Bit Of Good News Research Articles

Vascular Cognitive Impairment: A Little Bit of Good News for Women or Bad News for Men?

In a recent issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, Zinman et al. investigated the role of sex in the risk of cognitive impairment in 5,969 patients with a stroke or transient ischemic attacks. Using a short validated clinical screening tool, they noted that men had a 34% higher risk of screening positive for post-stroke cognitive impairment after adjusting for age, education, and stroke severity compared to women. This study highlights that more large, prospective, and multicenter studies are needed to evaluate sex-specific changes after a stroke since sex differences exist in many aspects of stroke presentation and management.

Whose Carbon Capture? A Bit of Good News

Global policy, policy makers and government representatives in the OECD countries routinely ignore the potential role to be played by carbon sequestration from crop waste biochar made by poor smallholders in the developing world. This paper argues that this is a mistake and makes the case for the design, development and distribution of low-cost, low-tech biochar making equipment to the world’s poorest farmers living on small farms and possessing only widely and thinly spread biomass resources on rough terrain. It argues that paying attention to the crop wastes of poor farmers can reduce GHG and PM2.5 emissions considerably and contends that the private motivations that underpin this approach can replace the talk of large-scale social behavior change with a self-replicating system built on farmers’ envy.

On Overcoming the Identified Limitations of a Usable PIN Entry Method

In the domain of password security, research has made significant progress in handling different kinds of threats which require human intelligence factor to fix the vulnerabilities. In spite of having strong theoretical establishments, most of these defense mechanisms cannot be used in practice as humans have limitations in processing complex information. The little bit of good news is that very few research proposals in this field have shown the promises to be deployable in practice. This paper focuses on such one method - proposed by Roth et al. back in 2004, which provides adequate user-friendliness to enter Personal Identification Number (PIN) securely in the presence of human shoulder surfers. Surprisingly, the background algorithm of this method for validating users’ responses runs in linear time on a search space of cardinality 5 and hence, the validation process does not put much load on the authenticating device. Therefore, such human identification protocol can also be integrated into the IoT infrastructure for conducting a more secured login from the client-side. Having such advantages, though remained secure for almost ten years after its release in 2004, recently, few proposals revealed some serious vulnerable aspects of the Roth et al. ’s proposal. In this paper, we have taken an attempt to save this user-friendly form of authentication. Firstly, we have made a critical discussion on the importance of the targeted PIN entry method in the domain of usable security and then given a brief overview of the identified limitations of this protocol. Followed by this, a few initiatives have been taken to fix the identified vulnerabilities of Roth et al. ’s proposal by revising its working principle, while the login procedure and the usability standard of this method stay unaffected.

On the Challenges in Designing Identity-Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Schemes for Mobile Devices

Providing secure, efficient, and privacy-preserving user authentication in mobile networks is a challenging problem due to the inherent mobility of users, variety of attack vectors, and resource-constrained nature of user devices. Recent studies show that identity-based cryptosystems can eliminate the certificate overhead and thus address the issues associated with public-key infrastructure technology—which is a rare bit of good news in today's computer security world. In this paper, we employ three representative identity-based remote user authentication schemes (i.e., Truong et al. 's scheme, Li et al. 's scheme, and Zhang et al. 's scheme) as case studies to reveal the challenges and subtleties in designing a practical authentication scheme for mobile devices. First, we demonstrate that Truong et al. 's scheme, which was presented at the IEEE AINA 2012, cannot achieve a few important security goals under our new attacking scenarios: 1) it fails to resist against known session-specific temporary information attack; 2) it cannot withstand key compromise impersonation attack; and 3) it is of poor usability. Second, we show that Li et al. 's privacy-preserving scheme, which was proposed at GLOBECOM 2012, is subject to some subtle (yet severe) efficiency problems that make it virtually impossible for any practical use. Third, we scrutinize a “provably secure” scheme for roaming services in mobile networks designed by Zhang et al. at SCN 2015 and find it prone to collusion attack and replay attack. Further, we investigate into the underlying causes for these identified failures, and figure out an improvement over Truong et al. 's scheme to overcome the revealed challenges while maintaining reasonable efficiency.

