Anonymous credit cards and their collusion analysis

Communications networks are traditionally used to bring information together. They can also be used to keep information apart in order to protect personal privacy. A cryptographic protocol specifies a process by which some information is transferred among some users and hidden from others. We show how to implement anonymous credit cards using simple cryptographic protocols. We pose, and solve, a collusion problem which determines whether it is possible for a subset of users to discover information that is designed to be hidden from them during or after execution of the anonymous credit card protocol

Characteristics and costs of individuals experiencing severe hypoglycaemia requiring emergency ambulance assistance in the community

Background and aims: Hypoglycaemia causes considerable a burden to individuals the healthcare providers. The aim of this study was to examine clinical characteristics of individuals requiring emergency medical assistance by ambulance services for an episode of severe hypoglycaemia and to estimate provider costs of hypoglycaemia. Materials and methods: Routinely collected information was retrieved for all episodes of severe hypoglycaemia attended to by the emergency ambulance services for a population of 367,051 people, including 75,603 people with diabetes, in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, UK, between 01/11/10 to 28/02/11. A total of 90,435 emergency calls were received in the study period, of which 523 (0.6%) were recorded as severe hypoglycaemia. The time to response, on-site treatment and hospitalisation were recorded along with standard clinical and blood glucose (BG) measures. Ambulance services costs were calculated. Results: The mean (SD) [proportion <= 3.2 mmol/L] pre and post-treatment BG levels were 1.9 (0.9) mmol/L [92%] and 6.5 (3.1) mmol/L [3%] respectively, 74% were under insulin treatment, 28% had nocturnal hypoglycaemia, and 153 (32%) individuals were transported to hospital. Lower pre-treatment BG (p<0.01) and Glasgow Coma Scale scores (p=0.05) were observed in insulin treated individuals in comparison to non-insulin treated individuals. No significant differences in individual characteristics were observed for other clinical measurements: post-treatment blood glucose (p=0.39), systolic blood pressure (p=0.28), diastolic blood pressure (p=0.64) and heart rate (p=0.93). Non insulin treatment was an independent predictor of transportation to hospital (p<0.01). Median time from allocation of call to departure of scene by ambulance services was 39 and 59 minutes for those transported and not transported to hospital respectively, translating to costs of £92 and £139 respectively. The median time from allocation to handing over patients to emergency staff was 75 minutes, equating to a cost of £176. Conclusion: The majority of cases of severe hypoglycaemia are successfully treated at the scene by the emergency ambulance services. Insulin treated and non insulin treated individuals do not differ by clinical characteristics, however non insulin treated individuals were more likely to be transported to hospital. Further studies are needed into the effect of prehospital ambulance care by treatment type on subsequent outcomes

Anonymous credit card transactions

Techniques for performing credit-card transactions without disclosing the subject matter of the transaction to the institution providing the credit card. The techniques include the use of a communications exchange so that information and funds may be transferred without the destination for the transfer knowing the source of the information or funds and the use of public key encryption so that each party to the transaction and the communications exchange can read only the information the party or the exchange needs for its role in the transaction. Also disclosed are techniques for authenticating a card holder by receiving personal information from the card holder, using the information to ask the card holder one or more questions, and using the answers to authenticate the card holder

Data mining approach to estimate the duration of drug therapy from longitudinal electronic medical records

Background: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) from primary/ ambulatory care systems present a new and promising source of information for conducting clinical and translational research. Objectives: To address the methodological and computational challenges in order to extract reliable medication information from raw data which is often complex, incomplete and erroneous. To assess whether the use of specific chaining fields of medication information may additionally improve the data quality. Methods: Guided by a range of challenges associated with missing and internally inconsistent data, we introduce two methods for the robust extraction of patient-level medication data. First method relies on chaining fields to estimate duration of treatment (“chaining”), while second disregards chaining fields and relies on the chronology of records (“continuous”). Centricity EMR database was used to estimate treatment duration with both methods for two widely prescribed drugs among type 2 diabetes patients: insulin and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists. Results: At individual patient level the “chaining” approach could identify the treatment alterations longitudinally and produced more robust estimates of treatment duration for individual drugs, while the “continuous” method was unable to capture that dynamics. At population level, both methods produced similar estimates of average treatment duration, however, notable differences were observed at individual-patient level. Conclusion: The proposed algorithms explicitly identify and handle longitudinal erroneous or missing entries and estimate treatment duration with specific drug(s) of interest, which makes them a valuable tool for future EMR based clinical and pharmaco-epidemiological studies. To improve accuracy of real-world based studies, implementing chaining fields of medication information is recommended.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

