RATIONALE Rates of adolescent electronic (e-) cigarette use are increasing, but there has been little study of the chronic effects of use. Components of e-cigarette aerosol have known pulmonary toxicity. OBJECTIVES To investigate the associations of e-cigarette use with chronic bronchitis symptoms and wheeze in an adolescent population. METHODS Associations of self-reported use of e-cigaret...

The availability of large music repositories calls for new ways of automatically organizing and accessing them. While artist-based listings or title indexes may help in locating a specific piece of music, a more intuitive, genre-based organization is required to allow users to browse an archive and explore its contents. So far, however, these organizations following musical styles have to be de...

Reliable cell segmentation plays an important role in biological imaging studies, though continues to be challenging due to the complex nature of many imaging scenes. The approach here uses a novel immersion simulation based self-organizing (ISSO) transform, an automated method for image segmentation. The method allows users to customize the immersion simulation process via user-defined or defa...

Cognitive biases, including implicit memory associations are thought to play an important role in the development of addictive behaviors. The aim of the present study was to investigate implicit affective memory associations in heavy cannabis users. Implicit positive-arousal, sedation, and negative associations toward cannabis were measured with three Single Category Implicit Association Tests ...

A theoretical scalability analysis of a self-organizing community formed by middle agents (described in detail in (Wang, 2002)) is carried out in this paper. We provide evidence that the formation time of self-organizing communities may increase linearly with the log of the number of users and also linearly with the number of middle agents.

Recommender systems have traditionally recommended items to individual users, but there has recently been a proliferation of recommenders that address their recommendations to groups of users. The shift of focus from an individual to a group makes more of a difference than one might at first expect. This chapter discusses the most important new issues that arise, organizing them in terms of fou...

When studying the use of Cognoter, a multi-user idea organizing tool, we noticed that users encountered unexpected communicative breakdowns. Many of these difficulties stemmed from an incorrect model of conversation implicit in the design of the software. Drawing on recent work in psychology and sociology, we were able to create a more realistic model of the situation our users faced and apply ...

Currently, the only way to disseminate streaming media to many users is to pay for lots of bandwidth. A more democratic alternative would be for interested users to donate bandwidth to help disseminate the data further. In this paper we discuss the design of P2PCast, a completely decentralized, scalable, fault-tolerant self-organizing system aimed at being able to stream content to thousands of...

The GM-MDS conjecture of Dau et al. (ISIT 2014) speculates that the MDS condition, which guarantees the existence of MDS matrices with a prescribed set of zeros over large fields, is in fact sufficient for existence of such matrices over small fields. We prove this conjecture.