Testing, Testing 1,2,3

Overview: Since childhood, most human beings have been raised on the foundation of accepting and adhering to the “Golden Rule” in everyday aspects of life. We have grown to appreciate the idea that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reports that more than 100 million animals every year suffer and die in cruel chemical, drug, food and cosmetic tests; lab experimentations and lessons in the sciences; medical training exercises; and curiosity-driven medical experiments. Why do human beings sit back and do nothing, knowing that these innocent creatures who so greatly benefit the world are locked up in cold cages? The animals ache with lonesomeness, suffer in agony, and so desperately yearn to be free and loved. Instead, all they are able to do is wait in terror of the next excruciatingly painful procedure that they must tolerate. The stress and boredom these animals are compelled to deal with everyday causes many of them to exhibit neurotic behaviors, including ceaselessly spinning in circles, pulling out their own hair, and biting their own skin. After enduring lonely lives filled with pain, many of them will be killed. At what point will human beings step up and act in these animals’ best interest; at what point will we treat them the way we know we would want to be treated? Animal rights activist, Charles R. Magel detests the lack of logic behind animal testing. “Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are like us.’ Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are not like us.’ Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction” (Magel). According to Robert Waterston, a prominent American geneticist, in his article, “Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome and Comparison with the Human Genome,” “There is only a slight difference, roughly 2%, between the genome of a human being and the genome of a chimpanzee” (Waterston 73). We should be promoting animals’ happiness and well-being and treating them as if they were our brothers and sisters, not promoting their demise. Accordingly, in this paper I will argue that researchers who perform animal testing for medical advancements should understand that harming animals for the benefit of humanity violates basic bioethical principles and should therefore be stopped; further, animals cannot defend themselves and for this reason, humans should take on the responsibility of being the voice for the animals, promoting alternatives to animal testing, and acting in the animals best interest, promoting for these animals the same principles we insist on for humans, the principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Accordingly, this paper will examine (1) the reality of animal testing and what goes on behind closed doors, (2) the life-saving alternatives that are proven to be more cost effective and comprehendible, (3) the lifelong implications testing has on animals who survive, (4) the inefficiency of current laws regarding animal testing, and (5) why this destruction of lives is not justified based on the moral standing of animals as compared to humans

Testing mixed-signal cores: a practical oscillation-based test in an analog macrocell

A formal set of design decisions can aid in using oscillation-based test (OBT) for analog subsystems in SoCs. The goal is to offer designers testing options that do not have significant area overhead, performance degradation, or test time. This work shows that OBT is a potential candidate for IP providers to use in combination with functional test techniques. We have shown how to modify the basic concept of OBT to come up with a practical method. Using our approach, designers can use OBT to pave the way for future developments in SoC testing, and it is simple to extend this idea to BIST.European Union 2635

Testing the securitization paradigm of the so-called Copenhagen school in the case study of europe migrant crisis in 2015

Migration is an international phenomenon and contentious concept. Although people have been moving by political, economic and cultural motivations since the beginning of the human history; particularly recently, migration fuels traditional fears over national and societal security. Because, migration, a normal or typical political issue can be altered to a security threat by repetitive and successful speech acts. This fact has often been referred to as ‘the securitization of migration’, which means the presentation of migration as a security threat. In this regard, the arrival of more than one million refugees to the EU in 2015 -Migrant (Refugee) Crisis- constitutes an important milestone. The starting point of this study is to depict “How the securitization process of the ‘Migrant Crisis’ was operated”. It will be in charge of defining not only the key-concepts, such as “securitization move” and “securitization”, but also of what are the success criteria are. According to this study, securitizing actors and their speech acts have opened the way for the success of securitization by providing the perfect ground for altering the question of Migrants into a survival issue. To analyze the characteristics and the implications of securitizing the migration issue within the EU, this article primarily engages with the theoretical approach developed by the so-called Copenhagen School, which outlines how issues become threats those need to be handled by extra-ordinary measures.La migración es un fenómeno internacional y un concepto polémico. Aunque las personas se han trasladado por motivos políticos, económicos o culturales a lo largo de los siglos; la migración alimenta en la actualidad antiguos temores sobre seguridad nacional y social. Dado que la migración, un problema político normal, puede transformarse en amenaza de seguridad por cómo se habla de él -actos de habla-.Este hecho se ha denominado a menudo como "la seguritización de la migración"; es decir, el considerar la migración como una amenaza existencial. En este sentido, la llegada de más de un millón de refugiados a la UE en 2015, la crisis de los inmigrantes (refugiados), constituye un hito importante. El punto de partida de este estudio es describir "Cómo se llevó a cabo el proceso de seguritización de la 'Crisis Migratoria'". Se tratará de definir no solo conceptos claves, como "seguritización" y "acto de habla", sino también cuáles son los criterios que contribuyen a construir con éxito dicha seguritización. Según el presente estudio, actores securitizadores y sus actos de habla han abierto el camino para su triunfo, al proporcionar el terreno perfecto para transformar la cuestión de los migrantes en una cuestión de supervivencia. Para analizar las características y las implicaciones de la seguritización de la cuestión migratoria dentro de la UE, este trabajo aborda principalmente el enfoque teórico desarrollado por la llamada Escuela de Copenhague, que describe cómo los problemas se convierten en amenazas que deben manejarse con medidas extraordinarias

Testing times for global financial governance

Ignazio Angeloni believes that the increase in financial interdependence in recent decades has not been matched by sufficient progress in the international coordination among regulatory authorities. In fact, the international financial system has suffered from insufficient globalisation of regulatory and supervisory policies, not excessive globalisation of financial markets.

