bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Association of overweight and obesity with cardiovascular risk factors in patients with atherosclerotic diseases
Authors: Maksimovic Milos , Vlajinac Hristina , Radak Djordje , Marinkovic Jelena , Maksimovic Jadranka , Jorga Jagoda 
Published: July 2019

Summary

Background
The aim of this study was to compare demographic, clinical and biochemical characteristics, including inflammatory markers, according to the nutritional status of patients with verified atherosclerotic disease.

Methods
This cross-sectional study involved 1045 consecutive patients with verified carotid disease or peripheral arterial disease (PAD). Anthropometric parameters and data on cardiovascular risk factors and therapy for hypertension and hyperlipidemia were collected for all participants.

Results
Carotid disease was positively and PAD was negatively associated with body mass index (BMI). Negative association between obesity and PAD was significant only in former smokers, not in current smokers or in patients who never smoked. Overweight and general obesity were significantly related to metabolic syndrome (p < 0.001), lower values of high – density lipoprotein cholesterol (p < 0.001), increased triglycerides (p < 0.001), hyperglycemia (p < 0.001), self-reported diabetes (p < 0.001), hypertension (p < 0.001), high serum uric acid (p < 0.001), increased high sensitivity C-reactive protein (p = 0.020) and former smoking (p = 0.005) after adjustment for age, gender and type of disease. Antihypertensive therapy seems to be less effective in patients who are overweight and obese.

Conclusions
In conclusion, overweight and general obesity were significantly related to several cardiovascular risk factors.
Preoperative lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio versus platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio as a prognostic predictor for non-small cell lung cancer patients
Authors: Yan Haixi , Cai Linling , Chen Shuaishuai , Li Jun 
Published: July 2019

SummaryBackgroundWe investigated the prognostic value of the preoperative lymphocyte-to-mononuclear ratio (LMR) and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) in a large cohort of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).MethodsClinical-pathological data from 507 NSCLC patients at Taizhou Hospital of Zhejiang Province between 2010 and 2016 were retrospectively evaluated. X-tile software was used to assess the optimal cutoff levels for LMR and PLR. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression models were used to assess the prognostic factors.ResultsThe median follow-up duration after surgical resection was 34.5 months. Patients were stratified into 2 groups by LMR (2.6 and = 2.6) and PLR (179.6 and = 179.6). Our results revealed that lower LMR (HR = 3.163 (1.821–5.493), P = 0.000), age (HR = 2.252 (1.412–3.592), P = 0.001), T stage (HR = 3.749 (2.275–6.179), P = 0.000), N stage (HR = 3.106 (1.967–4.902), P = 0.000), and cut edge (HR = 3.830 (1.077–13.618), P = 0.038) were considered to be independent indicators for overall survival (OS) of NSCLC patients. For disease-free survival (DFS), age, sex, T stage, N stage, LMR and cut edge were verified to be independent prognostic factors in patients with NSCLC.ConclusionsIn the study cohort, reduced LMR was a robust independent predictor for both OS and DFS in patients with NSCLC who underwent surgical resection.
Lipid status association with 25-hydroxy vitamin D: Cross sectional study of end stage renal disease patients
Authors: Milinković Neda , Sarić Marija , Jovičić Snežana , Mirković Duško , Ležaić Višnja , Ignjatović Svetlana 
Published: July 2019

SummaryBackgroundSome observational studies indicate an association of 25-hydroxy vitamin D (25(OH)D) insufficiency and atherogenic cholesterol concentrations. The aim of this study was to investigate relationship between 25(OH)D concentrations and lipid parameters in end stage renal disease (ESRD) patients, separately for predialysis, hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis patients.MethodsWe have adjusted 25(OH)D concentrations for seasonal variability with cosinor analysis, and performed all further analysis using these corrected 25(OH)D concentrations. Concentrations of 25(OH)D and the lipid parameters were determined in 214 ESRD patients and 50 control group participants. The analysis included the measurement of 25(OH)D by HPLC, apolipoprotein (Apo) AI, ApoB and Lp(a) by nephelometry, total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and triglyceride (TG) by spectrophotometry and manually calculated ApoB/ApoAI and LDL-C/HDL-C ratio.ResultsESRD patients with adjusted 25(OH)D concentrations of ≤ 50 nmol/L had significantly higher TC (P = 0.005) and ApoAI (P = 0.049). Significantly higher HDL-C (P = 0.011) and ApoAI (P = 0.020) were found in hemodialysis patients with the 25(OH)D concentrations of ≤ 50 nmol/L. The other analyzed lipid parameters differed significantly between predialysis, hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis patients with 25(OH)D concentrations of < 50 nmol/L.ConclusionsOur study indicate the significant relationship between 25(OH)D repletion and optimal concentrations of lipid parameters in ESRD patients. Further research is necessary to explain whether joint evaluation of vitamin D status and lipid abnormalities could improve cardiovascular outcome in ESRD patients.
Influence of selenium supplementation on carbohydrate metabolism and oxidative stress in pregnant women with gestational diabetes mellitus
Authors: Saifi Hadjer , Mabrouk Yassine , Saifi Rayane , Benabdelkader Messaouda , Saidi Mouldi 
Published: July 2019

