Trust in Crowds: probabilistic behaviour in anonymity protocols

The existing analysis of the Crowds anonymity protocol assumes that a participating member is either ‘honest’ or ‘corrupted’. This paper generalises this analysis so that each member is assumed to maliciously disclose the identity of other nodes with a probability determined by her vulnerability to corruption. Within this model, the trust in a principal is defined to be the probability that she behaves honestly. We investigate the effect of such a probabilistic behaviour on the anonymity of the principals participating in the protocol, and formulate the necessary conditions to achieve ‘probable innocence’. Using these conditions, we propose a generalised Crowds-Trust protocol which uses trust information to achieves ‘probable innocence’ for principals exhibiting probabilistic behaviour

Dynamics of timed cognitive test performance by first-episode schizophrenia patients and healthy controls

The dataset contains results of the project: "Dynamics of timed cognitive test performance by first-episode schizophrenia patients and healthy controls

MST network metrics and cognitive speed RT ressults in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls

The database contains raw data on the parameters of the functional neural network, the results of cognitive tests in the form of response times and their analysis, and psychopathological evaluation. The study concerned a group of patients with the first psychotic episode and a comparable group of healthy controls. A study goal was to find significant relationships between abnormal features of network organization in patients group and distributional dimensions of RTs derived from cognitive speed task

Short-term outcome after microdiscectomy for lumbar disc herniation – a single centre study

Introduction. Lumbar disc herniation (LDH) is a common cause of back pain and leg pain. For more than 60 years, standard discectomy by fenestration has been used to treat LDH. In his study, three commonly used scales were used to assess the outcome after microdiscectomy, such as the Low Back Pain Rating Scale (LBPRS), Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study analyzing treatment results at 3 months after microdiscectomy. Materials and method. During almost 5 years, a total of 327 patients underwent microdiscectomy operations for single level disc disease. Of these, 286 patients were available for 3-mounth follow-up. All patients were operated on at the Neurosurgery Department in the Specialist Hospital in Sandomierz, Poland. Before surgery and 3 months after burgery, all patients were asked to complete LBPRS, ODI and VAS scales. The statistical analysis used was p2, the effect size indicator for ANOVA. Results. Significant improvement was observed in all scales used 3 months after surgery. Conclusions. There are new, minimally invasive percutaneous techniques available, such as percutaneous laser disc decompression and intradiscal injection of radiopaque gelified ethanol. There are also trials with platelet-rich plasma or mesenchymal stem cells injected into the disc, aimed at the restoration of healthy disc properties. The hypothesis that metabolic products of bacteria propionibacterium acnes can contribute to disc degeneration inspired attempts at antibiotic therapy This study was conducted on a large group of patients and confirmed that discectomy is the recommended method of surgery which produces good treatment results in 3-mounths follow-up

The relationship of problematic Facebook use and Facebook context on empathy for pain processing: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Positive and negative consequences of using social media (SM) have been observed. Excessive use of SM, such as Facebook, can lead to problematic behaviours, resulting in emotional and social functioning changes. Moreover, the problematic use of SM is negatively associated with empathy's affective and cognitive components. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to test empathy differences between problematic and non-problematic Facebook users. In addition, the Facebook-related context that may modulate empathic response was investigated. Fifty-two participants (25 females; Mage = 24.6 years [SD ± 2.9]) took part in the study and were classified into two groups: non-problematic and problematic Facebook users. The study was conducted using the empathy for pain paradigm with three media-related contextual conditions: newspaper, Facebook-related, and neutral. The results indicated there was a statistically significant difference between the left and right side of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) among nonproblematic Facebook users when observing pain stimuli in the context of Facebook. For problematic Facebook users, there was significantly more activity on the left side of the PFC (compared to the right side) when observing painful stimuli in the newspaper context and non-painful stimuli in a neutral context. The differences in haemodynamic activity registered by fNIRS between the left and right PFCs were observed in both groups and may have resulted from difficulties in regulating emotional response and attention, particularly among the problematic Facebook user group