Research on ecosystem services (ESs) has increased substantially in recent decades, but the findings have been slow to affect actual management, perhaps because most studies to date have neglected ...ESs supply and demand coupling mechanisms. Human reliance on ESs is due to the capacity of the landscape to supply services, but also to a societal need for these services. Sustainable land management requires supply and demand mismatches to be reconciled and the needs of different stakeholders to be balanced. Explicit spatial mapping of ESs supply and demand associated with land use changes can provide relevant insights for enhancing land management in urban areas. The emphasis is now shifting to enhancing sustainable land use, to ensure that supply meets or exceeds demand. In this study, a comprehensive framework comprising four core steps for quantifying ESs supply and demand changes associated with land use changes was developed and applied in a case study on Shanghai municipality, on the basis of environmental quality standards and policy goals. The balance thresholds of ESs supply and demand were derived by regression analysis between ESs and land use/land cover types. The results revealed large spatial heterogeneity in supply and demand for four key ESs tested: carbon sequestration, water retention, particulate (PM10) removal and recreation. Carbon sequestration, water retention and recreation services all showed major shortfalls in supply that changed dramatically with urban land use change. This is valuable empirical evidence and has timely policy implications for management in a rapid urbanising world.
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•Framework for linking ecosystem services supply and demand is presented.•PM10 removal service is in a state of surplus while the other three have shortfalls.•The ecosystem services assessed had spatial heterogeneity in supply and demand.•The balance thresholds of ecosystem services supply and demand were derived.•Countermeasures to help reduce shortfalls and mismatches are suggested.
Using naturalistic data to assess e-cyclist behavior Dozza, Marco; Bianchi Piccinini, Giulio Francesco; Werneke, Julia
Transportation research. Part F, Traffic psychology and behaviour,
08/2016, Letnik:
41
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
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•Collected naturalistic e-cycling data and analyzed risk with odds ratios.•Risk increased at intersections and when vehicles stopped on the bike lane.•E-cyclists were faster than ...traditional cyclist and experienced different conflicts.•Increasing e-bikes conspicuity to facilitate identification may increase safety.•E-bikes may enable intelligent transport systems and cooperative applications.
In Europe, the use of electric bicycles is rapidly increasing. This trend raises important safety concerns: Is their use compatible with existing infrastructure and regulations? Do they present novel safety issues? How do they impact other traffic? This study sought to address these concerns, using instrumented electric bicycles to monitor e-cyclists’ behavior in a naturalistic fashion. Data was collected from 12 bicyclists, each of whom rode an instrumented bicycle for two weeks. In total, 1500km worth of data were collected, including 88 critical events (crashes and near-crashes). Analysis of these critical events identified pedestrians, light vehicles and other bicycles as main threats to a safe ride. Other factors also contributed to crash causation, such as being in proximity to a crossing or encountering a vehicle parked in the bicycle lane. A comparison between electric and traditional bicycles was enabled by the availability of data from a previous study a year earlier, which collected naturalistic cycling data from traditional bicycles using the same instrumentation as in this study. Electric bicycles were found to be ridden faster, on average, than traditional bicycles, in addition to interacting differently with other road users. The results presented in this study also suggest that countermeasures to bicycle crashes should be different for electric and traditional bicycles. Finally, increasing electric bicycle conspicuity appears to be the easiest, most obvious way to increase their safety.
The incorporation of dynamic voltage scaling technology into computation offloading offers more flexibilities for mobile edge computing. In this paper, we investigate partial computation offloading ...by jointly optimizing the computational speed of smart mobile device (SMD), transmit power of SMD, and offloading ratio with two system design objectives: energy consumption of SMD minimization (ECM) and latency of application execution minimization (LM). Considering the case that the SMD is served by a single cloud server, we formulate both the ECM problem and the LM problem as nonconvex problems. To tackle the ECM problem, we recast it as a convex one with the variable substitution technique and obtain its optimal solution. To address the nonconvex and nonsmooth LM problem, we propose a locally optimal algorithm with the univariate search technique. Furthermore, we extend the scenario to a multiple cloud servers system, where the SMD could offload its computation to a set of cloud servers. In this scenario, we obtain the optimal computation distribution among cloud servers in closed form for the ECM and LM problems. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the energy consumption and shorten the latency with respect to the existing offloading schemes.
