Confluence and contours: reflexive management of environmental risk

Government institutions have responsibilities to distribute risk management funds meaningfully and to be accountable for their choices. We took a macro-level sociological approach to understanding the role of government in managing environmental risks, and insights from micro-level psychology to examine individual-level risk-related perceptions and beliefs. Survey data from 2,068 U.K. citizens showed that lay people's funding preferences were associated positively with beliefs about responsibility and trust, yet associations with perception varied depending on risk type. Moreover, there were risk-specific differences in the funding preferences of the lay sample and 29 policymakers. A laboratory-based study of 109 participants examined funding allocation in more detail through iterative presentation of expert information. Quantitative and qualitative data revealed a meso-level framework comprising three types of decisionmakers who varied in their willingness to change funding allocation preferences following expert information: adaptors, responders, and resistors. This research highlights the relevance of integrated theoretical approaches to understanding the policy process, and the benefits of reflexive dialogue to managing environmental risks.Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, EPSRC, NERC, ESR

Consequences of Compliance and Deterrence Models of Law Enforcement for the Exercise of Police Discretion

The Internet is suffering from ossification. There has been substantial research on improving current protocols, but the vendors are reluctant to deploy new ones. We believe that this is in part due to the difficulty of evaluating protocols under realistic conditions. Recent wide-area testbeds can help alleviate this problem, but they require substantial resources (equipment, bandwidth) from each participant, and they have difficulty in providing repeatability and full control over the experiments. Existing in-house networking testbeds are capable of running controlled, repeatable experiments, but are typically small-scale (due to various overheads), limited in features, or expensive. The premise of our work is that it is possible to leverage the recent increases in computational power to improve the researchers' ability to experiment with new protocols in lab settings. We propose a cost-effective testbed, called MX, which emulates many programmable routers running over a realistic topology on multi-core commodity servers. We leverage open source implementations of programmable routers, such as Click, and modify them to allow coexistence of multiple instances in the same kernel in an effort to reduce packet forwarding overheads. Our initial results show that we outperform similar cost-effective solutions by a factor of 2. Next, we demonstrate that grouping and placing routers on to cores which share the L2 cache yields high performance.QC 20140707</p

The relationship between information processing style and information seeking, and its moderation by affect and perceived usefulness: analysis vs. procrastination

We examined the relationship between information processing style and information seeking, and its moderation by anxiety and information utility. Information about Salmonella, a potentially commonplace disease, was presented to 2960 adults. Two types of information processing were examined: preferences for analytical or heuristic processing, and preferences for immediate or delayed processing. Information seeking was captured by measuring the number of additional pieces of information sought by participants. Preferences for analytical information processing were associated positively and directly with information seeking. Heuristic information processing was associated negatively and directly with information seeking. The positive relationship between preferences for delayed decision making and information seeking was moderated by anxiety and by information utility. Anxiety reduced the tendency to seek additional information. Information utility increased the likelihood of information seeking. The findings indicate that low levels of anxiety could prompt information seeking. However, information seeking occurred even when information was perceived as useful and sufficient, suggesting that it can be a form of procrastination rather than a useful contribution to effective decision making

Some Things You Always Wanted to Know About Web Pages (But Were Too Busy to Ask)

The organic growth of the web has led to web sites that exhibit a large variety of properties. We conduct a large- scale study to gain quantitative insights into the browser-side effects of the structure and behavior of thousands of the most popular web sites. We find that 50 % of web pages load more than 100 resources from more than 17 distinct hosts and make the browser process more than 730 kB of javascript. Embedded third-party advertisements are the prevailing model on the web to monetize services or content that are otherwise provided free-of-cost to end users. We quantify the effects on browser-side resource consumption caused by advertisements and find that on pages with ads, the ads make up 20 % of all HTTP requests. Furthermore, ads lead to three times as many javascript background events that prevent the processor from staying in deep sleep mode

Vorsorgelücke während der Coronavirus-Pandemie : Vorsorgeuntersuchungen in der Krise

Die Corona-Pandemie zeigt ihre Auswirkungen in jedem Lebensbereich. Es ist die tiefgreifendste Gesundheitskrise seit Jahrzehnten und das nicht nur für direkt von einer Covid-19-Erkrankung Betroffene; sie schlägt sich auf alle Bereiche des Gesundheitssystems nieder. Zum Weltkrebstag veröffentlichte Zahlen legen nahe, dass präventive Arztbesuche und Vorsorgemaßnahmen während der Pandemie stark abgenommen haben und verschoben wurden (BARMER, 2021; TK, 2021). Da regelmäßige Vorsorgeuntersuchungen oft schwere Krankheitsverläufe verhindern können, besteht die Gefahr, dass die Vorsorgelücke das Mortalitätsrisiko an eigentlich behandelbaren Krankheiten erhöht. In dieser Kurzexpertise geben wir zuerst einen Überblick über die Wichtigkeit von Vorsorgeuntersuchungen und zeigen dann, dass eine Vielzahl von Ergebnissen einen starken Rückgang der Vorsorgeuntersuchungen während der Coronavirus-Pandemie beschreibt. Als nächstes zeigen wir anhand von Google Suchanfragen, dass der Rückgang der Vorsorgeuntersuchungen zumindest teilweise durch das empfundene Risiko sich in der Arztpraxis mit dem Coronavirus anzustecken, erklärt werden kann. Zum Schluss diskutieren wir Vorschläge, wie die Vorsorgelücke geschlossen werden kann

