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Carfilzomib (CFZ) is a proteasome inhibitor currently approved for the treatment of relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM). Multiple trials are ongoing to evaluate its efficacy and safety in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (NDMM). The use of CFZ-based two- or three-drug combination regimens as induction for the management of NDMM is an emerging approach. CFZ-based regimens include combinations of immunomodulators, alkylating agents, and monoclonal antibodies along with dexamethasone. In this review, we assess the efficacy and toxicity of CFZ-based regimens in NDMM. We reviewed a total of 27 studies (n=4538 patients) with overall response rates (ORR) ranging between 80% and 100%. Studies evaluating the combination of CFZ with daratumumab reported an ORR of approximately 100%. Achievement of minimal residual disease (MRD) negativity, measured by multi-parameter flow cytometry (MPFC), ranged between 60% and 95% in 4 (n=251) out of 6 studies that measured MRD-negativity. The interim results of the ENDURANCE trial failed to show superior efficacy and progression-free survival (PFS) of carfilzomib-lenalidomide when compared to bortezomib–lenalidomide combination, albeit with a lower incidence of neuropathy. Hematological toxicity was the most common adverse event observed with these regimens, and the most common non-hematological adverse events were related to cardiovascular and electrolyte disturbances. We need to further evaluate the role of CFZ in NDMM by conducting more Phase III trials with different combinations.

This article examines China and South Korea’s health surveillance infrastructures that are being developed and deployed during COVID19. To control the outbreak and maintain the state, the Chinese government implemented the "Alipay Health Code” in collaboration with technology giants like Alibaba, while South Korea launched a “self-quarantine safety protection app” to enforce home isolation to suspected carriers and monitor their health statuses. By comparatively analyzing these quarantine surveillance mobile applications that the Chinese and South Korean governments are utilizing in pandemic control, we investigate how these two different governmental regimes - one authoritarian and the other democratic - construct and propagate what their state-of-the-art surveillance technologies can offer to the public in moments of emergency. Through a mixture of walk-through method and situational analysis, this article aims to unpack the processes in which these technologies become developed and examine the politics around their deployment. More broadly, we argue that analyzing them offers new opportunities to investigate the relationship between state surveillance and personal privacy in the context of a national crisis. As surveillance tactics that were deemed oppressive and undemocratic in ordinary times get easily normalized in crisis situations, these moments allow us to reveal the precarious and flexible nature of surveillance and privacy while destabilizing the West-oriented, dichotomic understanding of these concepts. This article tackles this question by observing the relationships among relevant actors – the state officials, industry professionals, and general users – and various contestations/negotiations involved in the processes of designing and deploying these quarantine surveillance apps.

Background: Paediatric shaft femoral fracture can be treated either conservatively or by internal fixation. Complications inherited with cast management and advantages of the intramedullary nailing in long bone fracture, resulted in increased use of this technique for paediatric shaft femur fracture. We conducted a retrospective study of the patients treated with close intramedullary nailing by using titanium elastic nail in shaft femur fracture for paediatric patients.Materials & Methods: During 2013 and 2016, we have conducted a retrospective study of 40 diaphyseal fractures of femur using closed titanium elastic nail (TEN), in paediatric patients(24 male and 16 female). Patients’ evaluation was done using Flynn criteria, resumption of school and associated complications.Results: With minimum follow-up period of 6 months, 92.5% of the patients had shown radiological union by 4 to 6 weeks with resumption of school by 8 weeks. According to Flynn criteria, excellent results were achieved in 31 (77.5%) patients, good result in 8 (20%) and poor result was present in 1(2.5%) case.Conclusions: Titanium elastic nailing in paediatric patients with shaft femur fracture is a safe, simple and reproducible technique with minimum complications, leading to early return to preinjury level with minimum morbidity.

Globally, a wide variety of business models are proposed and used to address the challenge such as survival of business in the global market. Telecommunication industry has grown tremendously over the last decade. While the industry now offers enormous services to customers the entrepreneurs still struggle while choosing an appropriate model, its implementation and business survival. The business model may be defined as a system that works takes inputs and uses business activities to produce some outputs that may be regarded as outcomes. These outcomes are aimed at achieving valued targets over various lengths of terms. Hence various models or combination of models may be required to fulfill different goals in a business environment. The aim of this paper is to highlight the global telecom business model research by analyzing the proposed solutions while highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. An insight into the steps that may help design an optimized business model for the telecom industry has also been provided.

