Objectives: Extensive research suggests that short-term meditation interventions may hold therapeutic promise for a wide range of psychosocial outcomes. In response to calls to subject these interventions to more methodologically rigorous tests, a randomized controlled trial tested the effectiveness of a mindfulness meditation intervention and a compassion meditation intervention against an active control in a demographically diverse sample of medically and psychiatrically healthy adults. Methods: Two hundred and four participants completed a battery of questionnaires to assess psychological experience, participated in a laboratory stress test to measure their biological stress reactivity, and wore the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) to assess daily behaviors before and after an eight-week intervention (mindfulness meditation intervention, compassion meditation intervention, or health education discussion group). Results: Neither meditation intervention reliably impacted participants’ subjective psychological experience, biological stress reactivity, or objectively assessed daily behaviors. Furthermore, post hoc moderation analyses found that neither baseline distress nor intervention engagement significantly moderated effects. Conclusions: Results from this trial—which was methodologically rigorous and powered to detect all but small effects—were essentially null. These results are an important data point for the body of research about meditation interventions. Implications of these non-significant effects are discussed in the context of prior studies, and future directions for contemplative intervention research are recommended. Clinical Trial Registry: Registry Number: NCT01643369.

Automated monitoring of dark web (DW) platforms on a large scale is the first step toward developing proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). While there are efficient methods for collecting data from the surface web, large-scale dark web data collection is often hindered by anti-crawling measures. In particular, text-based CAPTCHA serves as the most prevalent and prohibiting type of these measures in the dark web. Text-based CAPTCHA identifies and blocks automated crawlers by forcing the user to enter a combination of hard-to-recognize alphanumeric characters. In the dark web, CAPTCHA images are meticulously designed with additional background noise and variable character length to prevent automated CAPTCHA breaking. Existing automated CAPTCHA breaking methods have difficulties in overcoming these dark web challenges. As such, solving dark web text-based CAPTCHA has been relying heavily on human involvement, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this study, we propose a novel framework for automated breaking of dark web CAPTCHA to facilitate dark web data collection. This framework encompasses a novel generative method to recognize dark web text-based CAPTCHA with noisy background and variable character length. To eliminate the need for human involvement, the proposed framework utilizes Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to counteract dark web background noise and leverages an enhanced character segmentation algorithm to handle CAPTCHA images with variable character length. Our proposed framework, DW-GAN, was systematically evaluated on multiple dark web CAPTCHA testbeds. DW-GAN significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art benchmark methods on all datasets, achieving over 94.4% success rate on a carefully collected real-world dark web dataset. We further conducted a case study on an emergent Dark Net Marketplace (DNM) to demonstrate that DW-GAN eliminated human involvement by automatically solving CAPTCHA challenges with no more than three attempts. Our research enables the CTI community to develop advanced, large-scale dark web monitoring. We make DW-GAN code available to the community as an open-source tool in GitHub.

Introduction: Medication automatic dispensing systems (ADS) have been implemented in many settings, including fire-based EMS stations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of in-station ADSs on controlled substance administration rates and EMS response intervals. Methods: This study was a retrospective review of data from a single fire-based EMS agency. Medication administration rates and EMS response intervals were compared before ADS implementation (P1; 6/1/15 to 5/31/16) and after ADS implementation (P3; 6/1/17-5/31/19). Cases with missing data and during a one-year implementation period were excluded. Results: 4045 cases were identified in P1 and 8168 in P3. The odds of morphine or versed administration increased following ADS implementation: OR = 1.77 (95% CI: 1.53, 2.03) and OR = 1.53 (95%CI: 1.18, 2.00) respectively. There were statistically, but likely not operationally significant increases in median response interval and transport interval from P1 to P3 of 14 seconds, (p < 0.001) and 39 seconds (p < 0.001) respectively. Time at hospital for all calls decreased by more than 11 minutes for all transports, from a median of 34 minutes (IQR; 23.7, 45.5) to 22.7 minutes (IQR:18.5, 27.6) in P3, p < 0.001 and by 27.9 minutes for calls in which a controlled substance was given: P1 = 50.6 minutes (IQR: 34.6, 63.2), P3 = 22.7 minutes (IQR: 18.3, 27.4), p < 0.001. Conclusion: In this system, medication ADS implementation was associated with an increase in the rates of controlled substance administration and a decrease in the time units were at hospitals.

We study effort provision and the development of the belief that effort matters over time: a student is uncertain whether she has control over success through her effort or whether success is determined by her innate ability, which she also does not know. In each period, what she can learn about her control and her ability depends on the level of effort she exerts. The student's optimal effort policy in this two-dimensional bandit problem takes the form of a linear belief cutoff rule and typically features repeated switching of the effort level. Moreover, we define perseverance and procrastination as indices for the student's behavior over time and analyze how they are affected by control, cost, and confidence. Finally, we relate our results to findings in educational psychology and discuss policies to foster perseverance and to lower procrastination.

