SecuCode: Intrinsic PUF Entangled Secure Wireless Code Dissemination for Computational RFID Devices

The simplicity of deployment and perpetual operation of energy harvesting devices provides a compelling proposition for a new class of edge devices for the Internet of Things. In particular, Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) devices are an emerging class of battery-free, computational, sensing enhanced devices that harvest all of their energy for operation. Despite wireless connectivity and powering, secure wireless firmware updates remains an open challenge for CRFID devices due to: intermittent powering, limited computational capabilities, and the absence of a supervisory operating system. We present, for the first time, a secure wireless code dissemination (SecuCode) mechanism for CRFIDs by entangling a device intrinsic hardware security primitive Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Function (SRAM PUF) to a firmware update protocol. The design of SecuCode: i) overcomes the resource-constrained and intermittently powered nature of the CRFID devices; ii) is fully compatible with existing communication protocols employed by CRFID devices in particular, ISO-18000-6C protocol; and ii) is built upon a standard and industry compliant firmware compilation and update method realized by extending a recent framework for firmware updates provided by Texas Instruments. We build an end-to-end SecuCode implementation and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate standards compliance, evaluate performance and security.Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computin

A cultural exploration of the social media manipulators

The widespread use of Internet social media sites for the production and dissemination of propaganda continues to grow and gather attention. Social media sites spread information faster and wider than those institutions and methods historically limited to state-affiliated organizations. There are several characteristics that are unique to virtual space and make the production and dissemination of propaganda different; they include the Internet’s global reach, the recipient’s apparent trust placed in information source as well as the information sources, and the low cost of participation. Thus, the use of social media as a method to spread misleading information exploits trust relationships between the reader and the source. Although propaganda is a weapon with a long history in war, in the 21st century, the delivery and distribution of propaganda through the trusted channel of social media is markedly different than what was historically observed. We investigated the relationships among state-affiliated actors who use social media to produce and distribute propaganda along with their national cultural values. Prior research inferred a link between culture and social media usage (Hofstede et al., 2010; Sample & Karamanian 2014). Specifically, Hofstede et al. (2010) contended that cultures that are more masculine use the Internet for information seeking, whereas more feminine-oriented cultures use social media sites for sharing information, seeking to build better “trusting” relationships. We sought to explore whether masculine countries would leverage the trust relationships that are present with social media users to further the reach of state-affiliated propaganda. We built upon Bradshaw & Howard’s (2017) study on propaganda purveyors, which examined preferred social media deployment techniques across 29 different countries. Using previously published methods, we examined associations with culture using Hofestede’s scale. Since masculine countries have previously been associated with information-seeking behaviors, we sought to explore the potential that more masculine cultural values are associated with greater information-shaping and -distributing behaviors compared with more feminine cultural values. The results showed a strong difference in distributions, countries that deployed fake news via social media tended to have more masculine cultural values. Moderate differences were observed in other cultural values, purveyors of social media propaganda exhibited more authoritarianism and uncertainty avoidance. These findings suggest that specific cultural values associate with the distrubtion of fake news, indicating that culturally aware responses may be more effective when responding to these events

A cultural exploration of social media manipulators

Internet social media sites enable the rapid and widespread production and dissemi- nation of propaganda. Although propaganda has a long history in warfare, the spreading of propaganda via social media is markedly different from past distribution methods. The authors investigated the relationships between state-affiliated actors who use social media to produce and distribute propaganda and their national cultural values. The results showed that countries that deployed fake news via social media tended to have more masculine cultural values. These findings suggest that specific cultural values are associated with fake news distribution, which may indicate that culturally aware responses may be more effective in responding to propaganda

Safety aspects of infliximab in inflammatory bowel disease patients - A retrospective cohort study in 100 patients of a German University Hospital

Background: Infliximab, a chimeric anti-tumour necrosis factor monoclonal antibody with potent anti-inflammatory effects, represents an effective treatment option in patients with severe inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Serious side-effects of such an immunomodulating therapy are speculated and therefore we reviewed our clinical experience in a retrospective safety study looking upon a single cohort of 100 IBD patients from a large German University Hospital. Methods: 100 patients with severe Crohn's disease (n = 92), ulcerative colitis (n = 7) or indeterminate colitis (n = 1) treated with infliximab (5 mg/kg) from January 2000 to December 2003 were retrospectively analysed for acute and subacute adverse events by chart review. Results: Overall, infliximab therapy was generally well tolerated. No fatal complications, malignancies, autoimmune diseases, neurologic or cardiovascular complications were observed in the cohort during the study period. Overall, adverse events were observed in 10 patients: 2 patients showed an acute infusion reaction, 1 patient a serum sickness-like reaction, in 4 patients a bacterial or viral infection occurred, in 1 patient pancytopenia and 2 patients developed surgical complications. Only 6 patients with adverse events required admission to hospital. A case of tuberculosis after infliximab was not found. The lack of adverse side-effects was associated with young median age and infrequent comorbidities of the cohort. Conclusion: Regarding its strong immunomodulating capacity, infliximab appears to be an efficient and relatively safe therapeutic option for patients with severe IBD. However, the use of infliximab requires careful screening and close patient monitoring to identify patients at risk and the infrequent, but sometimes serious complications of infliximab. Copyright (C) 2004 S. Karger AG, Basel

