Search for: All records

Abstract IntroductionRecent research shows an increase in polyamory and acceptance of polyamorous relationships. However, there is still limited research on broader attitudes toward monogamy and polyamory, particularly regarding legal rights and with a national sample. This study examines the impact of cohort, sexual orientation, and contact with polyamorists on attitudes toward monogamy and polyamorous legal rights. This research has the potential to bring more attention to polyamorous relationships, disrupt heteronormative views of relationships, and consider legal rights for those in relationships involving more than two people. MethodsWe use data from a sample of 2665 adults from the 2021 American Marriage Survey, a national survey focused on attitudes toward marriage post-marriage equality, to consider the relationship between cohort, sexual orientation, contact, and attitudes toward mononormativity and polyamory. ResultsOverall, there is support for the idea that monogamy is the norm while people are generally not supportive of granting legal rights for polyamorous relationships. Younger cohorts, LGBQ individuals, and those who know a polyamorous person are less likely to support mononormativity and more likely to support legal rights for polyamorous relationships. Furthermore, contact has a stronger impact on attitudes of Millennials and LGBQ individuals. ConclusionWhile mononormativity remains the norm and polyamory is not widely supported, given patterns of greater acceptance among younger cohorts and LGBQ individuals, there is a good possibility that acceptance will increase over time. Policy ImplicationsThis research has the potential to bring more attention to polyamorous relationships, disrupt heteronormative views of relationships, and consider legal rights for those in relationships involving more than two people. 

Crossover designs play an increasingly important role in precision medicine. We show the search of an optimal crossover design can be formulated as a convex optimization problem and convex optimization tools, such as CVX, can be directly used to search for an optimal crossover design.  We first demonstrate how to transform crossover design problems into convex optimization problems and show CVX can effortlessly find optimal crossover designs that coincide with a few theoretical crossover optimal designs in the literature. The proposed approach is especially useful when it becomes problematic to construct optimal designs analytically for complicated models. We then apply CVX to find crossover designs for models with auto-correlated error structures or when the information matrices may be singular and analytical answers are unavailable. We also construct N-of-1 trials frequently used in precision medicine to estimate treatment effects on the individuals or to estimate average treatment effects, including finding dual-objective optimal crossover designs. 

Deeply embedded systems powered by microcontrollers are becoming popular with the emergence of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology. However, these devices primarily run C/C\({+}{+}\)code and are susceptible to memory bugs, which can potentially lead to both control data attacks and non-control data attacks. Existing defense mechanisms (such as control-flow integrity (CFI), dataflow integrity (DFI) and write integrity testing (WIT), etc.) consume a massive amount of resources, making them less practical in real products. To make it lightweight, we design a bitmap-based allowlist mechanism to unify the storage of the runtime data for protecting both control data and non-control data. The memory requirements are constant and small, regardless of the number of deployed defense mechanisms. We store the allowlist in the TrustZone to ensure its integrity and confidentiality. Meanwhile, we perform an offline analysis to detect potential collisions and make corresponding adjustments when it happens. We have implemented our idea on an ARM Cortex-M-based development board. Our evaluation results show a substantial reduction in memory consumption when deploying the proposed CFI and DFI mechanisms, without compromising runtime performance. Specifically, our prototype enforces CFI and DFI at a cost of just 2.09% performance overhead and 32.56% memory overhead on average.