Summary

Background
In the presence of conflicting advice about the relationship between selenium-type II diabetes-oxidative stress trio, this study aimed to assess the consequences of selenium supplementation on fasting plasma glucose (FPG) level, antioxidant activities of selenodependent and non-selenodependent enzymes, and other markers of oxidative stress studied for the first time during gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM).

Methods
This research was carried out among 180 pregnant Algerian women, 60 of whom were in good health, 60 women with GDM did not take supplements, and 60 women with GDM took selenium orally (50 μg/d) for 12 weeks starting from their second trimester of pregnancy. Blood samples were taken in order to assay FPG level and oxidative stress markers.

Results
Selenium supplementation during GDM has demonstrated its hypoglycemic power in the significant decline of FPG level, and its antioxidant properties in the significant reinforcement of antioxidant activities of erythrocyte selenodependent enzymes (glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase), the significant increase in erythrocyte catalase and superoxide dismutase activities simultaneously with the highest decrease in erythrocyte and plasma malondialdehyde levels. This decrease was only significant for plasma carbonyl proteins, which was not the case for erythrocyte carbonyl proteins.

Conclusions
The recourse to selenium supplementation by seleno-deficient pregnant women with GDM is beneficial for maternal health. This micronutrient exploits its antioxidant and insulin-mimetic properties in the maintenance of blood glucose homeostasis and the fight against oxidative stress, and consequently, its supplementation delays the occurrence of GDM complications.
Carl F. H. Henry on the Problem of (Good and) Evil
Authors: Martin Edward N. 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
Carl Henry devotes a few chapters directly (and a few indirectly) in volume 6 of his God, Revelation, and Authority [GRA] to the problem of evil [POE]. The author examines Henry’s contribution as a theologian, noting that GRA is a work of theology, not philosophy proper. However, Henry had a PhD in Philosophy (Boston, 1949), and one finds present several presuppositions and control beliefs that are philosophically motivated. Observation of the text reveals several of these. Chief here is Henry’s working assumption that to understand and explain the nature of evil, one must first understand and explain the nature, origin and etiology of good. This point and its implications are developed at length in this article. Unsurprising is Henry’s contribution exhibiting an awareness of methods and theodical approaches traditionally used by philosophers of religion such as Rowe, Plantinga, and Hick. Surprising is the fact that Henry does not clearly take a side on the nature of human free will. What he does say seems to underdetermine his exact position. Finally, the importance of Kant vis a vis Henry’s theodicy and entire theological program is emphasized as well.
The Uneasy Pulpit: Carl Henry, the Authority of the Bible, and Expositional Preaching
Authors: King Kevin 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
It has been asserted that preaching in the first half of the twenty-first century is in crisis by the authors of Engaging Preaching. This crisis has arisen, so say the authors, due in part to those who have been entrusted to preach the ‘oracles of God’ (1 Peter 4:11), having failed to faithfully proclaim the Word of the Lord. No longer do the words of ‘Thus saith the Lord’, regularly fill the halls of the sanctuary. Instead of a sure word from the Bible, those in attendance are just as likely to give tips on self-fulfillment or achieving one’s dreams. By this practice, it seems there are a significant number of pulpit practitioners who neither trust in the authority or the sufficiency of the Word of God. The situation seems bleak, but there is a remedy to be applied to this situation. Carl F. H. Henry has left us a wealth of theological writings that speak to this very problem. This paper will argue as Henry has masterfully argued for the authority of Scripture, the preacher finds a sure footing for a pulpit practice that displays the authority and the sufficiency of the Bible. It will be argued that expositional preaching is the most natural response to a robust view of the authority and sufficiency of the Word of God.
Tracking Anonymized Bluetooth Devices
Authors: Becker Johannes K , Li David , Starobinski David 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices use public (non-encrypted) advertising channels to announce their presence to other devices. To prevent tracking on these public channels, devices may use a periodically changing, randomized address instead of their permanent Media Access Control (MAC) address. In this work we show that many state-of-the-art devices which are implementing such anonymization measures are vulnerable to passive tracking that extends well beyond their address randomization cycles. We show that it is possible to extract identifying tokens from the pay-load of advertising messages for tracking purposes. We present an address-carryover algorithm which exploits the asynchronous nature of payload and address changes to achieve tracking beyond the address randomization of a device. We furthermore identify an identity-exposing attack via a device accessory that allows permanent, non-continuous tracking, as well as an iOS side-channel which allows insights into user activity. Finally, we provide countermeasures against the presented algorithm and other privacy flaws in BLE advertising.
MAPS: Scaling Privacy Compliance Analysis to a Million Apps
Authors: Zimmeck Sebastian , Story Peter , Smullen Daniel , Ravichander Abhilasha , Wang Ziqi , Reidenberg Joel , Cameron Russell N. , Sadeh Norman 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
