Self-Assessed Health Status and Satisfaction with Health Care Services in the Context of the Enlarged European Union

The paper aims at analysing the relationship between self-rated health-status, satisfaction with health care services and socio-economic factors, in the context of different national health care systems in the enlarged European Union. The effects of socio-economic deprivation and the functioning of national health care systems on self-rated health status and satisfaction with health care services are investigated using the European Social Survey 2006 dataset (ESS3), and macro data provided by Eurostat (2007) and the World Health Organization (2007). Socio-economic deprivation is measured both at the micro-level (using indicators of economic strain, household income, education, employment status and belonging to discriminated groups), and the macro-level (national poverty rates, the values of poverty thresholds, quintile ratios and GDP per capita). The performance of national health care systems is quantified with the help of two indexes, designed for the purpose of the present study: an index of total health care provisions and an index of governmental commitment to health care. The following countries are included in the analysis: Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.self-assessed health ; health care systems ; health inequalities ; governmental policies

Study on Measuring and Analysing the Quality of Road Freight Transport Service

The study aims to measure and analyse the quality of road haulage services in order to identify and implement best practices for quality improvement. The assessment of the quality of road haulage services was carried out from the external perspective of the customer with a focus on the dimensions of quality, based on their perceptions of the satisfaction of the requirements and conditions demanded by the 43 customers, represented by companies from the food industry, light industry and wholesale trade. As research methods, a survey based on a structured questionnaire was used, which included 51 items/primary variables that formed the basis for the construction of the 5 aggregate variables, which express both the quality of the road haulage service provided to the approached as a process and the human resource practices that contributed to quality assurance

Cytotaxonomical remarks on Loncomelos visianicum (Hyacinthaceae), a poorly known species endemic to Croatia

Loncomelos visianicum, a rare and poorly known geophyte of the Croatian flora, was described from the remote and uninhabited Adriatic island of Palagruza as Ornithogalum visianicum, and it has not been collected again for over a century. Basing on living materials, recently rediscovered in the locus classicus, it was possible to carry out a careful investigation regarding the morphology, karyology, leaf anatomy, and ecology of this very peculiar species. It is triploid, showing 2n = 42 + 0-5B chromosomes, taxonomically quite isolated, showing some morphological relationships with L. narbonense and L. creticum. Currently, L. visianicum is represented by a low number of individuals growing in rocky places within the xerophilous maquis. In addition to a detailed description, a new iconography, conservation status and identification key for Croatian taxa of the genus Loncomelos are also provided

A Cryptographic Analysis of UMTS/LTE AKA

International audienceSecure communications between mobile subscribers and their associated operator networks require mutual authentication and key derivation protocols. The 3GPP standard provides the AKA protocol for just this purpose. Its structure is generic, to be instantiated with a set of seven cryptographic algorithms. The currently-used proposal instantiates these by means of a set of AES-based algorithms called MILENAGE; as an alternative, the ETSI SAGE committee submitted the TUAK algorithms, which rely on a truncation of the internal permutation of Keccak.In this paper, we provide a formal security analysis of the AKA protocol in its complete three-party setting. We formulate requirements with respect to both Man-in-the-Middle (MiM) adversaries, i.e. key-indistinguishability and impersonation security, and to local untrusted serving networks, denoted “servers”, namely state-confidentiality and soundness. We prove that the unmodified AKA protocol attains these properties as long as servers cannot be corrupted. Furthermore, adding a unique server identifier suffices to guarantee all the security statements even in in the presence of corrupted servers. We use a modular proof approach: the first step is to prove the security of (modified and unmodified) AKA with generic cryptographic algorithms that can be represented as a unitary pseudorandom function –PRF– keyed either with the client’s secret key or with the operator key. A second step proceeds to show that TUAK and MILENAGE guarantee this type of pseudorandomness, though the guarantee for MILENAGE requires a stronger assumption. Our paper provides (to our knowledge) the first complete, rigorous analysis of the original AKA protocol and these two instantiations. We stress that such an analysis is important for any protocol deployed in real-life scenarios