Fibro-osseous lesions of the jaws: An insight

Fibro-osseous lesions of the jaws comprise a diverse group of conditions, which are characterized by replacement of normal bone by fibroblasts, collagen fibers, and mineralized tissue. The diagnosis based on microscopy alone is often impossible due to overlapping of histopathologic features. Adequate clinical and para clinical observations, such as patient’s age, sex, location of the lesion, duration of symptoms, imaging characteristics, and histologic findings are necessary to arrive at an accurate diagnosis.Certain cases present features that may be atypical and do not favor a definite diagnosis. Sound knowledge of various fi bro-osseous lesions of craniofacial structures is critical for proper interpretation and diagnosis of these lesions. Despite striking similarity in the clinical, radiographic and to some extent the histologic patterns, the biologic behavior varies; so each lesion may require a diff erent treatment approach. In this review, the most important and frequent features of the fi bro-osseous lesions of jaws along with diff erent classifications are discussed

SWOT analysis of e-marketing for e-business

E-businesses are becoming more and more popular with time, mainly due to the range of opportunities offered by the internet and other technologies. These new technologies have provided marketers with new ways of promoting their products or services to the public. This paper compares the traditional marketing media with the new ones and looks at marketing tools which can be used to create a successful e-marketing strategy. The paper also analyses different e-marketing mediums using Porter’s 5 forces and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis.peer-reviewe

Exploring the impact of punishments on employee effort and performance in the workplace : Insights from England's premier league

Despite the prevalence of punishment as a method of enforcing organizational policies, management literature provides little guidance on the impact of punishment on individuals' work performance. A sample of 412 professional soccer players in England's Premier League was utilized to collect unobtrusive, longitudinal data to better understand how individuals react to punishments in their workplace. Our findings indicate that individuals deploy significantly more effort (run more kilometers) following a punishment. However, the findings also indicate that individuals do not perform better following the administration of punishment. In fact, their performance is significantly lower than before the punishment. Although individuals work harder, they actually perform weaker. Further, we found that, when punished more than their team members, individuals deploy significantly more effort than individuals who get punished less than their team members but perform significantly weaker than those individuals.© 2024 The Authors.European Management Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Academy of Management (EURAM). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Traditional vs. interactive technologies for corporate social responsibility communication in health care : a study in Malta and India

This work aims to understand the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the health care sector and investigates the use of traditional and interactive technologies for health care organizations’ CSR communication strategies. Based on a quantitative research methodology, we examine and compare CSR communication between two countries, namely Malta and India, which are characterized by very different contexts. The study shows that in both countries, CSR is perceived to be of medium to high importance and that health care organizations need to be more aware of the importance to communicate CSR activities through the use of interactive technologies.peer-reviewe

Real-time hospital bed occupancy and requirements forecasting

To ensure better utilization and availability of the healthcare resources healthcare managers, planners and hospital staff need to develop policies. The hospital length of stay (LOS) of patients and therefore the resource requirements depend on many factors such as the covariates that represent the characteristics of the patients. Here we have used the discharge dataset of Mater Dei Hospital, Malta to model the LOS and admissions. Phase type survival tree is used to cluster patients into homogeneous groups with respect to the LOS and admissions.peer-reviewe

Logic Locking - Connecting Theory and Practice

Due to the complexity and the cost of producing integrated circuits, most hardware circuit designers outsource the manufacturing of their circuits to a third-party foundry. However, a dishonest foundry may abuse its access to the circuit\u27s design in a variety of ways that undermine the designer\u27s investment or potentially introduce vulnerabilities. To combat these issues, the hardware community has developed the notion of logic locking, which allows the designer to send the foundry a ``locked\u27\u27 version of the original circuit. After the locked circuit has been manufactured, authorized users can unlock the original functionality with a secret key. Unfortunately, most logic locking schemes are analyzed using informal security notions, leading to a cycle of attacks and ad hoc defenses that impedes the adoption of logic locking. In this work, we propose a formal simulation-based security definition for logic locking. We then show that a construction based on universal circuits provably satisfies the definition. More importantly, we explore ways to efficiently realize our construction in actual hardware. This entails the design of alternate approaches and optimizations, and our evaluation (based on standard hardware metrics like power, area, and performance) illuminates tradeoffs between these designs

