A Quantitative Method for Measuring Health of Authoritative Name Servers

The Domain Name System - DNS is regarded as one of the critical infrastructure component of the global Internet because a large-scale DNS outage would effectively take a typical user offline. Therefore, the Internet community should ensure that critical components of the DNS ecosystem - that is, root name servers, top-level domain registrars and registries, authoritative name servers, and recursive resolvers - function smoothly. To this end, the community should monitor them periodically and provide public alerts about abnormal behavior. The authors propose a novel quantitative approach for evaluating the health of authoritative name servers – a critical, core, and a large component of the DNS ecosystem. The performance is typically measured in terms of response time, reliability, and throughput for most of the Internet components. This research work proposes a novel list of parameters specifically for determining the health of authoritative name servers: DNS attack permeability, latency comparison, and DNSSEC validation.

Operating Room Waste Generated Across Otolaryngology Cases

ABSTRACT Background Hospital waste adds to the ecological footprint of the healthcare system, whereas inattention to recyclables may increase costs. The primary objective of this study was to assess the amount of recyclable and nonrecyclable intraoperative waste produced across representative otolaryngology surgical procedures. Methods Representative surgical cases across four otolaryngology subspecialties at a tertiary care military medical institution were prospectively identified. Waste was collected, divided, and weighed across two categories: recyclable and nonrecyclable. This study was performed in conjunction with a hospital-approved quality improvement project. Results The study included 22 otolaryngology surgeries performed across four otolaryngology subspecialties: facial plastics, pediatrics, otology, and head and neck oncology. Overall, 197.4 kg of waste was collected of which 40.2 kg (20%) was recyclable and 157.2 kg (80%) was nonrecyclable. An average of 1.8 kg of recyclable materials and 7.1 kg of nonrecyclable materials were collected per case. Conclusion This study supports that otolaryngology surgical procedures generate a significant amount of waste, a large component of which is recyclable. It highlights the need for proper disposal of this waste and the implementation of a recycling program at our institution with the potential for both ecologic and economic benefits.

Spending Time: An investigation of the relationship between emotions, time and spending

<p>The significance of exchange within our daily lives encompasses not only the economic exchange of physical commodities but more abstract entities such as knowledge, skills and beliefs. This research investigation developed from a desire to understand my personal engagement with money and the design of money, through the exploration of shopping and spending habits. The activity of spending and everyday provisioning is one which has come to form a large component of our everyday lives and is partly informed by the non-economic aspects of exchange described above. This has led researchers, such as Daniel Miller (1998), to investigate the cultural phenomenon of consumerism. As our ability to consume has expanded to an almost unlimited wealth of products to choose from, a consumer has been able to form an imagined relationship with their purchases and may even regard it as a physical manifestation of various emotions. This level of constant spending and provisioning demands further examination, as the systems designed to enable us to consume are the same which have capitalised on our emotions. By making use of ethnographic methods of investigation (specifically interviews and qualitative survey tools), this research explores how an increased level of monetary literacy could be developed towards a consumers everyday spending. Through the design of a research tool, The Spending Map, a process of critical reflection is encouraged where it is possible to exhibit a dialogue that can capture, catalogue and critique the emotional engagement a consumer has towards their spending.</p>

Spending Time: An investigation of the relationship between emotions, time and spending

<p>The significance of exchange within our daily lives encompasses not only the economic exchange of physical commodities but more abstract entities such as knowledge, skills and beliefs. This research investigation developed from a desire to understand my personal engagement with money and the design of money, through the exploration of shopping and spending habits. The activity of spending and everyday provisioning is one which has come to form a large component of our everyday lives and is partly informed by the non-economic aspects of exchange described above. This has led researchers, such as Daniel Miller (1998), to investigate the cultural phenomenon of consumerism. As our ability to consume has expanded to an almost unlimited wealth of products to choose from, a consumer has been able to form an imagined relationship with their purchases and may even regard it as a physical manifestation of various emotions. This level of constant spending and provisioning demands further examination, as the systems designed to enable us to consume are the same which have capitalised on our emotions. By making use of ethnographic methods of investigation (specifically interviews and qualitative survey tools), this research explores how an increased level of monetary literacy could be developed towards a consumers everyday spending. Through the design of a research tool, The Spending Map, a process of critical reflection is encouraged where it is possible to exhibit a dialogue that can capture, catalogue and critique the emotional engagement a consumer has towards their spending.</p>