The app economy is largely reliant on data collection as its primary revenue model. To comply with legal requirements, app developers are often obligated to notify users of their privacy practices in privacy policies. However, prior research has suggested that many developers are not accurately disclosing their apps’ privacy practices. Evaluating discrepancies between apps’ code and privacy policies enables the identification of potential compliance issues. In this study, we introduce the Mobile App Privacy System (MAPS) for conducting an extensive privacy census of Android apps. We designed a pipeline for retrieving and analyzing large app populations based on code analysis and machine learning techniques. In its first application, we conduct a privacy evaluation for a set of 1,035,853 Android apps from the Google Play Store. We find broad evidence of potential non-compliance. Many apps do not have a privacy policy to begin with. Policies that do exist are often silent on the practices performed by apps. For example, 12.1% of apps have at least one location-related potential compliance issue. We hope that our extensive analysis will motivate app stores, government regulators, and app developers to more effectively review apps for potential compliance issues.
Keeping the Smart Home Private with Smart(er) IoT Traffic Shaping
Authors: Apthorpe Noah , Huang Danny Yuxing , Reisman Dillon , Narayanan Arvind , Feamster Nick 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
The proliferation of smart home Internet of things (IoT) devices presents unprecedented challenges for preserving privacy within the home. In this paper, we demonstrate that a passive network observer (e.g., an Internet service provider) can infer private in-home activities by analyzing Internet traffic from commercially available smart home devices even when the devices use end-to-end transport-layer encryption. We evaluate common approaches for defending against these types of traffic analysis attacks, including firewalls, virtual private networks, and independent link padding, and find that none sufficiently conceal user activities with reasonable data overhead. We develop a new defense, “stochastic traffic padding” (STP), that makes it difficult for a passive network adversary to reliably distinguish genuine user activities from generated traffic patterns designed to look like user interactions. Our analysis provides a theoretical bound on an adversary’s ability to accurately detect genuine user activities as a function of the amount of additional cover traffic generated by the defense technique.
Mesh: A Supply Chain Solution with Locally Private Blockchain Transactions
Authors: AlTawy Riham , Gong Guang 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
A major line of research on blockchains is geared towards enhancing the privacy of transactions through anonymity using generic non-interactive proofs. However, there is a good cluster of application scenarios where complete anonymity is not desirable and accountability is in fact required. In this work, we utilize non-interactive proofs of knowledge of elliptic curve discrete logarithms to present membership and verifiable encryption proof, which offers plausible anonymity when combined with the regular signing process of the blockchain transactions. The proof system requires no trusted setup, both its communication and computation complexities are linear in the number of set members, and its security relies on the discrete logarithm assumption. As a use-case for this scenario, we present Mesh which is a blockchain-based framework for supply chain management using RFIDs. Finally, the confidentiality of the transacted information is realized using a lightweight key chaining mechanism implemented on RFIDs. We formally define and prove the main security features of the protocol, and report on experiments for evaluating the performance of the modified transactions for this system.
Encrypted Databases for Differential Privacy
Authors: Agarwal Archita , Herlihy Maurice , Kamara Seny , Moataz Tarik 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
The problem of privatizing statistical databases is a well-studied topic that has culminated with the notion of differential privacy. The complementary problem of securing these differentially private databases, however, has—as far as we know—not been considered in the past. While the security of private databases is in theory orthogonal to the problem of private statistical analysis (e.g., in the central model of differential privacy the curator is trusted) the recent real-world deployments of differentially-private systems suggest that it will become a problem of increasing importance. In this work, we consider the problem of designing encrypted databases (EDB) that support differentially-private statistical queries. More precisely, these EDBs should support a set of encrypted operations with which a curator can securely query and manage its data, and a set of private operations with which an analyst can privately analyze the data. Using such an EDB, a curator can securely outsource its database to an untrusted server (e.g., on-premise or in the cloud) while still allowing an analyst to privately query it. We show how to design an EDB that supports private histogram queries. As a building block, we introduce a differentially-private encrypted counter based on the binary mechanism of Chan et al. (ICALP, 2010). We then carefully combine multiple instances of this counter with a standard encrypted database scheme to support differentially-private histogram queries.
p1-FP: Extraction, Classification, and Prediction of Website Fingerprints with Deep Learning
Authors: Oh Se Eun , Sunkam Saikrishna , Hopper Nicholas 
Published: July 2019