Obfuscation and Outsourced Computation with Certified Deletion

Can we outsource computation on encrypted data, while ensuring that the data is certifiably, information-theoretically deleted by the server after computation? Can we encode a computer program in a manner that preserves its functionality, while allowing an evaluator to {\em prove that they deleted the program}? This work answers the above questions, providing the first fully (maliciously) secure solution to the question of blind delegation with certified deletion, and the first solution to the question of obfuscation with certified deletion. Unlike prior work on deletion, these settings require security in the presence of repeated access to partial decryptions of encoded data, followed by certified deletion of the (rest of the) encoded data. To enable security, we introduce a powerful new paradigm for secure information-theoretic deletion of data based on quantum \emph{subspace coset states}. We obtain the following results. Blind Delegation with Certified Deletion - Assuming the quantum hardness of learning with errors, we obtain maliciously-secure blind delegation with certified deletion. This improves upon prior protocols by Poremba (ITCS 2023) and Bartusek and Khurana (arXiv 2022) that we show are insecure against a malicious server. - Assuming sub-exponentially quantum-secure indistinguishability obfuscation, we obtain a \emph{two-message} protocol for blind delegation with certified deletion. All previous protocols required multiple rounds of interaction between the client and server. Obfuscation with Certified Deletion - Assuming post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscation, we obtain a construction of differing-inputs obfuscation with certified deletion, for a polynomial number of differing inputs. As an immediate corollary, we obtain a strong variant of secure software leasing for every differing-inputs circuit family. - We obtain two flavors of functional encryption with certified deletion, one where ciphertexts can be certifiably deleted, and the other where secret keys can be certifiably deleted, assuming appropriate variants of indistinguishability obfuscation and other standard assumptions. - We show how to prepare an ``oracle with certified deletion\u27\u27 implementing any efficient classical functionality. Additional Results - Assuming post-quantum CCA-secure public-key encryption, we obtain a notion of CCA-secure public-key encryption with certified deletion. We view this primarily as a pedagogical tool towards understanding our technique. - Assuming post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscation, we show how to generically add a \emph{publicly-verifiable} certified deletion property to a variety of cryptosystems. Publicly-verifiable deletion schemes prior to our work either relied on unproven conjectures (Poremba, ITCS 2023) or structured oracles (Hiroka et al., Asiacrypt 2021). All our primitives satisfy {\em everlasting security after deletion}, except for functional encryption with deletion for secret keys, where a computational certified deletion guarantee is inherent

Extractors for Adversarial Sources via Extremal Hypergraphs

Randomness extraction is a fundamental problem that has been studied for over three decades. A well-studied setting assumes that one has access to multiple independent weak random sources, each with some entropy. However, this assumption is often unrealistic in practice. In real life, natural sources of randomness can produce samples with no entropy at all or with unwanted dependence. Motivated by this and applications from cryptography, we initiate a systematic study of randomness extraction for the class of adversarial sources defined as follows. A weak source $\mathbf{X}$ of the form $\mathbf{X}_1,...,\mathbf{X}_N$, where each $\mathbf{X}_i$ is on $n$ bits, is an $(N,K,n,k)$-source of locality $d$ if the following hold: (1) Somewhere good sources: at least $K$ of the $\mathbf{X}_i$\u27s are independent, and each contains min-entropy at least $k$. We call these $\mathbf{X}_i$\u27s good sources, and their locations are unknown. (2) Bounded dependence: each remaining (bad) source can depend arbitrarily on at most $d$ good sources. We focus on constructing extractors with negligible error, in the regime where most of the entropy is contained within a few sources instead of across many (i.e., $k$ is at least polynomial in $K$). In this setting, even for the case of $0$-locality, very little is known prior to our work. For $d \geq 1$, essentially no previous results are known. We present various new extractors for adversarial sources in a wide range of parameters, and some of our constructions work for locality $d = K^{\Omega(1)}$. As an application, we also give improved extractors for small-space sources. The class of adversarial sources generalizes several previously studied classes of sources, and our explicit extractor constructions exploit tools from recent advances in extractor machinery, such as two-source non-malleable extractors and low-error condensers. Thus, our constructions can be viewed as a new application of non-malleable extractors. In addition, our constructions combine the tools from extractor theory in a novel way through various sorts of explicit extremal hypergraphs. These connections leverage recent progress in combinatorics, such as improved bounds on cap sets and explicit constructions of Ramsey graphs, and may be of independent interest