ERbeta regulation of NF-kB activation in prostate cancer is mediated by HIF-1

We examined the regulation of NF-kappaB in prostate cancer by estrogen receptor beta (ERbeta) based on the inverse correlation between p65 and ERbeta expression that exists in prostate carcinomas and reports that ERbeta can inhibit NF-kappaB activation, although the mechanism is not known. We demonstrate that ERbeta functions as a gate-keeper for NF-kappaB p65 signaling by repressing its expression and nuclear translocation. ERbeta regulation of NF-kappaB signaling is mediated by HIF-1. Loss of ERbeta or hypoxia stabilizes HIF-1alpha, which we found to be a direct driver of IKKbeta transcription through a hypoxia response element present in the promoter of the IKKbeta gene. The increase of IKKbeta expression in ERbeta-ablated cells correlates with an increase in phospho-IkappaBalpha and concomitant p65 nuclear translocation. An inverse correlation between the expression of ERbeta and IKKbeta/p65 was also observed in the prostates of ERbeta knockout (BERKO) mice, Gleason grade 5 prostate tumors and analysis of prostate cancer databases. These findings provide a novel mechanism for how ERbeta prevents NF-kappaB activation and raise the exciting possibility that loss of ERbeta expression is linked to chronic inflammation in the prostate, which contributes to the development of high-grade prostate cancer

MEC-Intelligent Agent Support for Low-Latency Data Plane in Private NextG Core

Private 5G networks will soon be ubiquitous across the future-generation smart wireless access infrastructures hosting a wide range of performance-critical applications. A high-performing User Plane Function (UPF) in the data plane is critical to achieving such stringent performance goals, as it governs fast packet processing and supports several key control-plane operations. Based on a private 5G prototype implementation and analysis, it is imperative to perform dynamic resource management and orchestration at the UPF. This paper leverages Mobile Edge Cloud-Intelligent Agent (MEC-IA), a logically centralized entity that proactively distributes resources at UPF for various service types, significantly reducing the tail latency experienced by the user requests while maximizing resource utilization. Extending the MEC-IA functionality to MEC layers further incurs data plane latency reduction. Based on our extensive simulations, under skewed uRLLC traffic arrival, the MEC-IA assisted bestfit UPF-MEC scheme reduces the worst-case latency of UE requests by up to 77.8% w.r.t. baseline. Additionally, the system can increase uRLLC connectivity gain by 2.40x while obtaining 40% CapEx savings

Strand-biased gene distribution, purine assymetry and environmental factors influence protein evolution in Bacillus

AbstractA strong purine asymmetry, along with strand-biased gene distribution and the presence of PolC, prevails in Bacillus and some other members of Firmicutes, Fusobacteria and Tenericutes. The analysis of protein features in 21 Bacillus species of diverse metabolic, virulence and ecological traits revealed that purine asymmetry in conjunction with lineage/niche specific constraints significantly influences protein evolution in Bacillus. All Bacillus species, except for Se-respiring Bacillus selenitireducens, display distinct strand-specific biases in amino acid usage, which may affect the isoelectric point or surface charge distribution of proteins with prevalence of acidic and basic residues in the leading and lagging strand proteins, respectively

Prevalence and incidence of complications at diagnosis of T2DM and during follow-up by BMI and ethnicity:A matched case-control analysis

Aims To estimate the risk of developing long-term major cardiovascular and renal complications in relation to levels of body mass index (BMI) in a population of White European (WE), African-Caribbean (AC), and South Asian (SA) patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Materials and methods Patients with new diagnosis of T2DM, aged ≥ 18 years from January 2000 (n = 69,436) and their age-sex-ethnicity matched non-diabetic controls (n = 272,190) were identified from UK primary care database. Incidence rates ratios (IRRs) for non-fatal major cardiovascular events (MACE) and chronic kidney disease (CKD) in patients with T2DM compared to controls were estimated using multivariate Mantel-Cox model. Results Among normal weight patients with T2DM, WEs had significantly higher prevalence of cardiovascular multi-morbidity (95% CI 9.5, 11.3), compared to SAs (95% CI 4.8, 9.5). AC and SA overweight and obese patients had similar prevalence, while obese WEs had significantly higher prevalence. During a median 7 years of follow-up, risk of MACE was significantly higher for overweight (95% CI of IRR 1.50, 2.46) and obese (95% CI of IRR 1.49, 2.43) SAs compared to their WE counterparts. However, similar risk levels were observed for normal weight WEs and SAs, respectively. Risk of CKD was higher and uniform for BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2 amongst WEs and ACs, whereas only overweight patients had significantly higher risk of CKD amongst SA [IRR 2.08 (95% CI 1.49, 2.93)]. Conclusion Risk of MACE/CKD varies over levels of BMI within each ethnic group, with overweight SAs having a disproportionate risk of CKD

Anonymous credit card transactions

Techniques for performing credit-card transactions without disclosing the subject matter of the transaction to the institution providing the credit card. The techniques include the use of a communications exchange so that information and funds may be transferred without the destination for the transfer knowing the source of the information or funds and the use of public key encryption so that each party to the transaction and the communications exchange can read only the information the party or the exchange needs for its role in the transaction. Also disclosed are techniques for authenticating a card holder by receiving personal information from the card holder, using the information to ask the card holder one or more questions, and using the answers to authenticate the card holder