Although awareness is constantly rising, that industrial computer networks (in a very broad sense) can be exposed to serious cyber threats, many people still think that the same countermeasures, ...developed to protect general-purpose computer networks, can be effectively adopted also in those situations where a physical system is managed/controlled through some distributed Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as several examples of successful attacks carried out in the last decade, and more frequently in the very recent past, have dramatically shown. Experts in this area know very well that often the peculiarities of industrial networks prevent the adoption of classical approaches to their security and, in particular, of those popular solutions that are mainly based on a detect and patch philosophy. This paper is a contribution, from the security point of view, to the assessment of the current situation of a wide class of industrial distributed computing systems. In particular, the analysis presented in this paper takes into account the process of ensuring a satisfactory degree of security for a distributed industrial system, with respect to some key elements such as the system characteristics, the current state of the art of standardization and the adoption of suitable controls (countermeasures) that can help in lowering the security risks below a predefined, acceptable threshold.
CleanupSpec Saileshwar, Gururaj; Qureshi, Moinuddin K.
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture,
10/2019
Conference Proceeding
Speculation-based attacks affect hundreds of millions of computers. These attacks typically exploit caches to leak information, using speculative instructions to cause changes to the cache state. ...Hardware-based solutions that protect against such forms of attacks try to prevent any speculative changes to the cache sub-system by delaying them. For example, InvisiSpec, a recent work, splits the load into two operations: the first operation is speculative and obtains the value and the second operation is non-speculative and changes the state of the cache. Unfortunately, such a "Redo" based approach typically incurs slowdown due to the requirement of extra operations for correctly speculated loads, that form the large majority of loads.
In this work, we propose CleanupSpec, an "Undo"-based approach to safe speculation. CleanupSpec is a hardware-based solution that mitigates these attacks by undoing the changes to the cache sub-system caused by speculative instructions, in the event they are squashed on a mis-speculation. As a result, CleanupSpec prevents information leakage on the correct path of execution due to any mis-speculated load and is secure against speculation-based attacks exploiting caches (we demonstrate a proof-of-concept defense on Spectre Variant-1 PoC). Unlike a Redo-based approach which incurs overheads for correct-path loads, CleanupSpec incurs overheads only for the wrong-path loads that are less frequent. As a result, CleanupSpec only incurs an average slowdown of 5.1% compared to a non-secure baseline. Moreover, CleanupSpec incurs a modest storage overhead of less than 1 kilobyte per core, for tracking and undoing the speculative changes to the caches.
ret2spec Maisuradze, Giorgi; Rossow, Christian
Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security,
10/2018
Conference Proceeding
Odprti dostop
Speculative execution is an optimization technique that has been part of CPUs for over a decade. It predicts the outcome and target of branch instructions to avoid stalling the execution pipeline. ...However, until recently, the security implications of speculative code execution have not been studied. In this paper, we investigate a special type of branch predictor that is responsible for predicting return addresses. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study return address predictors and their consequences for the security of modern software. In our work, we show how return stack buffers (RSBs), the core unit of return address predictors, can be used to trigger misspeculations. Based on this knowledge, we propose two new attack variants using RSBs that give attackers similar capabilities as the documented Spectre attacks. We show how local attackers can gain arbitrary speculative code execution across processes, e.g., to leak passwords another user enters on a shared system. Our evaluation showed that the recent Spectre countermeasures deployed in operating systems can also cover such RSB-based cross-process attacks. Yet we then demonstrate that attackers can trigger misspeculation in JIT environments in order to leak arbitrary memory content of browser processes. Reading outside the sandboxed memory region with JIT-compiled code is still possible with 80% accuracy on average.
The interrupted-sampling repeater jamming (ISRJ) is a kind of intrapulse coherent deception jamming, it produces false-target peaks, which obfuscate the real target detection and tracking. In this ...article, a novel recognition method is proposed to identify the false-target peaks caused by ISRJ. The proposed method is realized via the integration decomposition of pulse compression, and the intermediate data in pulse compression are extracted to identify the false-target peaks. Due to the time-sharing transmit–receive antenna of the jammer, the jamming signal is short or discontinuous pieces compared with the real echo. This intrinsic property provides important feature for jamming identification. In the proposed method, a variance value is generated from the intermediate data, to evaluate the temporal energy distribution evenness of the signal component corresponding to each target peak. Real target echo corresponds to small variance whereas the jamming signal corresponds to large variance. In this way, false-target peaks caused by jamming signal can be identified efficiently. Besides, the computational cost of the proposed method is low, thus, it is suitable for real-time applications in practical radar systems. Numerical experiments under different jamming parameters demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed false-target recognition method. Moreover, Monte Carlo simulations under different SNR levels verify the reliable classification capability of the proposed method. In summary, this article provides a new perspective for ISRJ identification, and it is also the proof-of-concept example for other potential applications concerning integration decomposition.
