On behalf of the European Commission, this study establishes empirically the annual leakage rate of mobile air conditioners (MACs) in buses and coaches for the use-phase of the vehicles. In buses, refills are carried out in relatively short service intervals to compensate for leakages whatever their nature. Such refills are recorded over a sufficiently long time and in appropriate detail in Swe...

In today’s lecture we study one-time message authentication codes (MACs) which are secure in an information-theoretic sense. We will see that, compared to informationtheoretically secure encryption, significantly better parameters can be achieved. We will also study such MACs in the setting of imperfect randomness, i.e. when the secret key is not drawn from the uniform distribution but rather i...

In this paper, we revisit the security of several message authentication code (MAC) algorithms based on block ciphers, when instantiated with 64-bit block ciphers such as DES. We essentially focus on algorithms that were proposed in the norm ISO/IEC 9797–1. We consider both forgery attacks and key recovery attacks. Our results improve upon the previously known attacks and show that all algorith...

A block cipher or message authentication code (MAC) should behave as a random mapping. The mapping’s randomness can be evaluated with statistical tests. Statistical test suites typically used for this purpose, such as the NIST test suite, are not well-suited for block ciphers and MACs; also, these test suites employ a frequentist approach, making it difficult to obtain an overall evaluation of ...

Disruption management is an important topic in railway management and control. When a disruption occurs the original operational plan may become infeasible and will need to be revised to make it suitable for the new environment. The Dutch Railways (NS) address this problem and stress the importance of getting back to stable operations as efficiently as possible, especially in case of major inci...

BACKGROUND Epithelioid, foam, and multinucleated giant cells (MNGCs) are characteristics of tuberculosis granulomas, yet the precise genesis and functions of these transformed macrophages are unclear. We evaluated the role of platelets as drivers of macrophage transformation in mycobacterial infection. METHODS We employed flow cytometry and microscopy to assess cellular phenotype and phagocyt...

BACKGROUND Information on health-related quality of life is becoming increasingly important in children with cerebral palsy. This study investigated the relationship between activity limitation and health-related quality of life in school-aged children with cerebral palsy. METHODS Data were collected from 71 children aged 6-15 years with cerebral palsy. Activity limitations were assessed usin...

Adenylyl cyclases (ACs) generate the second messenger cAMP from ATP. Mammalian cells express nine transmembrane AC (mAC) isoforms (AC1-9) and a soluble AC (sAC, also referred to as AC10). This review will largely focus on mACs. mACs are activated by the G-protein Gαs and regulated by multiple mechanisms. mACs are differentially expressed in tissues and regulate numerous and diverse cell functio...

The standard treatment for most advanced cancers is multidrug therapy. Unfortunately, combinations in the clinic often do not perform as predicted. Therefore, to complement identifying rational drug combinations based on biological assumptions, we hypothesized that a functional screen of drug combinations, without limits on combination sizes, will aid the identification of effective drug cockta...

UNLABELLED The Bimanual Fine Motor Function (BFMF) is currently the principal classification of hand function recorded by the Surveillance of Cerebral Palsy in Europe (SCPE) register. The BFMF is used in a number of epidemiological studies, but has not yet been validated. AIMS To examine aspects of construct and content validity of the BFMF. METHODS AND RESULTS Construct validity of the BFM...