Changing Banking for Good: Counting the Costs of Market Misconduct

Because of the Budget 2016, the chancellor has been accused of “looking more like Gordon Brown as a purveyor of catchy gimmicks.” In difficult times when calls for his resignation over the row regarding the budget seemed to have eclipsed everything else, the rare bit of good news for George Osborne is that he can use the opportunity provided by the threat of Brexit – “a leap in the dark” which may cost the UK £100 billion or 5 per cent of GDP and 950,000 jobs by 2020 – to camouflage and obfuscate the real problems of conduct in the world of economics and finance. In an important interview with Charles Moore, the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that lenders have not stopped taking excessive risks with savers’ money and the result is “bankers have not learnt the lessons of the Great Crash”. Equally, in his new book, The End of Alchemy, King calls banks “the Achilles heel of capitalism”. Reviewing Professor Lord King’s concerns, I sketch emerging issues in the intersecting themes of economics, law and politics as seen in the media, especially through the lens of “conduct costs” – other overlapping themes are also explored. The case of Barclays, which is said to suffer from “an identity crisis”, is examined in some depth. My analysis is anchored in a recent lecture titled The Cost of Trust Gone Wrong – $300 Billion and Counting where issues related to the “rebuilding of trust agenda” are highlighted. Roger McCormick and Chris Stears point out to members of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment that until 2012 recklessness and negligence used to be associated as banks’ conduct related failings rather than cheating, lying and fraud. As argued in the lecture, it was known for years that PPI “stinks” but the bigwigs in banks such as the Royal Bank of Scotland felt “we can’t be the first to stop”; in other words, “we don’t care”. Aided by this analysis, I explore ethical dilemmas and conduct and technology related themes in the wider arena of banking and financial services. Identifying new directions for future research, I conclude the CCP Research Foundation is an expanding new social movement with considerable scope for changing banking for good.This paper also sheds light on HSBC’s dealings with Syria’s corrupt Makhlouf family as revealed by the Panama Papers, which essentially affirm past fears and point to the wholesale abdication of ethics in the banking sector. The wider political ramifications of the leaked documents are also discussed, as are the activities of the FCA in that regard; the City watchdog has given the banks until 15 April 2016 to report on the extent, if any, of their involvement and links with Mossack Fonseca or firms serviced by them. The corporate sector has a poor reputation but Mark Carney strangely declared last year (2015) at Mansion House that “the Age of Irresponsibility is over”. However, on proper analysis, the plain truth is that the authorities keep trying to bottle up earlier scandals but new ones constantly keep arising making it impossible for regulators, and even courts, to remedy all the awful things that go on behind the scenes. In the event regulators take action by imposing further penalties on the banks for their involvement in the Panama Papers’ scandal, such regulatory disciplining will inevitably provide further fertile ground for expanding the scope of the conduct costs centred analysis contemplated by the CCP Research Foundation’s “league table” approach to reforming the banking sector. Accused of “hypocrisy”, even prime minister David Cameron is under serious pressure from the fallout of highly damaging revelations in the Panama Papers which show he profited from his father Ian Cameron’s offshore company Blairmore Holdings Inc. Taunted that he “misled the public” and “lost the trust of the British people”, Cameron is feeling the heat and a taskforce under the aegis of HMRC, NCA, SFO and the FCA is expected to assess the legality of his financial affairs.

A Large-Scale Evaluation of High-Impact Password Strength Meters

Passwords are ubiquitous in our daily digital lives. They protect various types of assets ranging from a simple account on an online newspaper website to our health information on government websites. However, due to the inherent value they protect, attackers have developed insights into cracking/guessing passwords both offline and online. In many cases, users are forced to choose stronger passwords to comply with password policies; such policies are known to alienate users and do not significantly improve password quality. Another solution is to put in place proactive password-strength meters/checkers to give feedback to users while they create new passwords. Millions of users are now exposed to these meters on highly popular web services that use user-chosen passwords for authentication. More recently, these meters are also being built into popular password managers, which protect several user secrets including passwords. Recent studies have found evidence that some meters actually guide users to choose better passwords—which is a rare bit of good news in password research. However, these meters are mostly based on ad hoc design. At least, as we found, most vendors do not provide any explanation for their design choices, sometimes making them appear as a black box. We analyze password meters deployed in selected popular websites and password managers. We document obfuscated source-available meters, infer the algorithm behind the closed-source ones, and measure the strength labels assigned to common passwords from several password dictionaries. From this empirical analysis with millions of passwords, we shed light on how the server end of some web service meters functions and provide examples of highly inconsistent strength outcomes for the same password in different meters, along with examples of many weak passwords being labeled as strong or even excellent . These weaknesses and inconsistencies may confuse users in choosing a stronger password, and thus may weaken the purpose of these meters. On the other hand, we believe these findings may help improve existing meters and possibly make them an effective tool in the long run.

