Pyndri: a Python Interface to the Indri Search Engine

We introduce pyndri, a Python interface to the Indri search engine. Pyndri allows to access Indri indexes from Python at two levels: (1) dictionary and tokenized document collection, (2) evaluating queries on the index. We hope that with the release of pyndri, we will stimulate reproducible, open and fast-paced IR research.Comment: ECIR2017. Proceedings of the 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval. 2017. The final publication will be available at Springe

Neuro-Protection and Neuro-Therapy Effects of Acalypha Indica Linn. Water Extract Ex Vivo on Musculus Gastrocnemius Frog

The studies of neuro-protection and neuro-therapy effects of Acalypha indica Linn. water extract ex vivo on Musculus gastrocnemius frog have already done at three Departments in Faculty of Medicine, University of Indonesia. The experimental studies were done on 2 groups of frog for neuro-protection and neuro-therapy effects. Each group of frog was divided into 7 subgroups of application, 4 samples each. There were 5 subgroups of doses: 5; 10; 15; 20; 25 mg and 2 subgroups as control. Pancuronium bromide 0.2%, 4 mg, was used for a positive control as muscle relaxant. Neuro-protection study was done as follow: ringer – extract – pancuronium bromide, and neuro-therapy study was ringer – pancuronium bromide – extract, respectively. The parameters measured in these studies were the electrical activities such as amount and duration (second) of re-polarization; depolarization, resting potential, and the height of spike after electrical stimulation at 5 mV. Neuro-protection effect of extract was determined by the ability of muscle to show the electrical response after incubating with pancuronium bromide for 10 minutes, and after incubating with extract for 10 minutes for neuro-therapy effect. In the dose of 15 mg and 20 mg/mL of A. indica Linn. extract showed better activities than the dose of 25 mg of extract, both as neuro-protection and neuro-therapy effects, but statistically its have not a significant difference. This study should be followed by an in vivo experiment on frog and it would be done in pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies on other animal models

On Platforms, Incomplete Contracts, and Open Source Software

We consider a firm A initially owning a software platform (e.g. operating system) and an application for this platform. The specific knowledge of another firm B is needed to make the platform successful by creating a further application. When B's application is completed, A has incentives to expropriate the rents. Netscape claimed e.g. that this was the case with its browser running on MS Windows. We will argue that open sourcing or standardizing the platform is a warranty for B against expropriation of rents. The different pieces of software are considered as assets in the sense of the property rights literature (see Hart and Moore (Journal of Political Economy, 1990)). Two cases of joint ownership are considered beyond the standard cases of integration and non-integration: platform standardization (both parties can veto changes) and open source (no veto rights). In line with the literature, the more important a party's specific investments the more rights it should have. In contrast to Hart and Moore, however, joint ownership can be optimal in our setting. Open source is optimal if investments in the applications are more important than in the platform. The results are driven by the fact that in our model firms invest in physical (and not in human) capital and that there is non-rivalry in consumption for software.Platforms; open source; standardization; incomplete contracts; property rights; joint ownership

Report of the third Asian Prostate Cancer study meeting.

The Asian Prostate Cancer (A-CaP) study is an Asia-wide initiative that was launched in December 2015 in Tokyo, Japan, with the objective of surveying information about patients who have received a histopathological diagnosis of prostate cancer (PCa) and are undergoing treatment and clarifying distribution of staging, the actual status of treatment choices, and treatment outcomes. The study aims to clarify the clinical situation for PCa in Asia and use the outcomes for the purposes of international comparison. Following the first meeting in Tokyo in December 2015, the second A-CaP meeting was held in Seoul, Korea, in September 2016. This, the third A-CaP meeting, was held on October 14, 2017, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with the participation of members and collaborators from 12 countries and regions. In the meeting, participating countries and regions presented the current status of data collection, and the A-CaP office presented a preliminary analysis of the registered cases received from each country and region. Participants discussed ongoing challenges relating to data input and collection, institutional, and legislative issues that may present barriers to data sharing, and the outlook for further patient registrations through to the end of the registration period in December 2018. In addition to A-CaP-specific discussions, a series of special lectures were also delivered on the situation for health insurance in the United States, the correlation between insurance coverage and PCa outcomes, and the outlook for robotic surgery in the Asia-Pacific region. Members also confirmed the principles of authorship in collaborative studies, with a view to publishing original articles based on A-CaP data in the future

