Making Mountains out of Molehills: Challenges for Implementation of Cross-Disciplinary Research in the Big Data Era

We present a “Researcher’s Hierarchy of Needs” (loosely based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) in the context of interdisciplinary research in a “big data” era. We discuss multiple tensions and difficulties that researchers face in today’s environment, some current efforts and suggested policy changes to address these shortcomings and present our vision of a future interdisciplinary ecosystem

The new Magnetic Measurement System at the Advanced Photon Source

A new system for precise measurements of the field integrals and multipole components of the APS magnetic insertion devices is described. A stretched coil is used to measure magnetic field characteristics. The hardware includes a number of servomotors to move (translate or rotate) the coil and a fast data acquisition board to measure the coil signal. A PC under Linux is used as a control workstation. The user interface is written as a Tcl/tk script. The hardware is accessed from the script through a shared C-library. A description of the hardware system and the control program is given.Comment: 3 pages, 5 figures, paper 3271 submitted to ICALEPCS 2001 Conferenc

Be Selfish and Avoid Dilemmas: Fork After Withholding (FAW) Attacks on Bitcoin

In the Bitcoin system, participants are rewarded for solving cryptographic puzzles. In order to receive more consistent rewards over time, some participants organize mining pools and split the rewards from the pool in proportion to each participant's contribution. However, several attacks threaten the ability to participate in pools. The block withholding (BWH) attack makes the pool reward system unfair by letting malicious participants receive unearned wages while only pretending to contribute work. When two pools launch BWH attacks against each other, they encounter the miner's dilemma: in a Nash equilibrium, the revenue of both pools is diminished. In another attack called selfish mining, an attacker can unfairly earn extra rewards by deliberately generating forks. In this paper, we propose a novel attack called a fork after withholding (FAW) attack. FAW is not just another attack. The reward for an FAW attacker is always equal to or greater than that for a BWH attacker, and it is usable up to four times more often per pool than in BWH attack. When considering multiple pools - the current state of the Bitcoin network - the extra reward for an FAW attack is about 56% more than that for a BWH attack. Furthermore, when two pools execute FAW attacks on each other, the miner's dilemma may not hold: under certain circumstances, the larger pool can consistently win. More importantly, an FAW attack, while using intentional forks, does not suffer from practicality issues, unlike selfish mining. We also discuss partial countermeasures against the FAW attack, but finding a cheap and efficient countermeasure remains an open problem. As a result, we expect to see FAW attacks among mining pools.Comment: This paper is an extended version of a paper accepted to ACM CCS 201

Culture modernization level measurement of different student generations

Работа базируется на материалах конкретных социологических исследований проводимых среди студентов горда Пермь с начала девяностых годов. На основе авторской методики определяются различия уровня модернизации культуры студентов различных поколений.Paper is based on social survey which has been carrying out among Perm students since early nineties years. Culture modernization level differences between different generations are crarified by author‘s technique

Security and Interoperable Medical Device Systems, Part 2: Failures, Consequences and Classifications

Interoperable medical devices (IMDs) face threats due to the increased attack surface presented by interoperability and the corresponding infrastructure. Introducing networking and coordination functionalities fundamentally alters medical systems\u27 security properties. Understanding the threats is an important first step in eventually designing security solutions for such systems. Part 2 of this two-part article defines a failure model, or the specific ways in which IMD environments might fail when attacked. An attack-consequences model expresses the combination of failures experienced by IMD environments for each attack vector. This analysis leads to interesting conclusions about regulatory classes of medical devices in IMD environments subject to attacks

Functional Alarms for Systems of Interoperable Medical Devices

Alarms are essential for medical systems in order to ensure patient safety during deteriorating clinical situations and inevitable device malfunction. As medical devices are connected together to become interoperable, alarms become crucial part in making them high-assurance, in nature. Traditional alarm systems for interoperable medical devices have been patient-centric. In this paper, we introduce the need for an alarm system that focuses on the correct functionality of the interoperability architecture itself, along with several considerations and design challenges in enabling them

Is the UNDP Declared Human Development for Everyone Possible in Real Life?

The law of normal distribution applied to human development states that an equal level of development of countries (regions, and people) at one point in time cannot be achieved, and under any level of average development there will always be those lagging behind this level and those ahead of it. The main research issue within the framework of this article is the following: what happens beyond the average indicators of human development in real life, and is it possible to achieve the equally high level of human development for everyone? The authors answer this question with the help of diachronic and synchronic analysis of the Human Development Index (HDI) in the period 1990 – 2017 with respect to compliance of the HDI variance to normal distribution. Using cluster analysis, the authors obtained the results testifying that the modern world is increasingly divided into groups of countries (“worlds”) every one of which has its own average level of human development, and the HDI of the countries within each group varies in accordance with the Gauss curve. These four “worlds“ generally coincide with the UNDP division of countries into four groups - very high human development, high human development, medium human development, low human development. The authors came to the conclusion that the human development as the dynamic process is possible. But it is impossible to achieve the same level of human development for everyone without differences in the development levels between several groups of countries (several “worlds”) and within one group of countries (one “world”)