that leverages the recent development of powerful computational models to obtain the fine‐grained annotation required to apply metrics and techniques from (...) Cognitive Science to large datasets. Previous work in Cognitive Science has investigated the question‐asking strategies of human participants by employing different variants of the so‐called 20‐question‐game setting and proposing several evaluation methods. In our work, we focus on GuessWhat, a task proposed within the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities that is similar in structure to the 20‐question‐game setting. Crucially, the GuessWhat dataset contains tens of thousands of dialogues based on real‐world images, making it a suitable setting to investigate the question‐asking strategies of human players on a large scale and in a natural setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of computational tools to automatically code how the hypothesis space changes throughout the dialogue in complex visual scenes. On the one hand, we confirm findings from previous work on smaller and more controlled settings. On the other hand, our analyses allow us to highlight the presence of “uninformative” questions (in terms of Expected Information Gain) at specific rounds of the dialogue. We hypothesize that these questions fulfill pragmatic constraints that are exploited by human players to solve visual tasks in complex scenes successfully. Our work illustrates a method that brings together efforts and findings from different disciplines to gain a better understanding of human question‐asking strategies on large‐scale datasets, while at the same time posing new questions about the development of conversational systems. (shrink)

The continuous development of information communication technology facilitates the conventional grid in transforming into an automated modern system. Internet-of-Things solutions are used along with the evolving services of end-users to the electricity service provider for smart grid applications. In terms of various devices and machine integration, adequate authentication is the key to an accurate source and destination in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). Various protocols are deployed to lead the identification between two parties, which require high computation time and communicational (...) bit operations for system development. Therefore, Kerberos-based authentication protocols were designed in this study with the assistance of elliptic curve cryptography to manage the mutual authentication between two parties and reduce the time and bit operations. The protocols were evaluated in a widely adopted tool, AVISPA, which builds an understanding of the proposed protocol and ensures mutual authentication without unauthorized knowledge. In addition, upon comparing security and performance assessments to the current schemes, it was found that the protocol in this study required less time and bits to transmit information. Consequently, it effectively provides multiple security features making it suitable for resource constraint smart meters in AMI. (shrink)

We introduce a new and time-efficient memory-encoding paradigm for functional magnetic resonance imaging. This paradigm is optimized for mapping multiple contrasts using a mixed design, using auditory and visual stimuli. We demonstrate that the paradigm evokes robust neuronal activity in typical sensory and memory networks. We were able to detect auditory and visual sensory-specific encoding activities in auditory and visual cortices. Also, we detected stimulus-selective activation in environmental-, voice-, scene-, and face-selective brain regions. A subsequent recognition task allowed the (...) detection of sensory-specific encoding success activity in both auditory and visual cortices, as well as sensory-unspecific positive ESA in the hippocampus. Further, sensory-unspecific negative ESA was observed in the precuneus. Among others, the parallel mixed design enabled sustained and transient activity comparison in contrast to rest blocks. Sustained and transient activations showed great overlap in most sensory brain regions, whereas several regions, typically associated with the default-mode network, showed transient rather than sustained deactivation. We also show that the use of a parallel mixed model had relatively little influence on positive or negative ESA. Together, these results demonstrate a feasible, versatile, and brief memory-encoding task, which includes multiple sensory stimuli to guarantee a comprehensive measurement. This task is especially suitable for large-scale clinical or population studies, which aim to test task-evoked sensory-specific and sensory-unspecific memory-encoding performance as well as broad sensory activity across the life span within a very limited time frame. (shrink)

This book recognizes and questions a key assumption about time which is shared by common sense and philosophy—the assumption that time, like a single substance or a homogeneous quality, is subject to the law of contradiction. This leads to the logical conclusion that among different and mutually exclusive accounts of time, whether in science, practical action, or fine art, only one can be the “right” one. Four such accounts are shown here to be internally consistent though mutually (...) incompatible, suggesting that the initial assumption is mistaken, and that in some way each alternative concept of time must be incomplete. Brumbaugh suggests that we must choose the one appropriate to a particular purpose: artistic creation, technological efficiency, discovery of mathematical laws of nature, or work with biological and social phenomena. The selection should allow coherence between that aspect of reality which the selected time concept emphasizes, and the aspect of reality most relevant to a successful execution of our purpose. (shrink)