Does fair anonymization exist?

Anonymization is viewed as an instrument by which personal data can be rendered so that it can be processed further without harming data subjects' private lives, for purposes that are beneficial to the public good. The anonymization is fair if the possibility of re-identification can be practically excluded. The data processor does all that he or she can to ensure this. For a fair anonymization, simply removing the primary personal identification data, such as the name, resident address, phone number and email address, is not enough, as many papers have warned. Therefore, new guidance documents, and even legal rulings such as the HIPAA Privacy Rule on de-identification, may improve the security of anonymization. Researchers are continuously testing the efficiency of the methods and simulating re-identification attacks. Since the US and Canada do not have a population registry, re-identification experiments were carried out with the help of other publicly available databases, such as census data or the voters' database. Unfortunately, neither of these is complete and sufficiently detailed, so the computed risk was only an estimate. The author obtained the zip code, gender, date of birth distribution data from the Hungarian population registry and computed re-identification risks in several simulated cases. This paper also gives an insight into the legal environment of Hungarian personal medical data protection legislation.     

The stigmatized Italian visionary and the devout French physician: Palma Mattarelli d’Oria and docteur Imbert Gourbeyre*

ABSTRACT

The paper examines the case of an Italian local celebrity, Palma Mattarelli, born in 1825, and stigmatized at the significant age of 33. From that moment on, extraordinary phenomena multiplied around her: ecstasies, visions, ‘holy’ communion, apocalyptic prophecies. In the climate of renewed Catholic sensibility for extraordinary supernatural phenomena Palma’s fame soon extended abroad. The Docteur A. Imbert-Gourbeyre visited Palma in 1871, and dedicated the second volume of Les stigmatisées to her. Palma’s celebrity was undermined by the hostility of the local church authorities, and an inquisitorial examination of her which ended in 1872 with a negative judgement, ranging her cause in the frame of ‘afettata santità’. Imbert-Gourbeyre was advised not to republish his successful book on her. Yet, the extraordinary phenomena kept on recurring around her till her death in 1888.     

Forensic age estimation on digital X-ray images: Medial epiphyses of the clavicle and first rib ossification in relation to chronological age

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in forensic sciences about forensic age estimation in living subjects by means of radiological methods. This research was conducted on digital thorax X-rays to test the usefulness of some radiological changes in the clavicle and first rib. The sample consisted in a total of 123 subjects of Spanish origin (61 men and 62 women; age range: 5-75 years). From all subjects, a thorax posterior-anterior radiograph was obtained in digital format. Scoring for fusion of medial epiphyses of the clavicle was carried out by Schmeling's system and ossification of the costal cartilage of the first rib by Michelson's system. Degree of ossification and epiphyseal fusion were analyzed in relation with known age and sex of these subjects. The results give a minimum age of >20 years for full fusion of the medial epiphysis of the clavicle (Stages 4 and 5). Concerning the first rib, all subjects with the final Stage 3 of ossification were above 25 years of age. These results suggest that the first rib ossification might become an additional method to the ones so far recommended for forensic age estimation in subjects around 21. New research would be desirable to confirm this suggestion.