The strategy of in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures relies on the increasing pregnancy rate and decreasing the risk of premature ovulation and ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. They are also designed to avoid weekend oocyte retrievals. Combined oral contraceptive (OC) pills are among the medicines used to accomplish these objectives. Alternatively, estradiol can be used instead of OC to ob...

In classical cryptography, the bit commitment scheme is one of the most important primitives. We review the state of the art of bit commitment protocols, emphasizing its main achievements and applications. Next, we present a practical quantum bit commitment scheme, whose security relies on current technological limitations, such as the lack of long-term stable quantum memories. We demonstrate t...

As you can see from their comments, while referee #1 is rather negative towards your study, referees #2 and #3 are very supportive of its publication and agree on the high potential interest of your findings. In general, although they believe that the evidence presented properly supports your conclusions, some technical concerns have arisen with which you will have to deal before your manuscrip...

The topical stance detection problem addresses detecting the stance of the text content with respect to a given topic: whether the sentiment of the given text content is in FAVOR of (positive), is AGAINST (negative), or is NONE (neutral) towards the given topic. Using the concept of attention, we develop a two-phase solution. In the first phase, we classify subjectivity whether a given tweet is...

Conducted in a 77-bed long-term-care facility, this study compared the costs of implementing an intensive pressure ulcer prevention protocol plus the calculated costs of treatment before and after implementing the protocol. A total of 69 patients comprised the preprotocol sample; 16 of them developed 26 ulcers. The postprotocol sample consisted of 63 patient, 3 of whom developed 5 ulcers. The 6...

The problem of geometric alignment of two roughly pre-registered, partially overlapping, rigid, noisy 3D point sets is considered. A new natural and simple, robustified extension of the popular Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm 1 is presented, called the Trimmed ICP (TrICP). The new algorithm is based on the consistent use of the Least Trimmed Squares (LTS) approach in all phases of the o...

In signed social networks, link sign prediction refers to using the observed link signs to infer the signs of the remaining links, which is important for mining and analyzing the evolution of social networks. The widely used matrix factorization-based approach – Bayesian Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (BMF), assumes that the noise between the real and predicted entry is Gaussian noise, and ...

Secret-key authentication protocols have recently received a considerable amount of attention, and a long line of research has been devoted to devising efficient protocols with security based on the hardness of the learning-parity with noise (LPN) problem, with the goal of achieving low communication and round complexities, as well as highest possible security guarantees. In this paper, we cons...

The seasonal study of wing dimorphism in the European mole cricket, Gryllotalpa gryllotalpa (Linnaeus, 1758) (Orthoptera: Gryllotalpidae), was carried out in northwest Iran. Based on present research, the long-winged (LW) morph appeared in early-mid spring when vegetation density is low and the crickets need to fly to search for food. Study of foretibiae showed that the dactyls are elongated an...

In this paper we develop a mathematical model to capture BGP table fluctuations. This provides the necessary foundations to study shortand long-term routing table growth. We reason that this growth is operationally critical for network administrators who need to gauge the amount of memory to install in routers as well as being a potential deciding factor in determining when the Internet communi...