An abundance- and morphology-based similarity index

Classic similarity indices measure community resemblance in terms of incidence (the number of shared species) and abundance (the extent to which the shared species are an equivalently large component of the ecosystem). Here we describe a general method for increasing the amount of information contained in the output of these indices and describe a new “soft” ecological similarity measure (here called “soft Chao-Jaccard similarity”). The new measure quantifies community resemblance in terms of shared species, while accounting for intraspecific variation in abundance and morphology between samples. We demonstrate how our proposed measure can reconstruct short ecological gradients using random samples of taxa, recognizing patterns that are completely missed by classic measures of similarity. To demonstrate the utility of our new index, we reconstruct a morphological gradient driven by river flow velocity using random samples drawn from simulated and real-world data. Results suggest that the new index can be used to recognize complex short ecological gradients in settings where only information about specimens is available. We include open-source R code for calculating the proposed index.

Mass generation in the large N Gross-Neveu model: a constructive proof without intermediate field

We give a new constructive proof of the infrared behavior of the Euclidean Gross-Neveu model in two dimensions with small coupling and large component number N. Our argument does not rely on the use of an intermediate (auxiliary bosonic) field. Instead bubble series are resummed by hand, and determinant bounds replaced by a control of local factorials relying on combinatorial arguments and Pauli's principle. The discrete symmetry-breaking is ensured by considering the model directly with a mass counterterm chosen in such a way as to cancel tadpole diagrams. Then the fermion two-point function is shown to decay (quasi-)exponentially as in [12]/

Caption to Voice Bot for Assistive Vision

Over the last few years, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the generation of the caption of images has progressively caught the considerable interest of several artificial intelligence research groups and has become a fascinating and tedious mission. A large component of scene comprehension, which encompasses the knowledge of computer vision and natural language processing, is image caption, which automatically produces natural language explanations according to the content observed in an image. The applications of such an image caption are substantial and noteworthy. The prime intention of the project is to build an object detection and captioning module that produces captions from the features extracted from the input images fed to the module in the form of audio and interface it with a virtual text reader, a read-aloud technology. Additionally, both these features can be accomplished using live images. The module as a whole helps the visually impaired identify objects and their positions.

The transformation of mesopelagic structure across polar fronts

The oceans sequester 31% of atmospheric carbon annually 1, but the magnitude of biologically enhanced sequestration is not evenly distributed across the globe 2. Measuring surface primary productivity offers a reasonable proxy for estimating carbon flux into the ocean 3 but entirely misses the processes that affect carbon export to sequestration depths. A high proportion of carbon flux is broken up 4 or respired 5 by organisms at mesopelagic depths (200-1000 m). At low and mid-latitudes, daytime biomass peaks of mesopelagic organisms are clearly present and detectable as sound-scattering layers, and up to 40% of oceanic carbon passes through these layers 6,7. Here we demonstrate that acoustic backscatter, a proxy for abundance of mesopelagic fish and zooplankton decreases by up to 97% across polar fronts, revealing a distinct pelagic structure in high latitude systems. As mesopelagic fish and macrozooplankton comprise a large component of active carbon transport in the upper ocean, this latitudinal reduction in mesopelagic biomass across thermal fronts, in both the Arctic and Antarctic, suggests different carbon flux attenuation schemes exists in ocean twilight zones of polar ecosystem compared to low latitude systems. Rapid ocean warming projected at mesopelagic depths8 will likely disrupt vertical connectivity and alter biogeochemical cycles at high latitudes.