Significance: The dwarf planet, Pluto, has stirred the imagination of the public and of planetary scientists due to its many unusual properties. Among these properties is its Neptune-crossing orbit whose stability is owed to an orbital resonance with Neptune. Less well understood is the role of the other planets. We demonstrate that the orbital architecture of the giant planets lies within a narrow niche in which Pluto-like orbits are practically stable on gigayear timescales, whereas nearby are strongly chaotic orbits. Pluto is witness to the dynamical history of the solar system; quantifying its proximity to strong chaos and dynamical instability can enable quantitative constraints on its own dynamical history as well as that of the solar system.

This study tests whether men and women differ in their willingness to challenge a competitor in response to a prior transgression. A laboratory experiment is conducted, in which a player can choose to behave unfairly toward another. The other player may then challenge the first to a contest. We investigate the extent to which previous interactions can explain individual differences in tournament initiation decisions. The results show that men, but not women, tend to challenge a competitor more when the prior outcome is unfair and the unfairness occurred through the competitor's intentional choice. In contrast, unfair outcomes that occur by chance do not influence the decision to challenge others.

Russian thistle, also known as tumbleweed (Salsola spp.), is a problematic invasive plant found on natural and working landscapes. On a California rangeland, we tested the singular and interactive treatments of grazing, herbicide and seeding to determine how these approaches might influence Salsola cover across a five year experiment. Total Salsola cover declined by 3% annually during the study. A single spring treatment of chlorsulfuron + 2,4-D followed by glyphosate applied in the fall just prior to seeding, and then 2,4-D the following spring, significantly reduced Salsola cover compared to the untreated control. Seeded forage species cover increased over time and was significantly higher than seeded native species cover five years after seeding. However, the seeding treatment had no effect on Salsola cover. Although grazing did not reduce Salsola cover, due to the beneficial effects of grazing on reducing other non-native species, this study supports the use of an integrated approach of herbicide application, grazing and seeding to achieve management goals on an arid working landscape.

US public officials frequently argue that high temperatures are responsible for increasing mortality of undocumented border crossers (UBCs) in southern Arizona. In this article, we suggest that these kinds of assertions are not only empirically misleading, they also serve to naturalise UBC deaths in the region by helping to obscure their structural causes. Indeed, although heat exposure is a primary cause of death in the region, prior studies have also shown that migration patterns have shifted toward more remote and rugged terrain, characterised by higher elevations and greater shade cover. Using physiological modelling and a spatiotemporal forensic analysis, we assess whether the distribution of recovered human remains has shifted toward locations characterised by environments where the human body is more or less capable of regulating core temperature, and thus succumbing to heat stress. We find that the distribution of recovered UBC remains has consistently trended toward locations where the potential for heat stress is lower, rather than higher. This demonstrates that UBC mortality is not principally a function of ambient or regional temperature, but rather is a result of specific policy decisions that lead to cumulative stress and prolonged exposure due to factors like difficulty and distance of travel. To contextualise these findings, we discuss the evolution of the US Border Patrol's policy of Prevention Through Deterrence, and apply the concepts of structural and cultural violence to theorize its consistently deadly outcomes. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Significance: We have developed an Africa-wide synthesis of paleoenvironmental variability over the Plio-Pleistocene. We show that there is strong evidence for orbital forcing of variability during this time that is superimposed on a longer trend of increasing environmental variability, supporting a combination of both low- and high-latitude drivers of variability. We combine these results with robust estimates of mammalian speciation and extinction rates and find that variability is not significantly correlated with these rates. These findings do not currently support a link between environmental variability and turnover and thus fail to corroborate predictions derived from the variability selection hypothesis.

The purpose of this study was to examine how attitudes toward different nonhuman animal species (including emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and harm avoidance) are shaped by the coevolutionary histories between the ancestors of contemporary humans and these different nonhuman animal species. We compared the explanatory power of alternative categorization frameworks for classifying attitudes toward animals across several cross-cultural samples (Arizona, California, Costa Rica, Spain, and Mexico). Analytical Approach 1 directly compared two alternative frameworks. Adapa categories were generated as purely functional ones based upon the ecological niches occupied by each species within the biotic community generated by human–nonhuman animal relations, and Tuxtla categories were generated as cognitive ones based upon the degrees of consciousness commonly ascribed to the constituent species. Analytical Approach 2 tested the alternative hypothesis that both categories were part of a general scheme organized into three superordinate categories reflecting concentric circles around our own, consistent with fitness interdependence theory. Results supported this alternative hypothesis. The concentric circles model (Kith & Kin Animals, Domesticated Animals, and Wild Animals) better explained empathy and harm avoidance scores, suggesting that attitudes toward specific animal species are partly shaped by which circles they fall into, the product of the coevolutionary relationship shared between them and humans.