Search

Background Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death worldwide. Smoking is known to cause coronary artery disease, but studies have also shown that smoking independently is associated with higher risk of heart failure. However, the link between smoking and cardiac structure and function is not yet fully examined. Purpose The aim of the study was to investigate the independent effect of cigarette smoking on cardiac structure and function in a general population using echocardiographic measures. Methods A prospective cohort of 3,874 participants from a general population free of prevalent heart disease underwent an echocardiographic examination including two-dimensional speckle-tracking analysis. Smoking history was obtained through a self-administered questionnaire, that generated three groups; current smokers (18.6%), former smokers (40.9%) and never smokers (40.5%). Pack-years were estimated from the questionnaire. Results After multivariable adjustment for age, sex, body mass index, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes and lung function, current smokers had significantly alterations in septal thickness (1.1±0.2 cm, P=0.018) and relative wall thickness (0.4±0.1 cm, P=0.016) compared to never smokers. Furthermore, left ventricular mass index (LVMi) was increased in current smokers compared to never smokers (85.8±19.3 g/cm2, P=0.048). Reduced left ventricle systolic function as assessed by global longitudinal strain (GLS) was evident in current smokers compared to never smokers (19.1±2.3%, P Conclusion In a large general population study without known heart disease, current smoking and accumulated pack-years were independently associated with alterations in cardiac structure and reduced systolic function. Furthermore, we found that continuous smokers over a 10-year period developed relatively worse systolic function and increased LV structure alterations compared to never smokers and to participants that stopped smoking during that period. Funding Acknowledgement Type of funding sources: Foundation. Main funding source(s): The Copenhagen City Heart Study is funded by The Danish Heart Foundation andThe Metropolitan Region of Denmark.

Building trustless cross-blockchain trading protocols is challenging. Therefore, centralized liquidity providers remain the preferred route to execute transfers across chains - which fundamentally contradicts the purpose of permissionless ledgers to replace trusted intermediaries. Enabling cross-blockchain trades could not only enable currently competing blockchain projects to better collaborate, but seems of particular importance to decentralized exchanges as those are currently limited to the trade of digital assets within their respective blockchain ecosystem. In this paper we systematize the notion of cryptocurrency-backed tokens, an approach towards trustless cross-chain communication. We propose XCLAIM, a protocol for issuing, trading, and redeeming e.g. Bitcoin-backed tokens on Ethereum. We provide implementations for three possible protocol versions and evaluate their security and on-chain costs. With XCLAIM, it costs at most USD 1.17 to issue an arbitrary amount of Bitcoin-backed tokens on Ethereum, given current blockchain transaction fees. Our protocol requires no modifications to Bitcoin's and Ethereum's consensus rules and is general enough to support other cryptocurrencies.

Users of online services such as messaging, code hosting and collaborative document editing expect the services to uphold the integrity of their data. Despite providers��� best efforts, data corruption still occurs, but at present service integrity violations are excluded from SLAs. For providers to include such violations as part of SLAs, the competing requirements of clients and providers must be satisfied. Clients need the ability to independently identify and prove service integrity violations to claim compensation. At the same time, providers must be able to refute spurious claims. We describe LibSEAL, a SEcure Audit Library for Internet services that creates a non-repudiable audit log of service operations and checks invariants to discover violations of service integrity. LibSEAL is a drop-in replacement for TLS libraries used by services, and thus observes and logs all service requests and responses. It runs inside a trusted execution environment, such as Intel SGX, to protect the integrity of the audit log. Logs are stored using an embedded relational database, permitting service invariant violations to be discovered using simple SQL queries. We evaluate LibSEAL with three popular online services (Git, ownCloud and Dropbox) and demonstrate that it is effective in discovering integrity violations, while reducing throughput by at most 14%.

The friction and wear behavior of several types of PEEK polymers and composites were studied. The influence of carbon fiber, lubricant and thermally conductive fillers were evaluated, as well as the effects of contact load and temperature. The tests were done using a reciprocating ball-on-disc set-up. The materials were tested under the load of 5 N and 15 N, at room temperature, 80°C, 120°C and 150°C. The difference between the materials was substantial, with a friction coefficient varying between 0.03 and 0.3 for the different materials at 120°C. PEEK with carbon fiber filler showed an improvement in both friction and wear compared to unfilled PEEK. When adding lubricant, PTFE, to the composite the friction and wear were improved even more. PEEK with thermally conductive filler on the other hand had both highest friction and wear. Increasing the temperature slightly decreased both friction and wear for most of the PEEK materials. At 150°C, only the composite with PTFE lubricant had a low friction and wear.

We introduce TaLoS1, a drop-in replacement for existing transport layer security (TLS) libraries that protects itself from a malicious environment by running inside an Intel SGX trusted execution environment. By minimising the amount of enclave transitions and reducing the overhead of the remaining enclave transitions, TaLoS imposes an overhead of no more than 31% in our evaluation with the Apache web server and the Squid proxy.

