People-Nearby Applications (PNAs) are becoming popular day by day. People try to find new ways for increasing their social circle according to their interests. PNAs provide people with a best way to find new people within one’s physical vicinity by applying activities and interests filters. A large number of people using PNAs complain about privacy issues and fake users. Another big concern of ...

In this issue Health by Numbers explores asthma hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visit rates in relation to Healthy People 2010 (HP2010) goals. Two HP2010 objectives for asthma are specific to hospitalizations and ED visits. Objective 24-2 sets the following targets for asthma hospitalizations by age group: (1) an age-specific rate of 25 per 10,000 children under age 5 years, (2) ...

AI systems are now or will soon be sophisticated enough to make consequential decisions. Although this technology has flourished, we also need public appraisals of AI systems playing these more important roles. This article reports surveys of preferences for and against AI systems making decisions in various domains as well as experiments that intervene on these preferences. We find that these ...

This chapter introduces a novel framework for modeling interacting humans in a multi-stage game. This “iterated semi network-form game” framework has the following desirable characteristics: (1) Bounded rational players, (2) strategic players (i.e., players account for one another’s reward functions when predicting one another’s behavior), and (3) computational tractability even on real-world s...

The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is based on the bounded confidence approach. In the absence of propaganda, computer simulations show that the online population as a whole is either fragmented, pol...

BACKGROUND Despite federal and local efforts to educate the public to prepare for major emergencies, many US households remain unprepared for such occurrences. United States Armed Forces veterans are at particular risk during public health emergencies as they are more likely than the general population to have multiple health conditions. METHODS This study compares general levels of household...

An effective low-cost solution to determine characteristic features of objects from a simple infrared diode array, working on the reflection light scanner principle and using the fusion of amplitude information to detect and characterize objects, has been designed. Essentially, two arrays of several emitter-receiver pairs are mounted on opposite sides of the area of observation (e.g. a conveyer...

A simple yet remarkably powerful tool of selfish and malicious participants in a distributed system is “equivocation”: making conflicting statements to others. We present TrInc, a small, trusted component that combats equivocation in large, distributed systems. Consisting fundamentally of only a non-decreasing counter and a key, TrInc provides a new primitive: unique, once-in-alifetime attestat...

Individual conversion and personal salvation are stressed in some church circles, however, in the history of the Church there has always been a strong interest in the well-being and “conversion” of the community. Consider, for example, Paul’s approach to the Corinthians, and the analogy of the community as one “body” in chapter 12 of his letter to the Corinthians. We see this viewpoint emerging...

In this paper, we aim to monitor the flow of people in large public infrastructures. We propose an unsupervised methodology to cluster people flow patterns into the most typical and meaningful configurations. By processing 3D images from a network of depth cameras, we built a descriptor for the flow pattern. We define a data-irregularity measure that assesses how well each descriptor fits a dat...