209 Yet, disease staging is not without its disadvantages. Certain diseases cannot be staged.210 No actual statistical measures of resource consumption are utilized in categorizing patients.21 ' Disease staging also ignores concurrent conditions and patient-related variables which affect resource consumption.21 2 Disease staging may prove very useful in the refinement needed within the diagnost...

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First we present a new simple electronic voting scheme having standard re-encryption mix net back-end, which allows to cast a ballot and verify its correctness in a new way. Then we extend the proposed scheme to represent a new very efficient mix network construction. We called our mix network to be self-proving mix, because it is shown how mix process...

The current online voting system used in Estonia has not employed mathematically secure verifiable proofs of correctness for ensuring the honesty of the tabulation server [Com13a]. The auditing is based on observation of the procedures and if the procedures are done according to the protocol. Even though the protocol was not followed, as the cast votes were transferred from ballot storing serve...

Mix-automatic sequences form a proper extension of the class of automatic sequences, and arise from a generalization of finite state automata where the input alphabet is state-dependent. In this paper we compare the class of mix-automatic sequences with the class of morphic sequences. For every polynomial φ we construct a mix-automatic sequence whose subword complexity exceeds φ. This stands in...

Traffic analysis is typically countered by the use of intermediary nodes, whose role is to perturb the traffic flow and thus confuse an external observer. Such intermediaries are called mixes. We address attacks that exploit the timing behaviour of TCP and other protocols and applications in low-latency anonymity networks. Intermediaries delay and reroute exchanged messages, reorder them, pad t...

We study the random composition of a small family of O(n3) simple permutations on {0, 1}n. Specifically we ask what is the number of compositions needed to achieve a permutation that is close to k-wise independent. We improve on a result of Gowers [1] and show that up to a polylogarithmic factor, n3k3 compositions of random permutations from this family suffice. We further show that the result ...

Recently there has been much interest in blending successful development methods such as agile development and product line engineering into an even more successful hybrid. I will consider one technique for accomplishing this blending. I will briefly present an example that will be discussed in more detail at the Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) in September. In this issue of Strategic S...

The marketing mix refers to variables that a marketing manager can control to influence a brand’s sales or market share. Traditionally, these variables are summarized as the four Ps of marketing: product, price, promotion, and place (i.e., distribution; McCarthy, 1996). Product refers to aspects such as the firm’s portfolio of products, the newness of those products, their differentiation from ...

Bituminous mix design is a delicate balancing act among the proportions of various aggregate sizes and bitumen content. For a given aggregate gradation, the optimum bitumen content is estimated by satisfying a number of mix design parameters. This article briefly discusses the current approaches in bituminous mix design and singles out the issues involved.