Towards an SDN network control application for differentiated traffic routing

In the last years, Software Defined Networking has emerged as a promising paradigm to foster network innovation and address the issues coming from the ossification of the TCP/IP architecture. The clean separation between control and data plane, the definition of northbound and southbound interfaces are key features of the Software Defined Networking paradigm. Moreover, a centralised control plane allows network operators to deploy advanced control and management strategies. Effective traffic engineering and resources management policies allow to achieve a better utilisation of network resources and improve endto- end service performance. This paper deals with the architectural design and experimental validation of a control application that enables differentiated routing for traffic flows belonging to different service classes. The new control application makes routing decisions leveraging on OpenFlow network statistics, i.e., taking advantage of real-time network status information. Moreover, a Deep Packet Inspection module has been developed and integrated in the control application to detect VoIP traffic with Session Initiation Protocol signalling, enforcing this way policies for a differentiated treatment of VoIP traffic. Finally, a functional validation is performed in emulated environment.This work was supported by the EPSRC INTERNET Project EP/H040536/1.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2015.724925

10- m imaging of the bipolar protoplanetary nebula Mz-3

A 10-µm image is presented of the bipolar protoplanetary nebula Mz-3 made at the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope using the NIMPOL mid-infrared imaging polarimeter. The image shows extended emission from warm (110–130 K) dust both to the north and to the south of the central star, which correlates well with the visible bipolar lobes. The observed surface brightness of this emission is consistent with radiative heating of the dust by both direct stellar illumination and trapped Lyman α photons. Emission in excess of the point-source profile indicates that there is also an extended shell of dust surrounding the central star

SeaWiFS satellite ocean color data from the Southern Ocean

SeaWiFS estimates of surface chlorophyll concentrations are reported for the region of the U.S. JGOFS study in the Southern Ocean (similar to 170 degrees W, 60 degrees S). Elevated chlorophyll was observed at the Southern Ocean fronts, near the edge of the seasonal ice sheet, and above the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. The elevated chlorophyll levels associated with the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge are surprising since even the crest of the ridge is at depths \u3e 2000 m. This elevated phytoplankton biomass is likely the result of mesoscale physical-biological interactions where the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) encounters the ridge. Four cruises surveyed this region between October 1997 and March 1998, as part of the U.S. JGOFS. Satellite-derived chlorophyll concentrations were compared with in situ extracted chlorophyll measurements from these cruises. There was good agreement (r(2) of 0.72, from a linear regression of shipboard vs, satellite chlorophyll), although SeaWiFS underestimated chlorophyll concentrations relative to the ship data

Prostate cancer

The management of prostate cancer continues to evolve rapidly, with substantial advances being made in understanding the genomic landscape and biology underpinning both primary and metastatic prostate cancer. Similarly, the emergence of more sensitive imaging methods has improved diagnostic and staging accuracy and refined surveillance strategies. These advances have introduced personalised therapeutics to clinical practice, with treatments targeting genomic alterations in DNA repair pathways now clinically validated. An important shift in the therapeutic framework for metastatic disease has taken place, with metastatic-directed therapies being evaluated for oligometastatic disease, aggressive management of the primary lesion shown to benefit patients with low-volume metastatic disease, and with several novel androgen pathway inhibitors significantly improving survival when used as a first-line therapy for metastatic disease. Research into the molecular characterisation of localised, recurrent, and progressive disease will undoubtedly have an impact on clinical management. Similarly, emerging research into novel therapeutics, such as targeted radioisotopes and immunotherapy, holds much promise for improving the lives of patients with prostate cancer

Kant, Morality, and Hell

In this paper I argue that, although Kant argues that morality is independent of God (and hence, agrees with the Euthyphro), and rejects Divine Command Theory (or Theological Voluntarism), he believes that all moral duties are also the commands of God, who is a moral being, and who is morally required to punish those who transgress the moral law: "God’s justice is the precise allocation of punishments and rewards in accordance with men’s good or bad behavior." However, since we lack a strict proof of God's existence, we can still fulfill our duties from the motive of duty. if we did know that God exists, then this would undermine our pure moral motivation to do our duty, since we would have an even stronger interest in pleasing God through our good conduct. The effect of undermining our pure moral motivation would be to make us less eligible for divine reward, since God rewards us for doing our duty from the motive of duty

HE4 and CA125 as a diagnostic test in ovarian cancer: prospective validation of the Risk of Ovarian Malignancy Algorithm

BACKGROUND: Recently, a Risk of Ovarian Malignancy Algorithm (ROMA) utilising human epididymis secretory protein 4 (HE4) and CA125 successfully classified patients as presenting a high or low risk for epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). We validated this algorithm in an independent prospective study. METHODS: Women with a pelvic mass, who were scheduled to have surgery, were enrolled in a prospective study. Preoperative serum levels of HE4 and CA125 were measured in 389 patients. The performance of each of the markers, as well as that of ROMA, was analysed. RESULTS: When all malignant tumours were included, ROMA (receiver operator characteristic (ROC)-area under curve (AUC) = 0.898) and HE4 (ROC-AUC) = 0.857) did not perform significantly better than CA125 alone (ROC-AUC = 0.877). Using a cutoff for ROMA of 12.5% for pre-menopausal patients, the test had a sensitivity of 67.5% and a specificity of 87.9%. With a cutoff of 14.4% for post-menopausal patients, the test had a sensitivity of 90.8% and a specificity of 66.3%. For EOC vs benign disease, the ROC-AUC of ROMA increased to 0.913 and for invasive EOC vs benign disease to 0.957. CONCLUSION: This independent validation study demonstrated similar performance indices to those recently published. However, in this study, HE4 and ROMA did not increase the detection of malignant disease compared with CA125 alone. Although the initial reports were promising, measurement of HE4 serum levels does not contribute to the diagnosis of ovarian cancer. British Journal of Cancer (2011) 104, 863-870. doi:10.1038/sj.bjc.6606092 www.bjcancer.com Published online 8 February 2011 (C) 2011 Cancer Research U

FLICK: developing and running application-specific network services

Data centre networks are increasingly programmable, with application-specific network services proliferating, from custom load-balancers to middleboxes providing caching and aggregation. Developers must currently implement these services using traditional low-level APIs, which neither support natural operations on application data nor provide efficient performance isolation. We describe FLICK, a framework for the programming and execution of application-specific network services on multi-core CPUs. Developers write network services in the FLICK language, which offers high-level processing constructs and application-relevant data types. FLICK programs are translated automatically to efficient, parallel task graphs, implemented in C++ on top of a user-space TCP stack. Task graphs have bounded resource usage at runtime, which means that the graphs of multiple services can execute concurrently without interference using cooperative scheduling. We evaluate FLICK with several services (an HTTP load-balancer, a Memcached router and a Hadoop data aggregator), showing that it achieves good performance while reducing development effort