Are developers fixing their own bugs?: Tracing bug-fixing and bug-seeding committers

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 IGI GlobalThe process of fixing software bugs plays a key role in the maintenance activities of a software project. Ideally, code ownership and responsibility should be enforced among developers working on the same artifacts, so that those introducing buggy code could also contribute to its fix. However, especially in FLOSS projects, this mechanism is not clearly understood: in particular, it is not known whether those contributors fixing a bug are the same introducing and seeding it in the first place. This paper analyzes the comm-central FLOSS project, which hosts part of the Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Lightning extensions and Sunbird projects from the Mozilla community. The analysis is focused at the level of lines of code and it uses the information stored in the source code management system. The results of this study show that in 80% of the cases, the bug-fixing activity involves source code modified by at most two developers. It also emerges that the developers fixing the bug are only responsible for 3.5% of the previous modifications to the lines affected; this implies that the other developers making changes to those lines could have made that fix. In most of the cases the bug fixing process in comm-central is not carried out by the same developers than those who seeded the buggy code.This work has been partially funded by the European Commission, under the ALERT project (ICT-258098)

Boundary fluxes for non-local diffusion

We study a nonlocal diffusion operator in a bounded smooth domain prescribing the flux through the boundary. This problem may be seen as a generalization of the usual Neumann problem for the heat equation. First, we prove existence, uniqueness and a comparison principle. Next, we study the behavior of solutions for some prescribed boundary data including blowing up ones. Finally, we look at a nonlinear flux boundary condition

Water Use Efficiency in Chilean and Argentine Humid Temperate Grass-Legume Pastures

At two sites in Argentina and Chile five levels of water input were applied to four sown pastures of varying ages during spring and summer. The pastures consisted principally of C3 grasses and legumes, some of which were sown such as Lolium perenne, Trifolium repens, Dactylis glomerata. Dry matter (DM) production was measured and related to the estimated total evapotranspiration (ET): responses were both highly linear. Both responses to ET and absolute yields were higher at the Argentinian than at the Chilean site: respectively 10.7 and 15.2 kg DM/mm water evapotranspired. Nevertheless the calculated indices of sensitivity (Ky) of Doorenbos and Kassam (1979) were similar for the two sites, indicating a similar priority for irrigation in terms of expected responses

DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF THE ATOS SPONTANEOUS SPEECH CONVERSATIONAL SYSTEM

ABSTRACT In this paper we report our recent development work in Spanish spontaneous speech conversational systems. We describe the Automatic Telephone Operator Service (ATOS) and present the improvements introduced into it to deal with spontaneous speech, which are: (a) a task independent dialogue manager, that can be adapted to a new semantic domain by changing a configuration file. It also generates a prediction about the user's expected utterance to constrain the language model used by the speech recognizer. (b) a language modeling strategy, which allows to adapt the statistical language model to a new task with just few hundreds of sentences. This strategy reduces a 27% the word error rate. We also report the results, conclusions and the speech database collected in the evaluation of the ATOS system, which has been tested by 30 real users

Spatially explicit estimates of N2O emissions from croplands suggest climate mitigation opportunities from improved fertilizer management

With increasing nitrogen (N) application to croplands required to support growing food demand, mitigating N2O emissions from agricultural soils is a global challenge. National greenhouse gas emissions accounting typically estimates N2O emissions at the country scale by aggregating all crops, under the assumption that N2O emissions are linearly related to N application. However, field studies and meta-analyses indicate a nonlinear relationship, in which N2O emissions are relatively greater at higher N application rates. Here we apply a super-linear emissions response model to crop-specific, spatially-explicit synthetic N fertilizer and manure N inputs to provide subnational accounting of global N2O emissions from croplands. We estimate 0.66 Tg of N2O-N direct global emissions circa 2000, with 50% of emissions concentrated in 13% of harvested area. Compared to estimates from the IPCC Tier 1 linear model, our updated N2O emissions range from 20-40% lower throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe, to >120% greater in some Western European countries. At low N application rates, the weak non-linear response of N2O emissions suggests that relatively large increases in N fertilizer application would generate relatively small increases in N2O emissions. Since aggregated fertilizer data generate underestimation bias in nonlinear models, high-resolution N application data are critical to support accurate N2O emissions estimates

Dose Dependent Effects on Cell Cycle Checkpoints and DNA Repair by Bendamustine

Bendamustine (BDM) is an active chemotherapeutic agent approved in the U. S. for treating chronic lymphocytic leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Its chemical structure suggests it may have alkylator and anti-metabolite activities; however the precise mechanism of action is not well understood. Here we report the concentration-dependent effects of BDM on cell cycle, DNA damage, checkpoint response and cell death in HeLa cells. Low concentrations of BDM transiently arrested cells in G2, while a 4-fold higher concentration arrested cells in S phase. DNA damage at 50, but not 200 µM, was efficiently repaired after 48 h treatment, suggesting a difference in DNA repair efficiency at the two concentrations. Indeed, perturbing base-excision repair sensitized cells to lower concentrations of BDM. Timelapse studies of the checkpoint response to BDM showed that inhibiting Chk1 caused both the S- and G2-arrested cells to prematurely enter mitosis. However, whereas the cells arrested in G2 (low dose BDM) entered mitosis, segregated their chromosomes and divided normally, the S-phase arrested cells (high dose BDM) exhibited a highly aberrant mitosis, whereby EM images showed highly fragmented chromosomes. The vast majority of these cells died without ever exiting mitosis. Inhibiting the Chk1-dependent DNA damage checkpoint accelerated the time of killing by BDM. Our studies suggest that BDM may affect different biological processes depending on drug concentration. Sensitizing cells to killing by BDM can be achieved by inhibiting base-excision repair or disrupting the DNA damage checkpoint pathway

A retrospective analysis of clinical outcome of patients with chemo-refractory metastatic breast cancer treated in a single institution phase I unit

BACKGROUND AND METHODS: Novel approaches to treat chemo-refractory metastatic breast cancer (MBC) are currently under investigation. This retrospective series reviews the outcome of 70 MBC patients who have participated in 30 phase I trials at the Royal Marsden Hospital from 2002 to 2009. RESULTS: The median treatment lines before phase I trial entry for MBC was 5 (range: 1-12 lines). The overall response rate was 11.4% (95% CI: 4.0-18.9%) and the clinical benefit rate at 4 months was 20% (95% CI: 10.6-29.3). The median time to progression was 7.0 weeks (95% CI: 6.4-7.5) and median overall survival was 8.7 months (95% CI: 7.6-9.8) from start of first phase I treatment. No patients discontinued trial because of treatment-related toxicities. Abnormal lactate dehydrogenase, serum albumin <35 mg per 100 ml, >or=5 previous treatment lines, liver metastases and Eastern Cooperative Group performance status >or=2 at study entry were significantly associated with poor overall survival in multivariate analysis. CONCLUSION: This retrospective analysis provides evidence that patients with MBC tolerate phase I clinical trials and a significant proportion of patients with chemo-refractory disease, particularly those with triple-negative or Her2-positive breast cancer, may benefit from treatment