Transportation of hazardous materials via pipeline. A historical overview

The transportation of hazardous materials via pipelines is often considered a safer alternative to other transportation modalities such as railway, road and ship. However, pipelines often cross industrial and highly populated areas, so that their failure can pose a significant risk to the surrounding environment and the exposed population: the possible release of flammable and/or toxic materials in such areas can generate catastrophic events with very severe consequences. A number of accidents have actually occurred in the past years, and even when no deaths or injured are reported, significant damages to the surrounding environment often occur. This suggests that, given the extremely wide extension of the network worldwide, and the very high amounts of transported materials, a careful analysis is still required. In addition, the construction of pipelines also involves the contribution of expertise from a range of technical areas. As a consequence, the occurrence of accidents and the impact of their consequences, depend on the combination of a large number of parameters. In the present paper, an analysis of data relative to pipelines transporting hazardous materials has been carried out, and the influence of specific issues connected with their type and operation, has been assessed

The Union\u27s Duty of Fair Representation: Group Membership Interests v. Individual Interests

The author analyzes the judicial development of the union\u27s duty of fair representation and explores the potentially adverse impact on grievance machinery of reducing the standard for unfair representation to one of bad performance

Impeachment through Introduction of Prior Criminal Record - The Pennsylvania Rule v. Federal Rule of Evidence 609(a)

The author examines the Pennsylvania and federal rules governing the use of a witness\u27 prior criminal record as an impeachment technique. After tracing the legislative and judicial development of both rules, the commentator criticizes Pennsylvania\u27s adherence to the standards of admissibility announced in Luck and urges adoption of federal rule 609(a) as the rule in Pennsylvania

Protected pointers to specify access privileges in distributed systems

With reference to a distributed environment consisting of nodes connected in an arbitrary network topology, we propose the organization of a protection system in which a set of subjects, e.g. processes, generates access attempts to memory segments. One or more primary passwords are associated with each node. An access to a given segment can be accomplished successfully only if the subject attempting the access holds an access privilege, certified by possession of a valid protected pointer (p-pointer) referencing that segment. Each p-pointer includes a local password; the p-pointer is valid if the local password descends from a primary password by application of a universally known, parametric one-way generation function. A set of protection primitives makes it possible to manage the primary passwords, to reduce p-pointers to include less access rights, to allocate new segments, to delete existing segments, to read the segment contents and to overwrite these contents. The resulting protection environment is evaluated from a number of viewpoints, which include p-pointer forging and revocation, the network traffic generated by the execution of the protection primitives, the memory requirements for p-pointer storage, security, and the relation of our work to previous work. An indication of the flexibility of the p-pointer concept is given by applying p-pointers to the solution of a variety of protection problems

Attorney-Client - Unauthorized Practice of Law - Independent Negotiation of Claims by Public Casualty Adjuster

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has held that a licensed public casualty adjuster who independently negotiates claims on behalf of third parties is an unauthorized practitioner of law whose practice can be enjoined. Dauphin County Bar Association v. Mazzacaro, 351 A.2d 229 (Pa. 1976)

Extended pointers for memory protection in single address space systems

With reference to a single address space paradigm of memory addressing, we identify a set of mechanisms aimed at preserving the integrity of the virtual space of a given process from erroneous or fraudulent access attempts originated from other processes. These mechanisms guarantee a level of protection that is, in many respects, superior to that of a traditional multiple address space environment. We introduce extended pointers as a generalization of the concept of a memory address, which includes a password and an access authorization. A universally known, parametric one-way function is used to assign passwords. A specialized address translation circuitry supports memory reference and protection at the hardware level. A small set of protection primitives forms the process interface of the protection system. An indication of the flexibility of the proposed protection paradigm is given by applying extended pointers to the solution of a variety of protection problems

Timed Automata for Mobile Ransomware Detection

Considering the plethora of private and sensitive information stored in smartphone and tablets, it is easy to understand the reason why attackers develop everyday more and more aggressive malicious payloads with the aim to exfiltrate our data. One of the last trend in mobile malware landascape is represented by the so-called ransomware, a threat capable to lock the user interface and to cipher the data of the mobile device under attack. In this paper we propose an approach to model an Android application in terms of timed automaton by considering system call traces i.e., performing a dynamic analysis. We obtain encouraging results in the experimental analysis we performed exploiting real-world  (ransomware and legitimate) Android applications

diabetes mellitus affected patients classification and diagnosis through machine learning techniques

Medical studies demonstrated that diabetes pathology is increasing in last decades and the trend do not tends to stop. In order to help and to accelerate the diagnosis of diabetes in this paper we propose a method able to classify patients affected by diabetes using a set of characteristic selected in according to World Health Organization criteria. Evaluating real-world data using state of the art machine learning algorithms, we obtain a precision value equal to 0.770 and a recall equal to 0.775 using the HoeffdingTree algorithm

DELFIN+: An efficient deadlock detection tool for CCS processes

AbstractModel checking is a formal technique for proving the correctness of a system with respect to a desired behavior. However, deadlock detection via model checking is particularly difficult for the following two problems: (i) the state explosion problem, due to the exponential increase in the size of a finite state model as the number of system components grows; and (ii) the output interpretation problem, as often counter-examples are so long that they are hard to understand. The aim of this paper is to solve both problems by using heuristic-based search strategies. We have realized DELFIN+ (DEadLock FINder) a tool supporting efficient deadlock detection in CCS processes. We have used this tool to verify a sample of CCS processes, in order to evaluate the method on them

Using heuristic search for finding deadlocks in concurrent systems

AbstractModel checking is a formal technique for proving the correctness of a system with respect to a desired behavior. This is accomplished by checking whether a structure representing the system (typically a labeled transition system) satisfies a temporal logic formula describing the expected behavior. Model checking has a number of advantages over traditional approaches that are based on simulation and testing: it is completely automatic and when the verification fails it returns a counterexample that can be used to pinpoint the source of the error. Nevertheless, model checking techniques often fail because of the state explosion problem: transition systems grow exponentially with the number of components. The aim of this paper is to attack the state explosion problem that may arise when looking for deadlocks in concurrent systems described through the calculus of communicating systems. We propose to use heuristics-based techniques, namely the A* algorithm, both to guide the search without constructing the complete transition system, and to provide minimal counterexamples. We have realized a prototype tool to evaluate the methodology. Experiments we have conducted on processes of different size show the benefit from using our technique against building the whole state space, or applying some other methods