Palliative care provision for patients with a haematological malignancy : can we do more?

This editorial depicts the current challenges in palliative care provision for patients with a haematological malignancy and the contribution of cancer nurses. There have been significant advancements in the care of patients with a hematological malignancy over the past three or more decades1. Despite this, there still exists a significant mortality risk in curative treatment and many patients with a hematological malignancy will die from their disease1. A growing body of research indicates patients with a hematological malignancy do not receive best practice palliative and end-of-life care2. Shortfalls in care include poor referral patterns to specialist palliative care services, lack of honest discussions regarding death and dying, inadequate spiritual care for patients and families, patients frequently dying in the acute care setting and high levels of patient and family distress2. There have been a number of efforts in the United Kingdom, United States of America, Sweden, and Australia demonstrating palliative and hematology care can co-exist, exemplified through clinical case studies and innovative models of care2. However, deficits in the provision of palliative care for patients with a hematological malignancy persist as evident in the international literature2. Addressing this issue requires research exploring new aspects of a complex scenario; here we suggest priority areas of research...

On the security of PAS (predicate-based authentication service)

Recently a new human authentication scheme called PAS (predicate-based authentication service) was proposed, which does not require the assistance of any supplementary device. The main security claim of PAS is to resist passive adversaries who can observe the whole authentication session between the human user and the remote server. In this paper we show that PAS is insecure against both brute force attack and a probabilistic attack. In particular, we show that its security against brute force attack was strongly overestimated. Furthermore, we introduce a probabilistic attack, which can break part of the password even with a very small number of observed authentication sessions. Although the proposed attack cannot completely break the password, it can downgrade the PAS system to a much weaker system similar to common OTP (one-time password) systems.

On cloud computing service considerations for the small and medium enterprises

The concept of cloud computing services is appealing to the small and medium enterprises (SMEs), with the opportunity to acquire modern information technology resources as a utility and avoid costly capital investments in technology resources. However, the adoption of the cloud computing services presents significant challenges to the SMEs. The SMEs need to determine a path to adopting the cloud computing services that would ensure their sustainable presence in the cloud computing environment. Information about approaches to adopting the cloud computing services by the SMEs is fragmented. Through an interpretive design, we suggest that the SMEs need to have a strategic and incremental intent, understand their organizational structure, understand the external factors, consider the human resource capacity, and understand the value expectations from the cloud computing services to forge a successful path to adopting the cloud computing services. These factors would contribute to a model of cloud services for SMEs.