Hospital capacity reporting in Germany during COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals faced a unique predicament. Hospital care was urgently needed and society took efforts to prevent overwhelming hospitals. However, hospitals in case-based reimbursement schemes faced financial problems because of cancelled elective care visits and government regulations to keep capacity free for Covid-19 patients. Therefore, emergency financing measures were implemented in many countries. We analyze how hospitals in Germany responded to a scheme that provided financial support if the intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy rate in a county exceeded 75%. The scheme distributed over seven billion euros to hospitals and was notable because financial support depended on a measure (ICU occupancy rate) that hospitals could directly influence. To analyze hospitals’ reactions to this scheme, we employ event study analyses comparing ICU capacity before and after regions became eligible. We find no evidence of strategic reporting at an economically meaningful and hence empirically detectable scale

Polarization-correlated photon pairs from a single ion

In the fluorescence light of a single atom, the probability for emission of a photon with certain polarization depends on the polarization of the photon emitted immediately before it. Here correlations of such kind are investigated with a single trapped calcium ion by means of second order correlation functions. A theoretical model is developed and fitted to the experimental data, which show 91% probability for the emission of polarization-correlated photon pairs within 24 ns.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

TwinDrivers: Semi-Automatic Derivation of Fast and Safe Hypervisor Network Drivers from Guest OS Drivers

In a virtualized environment, device drivers are often run inside a virtual machine (VM) rather than in the hypervisor. Doing so protects the hypervisor from bugs in the driver, and also allows the reuse of the device driver and its support infrastructure in the VM. Unfortunately, this approach results in poor performance for I/O intensive devices such as network cards. The alternative approach is to run device drivers directly in the hypervisor. Although this approach results in better performance, it suffers from the loss of safety guarantees for the hypervisor, and incurs the software engineering cost of maintaining the driver support infrastructure. In this paper we present TwinDrivers, a framework which allows us to automatically create safe and efficient hypervisor drivers from guest OS drivers. The hypervisor driver runs directly in the hypervisor, but its data resides completely in the driver VM address space. A Software Virtual Memory mechanism allows the driver to access its VM data efficiently from the hypervisor running in any guest context, and also protects the hypervisor from invalid memory accesses from the driver. An upcall mechanism allows the hypervisor to largely reuse the driver support infrastructure present in the VM. The TwinDriver system thus combines the performance benefits of hypervisor-driver based approaches with the safety and software engineering benefits of VM driver based approaches. Using the TwinDrivers hypervisor driver, we are able to improve the guest domain networking performance in Xen by a factor of 2.4 for transmit workloads, and 2.1 for receive workloads. The resulting transmit perfomance is within 64% of native Linux performance, and the receive performance is within 67% of Linux performance

Expression of a large coding sequence: Gene therapy vectors for Ataxia Telangiectasia

Ataxia telangiectasia is a monogenetic disorder caused by mutations in the ATM gene. Its encoded protein kinase ATM plays a fundamental role in DNA repair of double strand breaks (DSBs). Impaired function of this kinase leads to a multisystemic disorder including immunodeficiency, progressive cerebellar degeneration, radiation sensitivity, dilated blood vessels, premature aging and a predisposition to cancer. Since allogenic hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation improved disease outcome, gene therapy based on autologous HSCs is an alternative promising concept. However, due to the large cDNA of ATM (9.2 kb), efficient packaging of retroviral particles and sufficient transduction of HSCs remains challenging.We generated lentiviral, gammaretroviral and foamy viral vectors with a GFP.F2A.Atm fusion or a GFP transgene and systematically compared transduction efficiencies. Vector titers dropped with increasing transgene size, but despite their described limited packaging capacity, we were able to produce lentiviral and gammaretroviral particles. The reduction in titers could not be explained by impaired packaging of the viral genomes, but the main differences occurred after transduction. Finally, after transduction of Atm-deficient (ATM-KO) murine fibroblasts with the lentiviral vector expressing Atm, we could show the expression of ATM protein which phosphorylated its downstream substrates (pKap1 and p-p53)

Li/MgO with spin sensors as catalyst for the oxidative coupling of methane

Co-doping of Li/MgO, a well-known catalyst for the oxidative coupling of methane, was investigated. It is demonstrated that Gd3+ and Fe3+ can be used as spin sensors in these solids to investigate the structure via EPR spectroscopy. These aliovalent ions occupy Mg2+ sites in the lattice; the expected coupling with charge-compensating neighboring Li+ was detected. A strong increase of the activity was observed. However, all samples suffered from deactivation. The solubility of Gd3+ in MgO turned out to be inhibited. No such restriction was observed for Fe3+