This chapter examines the efforts of advanced-industrialized Western democratic states to promote internet freedom through the backing of several international policy summits and associated funding efforts for promoting freedom of expression, for global internet users, especially in closed repressive political systems. However, the recent leaking of key classified documents identifying unlawful global surveillance practices by both authoritarian and democratic states, has further galvanized global attention towards the credibility and meaning of “internet freedom promotion.” In order to better understand what the promotion of Internet freedom entails and to unpack the complex international political economy of this global arena of policy entrepreneurship, this chapter critically examines the key stakeholders that have define and consolidate the norms and frameworks surrounding the shared global digital commons that have been used by protest movements and democracy promoters during all of the recent waves of transnational political mobilizations, including the Green Revolution, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street. The chapter argue that future investigations should discard reductive frames of analysis like ‘cyber-optimism” and “cyber-dystopianism,” and instead pay more critical attention on the key tech-savvy “communities of practice” that have emerged with a pragmatic focus on overseeing and infusing democratic norms into esoteric telecommunications policy.

While there have been many studies of the different ways regimes censor the use of social media by their citizens, shutting off social media altogether is something that rarely happens. However, it happens at the most politically sensitive times and has widespread - if not global - consequences for political, economic and cultural life. When do states disconnect their digital networks, and why? To answer this question, we build an event history database of incidents where a regime went beyond mere censorship of particular websites or users. We draw from multiple sources, including major news media, specialized news services, and international experts to construct an event log database of 566 incidents. This rich, original dataset allows for a nuanced analysis of the conditions for state action, and we offer some assessment of the impact of such desperate action. Comparative analysis indicates that both democratic and authoritarian regimes disable social media networks for citing concerns about national security, protecting authority figures, and preserving cultural and religious morals. But, whereas democracies also disable social media with the goal of protecting children, authoritarian regimes also attempt to eliminate what they perceive as propaganda on social media. We cover the period from 1995 to the first quarter of 2011, and build a grounded typology based on regime type, what states actually did to interfere with digital networks, why they did it, and who was affected.

Authentication and key exchange securely over the insecure channel is a big deal these days. It plays vital role in big data applications. Mutual authentication is generally relay at the single channel between two users. An attacker performs the passive attack (traffic analysis) and switch towards the active attack Three tier authentication system checks the authenticity of the client at three independent channels and if found secure then only allow the client to get the services from the application server. Two intermediate servers will provide two-split passwords and the application server will provide the complete password. These intermediate servers will forward the split password towards the main application server which compares and finds the similarities between them. Whole communication is based on public key cryptography to achieve mutual authentication, confidentiality and integrity of the message.

State powers and high technology industries have historically and symbiotically implemented new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to advance their operational goals. However, much of the scholarship and policy discourse studying such practices is limited to well-known mass surveillance revelations in advanced-industrialized Western democratic contexts. We present the first event-catalogued case-history analysis of 306 cases of mass surveillance systems that currently exist across 139 nation-states in the world system. Identifying the ‘known universe’ of these population-wide data infrastructures that shape the evolving relationships between citizens and state powers, this study pays particular attention to and fills an existing void in the contemporary study and understanding of mass surveillance practices by examining how population surveillance systems have diffused across the international system. By closely investigating cases of state-backed cross-sector surveillance collaborations, we address the following questions: What is the recent, global history of state-sanctioned mass surveillance systems deployment? Which stakeholders have most prominently expressed support for, benefited from, or opposed these systems, and why? What have been the comparative societal responses to the normalization of these systems in recent decades? Addressing these questions provides valuable traction for understanding how comparative contexts shape the way governance technologies unfold and spread, potentially in ways that re-enforce state powers’ interests and dominance over their citizens.

As has often been noted in these pages, one world region has been practically untouched by the third wave of democratization: North Africa and the Middle East. The Arab world has lacked not only democracy, but even large popular movements pressing for it. In December 2010 and the first months of 2011, however, this situation changed with stunning speed. Massive and sustained public demonstrations demanding political reform cascaded from Tunis to Cairo, Sana‘a, Amman, and Manama. This inspired people in Casablanca, Damascus, Tripoli, and dozens of other cities to take to the streets to call for change. By May, major political casualties littered the ground: Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, two of the region’s oldest dictators, were gone; the Libyan regime of Muammar Qadhafi was battling an armed rebellion that had taken over half the country and attracted NATO help; and several monarchs had sacked their cabinets and committed to constitutional reforms. Governments around the region had sued for peace by promising their citizens hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending of various kinds. Morocco and Saudi Arabia appeared to be fending off serious domestic uprisings, but as of this writing in May 2011, the outcomes for regimes in Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen remain far from certain. There are many ways to tell the story of political change. But one of the most consistent narratives from civil society leaders in Arab countries has been that the Internet, mobile phones, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter made the difference this time. Using these technologies, people interested in democracy could build extensive net

