The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide to impose movement restrictions on their citizens. Although critical to reducing the virus’ reproduction rate, these restrictions come with ...far-reaching social and economic consequences. In this paper, we investigate the impact of these restrictions on an individual level among software engineers who were working from home. Although software professionals are accustomed to working with digital tools, but not all of them remotely, in their day-to-day work, the abrupt and enforced work-from-home context has resulted in an unprecedented scenario for the software engineering community. In a two-wave longitudinal study (
N
= 192), we covered over 50 psychological, social, situational, and physiological factors that have previously been associated with well-being or productivity. Examples include anxiety, distractions, coping strategies, psychological and physical needs, office set-up, stress, and work motivation. This design allowed us to identify the variables that explained unique variance in well-being and productivity. Results include (1) the quality of social contacts predicted positively, and stress predicted an individual’s well-being negatively when controlling for other variables consistently across both waves; (2) boredom and distractions predicted productivity negatively; (3) productivity was less strongly associated with all predictor variables at time two compared to time one, suggesting that software engineers adapted to the lockdown situation over time; and (4) longitudinal analyses did not provide evidence that any predictor variable causal explained variance in well-being and productivity. Overall, we conclude that working from home was
per se
not a significant challenge for software engineers. Finally, our study can assess the effectiveness of current work-from-home and general well-being and productivity support guidelines and provides tailored insights for software professionals.
We present an effective implementation of the Prime+Probe side-channel attack against the last-level cache. We measure the capacity of the covert channel the attack creates and demonstrate a ...cross-core, cross-VM attack on multiple versions of GnuPG. Our technique achieves a high attack resolution without relying on weaknesses in the OS or virtual machine monitor or on sharing memory between attacker and victim.
As a key component in a modern datacenter, the cloud operating system is responsible for managing the physical and virtual infrastructure, orchestrating and commanding service provisioning and ...deployment, and providing federation capabilities for accessing and deploying virtual resources in remote cloud infrastructures.
Osteosarcoma (OS) is a malignancy of the bone that has no clearly identified prognostic factors for diagnosis. In this study, we evaluated the regulatory role of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) ANCR on ...the migration and invasion of OS cells as well as the possible mechanism involving the p38MAPK signalling pathway.
ANCR expression was determined in OS tissues and OS cell lines (MG-63, S1353, U2OS, and UMR-106) by qRT-PCR. It was observed that ANCR was down-regulated in MG-63 and U2OS cells by 48 h of siRNA-ANCR (si-ANCR) transfection. The proliferation of transfected cells was determined using the CCK-8 and the EdU assays. The migration and invasion of transfected cells were determined by the Transwell assay. The expression of E-cadherin, N-cadherin, and phosphorylated p38MAPK (p-p38MAPK) proteins was determined by Western blot. In addition, combinatorial treatment of cells with si-ANCR + SB203580 (p38MAPK inhibitor) was performed to investigate the association between ANCR and MAPK signalling in OS cells.
ANCR was up-regulated in OS cells and tissues. ANCR silencing significantly inhibited the proliferation rate, decreased the percentage of migration and invasion cells, down-regulated N-cadherin, and up-regulated E-cadherin and p-p38MAPK in MG-63 and U2OS cells. Inhibition of the p38MAPK signalling pathway (SB203580) in MG-63 and U2OS cells rescued si-ANCR-induced inhibition of cell migration and invasion.
Silencing of ANCR inhibited the migration and invasion of OS cells through activation of the p38MAPK signalling pathway.
Learn the intricacies of managing Azure AD and Azure AD Connect, as well as Active Directory for administration on cloud and Windows Server 2019 Key Features • Expert solutions for the federation, ...certificates, security, and monitoring with Active Directory • Explore Azure AD and AD Connect for effective administration on cloud • Automate security tasks using Active Directory and PowerShell Book Description Active Directory is an administration system for Windows administrators to automate network, security and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure. This book starts off with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas and partitions. Next, you'll learn how to manage domain controllers, organizational units and the default containers. Going forward, you'll explore managing Active Directory sites as well as identifying and solving replication problems. The next set of chapters covers the different components of Active Directory and discusses the management of users, groups and computers. You'll also work through recipes that help you manage your Active Directory domains, manage user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships and group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. You'll understand how to work with Group Policy and how to get the most out of it. The last set of chapters covers federation, security and monitoring. You will also learn about Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. You'll discover how Azure AD Connect synchronization works, which will help you manage Azure AD. By the end of the book, you have learned about Active Directory and Azure AD in detail. What you will learn • Manage new Active Directory features, such as the Recycle Bin, group Managed Service Accounts, and fine-grained password policies • Work with Active Directory from the command line and use Windows PowerShell to automate tasks • Create and remove forests, domains, and trusts • Create groups, modify group scope and type, and manage memberships • Delegate control, view and modify permissions • Optimize Active Directory and Azure AD in terms of security Who this book is for This book will cater to administrators of existing Active Directory Domain Services environments and/or Azure AD tenants, looking for guidance to optimize their day-to-day effectiveness. Basic networking and Windows Server Operating System knowledge would come in handy.
