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Privacy-Improving Multi-Authority Ciphertext- Policy Attribute-Based Encryption With Internal Fraud Attack Resistance Based on Blockchain
Get PDFMulti-Authority Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (MACP-ABE), an extension of CP-ABE, is a promising cryptographic mechanism for protecting data confidentiality and is widely adopted due to its enhanced scalability. However, MACP-ABE suffers from attribute privacy leakage and internal fraud attacks. Specifically, compromised authorities can collude to collect user's attributes exposing sensitive personal characteristics, and the collusion between authorities and malicious insiders can lead to unauthorized data access. To protect user privacy, previous researches adopted the Anonymous Credential System, which is centralized and reduces the reliability of the scheme. Moreover, they fail to consider the internal fraud attacks. In this paper, we propose the first privacy-improving MACP-ABE scheme capable of resisting internal fraud attacks. First, we use smart contracts to perform anonymous and credible identity authentication. We allow users to participate with pseudonyms, ensuring that the traceability of any pseudonym cannot be linked to a specific user. Furthermore, we present a blockchain-based anonymous key distribution protocol, where the key issuing process is recorded and verified by the blockchain. This ensures that malicious insiders and corrupt authorities cannot bypass the blockchain to perform spurious key distribution. Rigorous security analysis proves that our scheme can resist chosen plaintext attacks, internal fraud attacks and user collusion attacks. Experimental results show that, compared to state-of-the-art schemes, our scheme achieves comparable storage and computational efficiency in core algorithms while reducing the communication cost of anonymous key distribution by approximately 12.6% and computation cost by around 21.4%. Blockchain experiments reveal that, with balanced throughput and latency, the user initialization latency for 20 attributes is about 680 ms, the anonymous authentication latency is around 720 ms, and the overall latency of anonymous key distribution increases by around 26.7%, which remains within an acceptable range for real-world applications, given the significant security enhancements
How metaphors facilitate intercultural health communication : insights from traditional Chinese medicine doctors in UK clinics
No full textThis study examines the use of metaphors in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) within the context of health communication in the United Kingdom (UK). By analyzing the narratives collected through interviews with eleven TCM practitioners in UK clinics, this research investigates how metaphors facilitate the expression of complex medical concepts and bridge cultural gaps between Chinese medicine and Western medicine. The metaphors employed in describing conditions such as pain, emotion, infertility, cancer, and obesity in both Chinese and English are analyzed, and the findings suggest that the use of metaphors can enhance the description of medical conditions and improve health communication. This result is encouraging in that it highlights the importance of metaphorical language in mediating health experiences, improving diagnosis, support, self-management, and overall patient empowerment. The study also underscores the need for healthcare practitioners to be aware of their metaphor use and the cultural implications of their communication strategies. It can also enrich the repertoire of metaphorical language available to Western healthcare professionals and patients, fostering a more holistic and culturally sensitive approach to medical treatment
Solar farms as potential future refuges for bumblebees
Get PDFSolar farms offer an opportunity for habitat creation for wildlife, including insect pollinators, potentially simultaneously contributing to both low-carbon energy and nature recovery. However, it is unknown whether cobenefits would persist under future land-use change given that habitat value is context dependent. For the 1042 operational solar farms in Great Britain, we predict their ability to support bumblebee populations (both inside and outside the solar farm) under three different socioeconomic futures. These futures represent alternative 1 km scale landcover projections for the year 2050 with accompanying narratives. We downscale these to 10 m resolution, spatially allocating crop rotations, agri-environment interventions and other habitat features consistent with the scenario narratives, to realistically represent fine-scale landscape elements of relevance to bumblebee populations. We then input these detailed maps into a sophisticated process-based model that simulates bumblebee foraging and population dynamics, enabling us to predict bumblebee density in and around Great Britain's solar farms, accounting for the effects of their changed habitat context and configuration in these different future scenarios. We isolate the drivers of bumblebee density change across scenarios and scales and show that solar farm management was the main driver of bumblebee density within solar farms, with ~120% higher densities inside florally enhanced compared to turf grass solar farms, although the exact figure was influenced by wider landcover changes. In foraging zones immediately surrounding solar farms, landscape changes had a greater impact on bumblebee densities, suggesting a single solar farm in isolation generally did not counteract the influence of wider land-use changes expected under future scenarios. In addition to providing insights into the potential future value of pollinator habitat on solar farms, our methodology demonstrates how combining process-based modelling with landcover projections that are downscaled to ecologically relevant resolutions can be used to better assess future effectiveness of habitat interventions. This represents a step change in our ability to account for species' interactions with socioeconomically driven futures, which can be extended and applied to other taxa and land-use interventions
