Towards a highly scalable network tester

High end networked-systems have quickly climbed from a throughput of gigabits/sec to terabits/sec, and are approaching petabits/sec. Alas, network testing equipment has not scaled: it remained either low throughput or extremely expensive. With suitable network testing equipment either not at scale or too expensive even for commercial vendors, systems may be released without proper testing and validation. We propose a methodology for large scale testing of networked systems, based on using a low-cost open source network tester and a commodity switch. Our approach is scalable, open source, and accurate, and can be adapted to a variety of networking equipment, widely available to users.1. Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship ECF-2016-289, 2. (EPSRC) EARL: sdn EnAbled MeasuRement for alL project (Project Reference EP/P025374/1)

Responses of plasma transaminase activity in Cyprinus carpio var. communis to mercury toxicity

The present study reports the behavioural and enzymological responses in a freshwater teleost fish, Cyprinus carpio var. communis, exposed to acute and sublethal toxicities of mercuric chloride. During acute treatment, significant behavioural changes like erratic swimming, excess mucus secretion and increased opercular movements were noticed. During acute and sublethal treatments, both aspartate amino transferase and alanine amino transferase activity increased throughout the study period. Comparing the treatments, the changes in enzyme activities were found high in acute treatment and all the values were significant at 5% level. The above findings can be used as non-specific biomarkers of environmental pollutants

Wildlife art and illustration: drawing in ink - some experiments in Auroville, India

The various styles employed by some artists at the Pitchandikulam studio in Auroville International Township are discussed and some works analysed and commented upon. The basic history and applications of pen and ink drawing and black and white illustration are touched upon and the various schools of thought mentioned and discussed - from it simply being technically accurate and easily printed, to the conundrums with which it is beset

DRY SLIDING WEAR BEHAVIOR OF DIFFUSION BONDED AZ-91 MAGNESIUM ALLOY REINFORCED WITH SIC PARTICLES

Magnesium composites reinforced with 2, 4, 6 Wt.% of silicon carbide particles at different particle size of 10, 25 and 45 mm was synthesized using diffusion bonding process. Further the samples for scanning electron microscopic analysis and tribological analysis were made from the composites. Dry sliding wear test was carried out with L27 orthogonal design array on pin on disc tribometer. Mass loss of the pins was measured and wear rate was calculated. A statistical analysis was performed with the measured wear rate, the optimal parameter combination level was identified with main effect plot. From ANOVA analysis the significant parameters was identified

Charcot foot reconstruction with combined internal and external fixation: case report

Charcot neuroarthropathy is a destructive and often-limb threatening process that can affect patients with peripheral neuropathy of any etiology. Early recognition and appropriate management is crucial to prevention of catastrophic outcomes. Delayed diagnosis and subsequent pedal collapse often preclude successful conservative management of these deformities and necessitate surgical intervention for limb salvage. We review the current literature on surgical reconstruction of Charcot neuroarthropathy and present a case report of foot reconstruction with combined internal and external fixation methods

Relating two standard notions of secrecy

Two styles of definitions are usually considered to express that a security protocol preserves the confidentiality of a data s. Reachability-based secrecy means that s should never be disclosed while equivalence-based secrecy states that two executions of a protocol with distinct instances for s should be indistinguishable to an attacker. Although the second formulation ensures a higher level of security and is closer to cryptographic notions of secrecy, decidability results and automatic tools have mainly focused on the first definition so far. This paper initiates a systematic investigation of the situations where syntactic secrecy entails strong secrecy. We show that in the passive case, reachability-based secrecy actually implies equivalence-based secrecy for digital signatures, symmetric and asymmetric encryption provided that the primitives are probabilistic. For active adversaries, we provide sufficient (and rather tight) conditions on the protocol for this implication to hold.Comment: 29 pages, published in LMC

An ε -Uniform Numerical Method for a System of Convection-Diffusion Equations with Discontinuous Convection Coefficients and Source Terms

In this paper, a parameter-uniform numerical method is suggested to solve a system of singularly perturbed convection-diffusion equations with discontinuous convection coefficients and source terms subject to the Dirichlet boundary condition. The second derivative of each equation is multiplied by a distinctly small parameter, which leads to an overlap and interacting interior layer. A numerical method based on a piecewise uniform Shishkin mesh is constructed. Numerical results are presented to support the theoretical results

