Implications of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Results of Online Bulletin Board Interviews

Reluctance to accept vaccination against COVID-19 poses a significant public health risk and is known to be a multi-determined phenomenon. We conducted online focus groups, or “bulletin boards,” in order to probe the nature of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and its implications. Participants were 94 individuals from three distinct U.S. geographical areas and represented a range of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Six themes emerged from the 3 day-long bulletin boards: the most trusted source of health information sought is the personal physician; information about health is nevertheless obtained from a wide variety of sources; stories about adverse side effects are especially “sticky”; government health institutions like CDC and FDA are not trusted; most respondents engaged in individualistic reasoning; and there is a wide spectrum of attitudes toward vaccination.

On Secure E-Voting over Blockchain

This article discusses secure methods to conduct e-voting over a blockchain in three different settings: decentralized voting, centralized remote voting, and centralized polling station voting. These settings cover almost all voting scenarios that occur in practice. A proof-of-concept implementation for decentralized voting over Ethereum’s blockchain is presented. This work demonstrates the suitable use of a blockchain not just as a public bulletin board but, more importantly, as a trustworthy computing platform that enforces the correct execution of the voting protocol in a publicly verifiable manner. We also discuss scaling up a blockchain-based voting application for national elections. We show that for national-scale elections the major verifiability problems can be addressed without having to depend on any blockchain. However, a blockchain remains a viable option to realize a public bulletin board, which has the advantage of being a “preventive” measure to stop retrospective changes on previously published records as opposed to a “detective” measure like the use of mirror websites. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy ;

The social definition of love and its role in maintaining and intimate relationship. Typology of attitudes towards love

The goal of this paper is to increase knowledge about the social definition of love in the context of an intimate relationship. The empirical material analyzed comes from Focus Group Interviews, Bulletin Board Discussions online, and representative research conducted using the CAWI method. The research was an exploratory study, and the analyzed material presents one thematic area concerning how participants understand love and the importance they attribute to it in the duration of an intimate relationship. The first part of the paper will present thematic areas related to the attempt to understand what love is that were indicated by the respondents at the stage of qualitative research. The second part of the article will present the typology of attitudes towards love on the basis of the analysis of data derived from quantitative research. The following types were distinguished: optimists in love, waiting for love, rationalists in love, distanced from love.

Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy

When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites”) in the mid- to late-1990s. The “Scene,” as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez” itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software.” Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy. Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.

Public Policy Instruments Selected in Policy Implementation Prostitution Prevention and Revocation in Surabaya City

This study aims to analyze public policy instruments chosen in the implementation of prostitution prevention and repetition policies in the city of Surabaya. This type of research is a qualitative descriptive study with a focus of research analyzing Voluntary Model Instruments, Mixed Model Instruments and Mandatory Instruments (Regulations). Novelty (novelty) of this research is to see the reality of the problem of prostitution by looking at the public policy instruments chosen in the implementation of prostitution prevention and repetition policies. The results showed that from the voluntary model instrument, commercial sex workers (CSWs) had been given skills training as well as spiritual spray/recitation on a regular basis to then be repatriated to their home areas with compensation. But not all sex workers want compensation. Residents of Dolly and Jarak held a bulletin board after hundreds of residents burned tires in the middle of the road as a refusal.

The development of a lifestyle modification mobile application, “Health for You” for overweight and obese breast cancer survivors in Korea

Purpose: This study aimed to develop a lifestyle modification (LSM) mobile application based on the Android operating system for overweight and obese breast cancer survivors (BCS) in Korea and evaluate its usability.Methods: The content analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of the LSM intervention mobile application for overweight and obese BCS was conducted by identifying survivors’ needs, searching the literature, and reviewing existing mobile applications. The survey was conducted from June 1 to December 28, 2020 at Jeonju city, Korea.Results: The mobile application for BCS included dietary and exercise information, weight logs, as well as distress and daily achievement check. It also included information and videos on the prevention of breast cancer recurrence and used a communication bulletin board. Expert and user usability evaluation of its content and functions confirmed that it was appropriate and satisfactory for overweight and obese BCS.Conclusion: This LSM mobile application developed for overweight and obese BCS was found to be appropriate for use. It can be applied for further study of effectiveness on improving their health and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, to ultimately improve quality of life.

An efficient end to end verifiable voting system

Electronic voting systems have become a powerful technology for the improvement of democracy by reducing the cost of elections, increasing voter turnout and even allowing voters to directly check the entire electoral process. End-to-end (E2E) verifiability has been widely identified as a critical property for the adoption of such voting systems for electoral procedures. Moreover, one of the pillars of any vote, apart from the secret of the vote and the integrity of the result, lies in the transparency of the process, the possibility for the voters "to understand the underlying system" without resorting to the competences techniques. The end-to-end verifiable electronic voting systems proposed in the literature do not always guarantee it because they require additional configuration hypotheses, for example the existence of a trusted third party as a random source or the existence of a random beacon. Hence, building a reliable verifiable end-to-end voting system offering confidentiality and integrity remains an open research problem. In this work, we are presenting a new verifiable end-to-end electronic voting system requiring only the existence of a coherent voting board, fault-tolerant, which stores all election-related information and allows any party as well as voters to read and verify the entire election process. The property of our system is information guaranteed given the existence of the bulletin board, the involvement of the voters and the political parties in the process. This involvement does not compromise the confidentiality nor integrity of the elections and does not require cryptographic operations on the voters account. Les systèmes de vote électronique sont devenus une technologie puissante pour amé-liorer la démocratie en réduisant le coût des élections, en augmentant la participation des électeurs et en permettant même aux électeurs de vérifier directement l'ensemble de la procédure électorale. Cependant, la vérification de bout en bout (E2E) a été largement identifiée comme une propriété critique pour l'adoption de tels systèmes de vote en réel pour des procédures électorales. Par ailleurs, l'un des piliers de tout scrutin, outre le secret du vote et l'intégrité du résultat, réside dans la trans-parence du processus, la possibilité pour les électeurs "de comprendre le système sous-jacent" sans avoir recours aux compétences techniques. Les systèmes de vote électronique vérifiables de bout en bout proposés dans la littérature ne le garantissent pas toujours car ils nécessitent des hypothèses de configuration supplémentaires par exemple l'existence d'un tiers de confiance comme source de hasard, l'existence d'une balise aléatoire. Ainsi, construire un système de vote vérifiable de bout en bout fiable offrant la confidentialité et l'intégrité reste un problème de recherche ouvert. Dans ce tra-vail, nous présentons un nouveau système de vote électronique vérifiable de bout en bout nécessitant uniquement l'existence d'un babillard de vote cohérent, tolérant aux pannes, qui stocke toutes les in-formations relatives aux élections et permet à tout parti ainsi qu'aux électeurs de lire et vérifier le processus d'élection complet. La propriété de vérification de bout en bout de notre système est une information garantie compte tenu de l'existence du babillard, de l'implication des électeurs et des par-tis politique dans le processus. Cette implication ne compromet ni la confidentialité ni l'intégrité des élections et ne nécessite pas d'opérations cryptographiques pour le compte de l'électeur.