How Scale Affects Structure in Java Programs

Many internal software metrics and external quality attributes of Java programs correlate strongly with program size. This knowledge has been used pervasively in quantitative studies of software through practices such as normalization on size metrics. This paper reports size-related super- and sublinear effects that have not been known before. Findings obtained on a very large collection of Java programs -- 30,911 projects hosted at Google Code as of Summer 2011 -- unveils how certain characteristics of programs vary disproportionately with program size, sometimes even non-monotonically. Many of the specific parameters of nonlinear relations are reported. This result gives further insights for the differences of "programming in the small" vs. "programming in the large." The reported findings carry important consequences for OO software metrics, and software research in general: metrics that have been known to correlate with size can now be properly normalized so that all the information that is left in them is size-independent.Comment: ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), October 2015. (Preprint

The effects of non-abelian statistics on two-terminal shot noise in a quantum Hall liquid in the Pfaffian state

We study non-equilibrium noise in the tunnelling current between the edges of a quantum Hall liquid in the Pfaffian state, which is a strong candidate for the plateau at $\nu=5/2$. To first non-vanishing order in perturbation theory (in the tunneling amplitude) we find that one can extract the value of the fractional charge of the tunnelling quasiparticles. We note however that no direct information about non-abelian statistics can be retrieved at this level. If we go to higher-order in the perturbative calculation of the non-equilibrium shot noise, we find effects due to non-Abelian statistics. They are subtle, but eventually may have an experimental signature on the frequency dependent shot noise. We suggest how multi-terminal noise measurements might yield a more dramatic signature of non-Abelian statistics and develop some of the relevant formalism.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, a few change

Emission and absorption noise in the fractional quantum Hall effect

We compute the high-frequency emission and absorption noise in a fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) sample at arbitrary temperature. We model the edges of the FQHE as chiral Luttinger liquids (LL) and we use the non-equilibrium perturbative Keldysh formalism. We find that the non-symmetrized high frequency noise contains important signatures of the electron-electron interactions that can be used to test the Luttinger liquid physics, not only in FQHE edge states, but possibly also in other one-dimensional systems such as carbon nanotubes. In particular we find that the emission and absorption components of the excess noise (defined as the difference between the noise at finite voltage and at zero voltage) are different in an interacting system, as opposed to the non-interacting case when they are identical. We study the resonance features which appear in the noise at the Josephson frequency (proportional to the applied voltage), and we also analyze the effect of the distance between the measurement point and the backscattering site. Most of our analysis is performed in the weak backscattering limit, but we also compute and discuss briefly the high-frequency noise in the tunneling regime.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figure

SourcererCC: Scaling Code Clone Detection to Big Code

Despite a decade of active research, there is a marked lack in clone detectors that scale to very large repositories of source code, in particular for detecting near-miss clones where significant editing activities may take place in the cloned code. We present SourcererCC, a token-based clone detector that targets three clone types, and exploits an index to achieve scalability to large inter-project repositories using a standard workstation. SourcererCC uses an optimized inverted-index to quickly query the potential clones of a given code block. Filtering heuristics based on token ordering are used to significantly reduce the size of the index, the number of code-block comparisons needed to detect the clones, as well as the number of required token-comparisons needed to judge a potential clone. We evaluate the scalability, execution time, recall and precision of SourcererCC, and compare it to four publicly available and state-of-the-art tools. To measure recall, we use two recent benchmarks, (1) a large benchmark of real clones, BigCloneBench, and (2) a Mutation/Injection-based framework of thousands of fine-grained artificial clones. We find SourcererCC has both high recall and precision, and is able to scale to a large inter-project repository (250MLOC) using a standard workstation.Comment: Accepted for publication at ICSE'16 (preprint, unrevised

The psychological influence of the diagnosis of breast cancer on therapeutic options selection

The therapeutic management decision-making process for breast cancer is complex, and is influenced by multiple factors including patient age, comorbidities, ethnicity, education, and availability of immediate or delayed reconstruction options. Our study analysed 276 patients diagnosed with breast cancer in the “Colțea” Clinical Hospital between 2014 and 2015. Mean patients age was 61.24, median 62, with a range of 31 to 89 years. Younger age was associated with a less advanced local disease and younger patients were more likely to choose and benefit from conservative surgery. Most patients (61.76%) came from rural areas. Place of origin had a significant influence on the tumor size at the time of diagnosis (3.9 cm vs. 1.8cm) as well as on the choice of surgical procedure. Personalized treatment management plans that include aesthetic satisfaction coupled with oncological safety should be the objectives of contemporary breast surgery. Patient age is so important to the decision making process that it has been proposed as a determinant of educational and counselling strategies. From our experience, young patients from urban areas were more proactive patients. They were diagnosed earlier and more involved in treatment decisions compared with patients from rural areas, who generally did not question the surgeon’s opinion. Factors that influence the decision-making process likely include age, socioeconomic status, availability of radiotherapy, the necessity of periodic follow-up and the concern about recurrence