Culture and context shapes spiritual distress : A phenomenological study of spiritual distress in hospitalised people with advanced COPD in India
Get PDFBackground: Spiritual distress appears common in people with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease but is likely to be under-reported. Evidence indicates that spiritual distress becomes more intense during periods of hospitalisation when physical symptoms are exacerbated. Existing evidence on how such distress is experienced is mainly drawn from the Western context, which may not be appropriate to guide care for those from other cultures and contexts. The experience of spiritual distress in people with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in India is explored in this study. Methods: A descriptive, phenomenological approach was employed. People (n = 15) who were hospitalised with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were purposively sampled from an Indian tertiary care hospital in 2017. Unstructured interviews were conducted, audio-recorded, then transcribed. Analysis followed Giorgi’s method and themes related to spiritual distress were developed. Results: Three main themes were identified. (i) Purposeless life: repeated hospitalisation with acute breathlessness caused purposelessness but completing family responsibilities gave a sense of fulfilment. (ii) Despair and hope: extreme thoughts of ‘wishing to die but wanting to live’ were experienced alternately. (iii) Discontentment and death wish: Suffering caused feelings of abandonment by God, which triggered death wishes. Conclusions: This study has indicated that family and God were central to coping with spiritual distress during hospitalisation in Indian people with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Identifying spiritual distress in its context and culture and the utilisation of appropriate spiritual support are important for palliative care professionals providing care to culturally diverse populations
A bimodal image dataset for seed classification from the visible and near-infrared spectrum
Get PDFThe success of deep learning in image classification has been largely underpinned by large-scale datasets, such as ImageNet, which have significantly advanced multi-class classification for RGB and grayscale images. However, datasets that capture spectral information beyond the visible spectrum remain scarce, despite their high potential, especially in agriculture, medicine and remote sensing. To address this gap in the agricultural domain, we present a thoroughly curated bimodal seed image dataset comprising paired RGB and hyperspectral images for 10 plant species, making it one of the largest bimodal seed datasets available. We describe the methodology for data collection and preprocessing and benchmark several deep learning models on the dataset to evaluate their multi-class classification performance. By contributing a high-quality dataset, our manuscript offers a valuable resource for studying spectral, spatial and morphological properties of seeds, thereby opening new avenues for research and applications
Mapping food insecurity in the Brazilian Amazon using a spatial item factor analysis model
No full textFood insecurity, a latent construct defined as the lack of consistent access to sufficient and nutritious food, is a pressing global issue with serious health and social justice implications. Item factor analysis is commonly used to study such latent constructs, but it typically assumes independence between sampling units. In the context of food insecurity, this assumption is often unrealistic, as food access is linked to socioeconomic conditions and social relations that are spatially structured. To address this, we propose a spatial item factor analysis model that captures spatial dependence, allowing us to predict latent factors at unsampled locations and identify food insecurity hotspots. We develop a Bayesian sampling scheme for inference and illustrate the explanatory strength of our model by analysing household perceptions of food insecurity in Ipixuna, a remote river-dependent urban centre in the Brazilian Amazon. Our approach is implemented in the R package spifa , with further details provided in the Supplementary Material. This spatial extension offers policymakers and researchers a stronger tool for understanding and addressing food insecurity to locate and prioritise areas in greatest need. Our proposed methodology can be applied more widely to other spatially structured latent construct
From waste to walls : Why earth is the ultimate Circular Building Material
No full textThis book accompanies the éponymous exhibition exhibition of the Moroccan Pavilion at the 19th Venice Biennale, marking its inaugural participation. Far more than a simple presentation of the scenographic installation, it provides insights into the Pavilion's central theme: construction techniques using local materials
S4 E1 Raiding Sanctuary
No full textWhen anti-immigration raids intensified in the USA after Trump’s return to the presidency, it left many wondering: how could this happen in places like LA, ostensibly a “Sanctuary City”? What, in fact, are sanctuary cities? Launching our new series on the role of borders and migration in the roll out of Donald Trump’s MAGA project, Rachel Humphris, author of “Making Sanctuary Cities” joins us to explain all. She outlines the rich history of such places, with roots in both traditions of sheltering refugees but also in activist histories of non-cooperation. Rachel also describes how the term ‘Sanctuary Cities’ was appropriated in the so-called ‘culture wars’, used by the right to paint a misleading picture of urban areas as full of “undesirable” outsiders and their apparently woke defenders. Plus, we ask: what does the label ‘Sanctuary City’ obscure in places such as San Francisco, where many are being forced out as big tech money floods in? And how, by focusing on the history of American cities’ complex and caveated relationship to the federal state, might we still hold to a future of hope and resistance