Testing for alpha-1 antitrypsin in COPD in outpatient respiratory clinics in Spain: A multilevel, cross-sectional analysis of the EPOCONSUL study

Background Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD) is the most common hereditary disorder in adults, but is under-recognized. In Spain, the number of patients diagnosed with AATD is much lower than expected according to epidemiologic studies. The objectives of this study were to assess the frequency and determinants of testing serum α1-antitrypsin (AAT) levels in COPD patients, and to describe factors associated with testing. Methods EPOCONSUL is a cross-sectional clinical audit, recruiting consecutive COPD cases over one year. The study evaluated serum AAT level determination in COPD patients and associations between individual, disease-related, and hospital characteristics. Results A total of 4,405 clinical records for COPD patients from 57 Spanish hospitals were evaluated. Only 995 (22.5%) patients had serum AAT tested on some occasion. A number of patient characteristics (being male [OR 0.5, p < 0.001], ≤55 years old [OR 2.38, p<0.001], BMI≤21 kg/m2 [OR 1.71, p<0.001], FEV1(%)<50% [OR 1.35, p<0.001], chronic bronchitis [OR 0.79, p < 0.001], Charlson index ≥ 3 [OR 0.66, p < 0.001], or history or symptoms of asthma [OR 1.32, p<0.001]), and management at a specialized COPD outpatient clinic [OR 2.73,p<0.001] were identified as factors independently associated with ever testing COPD patients for AATD. Overall, 114 COPD patients (11.5% of those tested) had AATD. Of them, 26 (22.8%) patients had severe deficiency. Patients with AATD were younger, with a low pack-year index, and were more likely to have emphysema (p<0.05). Conclusion Testing of AAT blood levels in COPD patients treated at outpatient respiratory clinics in Spain is infrequent. However, when tested, AATD (based on the serum AAT levels ≤100 mg/dL) is detected in one in five COPD patients. Efforts to optimize AATD case detection in COPD are needed.SEPA

Automated Repair of Layout Cross Browser Issues Using Search-Based Techniques

A consistent cross-browser user experience is crucial for the success of a website. Layout Cross Browser Issues (XBIs) can severely undermine a website’s success by causing web pages to render incorrectly in certain browsers, thereby negatively impacting users’ impression of the quality and services that the web page delivers. Existing Cross Browser Testing (XBT) techniques can only detect XBIs in websites. Repairing them is, hitherto, a manual task that is labor intensive and requires significant expertise. Addressing this concern, our paper proposes a technique for automatically repairing layout XBIs in websites using guided search-based techniques. Our empirical evaluation showed that our approach was able to successfully fix 86% of layout XBIs reported for 15 different web pages studied, thereby improving their cross-browser consistency

Pavement testing by integrated geophysical methods: Feasibility, resolution and diagnostic potential

This work is focused on the assessment of the diagnostic potential of several geophysical methods when applied to the investigation of a rigid airport pavement. The potential and limit of each technique are evaluated as well as the added value deriving from their integration. Firstly, we reconstruct a high-resolution image of the pavement by a large electromagnetic and georadar screening. An advanced processing of georadar data, implemented through the picking of the arrival times of reflections for each profile, provides a quantitative estimation of the deviation between the design and the as-built thickness of layers. Additionally, electrical tomography has been applied to unequivocally identify the anomalous zones, where higher values of resistivity would be associated to porous zones that are prone to degradation and failure. The seismic tomographic survey had the additional purpose to recover the mechanical properties of the pavement in terms of both P- and S-waves and consequently of elastic constants (Poisson's ratio), whose values were consistent with those recovered in literature. The anomalies detected by each technique are consistent in their indications and they can be correlated to failure phenomena occurring at layer interfaces within the pavement structure or to unexpected variations of the layer thicknesses. The cost-effective geophysical campaign has validated the four-layered system deduced from the original design and has been used to reconstruct a high-resolution map of the pavement in order to discriminate fractures, crack-prone areas or areas where the as-built differs from the original design

Mechanical testing of metallic foams for 3d model and simulation of cell distribution effects

Cellular materials have a bulk matrix with a larger number of voids named also cells. Metallic foams made by powder technology represent stochastic closed cells. The related inhomogeneity leads to a scattering of results both in terms of stress–strain curves and maximum strength. Scattering is attributed to relative density variations and local cell discontinuities and it is confirmed also in case of dynamic loading. Finite element simulations through geometrical models that are able to capture the void morphology (named “mesoscale models”), confirm these results and some efforts have been already done to quantify the relationship between shape irregularities and mechanical behavior. The aim of this paper is to present the dynamic characterization of an AA7075 closed cell material and to calibrate its mesoscale finite element model according to the related cell shape distribution. Specimens have been derived from a small ingot (45x45x100 mm) divided along sections so that morphological analysis and experimental tests have been carried out. Specimens extracted from a half of the ingot have been used for dynamic compression tests by means of a split Hopkinson bar, meanwhile specimens extracted from the other half of the ingot have been dissected for porosity distribution analyses carried out by means of image analysis. Stress-strain curves obtained from the mechanical tests have been discussed in terms of strain rate and statistical descriptors of the porosity. Successively a 3D-model of the specimen has been generated starting from the Voronoi algorithm, assigning as input the above-mentioned statistical distribution of the porosity. Due to the peculiarity of the cell morphology (e.g. single larger cells), stress-strain localization has been demonstrated as one of the reasons of the scattering found during the experiments. A material model, to reproduce the investigated foam mechanical behavior, has been calibrated. Despite the difference among experiments the material model is able to reproduce all of them. Difference between the model coefficients quantifies roughly the difference due to the local geometry of the cells