Benign breast diseases: experience at a teaching hospital in rural India

Background: Though benign breast diseases are very common with nearly 1/3 of women suffering some time during their life time, not many studies have focused on this entity, especially in rural areas. Our teaching hospital situated amongst the villages in rural part of India provided the right background for the study.  Objective: To determine the frequency of benign breast diseases in a teaching hospital situated in the rural setting and to analyze the role of triple assessment in assessing benign breast diseases.Study design: Prospective, descriptive study.Setting: MVJ Medical College and Research Hospital, Hoskote, Bangalore Rural district, Karnataka, India.Method of study: Data including age, complaints, clinical examination, radiological investigations and histopathological diagnosis was collected from patients presenting to the department of surgery with breast complaints. Patients with carcinoma of the breast were excluded from the study.Results: A total of 110 patients were studied between November 2009 to March 2011. Mean age of patients was 28.6 years. Fibroadenoma was the most common diagnosis in 56.4% followed by fibroadenosis in 20.9%. There was one case each of lipoma, tuberculosis and duct ectasia and two cases of atypical ductal hyperplasia. The sensitivity of clinical diagnosis in our study was 91.1% and FNAC was 100% accurate in all patients with fibroadenoma but had a sensitivity of only 78% in the diagnosis of fibroadenosis. Only 3.3% of cases of fibroadenoma were treated conservatively

Enhanced Selection of High Affinity DNA-Reactive B Cells Following Cyclophosphamide Treatment in Mice

A major goal for the treatment of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus with cytotoxic therapies is the induction of long-term remission. There is, however, a paucity of information concerning the effects of these therapies on the reconstituting B cell repertoire. Since there is recent evidence suggesting that B cell lymphopenia might attenuate negative selection of autoreactive B cells, we elected to investigate the effects of cyclophosphamide on the selection of the re-emerging B cell repertoire in wild type mice and transgenic mice that express the H chain of an anti-DNA antibody. The reconstituting B cell repertoire in wild type mice contained an increased frequency of DNA-reactive B cells; in heavy chain transgenic mice, the reconstituting repertoire was characterized by an increased frequency of mature, high affinity DNA-reactive B cells and the mice expressed increased levels of serum anti-DNA antibodies. This coincided with a significant increase in serum levels of BAFF. Treatment of transgene-expressing mice with a BAFF blocking agent or with DNase to reduce exposure to autoantigen limited the expansion of high affinity DNA-reactive B cells during B cell reconstitution. These studies suggest that during B cell reconstitution, not only is negative selection of high affinity DNA-reactive B cells impaired by increased BAFF, but also that B cells escaping negative selection are positively selected by autoantigen. There are significant implications for therapy

Graphdti: A Robust Deep Learning Predictor Of Drug-Target Interactions From Multiple Heterogeneous Data

Traditional techniqueset identification, we developed GraphDTI, a robust machine learning framework integrating the molecular-level information on drugs, proteins, and binding sites with the system-level information on gene expression and protein-protein interactions. In order to properly evaluate the performance of GraphDTI, we compiled a high-quality benchmarking dataset and devised a new cluster-based cross-validation p to identify macromolecular targets for drugs utilize solely the information on a query drug and a putative target. Nonetheless, the mechanisms of action of many drugs depend not only on their binding affinity toward a single protein, but also on the signal transduction through cascades of molecular interactions leading to certain phenotypes. Although using protein-protein interaction networks and drug-perturbed gene expression profiles can facilitate system-level investigations of drug-target interactions, utilizing such large and heterogeneous data poses notable challenges. To improve the state-of-the-art in drug targrotocol. Encouragingly, GraphDTI not only yields an AUC of 0.996 against the validation dataset, but it also generalizes well to unseen data with an AUC of 0.939, significantly outperforming other predictors. Finally, selected examples of identified drug-target interactions are validated against the biomedical literature. Numerous applications of GraphDTI include the investigation of drug polypharmacological effects, side effects through off-target binding, and repositioning opportunities