Sequence Instability in the Proviral Long Terminal Repeat and gag Regions from Peripheral Blood and Tissue-Derived Leukocytes of FIV-Infected Cats during the Late Asymptomatic Phase.

Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) infection results in viral persistence, a prolonged asymptomatic phase, and progressive immunopathology. During the asymptomatic phase, a cohort of experimentally FIV-infected cats exhibits features of viral latency in blood suggestive of inactive viral replication. We sought to investigate viral replication activity and genomic stability of the FIV proviral long terminal repeat (LTR) and the 5' aspect of gag over time. FIV-infected cats during the asymptomatic phase demonstrated undetectable plasma FIV gag RNA transcripts and intermittent to undetectable blood-derived cell-associated FIV gag RNA. The LTR sequence demonstrated instability in blood-derived cells over time, in spite of low to undetectable viral replication. Sequence variation in the LTR was identified in CD4+ and CD21+ leukocytes from blood and surgically removed lymph nodes. Three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the LTR were commonly identified. Promoter functionality of a common LTR SNP and rare U3 mutation were examined by reporter gene assays and demonstrated either no change or increased basal FIV promoter function, respectively. In conclusion, this cohort of asymptomatic FIV-infected cats demonstrated instability of the LTR and 5' gag sequences during the study period, in spite of undetectable plasma and rare to undetectable viral gag RNA, which suggests that blood may not accurately represent viral activity in asymptomatic FIV-infected cats

Childhood Obesity: The Role of Health Policy

This first policy report from the CPRC and the NICHQ Childhood Obesity Action Network was released on March 18, 2008 in Miami Florida as part of the Second Childhood Obesity Congress

Multiple, Independent T Cell Lymphomas Arising in an Experimentally FIV-Infected Cat during the Terminal Stage of Infection.

Our laboratory has serially reported on the virologic and immunopathologic features of a cohort of experimental feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV)-infected cats for more than eight years. At 8.09 years post infection (PI), one of these animals entered the terminal stage of infection, characterized by undulating hyperthermia, progressive anorexia, weight loss, and pancytopenia; the animal was not responsive to therapeutic interventions, necessitating euthanasia six weeks later (8.20 years PI). Subsequent analyses indicated that neoplastic lymphocytes infiltrated multiple cervical lymph nodes and a band-like region of the mucosal lamina propria within a segment of the intestine. Immunohistochemistry and T cell clonality testing determined that the nodal and intestinal lesions were independently arising from CD3 T cell lymphomas. In-situ RNA hybridization studies indicated that diffuse neoplastic lymphocytes from the cervical lymph node contained abundant viral nucleic acid, while viral nucleic acid was not detectable in lymphocytes from the intestinal lymphoma lesion. The proviral long terminal repeat (LTR) was amplified and sequenced from multiple anatomic sites, and a common clone containing a single nucleotide polymorphism was determined to be defective in response to phorbol myristate acetate (PMA)-mediated promoter activation in a reporter gene assay. This assay revealed a previously unidentified PMA response element within the FIV U3 region 3' to the TATA box. The possible implications of these results on FIV-lymphoma pathogenesis are discussed

An ISO/IEC 7816-4 Application Layer Approach to Mitigate Relay Attacks on near Field Communication

Near Field Communication (NFC) has become prevalent in access control and contactless payment systems, however, there is evidence in the literature to suggest that the technology possesses numerous vulnerabilities. Contactless bank cards are becoming commonplace in society; while there are many benefits from the use of contactless payments, there are also security issues present that could be exploited by a malicious third party. The inherently short operating distance of NFC (typically about 4 cm) is often relied upon as a means of ensuring intentional interaction on the user’s part and limiting attack vectors. However, NFC is particularly sensitive to relay attacks, which entirely negate the security usefulness of the short-range aspect of technology. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how standard hardware can be used to exploit the technology to carry out a relay attack. Considering the risk that relay attacks pose, a countermeasure is proposed to mitigate this threat. Our countermeasure yields a 100% detection rate in experiments undertaken – in which over 10,000 contactless transactions were carried out on a range of different contactless cards and devices. In these experiments, there was a false positive rate of 0.38% – 0.86%. As little as 1 in every 250 transactions were falsely classified as being the subject of a relay attack and so the user experience was not significantly impacted. With our countermeasure implemented, transaction time was lengthened by only 0.22 seconds

Adaptive Functioning in High-Risk Preschoolers: Caregiver Practices Beyond Parental Warmth

Objectives: Prior research on caregiving behaviors associated with resilience in children exposed to adversity has focused primarily on broad constructs, such as parental warmth and supportiveness, as protective factors. In an effort to provide more precise analysis of caregiver behaviors related to adaptive functioning in high-risk preschoolers, the present study used a multi-method design to examine the unique and joint relations of specific emotion socialization behaviors and parental warmth with adaptive functioning in preschool-aged children. Methods: Participants were 124 children aged 3–6 years from Head Start programs and their primary caregiver. Caregivers and teachers reported on preschoolers\u27 functioning across multiple domains (emotion regulation, social competence, school readiness, and low levels of emotional/behavioral problems), and caregivers\u27 emotion coaching, validating, and invalidating behaviors were measured with self-report and observation. Results: The emotion socialization behaviors together accounted for significant variance on a global index of adaptive functioning after accounting for exposure to adversity, with emotion coaching serving as a unique predictor. Further, parental warmth moderated the association between particular behaviors (caregiver-reported emotion coaching and observed emotional invalidation) and adaptive functioning. Conclusions: These results suggest that engaging in emotion socialization behaviors in the context of a warm and supportive relationship can promote positive developmental outcomes in high-risk preschoolers

Fedoram: A Federated Oblivious RAM Scheme

Instant messaging (IM) applications, even with end-to-end encryption enabled, pose privacy issues due to metadata and pattern leakage. Our goal is to develop a model for a privacy preserving IM application, by designing an IM application that focuses on hiding metadata and discussion patterns. To solve the issue of privacy preservation through the obfuscation of metadata, cryptographic constructions like Oblivious Random Access Machines (ORAM) have been proposed in recent years. However, although they completely hide the user access patterns, they incur high computational costs, often resulting in excessively slow performance in practice. We propose a new federated model, FedORAM, which is the first ORAM scheme that uses a federation of servers to hide metadata for an IM use case. In order to investigate the trade-off between security and performance, we propose two versions of FedORAM: Weak FedORAM and Strong FedORAM. Strong FedORAM uses a tree-based federation architecture to ensure strong obliviousness, but with an increased overhead cost. Weak FedORAM has a more simple federated architecture that only uses Oblivious Transfer (OT) to increase communication speed, but with security consequences. Our results show that both constructions are faster than a similar client-server ORAM scheme. Furthermore, Weak FedORAM has a response time of less than 2 seconds per message for a middle-sized federation

Importance of data distribution on hive-based systems for query performance: An experimental study

SQL-on-Hadoop systems have been gaining popularity in recent years. One popular example of SQL-on-Hadoop systems is Apache Hive; the pioneer of SQL-on-Hadoop systems. Hive is located on the top of big data stack as an application layer. Besides the application layer, the Hadoop Ecosystem is composed of 3 different main layers: storage, the resource manager and processing engine. The demand from industry has led to the development of new efficient components for each layer. As the ecosystem evolves over time, Hive employed different execution engines too. Understanding the strengths of components is very important in order to exploit the full performance of the Hadoop Ecosystem. Therefore, recent works in the literature study the importance of each layer separately. To the best of our knowledge, the present work is the first work that focuses on the performance of the combination of both the storage layer and the execution engine. In this work, we compare the Hive\u27s query performance by using three different execution engines: MR, Tez and Spark on the skewed/well-balanced data distribution through the full TPC-H benchmark. Our results show the importance of data distribution on the storage layer for overall job performance of SQL-on-Hadoop systems and empirically showed even distribution improves performance up to 48% compared to skewed distribution. Moreover, the present study provides insightful findings by identifying particular SQL query cases that the certain processing engine deals exceptionally well