Progress in Medical Ethics: How the Ethicist Can Help

In this article Dr. Camenisch presents a plea for mutual understanding between ethicists and medical professionals. He is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University and is a post-doctoral Fellow at the Texas Institute of Religion

Anonymous Single-Sign-On for n designated services with traceability

Anonymous Single-Sign-On authentication schemes have been proposed to allow users to access a service protected by a verifier without revealing their identity which has become more important due to the introduction of strong privacy regulations. In this paper we describe a new approach whereby anonymous authentication to different verifiers is achieved via authorisation tags and pseudonyms. The particular innovation of our scheme is authentication can only occur between a user and its designated verifier for a service, and the verification cannot be performed by any other verifier. The benefit of this authentication approach is that it prevents information leakage of a user's service access information, even if the verifiers for these services collude which each other. Our scheme also supports a trusted third party who is authorised to de-anonymise the user and reveal her whole services access information if required. Furthermore, our scheme is lightweight because it does not rely on attribute or policy-based signature schemes to enable access to multiple services. The scheme's security model is given together with a security proof, an implementation and a performance evaluation.Comment: 3

Quant bain chapeschan ils scolars da la scola rumantscha rumantsch? Concretisaziun da standards da basa per la varietad da scola ed invista en la cumpetenza receptiva d'autras varietads

Dieser Artikel präsentiert empirische Daten zum Lese- und Hörverstehen in Romanisch von Schülerinnen und Schülern der romanischen Schule, die im Rahmen eines vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds finanzierten Projekts erhoben wurden. Ziel der Studie war, für die Schulsprachen der romanischen Schule (Romanisch und Deutsch) Basisstandards zu konkretisieren. Dazu wurden – basierend auf einer Bedarfsanalyse sowie den daraus resultierenden Kompetenzbeschreibungen – kommunikative Sprachtests erstellt und durchgeführt. Insgesamt nahmen 325 Schülerinnen und Schüler an der Erhebung teil. Die Tests zum Hör- und Leseverstehen in Romanisch enthielten einerseits Aufgaben in der jeweiligen Schulvarietät, die in vier Parallelversionen (Sursilvan, Vallader, Surmiran, Rumantsch Grischun) erstellt worden waren. Andererseits wurden in die Tests auch je eine Aufgabe zum Lese- und Hörverstehen in Rumantsch Grischun sowie eine Hörverstehensaufgabe zum Verständnis fremder Idiome integriert, da das Verständnis fremder Idiome bzw. Rumantsch Grischun in der Bedarfsanalyse verschiedentlich als wünschenswerte Kompetenz genannt worden war. Auch wenn diese Aufgaben zum Verständnis anderer Varietäten lediglich explorativen Charakter haben, so lässt sich dennoch feststellen, dass insbesondere die Hörverstehensaufgaben (in fremden Idiomen bzw. in Rumantsch Grischun) den meisten Schülerinnen und Schülern keine nennenswerten Schwierigkeiten bereiteten. Allerdings lassen sich aufgrund unserer Studie keine verallgemeinerbaren Aussagen zur rezeptiven Schwierigkeit anderer Varietäten machen, da nebst der sprachlichen Varietät auch weitere Faktoren wie Thema und Frageformat die Schwierigkeit einer Aufgabe wesentlich bestimmen können

A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Targeted Ad-System

Thanks to its low product-promotion cost and its efficiency, targeted online advertising has become very popular. Unfortunately, being profile-based, online advertising methods violate consumers' privacy, which has engendered resistance to the ads. However, protecting privacy through anonymity seems to encourage click-fraud. In this paper, we define consumer's privacy and present a privacy-preserving, targeted ad system (PPOAd) which is resistant towards click fraud. Our scheme is structured to provide financial incentives to to all entities involved

ROYALE: A Framework for Universally Composable Card Games with Financial Rewards and Penalties Enforcement