There are currently four radiation medical countermeasures that have been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration to mitigate hematopoietic acute radiation syndrome, all of which ...are repurposed radiomitigators. The evaluation of additional candidate drugs that may also be helpful for use during a radiological/nuclear emergency is ongoing. A chlorobenzyl sulfone derivative (organosulfur compound) known as Ex-Rad, or ON01210, is one such candidate medical countermeasure, being a novel, small-molecule kinase inhibitor that has demonstrated efficacy in the murine model. In this study, nonhuman primates exposed to ionizing radiation were subsequently administered Ex-Rad as two treatment schedules (Ex-Rad I administered 24 and 36 h post-irradiation, and Ex-Rad II administered 48 and 60 h post-irradiation) and the proteomic profiles of serum using a global molecular profiling approach were assessed. We observed that administration of Ex-Rad post-irradiation is capable of mitigating radiation-induced perturbations in protein abundance, particularly in restoring protein homeostasis, immune response, and mitigating hematopoietic damage, at least in part after acute exposure. Taken together, restoration of functionally significant pathway perturbations may serve to protect damage to vital organs and provide long-term survival benefits to the afflicted population.
•We identify risk factors affecting pedestrian crash injury severity in Florida.•Two locations are analyzed, signalized and unsignalized intersections.•We apply the mixed logit modeling ...approach.•Standard crosswalks experience 1.36% reduction in severity at unsignalized intersections.•At-fault pedestrians are more vulnerable of severe injuries at unsignalized intersections.
This study identifies and compares the significant factors affecting pedestrian crash injury severity at signalized and unsignalized intersections. The factors explored include geometric predictors (e.g., presence and type of crosswalk and presence of pedestrian refuge area), traffic predictors (e.g., annual average daily traffic (AADT), speed limit, and percentage of trucks), road user variables (e.g., pedestrian age and pedestrian maneuver before crash), environmental predictors (e.g., weather and lighting conditions), and vehicle-related predictors (e.g., vehicle type). The analysis was conducted using the mixed logit model, which allows the parameter estimates to randomly vary across the observations. The study used three years of pedestrian crash data from Florida. Police reports were reviewed in detail to have a better understanding of how each pedestrian crash occurred. Additionally, information that is unavailable in the crash records, such as at-fault road user and pedestrian maneuver, was collected. At signalized intersections, higher AADT, speed limit, and percentage of trucks; very old pedestrians; at-fault pedestrians; rainy weather; and dark lighting condition were associated with higher pedestrian severity risk. For example, a one-percent higher truck percentage increases the probability of severe injuries by 1.37%. A one-mile-per-hour higher speed limit increases the probability of severe injuries by 1.22%. At unsignalized intersections, pedestrian walking along roadway, middle and very old pedestrians, at-fault pedestrians, vans, dark lighting condition, and higher speed limit were associated with higher pedestrian severity risk. On the other hand, standard crosswalks were associated with 1.36% reduction in pedestrian severe injuries. Several countermeasures to reduce pedestrian injury severity are recommended.
Recent studies have established that dysregulation of the human immune system and the reactivation of latent herpesviruses persists for the duration of a 6-month orbital spaceflight. It appears ...certain aspects of adaptive immunity are dysregulated during flight, yet some aspects of innate immunity are heightened. Interaction between adaptive and innate immunity also seems to be altered. Some crews experience persistent hypersensitivity reactions during flight. This phenomenon may, in synergy with extended duration and galactic radiation exposure, increase specific crew clinical risks during deep space exploration missions. The clinical challenge is based upon both the frequency of these phenomena in multiple crewmembers during low earth orbit missions and the inability to predict which specific individual crewmembers will experience these changes. Thus, a general countermeasure approach that offers the broadest possible coverage is needed. The vehicles, architecture, and mission profiles to enable such voyages are now under development. These include deployment and use of a cis-Lunar station (mid 2020s) with possible Moon surface operations, to be followed by multiple Mars flyby missions, and eventual human Mars surface exploration. Current ISS studies will continue to characterize physiological dysregulation associated with prolonged orbital spaceflight. However, sufficient information exists to begin consideration of both the need for, and nature of, specific immune countermeasures to ensure astronaut health. This article will review relevant in-place operational countermeasures onboard ISS and discuss a myriad of potential immune countermeasures for exploration missions. Discussion points include nutritional supplementation and functional foods, exercise and immunity, pharmacological options, the relationship between bone and immune countermeasures, and vaccination to mitigate herpes (and possibly other) virus risks. As the immune system has sentinel connectivity within every other physiological system, translational effects must be considered for all potential immune countermeasures. Finally, we shall discuss immune countermeasures in the context of their individualized implementation or precision medicine, based on crewmember specific immunological biases.
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