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As decentralized finance (DeFi) applications take off and pose to revolutionize the world's financial infrastructure, the current public blockchains fall short in financial privacy. That is a significant barrier for traditional financial institutions to enter DeFi. The Oasis Ethereum ParaTime proposes a new privacy-first blockchain network to execute Ethereum smart contracts and trade Ethereum digital assets. It provides full transparency into smart contract code and logic. The smart contract is executed on replicated virtual machines on a decentralized set of validator nodes, and the result is guaranteed to be correct through the consensus of those nodes. Yet, the contract data and state are confidential even to the validators and node operators. The transactions and results are only revealed to users who submit the transactions. In this article, we will explore the design of the Oasis Ethereum ParaTime, and its potential applications. We will also discuss an early testnet we launched on the Oasis Network and its future plans.

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is the second most common fatal genetic disease in infancy. It is caused by deletion or intragenic pathogenic variants of the causative gene SMN1, which degenerates anterior horn motor neurons and leads to progressive myasthenia and muscle atrophy. Early treatment improves motor function and prognosis in patients with SMA, but drugs are expensive and do not cure the disease. Therefore, carrier screening seems to be the most effective way to prevent SMA birth defects. In this study, we genetically analyzed 1400 samples using multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), and compared the consistency of the results. We randomly selected 44 samples with consistent MLPA and qPCR results for comprehensive SMA analysis (CASMA) using a long-read sequencing (LRS)-based approach. CASMA results showed 100% consistency, visually and intuitively explained the inconsistency between exons 7 and 8 copy numbers detected by MLPA in 13 samples. A total of 16 samples showed inconsistent MLPA and qPCR results for SMN1exon 7. CASMA was performed on all samples and the results were consistent with those of resampling for MLPA and qPCR detection. CASMA also detected an additional intragenic variant c.-39A>G in a sample with two copies of SMN1(RT02). Finally, we detected 23 SMA carriers, with an estimated carrier rate of 1/61 in this cohort. In addition, CASMA identified the “2 + 0” carrier status of SMN1and SMN2in a family by analyzing the genotypes of only three samples (parents and one sibling). CASMA has great advantages over MLPA and qPCR assays, and could become a powerful technical support for large-scale screening of SMA.

The authors present information on the advantages of conducting consumer surveys using calling lists of cell phone owners. Topics include consumer behavior, buying behavior, and increasing effective marketing research.

The value of the immediacy of cellular telephone consumer surveys is discussed.

For many years, the US Government has pushed the adoption of health information exchange (HIE), which is a key to spur large-scale innovation in the healthcare delivery. As funding has diminished, healthcare managers need to assess the adoption incentivised by government programs. This study helps to get a better understanding of how the adoption is influenced by the factors associated with the policies regulated by public insurance programs: Medicare and Medicaid. Using the technology-organisation-environment (TOE) framework, we evaluate the health information exchange (HIE) adoption factors associate with policy implications. Based on a dataset integrated from data reported to the healthcare cost report information system and hospital comparison data, we conducted a logistic regression analysis to model the probability of HIE adoption as a function of TOE factors. Besides factors that affect hospital's technology adoption, such as hospital sizes and geographic locations, our research also revealed three significant HIE adoption factors not thoroughly examined before, including imaging efficiency, scale of outpatient departments, and payer mix. Our research could provide insights for practitioners and healthcare managers when examining the strategies associated with HIE adoption.

In this article, we demonstrate that lightweight high-level runtimes, such as WebAssembly, could offer performance and scaling advantages over existing solutions and could enable fine-grained, pay-as-you-use business models.

The article developed a five-lump kinetic model for delayed coking through needle coke. The kinetic parameters were determined using the experimental results of the genetic algorithm method. The results showed the calculated concentration distribution agreed well with the experimental results. The results of five-lump kinetic model that composed of parallel and serial reactions and their activation energy also showed that the thermal sensitivity of coal tar pitch declined and that the orderly orientation strengthened under external magnetic field. This facilitates the formation of wide mesophase pitch structures in thermal conversion.