Rumble: Data Independence for Large Messy Data Sets

This paper introduces Rumble, an engine that executes JSONiq queries on large, heterogeneous and nested collections of JSON objects, leveraging the parallel capabilities of Spark so as to provide a high degree of data independence. The design is based on two key insights: (i) how to map JSONiq expressions to Spark transformations on RDDs and (ii) how to map JSONiq FLWOR clauses to Spark SQL on DataFrames. We have developed a working implementation of these mappings showing that JSONiq can efficiently run on Spark to query billions of objects into, at least, the TB range. The JSONiq code is concise in comparison to Spark's host languages while seamlessly supporting the nested, heterogeneous data sets that Spark SQL does not. The ability to process this kind of input, commonly found, is paramount for data cleaning and curation. The experimental analysis indicates that there is no excessive performance loss, occasionally even a gain, over Spark SQL for structured data, and a performance gain over PySpark. This demonstrates that a language such as JSONiq is a simple and viable approach to large-scale querying of denormalized, heterogeneous, arborescent data sets, in the same way as SQL can be leveraged for structured data sets. The results also illustrate that Codd's concept of data independence makes as much sense for heterogeneous, nested data sets as it does on highly structured tables.Comment: Preprint, 9 page

Communicating Java Threads

The incorporation of multithreading in Java may be considered a significant part of the Java language, because it provides udimentary facilities for concurrent programming. However, we belief that the use of channels is a fundamental concept for concurrent programming. The channel approach as described in this paper is a realization of a systematic design method for concurrent programming in Java based on the CSP paradigm. CSP requires the availability of a Channel class and the addition of composition constructs for sequential, parallel and alternative processes. The Channel class and the constructs have been implemented in Java in compliance with the definitions in CSP. As a result, implementing communication between processes is facilitated, enabling the programmer to avoid deadlock more easily, and freeing the programmer from synchronization and scheduling constructs. The use of the Channel class and the additional constructs is illustrated in a simple application

MoPS: A Modular Protection Scheme for Long-Term Storage

Current trends in technology, such as cloud computing, allow outsourcing the storage, backup, and archiving of data. This provides efficiency and flexibility, but also poses new risks for data security. It in particular became crucial to develop protection schemes that ensure security even in the long-term, i.e. beyond the lifetime of keys, certificates, and cryptographic primitives. However, all current solutions fail to provide optimal performance for different application scenarios. Thus, in this work, we present MoPS, a modular protection scheme to ensure authenticity and integrity for data stored over long periods of time. MoPS does not come with any requirements regarding the storage architecture and can therefore be used together with existing archiving or storage systems. It supports a set of techniques which can be plugged together, combined, and migrated in order to create customized solutions that fulfill the requirements of different application scenarios in the best possible way. As a proof of concept we implemented MoPS and provide performance measurements. Furthermore, our implementation provides additional features, such as guidance for non-expert users and export functionalities for external verifiers.Comment: Original Publication (in the same form): ASIACCS 201

Labor Market Returns, Marriage Opportunities, or the Education System? Explaining Gender Differences in Numeracy in Indonesia

This paper measures the evolution of the gender differences in numeracy among school age children using a longitudinal dataset from Indonesia. A unique feature of the dataset is that it uses an identical test for two survey rounds, which implies that any changes in the gender gap are caused by actual changes in numeracy. To my knowledge, this is the first study that is able to distinguish actual changes in numeracy from changes in the difficulty of the tests. I find that girls outperform boys by 0.09 standard deviations when the sample was around 11 years old. Seven years later, the gap has increased to 0.19 standard deviations. This gap is equivalent to around 18 months of schooling. I find evidence for two explanations for the widening gap. The first is that households invest more resources in girls relative to boys. This behavior appears to be rational, driven by the higher labor market returns to numeracy for girls than for boys. In contrast, I find no marriage market returns to numeracy for either gender. The second explanation is that the Indonesian education system appears to play some role in promoting the gender gap. A particular source of this appears to be the teachers, as the gender gap in numeracy only occurs in schools where more than half of the teachers are female.numeracy, gender gap, education, Indonesia

Clustering of twitter technology tweets and the impact of stopwords on clusters

Year of 2010 could be termed as the year in which Twitter became completely mainstream. Twitter, which started as a means of communicating with friends, became much more than its beginning. Now Twitter is used by companies to promote their new products, used by movie industry to promote movies. A lot of advertising and branding is now tied to Twitter and most importantly any breaking news that happens, the first place one goes and tries to find is to search it on Twitter. Be it the Mumbai attacks that happened in 2008, or the minor earthquakes that happened in Bay Area in 2010 or the twitter revolution cause of the Iran elections, most of the tech and not so tech savvy viewers were following twitter rather than any main stream news channels. In fact most of the breaking news now comes on Twitter because of the huge number of user base rather than the traditional mainstream media. The focus of this paper is clustering with the TF-IDF weighted mechanism of daily technology news tweets of prominent bloggers and news sites using Apache Mahout and to evaluate the effects of introducing and removing stop words on the quality of clustering. This project restricts itself to only tweets in the English language