The Influence of Sociocultural Factors on Body Image: Searching for Constructs

Body image is a multidimensional construct that has received increasing scientific study over the past few decades. Considerable research has examined the determinants of body image development and functioning and their implications for other aspects of psychosocial wellbeing, especially eating pathology among girls and young women. Cafri, Yamamiya, Brannick, and Thompson (this issue) reported the results of a meta-analysis of how selected, self-reported sociocultural influence variables correlate with the basic dimension of body image evaluation. Their work raises and reinforces important questions about the definition and measurement of sociocultural influence constructs

A Phenomenological Study of the Lived and Professional Experiences of African American Male Instructors: Functions of the Practices of School Systems

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological investigation was to explore and ascribe meaning to the lived and professional experiences of African American male educators as functions of the practices (i.e., systemic policies and interactions with colleagues) of a suburban school system. The philosophical frameworks guiding this study were Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1970) and Tokenism (Kanter, 1977) as they relate, respectively, to the effects of engendered racism and the implications of the invisibility and hypervisibility associated with being Black male instructors. The three related sub-questions involved (1) the contributing roles of school systems’ procedures to the encounters of this group of educators (2) the additive impact of this phenomenon as a result of Black male teachers’ interactions with colleagues and educational stakeholders and (3) meanings assigned to these experiences as related to race, racism, and tokenism. The data was collected via open-ended, semi-structured interviews, an analysis of participant-provided professional artifacts, and a focus group with select respondents. Participants’ feedback was recorded via an electronic device and subsequently transcribed to ensure the accuracy of teachers’ responses. Data analysis was conducted using the tenets of hermeneutic phenomenology as defined by van Manen (1997) to include epoché, imaginative variation, clustering of recurring themes, and ascription of meaning. Factors related to gender, race, racism, and the emblematic status of being a Black man were found to impact the ways in which male educators of color assigned levels of significance to their lived and professional experiences. The aforementioned analysis created the basis for findings and implications of the current study as well as recommendation of additional topics for future investigation

Does Sarbanes-Oxley Protect Whistleblowers? The Recent Experience of Companies and Whistleblowing Workers Under SOX

The Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) attempts to prevent fraud in the business activities of public companies. SOX includes regulations designed to protect whistleblowing employees that may be triggered if workers allege fraudulent activity by their employers, and, in response, their employers retaliate. This Essay discusses the strength of the whistleblowing protection provided by SOX, the conduct covered by the SOX whistleblower provisions, and specifically the application of the law by the court

Prejudice Toward Fat People: The development and Validation of the Antifat Attitudes Test

Although the stigma of obesity in our society is well documented, the measurement of antifat attitudes has been a difficult undertaking, Two studies were conducted to construct and validate the Antifat Attitudes Test (AFAT), In study 1, college students (110 men and 175 women) completed the preliminary 54-item AFAT and specific indices of body image and weight-related concerns, Psychometric and factor analysis revealed a 47-item composite scale and three internally consistent factors that were uncorrelated with social desirability: Social/Character Disparagement, Physical/Romantic Unattractiveness, and Weight Control/Blame. Several body image correlates of antifat prejudice were identified, and men expressed more negative attitudes than women, Study 2 experimentally examined the effects of information about the controllability of weight on the antifat attitudes of 120 participants, Exposure to information on behavioral vs. biogenetic control led to greater blame of persons who are fat for their body size, The implications of the findings and the potential utility of the AFAT are discussed

Brain Age from the Electroencephalogram of Sleep

The human electroencephalogram (EEG) of sleep undergoes profound changes with age. These changes can be conceptualized as "brain age", which can be compared to an age norm to reflect the deviation from normal aging process. Here, we develop an interpretable machine learning model to predict brain age based on two large sleep EEG datasets: the Massachusetts General Hospital sleep lab dataset (MGH, N = 2,621) covering age 18 to 80; and the Sleep Hearth Health Study (SHHS, N = 3,520) covering age 40 to 80. The model obtains a mean absolute deviation of 8.1 years between brain age and chronological age in the healthy participants in the MGH dataset. As validation, we analyze a subset of SHHS containing longitudinal EEGs 5 years apart, which shows a 5.5 years difference in brain age. Participants with neurological and psychiatric diseases, as well as diabetes and hypertension medications show an older brain age compared to chronological age. The findings raise the prospect of using sleep EEG as a biomarker for healthy brain aging