With the widespread use of information systems, traditional manual audit approach cannot adapt to the quick development of information technologies. It has drawbacks of high cost, inefficiency, big risk, poor quality, etc. Computer-assisted audit and its applications are studied in this paper. Firstly, comparative analysis between traditional manual audit and computer-assisted audit is conducted. Then the flow of data-oriented computer-assisted audit is presented and the implementation steps are detailed. Finally, the applications of computer-assisted audit are discussed in four practical audit cases of information systems, i.e. hospital information system, electrical police management system, local taxation management information system and medical insurance fund management information system. And the corresponding audit results are given. The practical audit cases show that computer-assisted audit can expand the audit scope and perform deeper data analysis, thus cutting down the cost and risk of audit while improving efficiency and quality of audit. Therefore, it can effectively help auditors to perform information systems audit.

This paper introduces advantages of XML as a data exchange format, and proposes a multi-database system architecture based on XML, a data exchange platform model. We takes full advantage of is the features of XML, including good extensibility and interactivity, to implement the XML-based integration program of heterogeneous databases, making all kinds of data described in a unified XML format. And we describe the actual workflow of the system in this model and theoretically analyze the implementation details of its core modules. Finally, the workflow and the multi-database work mode for users to access databases in the system model based on XML are presented.

With our concern about food safety issues, many areas have adopted the food traceability system in management and monitoring the entire chain of food production, processing and marketing. There are still many issues to the existing food traceability system of China such as inconsistent traceability information flow, the non-standard content and the difficulty of sharing and exchanging data. This paper studies and designs beef product traceability system by the introduction of the Internet of things technologies and combining with the technology of RFID and EPC standard. The beef product traceability system that has important theoretical significance and practical value can provide consumers with beef product information query and facilitate the logistics responsibility traceability for managers.

Community structure detection has great importance in finding the relationships of elements in complex networks. This paper presents a method of simultaneously taking into account the weak community structure definition and community subgraph density, based on the greedy strategy for community expansion. The results are compared with several previous methods on artificial networks and real world networks. And experimental results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.

The Internet has changed security and because the Internet is borderless, security threats are now on a global scale. In this paper, the authors explore the global nature of information security from the perspectives of corporate professionals. Through an empirical study with corporate professionals, who have first-hand information security knowledge, the authors confirm that the proposed knowledge topics are relevant toward a comprehensive understanding of information security issues. Analyzing the empirical data, the authors found two global security factors: business protection of data and government/social issues.

Information system research posits that online intermediaries could reduce consumer search cost and improve market efficiency, and traditional intermediary would lose market share upon the advent of online intermediary. However, in reality, traditional intermediaries still hold strong market share positions. What are the advantages and disadvantages of online intermediaries and traditional intermediaries? Our research is an effort to address these questions so that we can better explain and predict intermediary's performance. We develop our analysis based on financial intermediation theory, and adopt delegated monitoring model to compare the intrinsic structures and efficiency of online intermediaries and traditional intermediaries. We achieve two important conclusions: first, when information asymmetry exists, traditional intermediary could improve consumer welfare. Second, traditional intermediary improves market welfare because it can diversify its delegated tasks. Based on these results, we also identify market segments and marketing strategies of online and traditional intermediaries.

Outpatient clinical drug trials and therapies conducted in the patients' natural environments not only drastically reduce clinical trial costs but also make the results more accurate. However, a major challenge in outpatient trials is to monitor the patients and make sure that they are compliant with trial protocols. In this paper, we first discuss why patient compliance is so important in clinical trials and identify two crucial compliance issues: drug dosing compliance and symptom self-report compliance. We suggest that pervasive wireless EDC (Electronic Data Capture) devices powered by web services can potentially provide solutions to those outpatient compliance issues. A wireless front-end architecture based on short-range wireless networks is proposed. Then, we survey current and emerging technologies that could be used to implement such clinical trial information systems. We put special emphases on core technologies including multimodal user interfaces, interoperable back end services and security.

Outpatient clinical drug trials and therapies conducted in the patients' natural environments not only drastically reduce clinical trial costs but also make the results more accurate. However, a major challenge in outpatient trials is to monitor the patients and make sure that they are compliant with trial protocols. In this paper, we first discuss why patient compliance is so important in clinical trials and identify two crucial compliance issues: drug dosing compliance and symptom self-report compliance. We suggest that pervasive wireless EDC (Electronic Data Capture) devices powered by web services can potentially provide solutions to those outpatient compliance issues. A wireless front-end architecture based on short-range wireless networks is proposed. Then, we survey current and emerging technologies that could be used to implement such clinical trial information systems. We put special emphases on core technologies including multimodal user interfaces, interoperable back end services and security.

A letter to the editor is presented regarding a study on the effects of fluoride (F) exposure to the health of aluminum plant workers and the early prevention of fluoride bone injury.