AbstractRecent advances in Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures have received a great deal of attention due to their ability to outperform state-of-the-art machine learning techniques across a wide range of application, as well as automating the feature engineering process. In this paper, we broadly study the applicability of deep learning to website fingerprinting. First, we show that unsupervised DNNs can generate lowdimensional informative features that improve the performance of state-of-the-art website fingerprinting attacks. Second, when used as classifiers, we show that they can exceed performance of existing attacks across a range of application scenarios, including fingerprinting Tor website traces, fingerprinting search engine queries over Tor, defeating fingerprinting defenses, and fingerprinting TLS-encrypted websites. Finally, we investigate which site-level features of a website influence its fingerprintability by DNNs.
Snapdoc: Authenticated snapshots with history privacy in peer-to-peer collaborative editing
Authors: Kollmann Stephan A. , Kleppmann Martin , Beresford Alastair R. 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
Document collaboration applications, such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online, need to ensure that all collaborators have a consistent view of the shared document, and usually achieve this by relying on a trusted server. Other existing approaches that do not rely on a trusted third party assume that all collaborating devices are trusted. In particular, when inviting a new collaborator to a group, one needs to choose between a) keeping past edits private and sending only the latest state (a snapshot) of the document; or b) allowing the new collaborator to verify her view of the document is consistent with other honest devices by sending the full history of (signed) edits. We present a new protocol which allows an authenticated snapshot to be sent to new collaborators while both hiding the past editing history, and allowing them to verify consistency. We evaluate the costs of the protocol by emulating the editing history of 270 Wikipedia pages; 99% of insert operations were processed within 11.0 ms; 64.9 ms for delete operations. An additional benefit of authenticated snapshots is a median 84% reduction in the amount of data sent to a new collaborator compared to a basic protocol that transfers a full edit history.
Investigating Statistical Privacy Frameworks from the Perspective of Hypothesis Testing
Authors: Liu Changchang , He Xi , Chanyaswad Thee , Wang Shiqiang , Mittal Prateek 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
Over the last decade, differential privacy (DP) has emerged as the gold standard of a rigorous and provable privacy framework. However, there are very few practical guidelines on how to apply differential privacy in practice, and a key challenge is how to set an appropriate value for the privacy parameter ɛ. In this work, we employ a statistical tool called hypothesis testing for discovering useful and interpretable guidelines for the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving frameworks. We formalize and implement hypothesis testing in terms of an adversary’s capability to infer mutually exclusive sensitive information about the input data (such as whether an individual has participated or not) from the output of the privacy-preserving mechanism. We quantify the success of the hypothesis testing using the precision- recall-relation, which provides an interpretable and natural guideline for practitioners and researchers on selecting ɛ. Our key results include a quantitative analysis of how hypothesis testing can guide the choice of the privacy parameter ɛ in an interpretable manner for a differentially private mechanism and its variants. Importantly, our findings show that an adversary’s auxiliary information - in the form of prior distribution of the database and correlation across records and time - indeed influences the proper choice of ɛ. Finally, we also show how the perspective of hypothesis testing can provide useful insights on the relationships among a broad range of privacy frameworks including differential privacy, Pufferfish privacy, Blowfish privacy, dependent differential privacy, inferential privacy, membership privacy and mutual-information based differential privacy.
A QUIC Look at Web Tracking
Authors: Sy Erik , Burkert Christian , Federrath Hannes , Fischer Mathias 
Published: July 2019

Abstract
QUIC has been developed by Google to improve the transport performance of HTTPS traffic. It currently accounts for approx. 7% of the global Internet traffic. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of user tracking via QUIC from the perspective of an online service. Our analysis reveals that the protocol design contains violations of privacy best practices through which a tracker can passively and uniquely identify clients across several connections. This tracking mechanisms can achieve reduced delays and bandwidth requirements compared to conventional browser fingerprinting or HTTP cookies. This allows them to be applied in resource- or time-constrained scenarios such as real-time biddings in online advertising. To validate this finding, we investigated browsers which enable QUIC by default, e.g., Google Chrome. Our results suggest that the analyzed browsers do not provide protective measures against tracking via QUIC. However, the introduced mechanisms reset during a browser restart, which clears the cached connection data and thus limits achievable tracking periods. To mitigate the identified privacy issues, we propose changes to QUIC’s protocol design, the operation of QUIC-enabled web servers, and browser implementations.