Relationships Between Reasoning, Reflective Practice, and Evidence-Based Practice: Educators’ Perspectives

Many models of professional thinking exist within occupational therapy, but the relationships among reasoning, reflective practice, and evidence-based practice as essential skills for practice are not clear. Because occupational therapy educators impart these skills to students, understanding how educators conceptualize relationships among skills is necessary. We used Delphi methodology to explore educator conceptualizations of the relationships among clinical reasoning, professional reasoning, reflective practice, and evidence-based practice. Inclusion criteria were: an educator in an occupational therapy program for at least three years at the master’s level or higher, currently an occupational therapy educator based in the United States, and available across multiple survey rounds. Nine participants completed all three survey rounds. Participants agreed that the four skills are reciprocally related to one another, with some discrepancies surrounding differing conceptualizations of clinical and professional reasoning. Additionally, relationships were understood to be non-linear and complex. Continued exploration of how these essential skills are related to one another is needed to support future exploration of how they are integrated in occupational therapy education and how this influences practice

Defining Reasoning, Reflective Practice, and Evidence-Based Practice in Occupational Therapy Education: A Delphi Study

Reasoning, reflective practice, and evidence-based practice are essential skills for occupational therapy practitioners, but it is unclear how these skills are defined in occupational therapy education. We used Delphi methodology to explore educator conceptualizations of clinical reasoning, professional reasoning, reflective practice, and evidence-based practice. Eligible participants on the Delphi expert panel were required to have been an educator in an occupational therapy program for at least three years at the master’s level or higher, to be a current occupational therapy educator, based in the United States, and available across multiple survey rounds. Nine participants completed all three survey rounds. Among members of the expert panel there was continued moderate disagreement about terminology related to reasoning and there were some discrepancies between expert perspectives and the occupational therapy literature. However, these educators largely agreed on key features of the complex constructs. Consistency about the use of these terms will support both education and research related to essential professional skills

Persistent Teaching Practices After Geospatial Technology Professional Development

This case study described teachers with varying technology skills who were implementing the use of geospatial technology (GST) within project-based instruction (PBI) at varying grade levels and contexts 1 to 2 years following professional development. The sample consisted of 10 fifth- to ninth-grade teachers. Data sources included artifacts, observations, interviews, and a GST performance assessment and were analyzed using a constant comparative approach. Teachers’ teaching actions, beliefs, context, and technology skills were categorized. Results indicated that all of the teachers had high beliefs, but their context and level of technology skills strongly influenced their teaching actions. Two types of teachers persisting in practices from professional development were identified: innovators and adapters. Persistence of practice and implementation of the integration of GST within PBI must continue after professional development ends, or the sustainability of the positive results experienced during the professional development will not persist

Persistent Teaching Practices After Geospatial Technology Professional Development

This case study described teachers with varying technology skills who were implementing the use of geospatial technology (GST) within project-based instruction (PBI) at varying grade levels and contexts 1 to 2 years following professional development. The sample consisted of 10 fifth- to ninth-grade teachers. Data sources included artifacts, observations, interviews, and a GST performance assessment and were analyzed using a constant comparative approach. Teachers’ teaching actions, beliefs, context, and technology skills were categorized. Results indicated that all of the teachers had high beliefs, but their context and level of technology skills strongly influenced their teaching actions. Two types of teachers persisting in practices from professional development were identified: innovators and adapters. Persistence of practice and implementation of the integration of GST within PBI must continue after professional development ends, or the sustainability of the positive results experienced during the professional development will not persist

VerdictDB: Universalizing Approximate Query Processing

Despite 25 years of research in academia, approximate query processing (AQP) has had little industrial adoption. One of the major causes of this slow adoption is the reluctance of traditional vendors to make radical changes to their legacy codebases, and the preoccupation of newer vendors (e.g., SQL-on-Hadoop products) with implementing standard features. Additionally, the few AQP engines that are available are each tied to a specific platform and require users to completely abandon their existing databases---an unrealistic expectation given the infancy of the AQP technology. Therefore, we argue that a universal solution is needed: a database-agnostic approximation engine that will widen the reach of this emerging technology across various platforms. Our proposal, called VerdictDB, uses a middleware architecture that requires no changes to the backend database, and thus, can work with all off-the-shelf engines. Operating at the driver-level, VerdictDB intercepts analytical queries issued to the database and rewrites them into another query that, if executed by any standard relational engine, will yield sufficient information for computing an approximate answer. VerdictDB uses the returned result set to compute an approximate answer and error estimates, which are then passed on to the user or application. However, lack of access to the query execution layer introduces significant challenges in terms of generality, correctness, and efficiency. This paper shows how VerdictDB overcomes these challenges and delivers up to 171$\times$ speedup (18.45$\times$ on average) for a variety of existing engines, such as Impala, Spark SQL, and Amazon Redshift, while incurring less than 2.6% relative error. VerdictDB is open-sourced under Apache License.Comment: Extended technical report of the paper that appeared in Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 1461-1476. ACM, 201