Chandra Discovery of a 300 kpc X-ray Jet in the GPS Quasar PKS1127-145

We have discovered an X-ray jet with Chandra imaging of the z=1.187 radio-loud quasar PKS1127-145. In this paper we present the Chandra X-ray data, follow-up VLA observations, and optical imaging using the HST WFPC2. The X-ray jet contains 273+/-5 net counts in 27ksec and extends ~30 arcsec, from the quasar core, corresponding to a minimum projected linear size of ~330/h_50 kpc. The evaluation of the X-ray emission processes is complicated by the observed offsets between X-ray and radio brightness peaks. We discuss the problems posed by these observations to jet models. In addition, PKS1127-145 is a Giga-Hertz Peaked Spectrum radio source, a member of the class of radio sources suspected to be young or ``frustrated'' versions of FRI radio galaxies. However the discovery of an X-ray and radio jet extending well outside the host galaxy of PKS1127-145 suggests that activity in this and other GPS sources may be long-lived and complex.Comment: 22 pages, 11 ps figures, 1 figure in a JPG file, 3 tables. AASTEX. Accepted by The Astrophysical Journa

Leakage-Abuse Attacks Against Searchable Encryption

Schemes for secure outsourcing of client data with search capability are being increasingly marketed and deployed. In the literature, schemes for accomplishing this efficiently are called Searchable Encryption (SE). They achieve high efficiency with provable security by means of a quantifiable leakage profile. However, the degree to which SE leakage can be exploited by an adversary is not well understood. To address this, we present a characterization of the leakage profiles of in-the-wild searchable encryption products and SE schemes in the literature, and present attack models based on an adversarial server’s prior knowledge. Then we empirically investigate the security of searchable encryption by providing query recovery and plaintext recovery attacks that exploit these leakage profiles. We term these \u27leakage-abuse attacks\u27 and demonstrate their effectiveness for varying leakage profiles and levels of server knowledge, for realistic scenarios. Amongst our contributions are realistic active attacks which have not been previously explored

What Else is Revealed by Order-Revealing Encryption?

The security of order-revealing encryption (ORE) has been unclear since its invention. Dataset characteristics for which ORE is especially insecure have been identified, such as small message spaces and low-entropy distributions. On the other hand, properties like one-wayness on uniformly-distributed datasets have been proved for ORE constructions. This work shows that more plaintext information can be extracted from ORE ciphertexts than was previously thought. We identify two issues: First, we show that when multiple columns of correlated data are encrypted with ORE, attacks can use the encrypted columns together to reveal more information than prior attacks could extract from the columns individually. Second, we apply known attacks, and develop new attacks, to show that the \emph{leakage} of concrete ORE schemes on non-uniform data leads to more accurate plaintext recovery than is suggested by the security theorems which only dealt with uniform inputs

The Tao of Inference in Privacy-Protected Databases

To protect database confidentiality even in the face of full compromise while supporting standard functionality, recent academic proposals and commercial products rely on a mix of encryption schemes. The common recommendation is to apply strong, semantically secure encryption to the “sensitive” columns and protect other columns with property-revealing encryption (PRE) that supports operations such as sorting. We design, implement, and evaluate a new methodology for inferring data stored in such encrypted databases. The cornerstone is the multinomial attack, a new inference technique that is analytically optimal and empirically outperforms prior heuristic attacks against PRE-encrypted data. We also extend the multinomial attack to take advantage of correlations across multiple columns. These improvements recover PRE-encrypted data with sufficient accuracy to then apply machine learning and record linkage methods to infer the values of columns protected by semantically secure encryption or redaction. We evaluate our methodology on medical, census, and union-membership datasets, showing for the first time how to infer full database records. For PRE-encrypted attributes such as demographics and ZIP codes, our attack outperforms the best prior heuristic by a factor of 16. Unlike any prior technique, we also infer attributes, such as incomes and medical diagnoses, protected by strong encryption. For example, when we infer that a patient in a hospital-discharge dataset has a mental health or substance abuse condition, this prediction is 97% accurate