Submission of Evidence on Online Violence Against Women to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its Causes and Consequences, Dr Dubravka Šimonović

Figure S1. B3GALNT2 levels determined by W.B. and ROC curve. a–c Relative mRNA expression of B3GALNT2 in HCC tumor tissues and normal liver tissues obtained from GSE76427, GSE36376, and TCGA-LIHC datasets. d Western blot analysis of B3GALNT2 levels in 24 pairs of HCC tissues. T HCC tumor tissue, N adjacent non-tumor tissue. e ROC curve analysis of the sensitivity and specificity for the predictive value of TNM model, B3GALNT2 expression, and the combination model. (TIFF 546 kb

Growth differentiation factor-15/adiponectin ratio as a potential biomarker for metabolic syndrome in Han Chinese

AimsGrowth differentiation factor-15 (GDF-15) and adiponectin are adipokines that regulate metabolism. This study aimed to evaluate the roles of GDF-15, adiponectin, and GDF-15/adiponectin ratio (G/A ratio) as biomarkers for detecting metabolic syndrome (MS).Materials and methodsThis cross-sectional study included 676 participants aged 20–70 years in Jurong, China. The participants were divided into four groups based on sex and age (<40 and ≥40 years). MS was defined according to the modified National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III criteria. Receiver operating characteristic curves were used to evaluate the performance of GDF-15, adiponectin, and the G/A ratio in predicting MS.ResultsThe prevalence of MS was 22.0% (149/676). Logistic regression analysis indicated that the G/A ratio and adiponectin levels, but not GDF-15 levels, were correlated with MS [odds ratio; 95% CI 1.010 (1.006–1.013) and 0.798 (0.735–0.865), respectively] after adjusting for confounding factors. The G/A ratio displayed a significant relationship with MS in each subgroup and with each MS component in both men and women; however, adiponectin concentrations were significantly associated with MS and all its components only in men (all P <0.05). The area under the curve (AUC) of the G/A ratio and the adiponectin level for MS was 0.758 and 0.748, respectively. The highest AUC was 0.757 for the adiponectin level in men and 0.724 for the G/A ratio in women.ConclusionsThis study suggests that the G/A ratio and adiponectin are potential biomarkers for detecting MS in women and men, respectively

Sustained high glucose intake accelerates type 1 diabetes in NOD mice

IntroductionEpidemiological studies have suggested that dietary factors, especially high consumption of high glycaemic index carbohydrates and sugars, may trigger or exacerbate the progression of type 1 diabetes. We aimed to provide experimental evidence to confirm this relevance and to explore the underlying mechanisms.MethodsNOD mice were given sustained high-glucose drinking or glucose-free water and observed for the incidence of type 1 diabetes and islet inflammation. RNAseq was performed to detect the transcriptome changes of the NOD islet beta cell line NIT-1 after high glucose treatment, and mass spectrometry was performed to detect the proteome changes of NIT-1-cells-derived sEVs.ResultsSustained high glucose drinking significantly aggravates islet inflammation and accelerates the onset of type 1 diabetes in NOD mice. Mechanistically, high glucose treatment induces aberrant ER stress and up-regulates the expression of autoantigens in islet beta cell. Moreover, high glucose treatment alters the proteome of beta-cells-derived sEVs, and significantly enhances the ability of sEVs to promote DC maturation and stimulate immune inflammatory response.DiscussionThis study provides evidence for negative effect of high glucose intake as a dietary factor on the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes in genetically predisposed individuals. Therefore, avoiding high sugar intake may be an effective disease prevention strategy for children or adults susceptible to type 1 diabetes

Interorganisational conflict between national and provincial sport organisations within China's elite sport system: Perspectives from national organisations

© 2018 Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand. In this article, the authors examine interorganisational conflict between provincial and national sport organisations in China. The authors theoretically ground the research in work related to interorganisational relationships and interorganisational conflict. The three case studies are artistic gymnastics, swimming, and cycling, and the authors conducted interviews with 11 staff from the relevant national-level sport organisations. Secondary data was sourced from official publications, websites, and influential domestic media. The key finding is that, whilst famed for its top-down bureaucratic system, there is considerable interorganisational conflict within the Chinese sport system. The extent and characteristics of the national-provincial conflict vary between sports. But there is also some consistency regarding the causes of the conflict and the measures adopted to mitigate the tension. Interorganisational conflict provides a useful heuristic for articulating and understanding the interorganisational relationships within the Chinese elite sport system and hence advances elite sport management research