An empirical investigation of the market duration of repossessed single‐family houses

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine if lender experience in disposing of repossessed single‐family houses in the local market is significantly related to the probability a property will sell. In addition, other factors that are significantly related to the market duration of repossessed houses are identified.Design/methodology/approachThe Cox proportional hazard model is used to analyze transaction data for 2,099 single‐family houses in Dayton, Ohio. Title to each of these properties was obtained by lenders through foreclosure. The study period approximates the first three years of the subprime mortgage crisis in the USA: 2007‐2009.FindingsThe marketing efforts of lenders with more local property disposition experience are found to be superior to the efforts of less experienced lenders. The results also indicate that the selling rate function increased over the study period, and there is seasonality in the data which is consistent with lenders attempting to limit holding costs.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited to the experience of lenders in a single local market over a three year study period. Additional research to determine if similar results apply in other markets would be a valuable addition to the literature.Practical implicationsWhile foreclosure is not a desirable outcome for any of the parties involved in a mortgage loan, the paper's results offer a bit of good news for lenders. The results are consistent with organizational learning theory which posits that experience should enhance performance. Given predictions that the mortgage crisis has not yet run its full course, lenders' performance in disposing of repossessed houses is likely to continue to improve.Originality/valueThis is the first study to apply the proportional hazard model to the study of foreclosed houses. This technique offers an advantage over previously applied methodologies because it allows the researcher to include properties that lenders did not sell during the study period into the analysis. All previous efforts were limited to sold properties and this restriction may have biased the previous results.

SMOKING AND SECONDHAND SMOKE: Global Estimate of SHS Burden

SMOKING AND SECONDHAND SMOKE: Global Estimate of SHS Burden

Tubab by Beltrán Mena

develops a lesbian relationship with one of the members, but the group soon disbands, and they disperse, finding their own places elsewhere. Kazumi, supposedly sexually more mature now, settles down with her fianc?, who has suddenly regained his eyesight. This is an ambitious work intended to provoke and enlighten the reader. But as Japanese critics point out, this is a static work, filled almost exclusively with the images of sexual experiments and lengthy discussions about them taking place in the confinement of small, private spaces. This story, which basically deals with the age-old theme of self versus society, regrettably overlooks the side of society. The translation is for the most part faithful, but not without frequent omissions and occasional additions. Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel Wesleyan University Beltr?n Mena. Tubab. Santiago, Chile. Alfaguara. 2009.429 pages. ch$ 15,700. isbn 978-956-239-631-8 The novel Tubab begins with a medical student, Beltr?n Mena, who spends his free time reading books and studying old maps of Africa. The basic plot of the book revolves around a trip a Chilean man takes to Africa in search of the mythical city of Timbuktu. The main character is a "tubab"?a white man, or foreigner, in some parts of Africa. "Maps fill our heads with names, names full of connotations and resonances, names that come to us through the air as notes cascad ing from the orchestra of paradise, they compel us to take a bus, wait for a ferry, fly on a plane," writes Mena. The trip will have no pur pose other than to advance from one city to another, to travel those maps crowded with unknown cities. The traveler senses that in Timbuktu heTl find nothing. No matter?it's only a pretext to start moving. Even though Mena begins his journey as a Chilean, he soon dis covers that in Africa he is a tubab. In traveling, one becomes a foreigner, another person, a stranger to oneself and to others. "What is important is not to travel, but rather, to cross borders," Mena affirms. And it is true that, by the end of his journey, the protagonist has crossed his own internal border. It is an indescrib able experience that edges toward silence and which the author him self finds difficult to define. First, he tells us, "I feel that I have crossed the most important border." Then he goes on to say, "I have no idea who the Tuareg are, but I will walk through the city like a Tuareg. I feel also that as I leave behind the line that I crossed, to my back, between the huts and the bowls of rice, radios and batteries, that it is a line which cannot be seen but which must look like the line that separates the teeth of those fantastic women, a line that tells us happiness is a whistle, a bit of good news that scratches the air." Just for a moment, Mena stops being a tubab, a foreigner. A changed man, he feels like any other per son in that wild and chaotic place, which has nothing to do with his own background. Tubab is also a meditation about movement and the need to start moving once again in order to awak en from the daily routine that makes us drowsy and keeps us from seeing life as it truly is. For Mena, the true journey is one the traveler carries out alone. Solitude obliges us to be more attentive, makes us fragile. It is precisely this fragility that allows us 1^1 "SELECTED L?TEftAR? NONFICTION VX/C. ?K I .1 ) ROBERT DAY Author of The Last Cax?Q Drive ^ M Save the World ^;:.': :? Day, ill.; These nineteen I ively essays by former ; ;.;.:.; - Washington Post contri.butor Day have v bee n t? I l ed "so me s pace to breathe i n" : J:, ;:-^-'::;an d "some, room to. h ear.the central pi ai h s : :attheirwi hdy a nd a wakebest" by .And cei jggS?odies? jf|8i^ ; ; :CiHoug^ y \. ',. .Hafied.\by:- theFrankfurter Ruhdschauas "? .. ; : infanta stic ah d poetic story" a bout ''a society . : disfigured by dictatorship," this )s the...

