652,160 research outputs found
Privacy Vulnerabilities in the Practices of Repairing Broken Digital Artifacts in Bangladesh
This paper presents a study on the privacy concerns associated with the practice of repairing broken digital objects in Bangladesh. Historically, repair of old or broken technologies has received less attention in ICTD scholarship than design, development, or use. As a result, the potential privacy risks associated with repair practices have remained mostly unaddressed. This paper describes our three-month long ethnographic study that took place at ten major repair sites in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We show a variety of ways in which the privacy of an individual’s personal data may be compromised during the repair process. We also examine people’s perceptions around privacy in repair, and its connections with their broader social and cultural values. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for future research to strengthen the repair ecosystem in developing countries. Taken together, our findings contribute to the growing discourse around post-use cycles of technology
Values in Repair
This paper examines the question of “values in repair” – the distinct forms of meaning and care that may be built into human-technology interactions through individual and collective acts of repair. Our work draws on research in HCI and the social sciences and findings from ethnographic studies in four sites — two amateur “fixers’ collectives” in Brooklyn and Seattle, USA and two mobile phone repair communities in Uganda and Bangladesh — to advance two arguments. First, studies of repair account for new sites and processes of value that differ from those appearing at HCI’s better-studied moments of design and use. Second, repair may embed modes of human interaction with technology and with each other in ways that surface values as contingent and ongoing accomplishments, suggesting ongoing processes of valuation that can never be fully fixed or commoditized. These insights help HCI account for human relationships to technology built into the world through repair
TarTar: A Timed Automata Repair Tool
We present TarTar, an automatic repair analysis tool that, given a timed
diagnostic trace (TDT) obtained during the model checking of a timed automaton
model, suggests possible syntactic repairs of the analyzed model. The suggested
repairs include modified values for clock bounds in location invariants and
transition guards, adding or removing clock resets, etc. The proposed repairs
are guaranteed to eliminate executability of the given TDT, while preserving
the overall functional behavior of the system. We give insights into the design
and architecture of TarTar, and show that it can successfully repair 69% of the
seeded errors in system models taken from a diverse suite of case studies.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure
Distributed Data Storage with Minimum Storage Regenerating Codes - Exact and Functional Repair are Asymptotically Equally Efficient
We consider a set up where a file of size M is stored in n distributed
storage nodes, using an (n,k) minimum storage regenerating (MSR) code, i.e., a
maximum distance separable (MDS) code that also allows efficient exact-repair
of any failed node. The problem of interest in this paper is to minimize the
repair bandwidth B for exact regeneration of a single failed node, i.e., the
minimum data to be downloaded by a new node to replace the failed node by its
exact replica. Previous work has shown that a bandwidth of B=[M(n-1)]/[k(n-k)]
is necessary and sufficient for functional (not exact) regeneration. It has
also been shown that if k < = max(n/2, 3), then there is no extra cost of exact
regeneration over functional regeneration. The practically relevant setting of
low-redundancy, i.e., k/n>1/2 remains open for k>3 and it has been shown that
there is an extra bandwidth cost for exact repair over functional repair in
this case. In this work, we adopt into the distributed storage context an
asymptotically optimal interference alignment scheme previously proposed by
Cadambe and Jafar for large wireless interference networks. With this scheme we
solve the problem of repair bandwidth minimization for (n,k) exact-MSR codes
for all (n,k) values including the previously open case of k > \max(n/2,3). Our
main result is that, for any (n,k), and sufficiently large file sizes, there is
no extra cost of exact regeneration over functional regeneration in terms of
the repair bandwidth per bit of regenerated data. More precisely, we show that
in the limit as M approaches infinity, the ratio B/M = (n-1)/(k(n-k))$
DNA damage and repair proteins in cellular response to sulfur mustard in Iranian veterans more than two decades after exposure
Delayed effects of sulfur mustard (SM) exposure on the levels of five important damage/repair proteins were investigated in 40 SM-exposed veterans of Iran-Iraq war and 35 unexposed controls. A major DNA damage biomarker protein – phosphorylated H2AX – along with four DNA repair proteins in cell response to the genome damage MRE11, NBS1, RAD51, and XPA were evaluated in blood lymphocytes from the veterans and controls using western blotting. Mean levels of XPA, MRE11, RAD51 and NBS1 were lower in SM-exposed patients and the decrease in NBS1 was significant. Even though the raised level of phosphor-H2AX in SM-poisoned group compared to the controls was not significant it was consistent with DNA damage findings confirming the severity of damage to the DNA after exposure to SM. There were correlations between the values of RAD51 and NBS1 proteins as well as XPA and MRE11 proteins. More than two decades after exposure to SM, there is still evidences of DNA damage as well as impaired repair mechanisms in cells of exposed individuals. Such disorders in cellular level may contribute to long term health problems of the SM veterans
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