While many tailor made card game protocols are known, the vast majority of those suffer from three main issues: lack of mechanisms for distributing financial rewards and punishing cheaters, lack of composability guarantees and little flexibility, focusing on the specific game of poker. Even though folklore holds that poker protocols can be used to play any card game, this conjecture remains unproven and, in fact, does not hold for a number of protocols (including recent results). We both tackle the problem of constructing protocols for general card games and initiate a treatment of such protocols in the Universal Composability (UC) framework, introducing an ideal functionality that captures general card games constructed from a set of core card operations. Based on this formalism, we introduce Royale, the first UC-secure general card games which supports financial rewards/penalties enforcement. We remark that Royale also yields the first UC-secure poker protocol. Interestingly, Royale performs better than most previous works (that do not have composability guarantees), which we highlight through a detailed concrete complexity analysis and benchmarks from a prototype implementation

An Anonymous Credit Card System

Credit cards have many important benefits; however, these same benefits often carry with them many privacy concerns. In particular, the need for users to be able to monitor their own transactions, as well as bank's need to justify its payment requests from cardholders, entitle the latter to maintain a detailed log of all transactions its credit card customers were involved in. A bank can thus build a profile of each cardholder even without the latter's consent. In this paper, we present a practical and accountable anonymous credit system based on ecash, with a privacy preserving mechanism for error correction and expense-reporting

Bigger is fitter? Quantitative genetic decomposition of selection reveals an adaptive evolutionary decline of body mass in a wild rodent population

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.In natural populations, quantitative trait dynamics often do not appear to follow evolutionary predictions. Despite abundant examples of natural selection acting on heritable traits, conclusive evidence for contemporary adaptive evolution remains rare for wild vertebrate populations, and phenotypic stasis seems to be the norm. This so-called "stasis paradox" highlights our inability to predict evolutionary change, which is especially concerning within the context of rapid anthropogenic environmental change. While the causes underlying the stasis paradox are hotly debated, comprehensive attempts aiming at a resolution are lacking. Here, we apply a quantitative genetic framework to individual-based long-term data for a wild rodent population and show that despite a positive association between body mass and fitness, there has been a genetic change towards lower body mass. The latter represents an adaptive response to viability selection favouring juveniles growing up to become relatively small adults, i.e., with a low potential adult mass, which presumably complete their development earlier. This selection is particularly strong towards the end of the snow-free season, and it has intensified in recent years, coinciding which a change in snowfall patterns. Importantly, neither the negative evolutionary change, nor the selective pressures that drive it, are apparent on the phenotypic level, where they are masked by phenotypic plasticity and a non causal (i.e., non genetic) positive association between body mass and fitness, respectively. Estimating selection at the genetic level enabled us to uncover adaptive evolution in action and to identify the corresponding phenotypic selective pressure. We thereby demonstrate that natural populations can show a rapid and adaptive evolutionary response to a novel selective pressure, and that explicitly (quantitative) genetic models are able to provide us with an understanding of the causes and consequences of selection that is superior to purely phenotypic estimates of selection and evolutionary change.The study was funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation (http://www.snf.ch) project grant (31003A_141110) awarded to EP

Projektbericht des SNF-Projekts „Empfehlungen für Basisstandards für die Schulsprachen der Rätoromanen.“

Dieser Bericht präsentiert methodisches Vorgehen und Resultate des vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds finanzierten Projekts „Empfehlungen für Basisstandards für die Schulsprachen der Rätoromanen”. Das Projekt hatte zum Ziel, auf der Basis von empirischen Daten, Basisstandards für das Leseverstehen in Romanisch und Deutsch, das Hörverstehen in Romanisch und das Schreiben in Deutsch für das Ende der 6. und 9. Klasse der romanischen Schule zu konkretisieren. Dazu wurden – basierend auf einer Bedarfsanalyse sowie den daraus resultierenden Kompetenzbeschreibungen – kommunikative Sprachtests erstellt und durchgeführt. Insgesamt nahmen 325 Schülerinnen und Schüler an der Erhebung teil. Im vorliegenden Projektbericht werden die Resultate der Sprachtests im Überblick präsentiert und anschliessend sowohl auf der Ebene des Gesamtresultats als auch auf der Ebene der einzelnen Frage-Items Basisstandards konkretisiert. Dabei wird insbesondere auf die Resultate eines mit erfahrenen Lehrpersonen durchgeführten Workshops zur Konkretisierung der Basisstandards eingegangen