Late pregnancy: a rare bit of good news?

By leaving motherhood until later in life because of practical reasons, emotional or simply circumstance, parents put their baby's health and the woman's own at greater risk, but are there benefits for children?

Losing Sleep Over Cancer

Losing Sleep Over Cancer

Another Side to the Climate-Cloud Conundrum Finally Revealed

GLOBAL WARMING Clouds have always given climate modelers fits. The clouds in their models are crude at best, and in the real world, researchers struggle to understand how clouds are responding to—and perhaps magnifying—greenhouse warming. As a result, cloud behavior is the biggest single source of uncertainty in climate prediction. But two new studies now show that much of the worry about clouds' role in the warming has been misdirected. Clouds' response to global temperature changes may be much quicker and more direct—and thus easier to study—than experts have thought. “It's a little bit of good news,” says climate researcher Brian Soden of the University of Miami in Florida. “People have been working on [the cloud problem] for 2 decades or more, and we haven't done a lot to decrease the uncertainty. I'm a little more optimistic now about making progress on this problem.” Researchers have always considered the cloud problem a matter of feedbacks. In a positive feedback, increasing greenhouse gases warm the surface, and the warmer surface then feeds back somehow to overlying clouds. The nature of the feedback remains mysterious, but if it's positive, it would decrease global cloud cover. With fewer clouds reflecting solar energy back into space, more energy would reach Earth, amplifying the initial warming. But Earth's surface and especially its oceans are slow to warm, so cloud feedbacks operate over decades—or so scientists assumed. Two groups have recently looked at just how quickly model clouds actually respond to an increase in greenhouse gases. Climate researchers Jonathan Gregory and Mark Webb, both of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K., report in the January Journal of Climate (issue 1) that model clouds, at least, can respond quickly to added carbon dioxide—in months, not decades. In most of the models examined, the classic cloud feedback driven by change at the surface played only a minor role. The real action took place where the clouds themselves were, up in the air. Added carbon dioxide absorbs more long-wave energy radiating from the surface; the air holding that carbon dioxide warms, and clouds evaporate, letting more solar radiation in. ![Figure][1] At risk. Greenhouse gases can directly reduce cloud cover and magnify warming. CREDIT: UCAR In follow-up work in press in Geophysical Research Letters , climate researchers Timothy Andrews and Piers Forster, both of the University of Leeds, U.K., extend and refine the analysis of Gregory and Webb. In seven models, they doubled carbon dioxide while holding the global surface temperature constant and watched how atmospheric temperatures respond. The classic, slow cloud response is only half of previous estimates, they find, and most of the cloud response is fast. Scientists “have been looking at the incorrect part of the problem,” says Forster. Properly accounting for fast response is important when modeling rising temperatures under the strengthening greenhouse, Webb and Gregory argue. And because it is fast and therefore has been going on for decades, notes Gregory, researchers may be able to tease the newly appreciated cloud response out of observations and improve their models faster than they have the past few decades. [1]: pending:yes