Path planning algorithms have been used in different applications with the aim of finding a suitable collision-free path which satisfies some certain criteria such as the shortest path length and ...smoothness; thus, defining a suitable curve to describe path is essential. The main goal of these algorithms is to find the shortest and smooth path between the starting and target points. This paper makes use of a Bézier curve-based model for path planning. The control points of the Bézier curve significantly influence the length and smoothness of the path. In this paper, a novel Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO) algorithm has been proposed to optimize the control points of Bézier curve, and the proposed algorithm comes in two variants: CPSO-I and CPSO-II. Using the chosen control points, the optimum smooth path that minimizes the total distance between the starting and ending points is selected. To evaluate the CPSO algorithm, the results of the CPSO-I and CPSO-II algorithms are compared with the standard PSO algorithm. The experimental results proved that the proposed algorithm is capable of finding the optimal path. Moreover, the CPSO algorithm was tested against different numbers of control points and obstacles, and the CPSO algorithm achieved competitive results.
Android fragmentation is a well-known issue referring to the adoption of different versions in the multitude of devices supporting such an operating system. Each Android version features a set of ...APIs provided to developers. These APIs are subject to changes and may cause compatibility issues. To support app developers, approaches have been proposed to automatically identify API compatibility issues.
CiD
, the state-of-the-art approach, is a data-driven solution learning how to detect those issues by analyzing the change history of Android APIs (“
API side
” learning). In this paper (extension of our MSR 2019 paper), we present an alternative data-driven approach, named
ACRyL
.
ACRyL
learns from changes implemented in apps in response to API changes (“
client side
” learning). When comparing these two solutions on 668 apps, for a total of 11,863 snapshots, we found that there is no clear winner, since the two techniques are highly complementary, and none of them provides a comprehensive support in detecting API compatibility issues:
ACRyL
achieves a precision of 7.0% (28.0%, when considering only the severe warnings), while
CiD
achieves a precision of 18.4%. This calls for more research in this field, and led us to run a second empirical study in which we manually analyze 500 pull-requests likely related to the fixing of compatibility issues, documenting the
root cause
behind the fixed issue. The most common causes are related to changes in the Android APIs (
∼
87%), while about 13% of the issues are related to external causes, such as build and distribution, dependencies, and the app itself. The provided empirical knowledge can inform the building of better tools for the detection of API compatibility issues.
HOS-ocean is an efficient High-Order Spectral code developed to solve the deterministic propagation of nonlinear wavefields in open ocean. HOS-ocean is released as open-source, developed and ...distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPLv3). Along with the source code, a documentation under wiki format is available which makes easy the compilation and execution of the source files. The code has been shown to be accurate and efficient.
Program title: HOS-ocean
Catalogue identifier: AEZS_v1_0
Program summary URL:http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AEZS_v1_0.html
Program obtainable from: CPC Program Library, Queen’s University, Belfast, N. Ireland
Licensing provisions: GNU General Public License, version 3
No. of lines in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 30332
No. of bytes in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 2656194
Distribution format: tar.gz
Programming language: Fortran.
Computer: Tested on Intel Xeon E5504 and Intel Core i7.
Operating system: Any system with a Fortran compiler: tested on Linux, OS X and Windows 7.
RAM: From several MB up to several GB, depending on problem (512×512, M=3: 385 MB and 256×256, M=3: 99 MB)
Classification: 4.12.
External routines: FFTW 3.3.4 1, LAPACK 2 and makedepf90 (linux.die.net/man/1/makedepf90)
Nature of problem:
HOS-ocean has been developed to study the propagation of highly nonlinear sea-states over large domains and long duration.
Solution method:
HOS-ocean is an implementation of the High-Order Spectral method, which solves the problem formulated on the free surface by means of a pseudo-spectral method.
Restrictions:
HOS-ocean is dedicated to the propagation of wave fields in infinite and finite constant depth, the evolution over variable bathymetry is not treated. Furthermore, simulations are restricted to non-breaking waves.
Running time:
2D simulation of irregular wavefield with Nx=1024 modes and an HOS order M=5: t≅2.010−1s per wave period
3D simulation of irregular wavefield with Nx=256, Ny=256 modes, an HOS order M=3: t≅10s per wave period.
References:1Matteo Frigo and Steven G. Johnson. The design and implementation of FFTW3. Proceedings of the IEEE, 93(2):216–231, 2005. Special issue on “Program Generation, Optimization, and Platform Adaptation”.2E. Anderson, Z. Bai, C. Bischof, S. Blackford, J. Demmel, J. Dongarra, J. Du Croz, A. Greenbaum, S. Hammarling, A. McKenney, and D. Sorensen. LAPACK Users’ Guide. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA, third edition, 1999.
Understanding the behaviour of a system’s API can be hard. Giving users access to
relevant
examples of how an API behaves has been shown to make this easier for them. In addition, such examples can ...be used to verify expected behaviour or identify unwanted behaviours. Methods for automatically generating examples have existed for a long time. However, state-of-the-art methods rely on either white-box information, such as source code, or on formal specifications of the system behaviour. But what if you do not have access to either? This may be the case, for example, when interacting with a third-party API. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically generate relevant examples of behaviours of an API, without requiring either source code or a formal specification of behaviour. Evaluation on an industry-grade REST API shows that our method can produce small and relevant examples that can help engineers to understand the system under exploration.
PDF