This empirical study addresses dynamics of viral information in the blogosphere and aims to fill gaps in the literature. In this study, we present a new methodology which enables us to capture the dynamism and the time-factor of information diffusion in networks. Moreover, we argue that the blogosphere is not monolithic and illuminate the role of four important blog types: elite, toppolitical, top-general and tail blogs. We also create a map of the ‗life cycle‘ of blogs posting links to viral information, specifically viral videos at the 2008 US presidential election. Finally, we show that elite and top-general blogs ignite the virality process, which means that they get the chance to frame messages and influence agenda setting, while, top-political and tail blogs act as followers in the process. To accomplish this, we gathered data on blogs (n=9,765) and their posts (n=13,173) linking to 65 of the top US presidential election videos that became viral on the Internet during the period between March 2007 and June 2009.

Data publication is a simple and cost-effective approach for data sharing across organizations. Data anonymization is a central technique in privacy preserving data publications. Many methods have been proposed to anonymize individual datasets and multiple datasets of the same data publisher. In real life, a dataset is rarely isolated and two datasets published by two organizations may contain the records of the same individuals. For example, patients might have visited two hospitals for follow-up or specialized treatment regarding a disease, and their records are independently anonymized and published. Although each published dataset poses a small privacy risk, the intersection of two datasets may severely compromise the privacy of the individuals. The attack using the intersection of datasets published by different organizations is called a composition attack. Some research work has been done to study methods for anonymizing data to prevent a composition attack for independent data releases where one data publisher has no knowledge of records of another data publisher. In this chapter, we discuss two exemplar methods, a randomization based and a generalization based approaches, to mitigate risks of composition attacks. In the randomization method, noise is added to the original values to make it difficult for an adversary to pinpoint an individual’s record in a published dataset. In the generalization method, a group of records according to potentially identifiable attributes are generalized to the same so that individuals are indistinguishable. We discuss and experimentally demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of both types of methods. We also present a mixed data publication framework where a small proportion of the records are managed and published centrally and other records are managed and published locally in different organizations to reduce the risk of the composition attack and improve the overall utility of the data usc

When Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann conceived of and developed her spiral of silence theory in the 1960s and early 1970s, she formulated it in an era when scholars perceived a return to all-powerful media-namely, that the media were able to exert strong eff ects because audience members actively turned to newspapers, television, radio, and magazines to help defi ne social reality. Indeed, the spiral of silence emerged as a theory not only of public opinion, but also of media eff ects. With their ubiquity, consonance, and cumulativeness, the mass media of decades ago allowed individuals to gauge the climate of public opinion and speak out or not, depending on whether they perceived themselves to be in the minority or majority opinion. In this process of eff ects, the media served what Noelle-Neumann (1993) termed an “articulation function,” providing audience members with arguments used to back up their opinions. After all, “if the mass media fail to provide them, there will be no words” (p. 172).

We wanted to determine whether a saline flush during vasectomy would reduce the time needed to reach azoospermia.During vasectomy men were randomly assigned to flush the prostatic end of the vas deferens with 10 mL of normal saline (intervention group, n = 50), while the remaining men (n = 56) served as controls. Sperm counts were performed on the immediate postprocedure urine specimen and on semen samples at 1, 6, and 12 weeks after vasectomy.The postprocedure urine specimens from the intervention and control groups contained 29.2 x 106 and 0.004 x 106 sperm, respectively (P.001). Total sperm counts in the ejaculate for intervention and control groups at 1, 6, and 12 weeks were (in millions of sperm): 14.1 and 13.8, 0.4 and 8.0, and 0.0 and 0.011, respectively (P.05 at all time points). There was no difference in the rate at which the men in the 2 groups achieved azoospermia.Vasal perfusion with saline during vasectomy was effective in removing sperm from the distal vas; however, perfusion did not increase the rate at which men achieve azoospermia.