In multi-tenant environments, Linux containers managed by Docker or Kubernetes have a lower resource footprint, faster startup times, and higher I/O performance com- pared to virtual machines (VMs) on hypervisors. Yet their weaker isolation guarantees, enforced through soft- ware kernel mechanisms, make it easier for attackers to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of applica- tion data within containers. We describe SCONE, a secure container mechanism for Docker that uses the SGX trusted execution support of Intel CPUs to protect container processes from out- side attacks. The design of SCONE leads to (i) a small trusted computing base (TCB) and (ii) a low performance overhead: SCONE offers a secure C standard library in- terface that transparently encrypts/decrypts I/O data; to reduce the performance impact of thread synchronization and system calls within SGX enclaves, SCONE supports user-level threading and asynchronous system calls. Our evaluation shows that it protects unmodified applications with SGX, achieving 0.6✓–1.2✓ of native throughput.

Ulkomaalaisten määrässä viime vuosina tapahtunut kasvu ilmenee mm. sosiaali- ja terveyspalveluja käyttäneiden osuudessa. Tässä tarkastellaan Kelan järjestämän ammatillisen kuntoutuksen toteutumista maahanmuuttajilla kuntoutuksen jälkeisen työmarkkina-aseman perusteella. Kohderyhmä koostuu vuonna 2007 Kelan järjestämän ammatillisen kuntoutuksen päättäneistä, kuntoutukseen hakeutuessa 16–60-vuotiaista maahanmuuttajista (n = 143). Kaikista kuntoutuksen vuonna 2007 päättäneistä (n = 34 027) ulkomaiden kansalaisista ja Suomen kansalaisista esitetään keskeiset hakemusajankohdan taustatiedot. Ulkomaiden kansalaisia ja eräitä heidän saamiaan terveysturvaetuuksia on tarkasteltu vuoden 2010 seuranta-ajankohdan työmarkkina-aseman mukaan, ja näitä työmarkkina-asemaan yhteydessä olevia tekijöitä lisäksi askeltavalla logistisella regressioanalyysilla. Maahanmuuttajakuntoutujat painottuivat kantaväestöä nuorempiin ikäryhmiin, mikä ilmeni heidän muussa sosiodemografisessa taustassa ja työhistoriassa. Työmarkkina-asemaltaan aktiivien, ts. työvoimaan kuuluneiden tai opiskelijoiden osuus oli maahanmuuttajissa kantaväestöä matalampi sekä hakemusajankohtana että myöhemmin seuranta-aikana. Kuntoutuksen jälkeen ilmennyt työmarkkina-asemaltaan aktiivien väheneminen merkitsi lähinnä niiden osuuden kasvua, joiden työtilanne seuranta-ajankohtana ei ollut vielä selkiytynyt tai joiden tilanteesta ei ollut tietoa. Kantaväestössä ilmeni selvää eläkkeellä olleiden osuuden kasvua vuodesta 2007 vuoteen 2010. Maahanmuuttajakuntoutujien työmarkkina-aktiivisuuteen yhteydessä olevat tekijät ovat hyvin pitkälle samoja kuin kantaväestöllä: ns. paras työikä, kuntoutusta edeltänyt aktiivi työmarkkina-asema sekä tuki- ja liikuntaelinten sairaus kuntoutustarpeen diagnoosina. On kuitenkin ilmeistä, että etenkin maahanmuuttajilla kuntoutuksen jälkeiseen työtilanteeseen vaikuttavat paitsi monet muut yksilötason tekijät myös erityisesti kyseeseen tulevan alan työllisyystilanne.

16 s. + liitetaulukko

Objective: To describe the incidence, characteristics and outcomes of patients with influenza-like symptoms presenting to 27 public hospital emergency departments (EDs) in Queensland, Australia. Methods: A descriptive retrospective study covering 5 years (2005-9) of historical data from 27 hospital EDs was undertaken. State-wide hospital ED Information System data were analysed. Annual comparisons between influenza and non-influenza cases were made across the southern hemisphere influenza season (June-September) each year. Results: Influenza-related presentations increased significantly over the 5 years from 3.4% in 2005 to 9.4% in 2009, reflecting a 276% relative increase. Differences over time regarding characteristics of patients with influenza-like symptoms, based on the influenza season, occurred for admission rate (decreased over time from 28% in 2005 to 18% in 2009), length of stay (decreased over time from a median of 210 min in 2005 to 164 min in 2009) and access block (increased over time from 33% to 41%). Also, every year there was a significantly (p

An outline is presented here of the Po Valley Fog Experiment 1989, carried out within the EUROTRAC-GCE project. This experiment is a joint effort by several European research groups from 5 countries. The physical and chemical behaviour of the fog multiphase system was studied experimentally following the temporal evolution of the relevant chemical species in the different phases (gas, droplet, interstitial aerosol) and the evolution of micrometeorological and microphysical conditions, from the pre-fog situation through the whole fog evolution, to the post-fog period. Some general results, useful for describing the general features of the fog system, are presented here, while specific scientific questions on the different processes taking place within the system itself will be addressed in other companion papers of this same issue.DOI: 10.1034/j.1600-0889.1992.t01-4-00002.x