The Lived Experiences of Live-in Domestic Workers

The plight and resilience of domestic workers remain largely unseen within society, hidden behind the closed doors of their employers\u27 homes. This study delves into the lived experiences of live-in domestic workers in Baguio City, Philippines, shedding light on their challenges, coping mechanisms, aspirations, and strategies for achieving their goals. Four research questions were crafted to provide a context to the lived experiences of these domestic workers namely: “What are the most common challenges of domestic workers?”, “How do they cope with these challenges?”, “What are the most common aspirations of domestic workers moving forward?”, and “How do they plan to accomplish these aspirations?”. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, data was collected through interviews to capture the nuanced perspectives of fourteen (14) domestic workers. Findings reveal that the domestic workers\u27 most common challenges are emotional strain and demanding workloads, such as stress, homesickness, balancing chores, and overworking. Despite these difficulties, they exhibited resilience by utilizing various coping strategies, with adaptive coping, such as seeking support and engaging in hobbies, being the most prevalent. Their aspirations primarily revolve around family and home, including goals of educating children, owning a home, and supporting loved ones. Domestic workers rely on self-reliance and strategic planning to achieve these aspirations, demonstrating a preference for internal resources over external support

The arms race: adversarial search defeats entropy used to detect malware

Malware creators have been getting their way for too long now. String-based similarity measures can leverage ground truth in a scalable way and can operate at a level of abstraction that is difficult to combat from the code level. At the string level, information theory and, specifically, entropy play an important role related to detecting patterns altered by concealment strategies, such as polymorphism or encryption. Controlling the entropy levels in different parts of a disk resident executable allows an analyst to detect malware or a black hat to evade the detection. This paper shows these two perspectives into two scalable entropy-based tools: EnTS and EEE. EnTS, the detection tool, shows the effectiveness of detecting entropy patterns, achieving 100% precision with 82% accuracy. It outperforms VirusTotal for accuracy on combined Kaggle and VirusShare malware. EEE, the evasion tool, shows the effectiveness of entropy as a concealment strategy, attacking binary-based state of the art detectors. It learns their detection patterns in up to 8 generations of its search process, and increments their false negative rate from range 0–9%, up to the range 90–98.7%

The interactive effects of elevated CO2, temperature and N supply on N concentration and allocation in rice (Oryza sativa L.)

The study was conducted to examine the effects of elevated CO2, temperature and nitrogen supply on the N concentration, content and allocation, biomass and root:shoot ratios in rice plants. Rice (Oryza sativa L. cv. IR 72) was grown in growth chambers under combinations of two CO2 (375 and 750 mL L-1), temperature (29/21 and 34/26 C day/night) and N (40 and 80 mg L-1) regimes from sowing until grain maturity. The total nitrogen concentrations were significantly lower in CO2-enriched plants in both temperature regimes at all harvests except at flowering. The total plant N content was significantly higher under elevated CO2 in both temperature and N treatments during the vegetative stage with greater CO2 effect at high temperature treatment. Plants supplemented with high N had significantly higher total plant N concentrations and contents in all CO2 and temperature treatments. The allocation of N to the leaves was significantly lower at elevated CO2 and at ambient temperature at all harvests. CO2 effect was more pronounced at ambient temperature at grain maturity. Elevated CO2 significantly enhanced the allocation of N to the culms under a high N supply at flowering and grain maturity, and to the roots under a low N supply and ambient temperature treatments at all harvests except at 27 days after sowing. The allocation of N to the panicles was significantly reduced under high N supply. CO2-enriched plants grown at high temperature had significantly reduced N allocation to the grains. The enhancement of total biomass by elevated CO2 was greater at high temperature and N. Root:shoot ratios increased under CO2 enrichment with greater effects at ambient temperature and low N. IR 72 may exhibit an efficient uptake and utilization of N during early vegetative stage under global warming condition