Verifiable Edge Computing for Indoor Positioning

Edge computing has been widely adopted in many systems, thanks for its advantages to offer low latency and alleviate heavy request loads from end users. Its integration with indoor positioning is one of promising research topics. Different from a traditional positioning system where a user normally query remotely deployed positioning services provided by a Location Information Service Provider (LIS), LIS will outsource its service to an edge device, and the user can obtain the service by directly accessing the edge device in an edge computing-based system. Though the benefits from edge computing, there is still some open issues for service outsourcing. One of them is how to ensure that the outsourced service is executed honestly by the edge device. However, the current literature has not yet seriously studied this issue with a feasible solution. In this paper, we design a verification scheme to solve this open problem for indoor positioning based on edge computing. By injecting some specially designed datasetinto a trained machine learning based positioning model, the functionality of outsourced model on edge devices can be verified through this dataset with regard to its prediction accuracy from outsourced model. The verification is successful only when the prediction accuracy can pass a threshold. In experiments, we provide extensive empirical evidence using state-of-the-art positioning models based on real-world datasets to prove the effectiveness of our proposed scheme and meanwhile investigate the effects caused by different factors.Peer reviewe

Efficient Privacy Protection Protocols for 5G Enabled Positioning in Industrial IoT

Publisher Copyright: IEEEHigh-accuracy positioning has drawn huge attention with the potential in enhancing location-aware communications, intelligent transportation, and so on. The emergency of the fifth-generation (5G) technologies like device to device (D2D) communications, vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications and crowdsourcing networks is expected to help achieve highly accurate positioning. By employing nearby mobile terminals to estimate position cooperatively, these technologies can improve positioning accuracy effectively, especially in indoor and urban areas. Despite the benefit, the potential information disclosure in these positioning systems threatens the engagement of public participants (also known as reference points). The location of the reference points and their distances to a target point is quite sensitive since they can be easily used to locate the reference points once exposed. Though existing solutions based on Paillier homomorphic encryption have been proposed to preserve the privacy of distance information. The sensitivity of reference points’ locations is ignored. Additionally, the adoption of Paillier introduces a high computation cost, which is impractical in reality. To address the above problems, this paper proposes two efficient protocols, named Pub-pos and Pri-pos. By leveraging matrix concatenation and multiplication, these two protocols can disguise the original sensitive data, including both distance and location information, into a random matrix while keeping a positioning result intact. We analyze security strength, complexity and optimal variable selection of the proposed protocols. Numerous experiments verify that our proposed protocols have significant efficiency improvement in both system and individual levels compared with a Paillier based solution.Peer reviewe

Predict Pairwise Trust based on Machine Learning in Online Social Networks

Trust plays a crucial role in online social networks where users do not communicate or interact with each other in a direct face-to-face manner. Although many researchers have already conducted comprehensive studies on trust computing like trust evaluation, pairwise trust prediction is still relatively under explored especially with machine learning methods which can overcome the disadvantages of both linear predication and trust propagation. This survey aims to fill this gap and first provides an overview of state-of-the-art researches in pairwise trust prediction using machine learning techniques, especially in the context of social networking. Specifically, we present a workflow of trust prediction using machine learning and summarize current available trust-related datasets, classifiers and different metrics used to evaluate a trained classifier. Also, we review, compare, and contrast the literature for the purpose of identifying open issues and directing future research.Peer reviewe

Privacy-preserving D2D Cooperative Location Verification

Device-to-Device (D2D) cooperative location verification allows a device to verify its location with the help of neighbouring devices. It is especially handy in location-based services where location verification is essential. However, the exposure of device location during verification rises a big privacy risk for participants since they have to send their real-time locations to unknown verifiers holding anonymous identities. Thus, a privacy-preserving solution is urgently needed to provide verification without location disclosure. Traditional solutions based on Paillier and garbled circuits can solve the problem but also introduce high cost. Based on order-preserving encryption, we propose an efficient protocol with high-security guarantee to address this issue. Apart from rigorous security proof, complexity analysis and extensive experiments are also conducted to evaluate the proposed solution. The results compared with related work show that order-preserving encryption based mechanism achieves the best balance with regards to privacy, utility and performance requirements.Peer reviewe

Volunteering for sports mega events: A non-host region perspective

Despite a plethora of studies focussing on sports mega event volunteering, little is known about volunteers who live outside of the host city. This exploratory research makes a novel contribution by focusing on a group of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games volunteers from a non-host region. Within this context, the study explores volunteers’ motives, the utility of using financial subsidies to support volunteering participation, and their attitudes towards post-event volunteering. Semi-structured interviews with twelve volunteers were conducted, accompanied by interviews with key local stakeholders. The findings suggest that Olympic-related factors and altruistic feelings were central motivations to volunteering. Some previous volunteering experiences increased confidence levels to volunteer at the Olympics. The financial scheme was perceived as an impetus further enhancing Leicestershire residents’ confidence to volunteer. Program participants also indicated positive attitudes towards future volunteering intentions