Publications by authors named "L Funderburg"

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) face two important and conflicting challenges with regards to security: preserve the privacy of vehicles in order to prevent malicious entities from tracking users and detect and remove bad actors that attempt to game the system for their own advantage. In particular, detecting Sybil attacks, in which one node attempts to appear as many, seemingly conflicts with the goal of privacy preservation, and existing schemes fail on either one or both accounts. To fill this gap, we present a hierarchical key management system which uses short group signatures to preserve member privacy at lower levels while allowing mid-level nodes to detect Sybil attacks and highly trusted nodes at the top of the hierarchy to completely reveal the real identities of malicious nodes in order to prevent them from rejoining the system and for use by legal authorities.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Catatonia is a syndrome heterogeneous with regard to presentation and etiology. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) remains the first-line treatment for catatonia. Literature review reveals only a few published case reports on the use of right unilateral (RUL) ECT in catatonia, 1 case report on ultrabrief RUL ECT, and an absence of evidence on the relative effectiveness and tolerability of RUL versus bilateral ECT in treating catatonia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Neuroleptic drugs block brain dopamine receptors and are effective in treating psychoses of diverse origins. This finding has become a cornerstone of the dopamine theory of schizophrenia, but clinical studies relating schizophrenia, per se, to brain dopamine metabolism have ranged from controversial to negative. This article presents new evidence that cerebrospinal fluid levels of the dopamine metabolite homovanillic acid are related to the severity of psychosis in schizophrenia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The present pilot study examined the ability of parental communication deviance (CD) to predict relapse in schizophrenic patients in the 1-year period after hospital discharge. Measures of CD were obtained from verbatim transcripts of family problem-solving discussions for 20 schizophrenic patients and their parents at an initial assessment and before the patients' hospital discharge. Relapse was assessed using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale at 3-month intervals after discharge.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Accurate assessment of negative symptom changes in schizophrenic patients is crucial to determining the efficacy of new treatments. The present study examined the sensitivity to change over the course of hospitalization in negative symptomatology assessed by the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), the Negative Symptom Assessment (NSA), and an expanded version of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) in a sample of 60 schizophrenic patients. Symptoms were assessed when the patients were acutely ill and again when they were stabilized.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF