OBJECTIVE To evaluate a contribution of selected laboratory parameters for a prediction of progressive and erosive development in patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS In a prospective study baseline levels of antibodies to cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP), IgM, IgA, and IgG rheumatoid factors (RFs) were measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in 104 pati...

In the developing world, the dramatic male bias in tobacco use is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political, or economic power. This bias might also reflect under-reporting by woman and/or over-reporting by men. To test the role of gender inequality on gender differences in tobacco use we investigated tobacco use among the Aka, a Congo Basin foraging population note...

The SSL/TLS protocol is a de-facto standard that has proved its effectiveness in the wired Internet and it will probably be the most promising candidate for future heterogeneous wireless environments. In this paper, we propose potential solutions that this protocol can offer to future “all-IP” heterogeneous mobile networks with particular emphasis on the user’s side. Our approach takes into con...

The broadcast nature of radio propagation makes wireless networks vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. To enhance authentication strength in wireless networks, various physical layer authentication schemes were proposed by exploiting physical layer characteristics. Recently, we proposed a novel PHYsical layer Phase Challenge-Response Authentication Scheme (PHY-PCRAS), which exploits both the re...

WSNs (Wireless sensor networks) are nowadays viewed as a vital portion of the IoTs (Internet of Things). Security is a significant issue in WSNs, especially in resource-constrained environments. AKA (Authentication and key agreement) enhances the security of WSNs against adversaries attempting to get sensitive sensor data. Various AKA schemes have been developed for verifying the legitimate use...

Few studies exist of allomaternal nursing in humans. It is relatively common among some cultures, such as the Aka and Efé hunter-gatherers of the Congo Basin, but it does not occur in other foragers such as the !Kung and Hadza of Southern and East Africa. This paper utilizes focal follow observations of Aka and Efé infants, interviews with Aka mothers, ethnographic reports from researchers work...

In case-based reasoning, the adaptation of a source case in order to solve the target problem is at the same time crucial and difficult to implement. The reason for this difficulty is that, in general, adaptation strongly depends on domain-dependent knowledge. This fact motivates research on adaptation knowledge acquisition (AKA). This paper presents an approach to AKA based on the principles a...

In a Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a user equipment (UE) can access IP multimedia services through IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). In addition to passing IMS authentication, called IMS AKA, this UE also needs to pass General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) authentication, called 3GPP AKA, since the data of the IMS service is transmitted through a GPRS network. Many steps in the...

This paper reports CT (Computerized Tomography) scan findings of the examination of the vertebral canals of 12 patients with severe osteofluorosis diagnosed by X-ray and with typical signs of spinal nerve damage. The examination showed various degrees of ossification of the rear longitudinal ligament (RLL) (aka posterior longitudinal ligament) in all 12 cases and of the yellow ligament (YL) (ak...