The Heat Is On …︁

The Heat Is On …︁

Neurology: Pesticides and Parkinson Disease

Vol. 112, No. 10 EnvironewsOpen AccessNeurology: Pesticides and Parkinson Diseaseis companion ofPesticides and Organic Agriculture Renée Twombly Renée Twombly Search for more papers by this author Published:1 July 2004https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.112-a548bCited by:1AboutSectionsPDF ToolsDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InReddit In support of the theory that the most common form of Parkinson disease (PD) may result to some degree from exposure to environmental toxicants, researchers at Emory University have identified a mechanism of toxicity linking the pesticide rotenone to the same kind of cell damage that is associated with PD. Experiments in both cell culture and rats demonstrated that the insecticide, derived from natural compounds and often used in organic gardening and farming, reproduced many of the pathological features of PD, including progressive damage to neurons in the brain’s basal ganglia that are vital to transmission of dopamine.In the November 2003 Journal of Neuroscience, Emory researchers Tim Greenamyre and Todd Sherer report that rotenone does its damage within the neuron’s mitochondria by inhibiting a crucial enzyme in the electron transport chain known as complex I. Chronic treatment with low concentrations of rotenone inhibited complex I, leading to oxidative stress and gradual degeneration of dopamine neurons in rats, followed by a buildup of protein inside the nerve cells like that known to occur in certain PD patients. The rats also demonstrated an associated movement disorder.The researchers then examined synthetic pesticides that are used in much greater quantities than rotenone, and that are also known to disrupt complex I in mitochondria. In findings reported at the November 2003 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, they found that pyridaben, used to control mites on fruits and vegetables, was far more toxic than rotenone. “In a human neuroblastoma cell culture, pyridaben did the same thing as rotenone, but much more potently,” says Greenamyre. Pyridaben has not yet been tested in vivo.The researchers cannot yet say whether the new findings should prompt concern about chronic exposure to these chemicals. But what the work does do is show that the way these pesticides affect dopaminergic neurons mirrors what happens when genes go awry. A handful of rare mutations associated with PD have been discovered that appear to affect neurons in the same way, Greenamyre says: “The diverse causes of Parkinson’s disease may all be related mechanistically—that is, by oxidative damage, protein mishandling, and mitochondrial impairment.”According to University of Pittsburgh scientist Teresa Hastings, some epidemiological data suggest that some people may be at increased risk due to pesticide exposure. However, she says, it’s much more likely that increased risk arises through a combination of level and route of exposure and genetic susceptibility.J. William Langston, founder of The Parkinson’s Institute and one of the field’s pioneers, agrees. “A lot of people are likely exposed to these pesticides, but few develop Parkinson’s disease, so [this research] suggests that those who do develop it have genetic predilections,” he says.Finding common mechanisms between rare forms of the disease and environmental chemical exposures may offer a bit of good news, Greenamyre says. “If you can define a common pathway that leads to neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s disease,” he says, “it may be possible to design drugs that protect that pathway.”FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited ByDiMatteo K (2004) Pesticides and Organic Agriculture, Environmental Health Perspectives, 112:15, (A865-A865), Online publication date: 1-Nov-2004.Related articlesPesticides and Organic Agriculture1 November 2004Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 112, No. 10 July 2004Metrics About Article Metrics Publication History Originally published1 July 2004Published in print1 July 2004 Financial disclosuresPDF download License information EHP is an open-access journal published with support from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health. All content is public domain unless otherwise noted. Note to readers with disabilities EHP strives to ensure that all journal content is accessible to all readers. However, some figures and Supplemental Material published in EHP articles may not conform to 508 standards due to the complexity of the information being presented. If you need assistance accessing journal content, please contact [email protected]. Our staff will work with you to assess and meet your accessibility needs within 3 working days.

And Now for a Bit of Good News…from Washington?

And Now for a Bit of Good News…from Washington?

A Temporal Analysis of Earnings Surprises: Profits versus Losses

I show that median earnings surprise has shifted rightward from small negative (miss analyst estimates by a small amount) to zero (meet analyst estimates exactly) to small positive (beat analyst estimates by a small amount) during the 16 years, 1984 to 1999. I show that a rightward temporal shift in median surprise from negative to positive describes earnings, but neither profits nor losses. Median profit surprise shifts within the positive quadrant, from zero to one cent per share. Median loss surprise shifts within the negative quadrant from extreme negative (about ‐33 cents per share) to zero. I show that the median surprise for profits exceeds that for losses in every year. I document significant positive temporal trends in both meet and beat analyst estimates for both profits and losses, but I find a greater frequency of profits that either meet or beat analyst estimates in every year. I find a significant positive temporal trend in positive profits that are “a little bit of good news,” and a significant negative temporal trend in managers who report losses that are an “extreme amount of bad news.” My results are robust to the four internal validity threats I consider—namely temporal changes in: (1) analyst forecast accuracy, (2) the mix of earnings of one sign preceded by earnings of another sign four quarters ago, (3) the timeliness of the most recent analyst forecast, and (4) the I/B/E/S definition of actual earnings. I find that managers of growth firms are relatively more likely than managers of value firms to report good news profits. I show that when they do report positive profit surprises, managers of growth firms are more likely to report “a little bit of good news” in every year.

From Genome to Functional Genomics

Even before the first genetic sequence of a flowering plant, a wild mustard called Arabidopsis thaliana, is completed, a group of plant scientists has hatched an ambitious plan for the next phase: figuring out the functions of all 25,000 genes. Announced last week, the plan, which has the blessing of the National Science Foundation, came with another bit of good news for the Arabidopsis community: the unexpected release of a set of molecular markers for finding those genes.