Absence of Morphotropic Phase Boundary Effects in BiFeO3-PbTiO3 Thin Films Grown via a Chemical Multilayer Deposition Method

Here, we report the unusual behaviour shown by the (BiFeO3)1-x-(PbTiO3)x (BF-xPT) films prepared using a multilayer deposition approach by chemical solution deposition method. Thin film samples of various compositions were prepared by depositing several bilayers of BF and PT precursors by varying the BF or PT layer thicknesses. X-ray diffraction showed that final samples of all compositions show mixing of the two compounds resulting in a single phase mixture, also confirmed by transmission electron microscopy. In contrast to bulk equilibrium compositions, our samples show a monoclinic (MA type) structure suggesting disappearance of morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) about x = 0.30 as observed in the bulk. This is accompanied by the lack of any enhancement of remnant polarization at MPB as shown by the ferroelectric measurements. Magnetic measurements show that the magnetization of the samples increases with increasing BF content. Significant magnetization of the samples indicates melting of spin spirals in the BF-xPT arising from random distribution of iron atoms across the film. Absence of Fe2+ ions in the films was corroborated by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements. The results illustrate that used thin film processing methodology significantly changes the structural evolution in contrast to predictions from the equilibrium phase diagram as well as modify the functional characteristics of BP-xPT system dramatically.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Case Reports1. A Late Presentation of Loeys-Dietz Syndrome: Beware of TGFβ Receptor Mutations in Benign Joint Hypermobility

Background: Thoracic aortic aneurysms (TAA) and dissections are not uncommon causes of sudden death in young adults. Loeys-Dietz syndrome (LDS) is a rare, recently described, autosomal dominant, connective tissue disease characterized by aggressive arterial aneurysms, resulting from mutations in the transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) receptor genes TGFBR1 and TGFBR2. Mean age at death is 26.1 years, most often due to aortic dissection. We report an unusually late presentation of LDS, diagnosed following elective surgery in a female with a long history of joint hypermobility. Methods: A 51-year-old Caucasian lady complained of chest pain and headache following a dural leak from spinal anaesthesia for an elective ankle arthroscopy. CT scan and echocardiography demonstrated a dilated aortic root and significant aortic regurgitation. MRA demonstrated aortic tortuosity, an infrarenal aortic aneurysm and aneurysms in the left renal and right internal mammary arteries. She underwent aortic root repair and aortic valve replacement. She had a background of long-standing joint pains secondary to hypermobility, easy bruising, unusual fracture susceptibility and mild bronchiectasis. She had one healthy child age 32, after which she suffered a uterine prolapse. Examination revealed mild Marfanoid features. Uvula, skin and ophthalmological examination was normal. Results: Fibrillin-1 testing for Marfan syndrome (MFS) was negative. Detection of a c.1270G > C (p.Gly424Arg) TGFBR2 mutation confirmed the diagnosis of LDS. Losartan was started for vascular protection. Conclusions: LDS is a severe inherited vasculopathy that usually presents in childhood. It is characterized by aortic root dilatation and ascending aneurysms. There is a higher risk of aortic dissection compared with MFS. Clinical features overlap with MFS and Ehlers Danlos syndrome Type IV, but differentiating dysmorphogenic features include ocular hypertelorism, bifid uvula and cleft palate. Echocardiography and MRA or CT scanning from head to pelvis is recommended to establish the extent of vascular involvement. Management involves early surgical intervention, including early valve-sparing aortic root replacement, genetic counselling and close monitoring in pregnancy. Despite being caused by loss of function mutations in either TGFβ receptor, paradoxical activation of TGFβ signalling is seen, suggesting that TGFβ antagonism may confer disease modifying effects similar to those observed in MFS. TGFβ antagonism can be achieved with angiotensin antagonists, such as Losartan, which is able to delay aortic aneurysm development in preclinical models and in patients with MFS. Our case emphasizes the importance of timely recognition of vasculopathy syndromes in patients with hypermobility and the need for early surgical intervention. It also highlights their heterogeneity and the potential for late presentation. Disclosures: The authors have declared no conflicts of interes