Abstract: Stress is a risk factor for impaired general, mental and reproductive health. The role of physiological and supraphysiological estradiol concentrations in stress perception and stress processing is less well understood. We therefore, conducted a prospective observational study to investigate the association between estradiol, stress perception and stress-related cognitive performance within serial measurements either during the natural menstrual cycle or during fertility treatment, where estradiol levels are strongly above the physiological level of a natural cycle and consequently, represent a good model to study dose-dependent effects of estradiol. Data from 44 women receiving in vitro fertilization at the Department of Reproductive Endocrinology in Zurich, Switzerland was compared to data from 88 women with measurements during their natural menstrual cycle. The german version of the Perceived Stress Questionnaire (PSQ) and the Cognitive Bias Test (CBT), in which cognitive performance is tested under time stress were used to evaluate subjective and functional aspects of stress. Estradiol levels were investigated at four different time points during the menstrual cycle and at two different time points during a fertility treatment. Cycle phase were associated with PSQ worry and cognitive bias in normally cycling women, but different phases of fertility treatment were not associated with subjectively perceived stress and stress-related cognitive bias. PSQ lack of joy and PSQ demands related to CBT in women receiving fertility treatment but not in women with a normal menstrual cycle. Only strong changes of the estradiol level during fertility treatment were weakly associated with CBT, but not with subjectively experienced stress. Our research emphasises the multidimensional character of stress and the necessity to adjust stress research to the complex nature of stress perception and processing. Infertility is associated with an increased psychological burden in patients. However, not all phases of the process to overcome infertility do significantly increase patient stress levels. Also, research on the psychological burden of infertility should consider that stress may vary during the different phases of fertility treatment.

Abstract: We show how the Mur$\varphi$ model checker can be used to automatically carry out safety analysis of a quite complex hybrid system tele-controlling vehicles traffic inside a safety critical transport infrastructure such as a long bridge or a tunnel. We present the Mur$\varphi$ model we developed towards this end as well as the experimental results we obtained by running the Mur$\varphi$ verifier on our model. Our experimental results show that the approach presented here can be used to verify safety of critical dimensioning parameters (e.g. bandwidth) of the telecommunication network embedded in a safety critical system.

Abstract: The NRL Pump protocol defines a multilevel secure component whose goal is to minimize leaks of information from high level systems to lower level systems, without degrading average time performances. We define a probabilistic model for the NRL Pump and show how a probabilistic model checker (FHP-mur$\varphi$) can be used to estimate the capacity of a probabilistic covert channel in the NRL Pump. We are able to compute the probability of a security violation as a function of time for various configurations of the system parameters (e.g. buffer sizes, moving average size, etc). Because of the model complexity, our results cannot be obtained using an analytical approach and, because of the low probabilities involved, it can be hard to obtain them using a simulator.