As Converse once said of public opinion research, “a sample design which extracts unrelated individuals from the whole and assigns the opinion of each an equal weight is a travesty on any 'realistic' understanding of what the concept of public opinion means” (Converse 1987, S14). Today, any realistic understanding of public opinion formation in Muslim media systems must come from a critical awareness of the limits to survey data, but also an appreciation that digital information technologies are providing new opportunity structures for inclusion in the process of public opinion formation and measurement.Ruling elites often try to co-opt civil society groups, and in times of political or military crises they can attempt to control the national information infrastructure. But a defining feature of civil society is independence from the authority of the state, even in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And in important ways, digital communication networks are also independent of any particular state authority. What has been the impact of digital media on political communication in Muslim media systems? How have tools such as mobile phones and the internet affected the process of forming political identity, particularly for the young? When do such tools change the opportunity for civic action, and when do they simply empower ruling elites to be more effective censors? In this chapter, we analyze the best available micro level data on technology use and changing patterns of political identity and macro level data on networks of civil society actors.Saudi Arabia and Egypt are two strong authoritarian regimes, the first an Islamist monarchy, the latter staunchly secular. Indonesia is an emerging democracy. Pakistan, with a mixed authoritarian and democratic history, is a fragile state. Despite important differences in political culture, technology diffusion is causing new patterns of political communication in all four regimes, with consequences for political participation and collective action. These four cases may be the best instances of governance archetypes in political Islam: Egypt is the biggest secular authoritarian regime, Saudi Arabia is the biggest Islamist constitutional monarchy, Indonesia is the biggest Muslim democracy, and Pakistan is the largest of fragile states. Yet all four are also interesting candidates for comparison: they have among the highest diffusion rates of digital media in the developing world; they are all countries in which digital media has been a means of building a transnational, Muslim political identity; they are all countries in which the protection of religious and cultural norms has been used to justify levels of censorship and surveillance not tolerated in other parts of the world. We identify the ways in which authoritarian regimes do make effective use of information infrastructure as a means of social control. But we also demonstrate the ways in which civil society groups effectively use information infrastructure to strengthen their own organizational capacity and preserve independence from the state.

During the "Arab Spring," young tech savvy activists led uprisings in a dozen countries across North Africa and the Middle East. At first, digital media allowed democratization movements to develop new tactics for catching dictators off guard. Eventually, authoritarian governments worked social media into their own counter-insurgency strategies. What have we learned about the role of digital media in modern protest? Digital media helped to turn individualized, localized, and community-specific dissent into structured movements with a collective consciousness about both shared grievances and opportunities for action.

The aim of this study is to understand the role of bloggers in driving viral information. More specifically, we develop a new methodology that creates a map of the 'life cycle' of blogs posting links to viral information. Our dataset focuses blogs linking to the most significant viral videos of the 2008 US presidential election. To do so, we gathered data on all blogs (n=9,765) and their posts (n=13,173) linking to 65 of the top US presidential election videos that went viral on the Internet during the period between March 2007 and June 2009. Among other things, our findings illuminate the importance of different types of blogs: elite, top-political, top-general and tail blogs. We also found that while elite and top-general blogs create political information, they drive and sustain the viral process, whereas top-political and tail blogs act as followers in the process.

SUMMARY hen do governments decide to interfere with the Internet, and why? While many observers celebrate the creative use of digital media by activists and civil society leaders, there are a significant number of incidents involving government-led Internet shutdowns. Governments have offered a range of reasons for interfering with digital networks, employed many tactics, and experienced both costs and benefits in doing so. When and why do states disconnect their digital networks is a principle question we examine in this paper. To answer this question, we built an event history database of incidents in which a regime went beyond mere surveillance of particular websites or users, and actually disconnected Internet exchange points or blocked significant amounts of certain kinds of traffic. All in all, there were 606 unique incidents involving 99 countries since 1995: 39 percent of the incidents occurred in democracies, 6 percent occurred in emerging democracies, 52 percent occurred in authoritarian regimes, and 3 percent occurred in fragile states. Then we developed three standardized typologies for the kinds of incidents being reported. First, we developed a category that iteratively helped define the case, and a typology of actions that states take against social media. Second, we developed a category for why they took that action, sometimes relying on third-party reports if the state simply denied any interference. Finally, we developed a category for the impact of the interference.

Fibroepithelial polyps of the ureter are rare, benign tumors often not easily distinguished from malignant transitional-cell carcinomas by radiologic means. Historically, many patients have undergone unnecessary nephroureterectomy for these lesions. With recent advancement in endourologic instrumentation, a biopsy-proven diagnosis of suspect upper-tract lesions can be made prior to definitive therapy. We describe a typical case of fibroepithelial ureteral polyp wherein the diagnosis and surgical treatment was accomplished entirely by endoscopic means.