When propriety is improper

We argue that philosophers ought to distinguish epistemic decision theory and epistemology, in just the way ordinary decision theory is distinguished from ethics. Once one does this, the internalist arguments that motivate much of epistemic decision theory make sense, given specific interpretations of the formalism. Making this distinction also causes trouble for the principle called Propriety, which says, roughly, that the only acceptable epistemic utility functions make probabilistically coherent credence functions immodest. We cast doubt on this requirement, but then argue that epistemic decision theorists should never have wanted such a strong principle in any case

Cardiac Calcium Atpase Dimerization Measured by Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer and Chemical Cross-Linking

The cardiac sarco/endoplasmic reticulum calcium ATPase (SERCA) establishes the intracellular calcium gradient across the sarcoplasmic reticulum membrane. It has been proposed that SERCA forms homo-oligomers that increase the catalytic rate of calcium transport. We investigated SERCA oligomerization in rabbit left ventricular myocytes using a photoactivatable cross-linker. Western blotting of cross-linked SERCA revealed higher molecular weight species consistent with SERCA oligomerization. Fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) measurements in cells transiently transfected with fluorescently-labeled SERCA2a revealed that SERCA readily forms homo-dimers. These dimers formed in the absence or presence of the SERCA regulatory partner, phospholamban (PLB) and were unaltered by PLB phosphorylation or changes in calcium or ATP. Fluorescence lifetime data are compatible with a model in which PLB interacts with a SERCA homo-dimer in a stoichiometry of 1:2. Functional data show that homo-dimerization of SERCA is an important component of SERCA regulation. Together, these results suggest that SERCA forms constitutive homo-dimers in live cells that and dimer formation is not modulated by SERCA conformational poise, PLB binding, or PLB phosphorylation

Hyperfuzzing: black-box security hypertesting with a grey-box fuzzer

Information leakage is a class of error that can lead to severe consequences. However unlike other errors, it is rarely explicitly considered during the software testing process. LeakFuzzer advances the state of the art by using a noninterference security property together with a security flow policy as an oracle. As the tool extends the state of the art fuzzer, AFL++, LeakFuzzer inherits the advantages of AFL++ such as scalability, automated input generation, high coverage and low developer intervention. The tool can detect the same set of errors that a normal fuzzer can detect, with the addition of being able to detect violations of secure information flow policies. We evaluated LeakFuzzer on a diverse set of 10 C and C++ benchmarks containing known information leaks, ranging in size from just 80 to over 900k lines of code. Seven of these are taken from real-world CVEs including Heartbleed and a recent error in PostgreSQL. Given 20 24-hour runs, LeakFuzzer can find 100% of the leaks in the SUTs whereas existing techniques using such as the CBMC model checker and AFL++ augmented with different sanitizers can only find 40% at best.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Respiration and Heart Rate at the Surface between Dives in Northern Elephant Seals

All underwater activities of diving mammals are constrained by the need for surface gas exchange. Our aim was to measure respiratory rate (fb) and heart rate (fh) at the surface between dives in free-ranging northern elephant seals Mirounga angustirostris. We recorded fb and fh acoustically in six translocated juveniles, 1.8-2. 4 years old, and three migrating adult males from the rookery at Ano Nuevo, California, USA. To each seal, we attached a diving instrument to record the diving pattern, a satellite tag to track movements and location, a digital audio tape recorder or acoustic datalogger with an external hydrophone to record the sounds of respiration and fh at the surface, and a VHF transmitter to facilitate recovery. During surface intervals averaging 2.2+/−0.4 min, adult males breathed a mean of 32.7+/−5.4 times at a rate of 15. 3+/−1.8 breaths min(−)(1) (means +/− s.d., N=57). Mean fh at the surface was 84+/−3 beats min(−)(1). The fb of juveniles was 26 % faster than that of adult males, averaging 19.2+/−2.2 breaths min(−)(1) for a mean total of 41.2+/−5.0 breaths during surface intervals lasting 2.6+/−0.31 min. Mean fh at the surface was 106+/−3 beats min(−)(1). fb and fh did not change significantly over the course of surface intervals. Surface fb and fh were not clearly associated with levels of exertion, such as rapid horizontal transit or apparent foraging, or with measures of immediately previous or subsequent diving performance, such as diving duration, diving depth or swimming speed. Together, surface respiration rate and the duration of the preceding dive were significant predictors of surface interval duration. This implies that elephant seals minimize surface time spent loading oxygen depending on rates of oxygen uptake and previous depletion of stores

Comparing Perceptual and Computational Complexity for Short Rhythmic Patterns

According to Leibniz ‘Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.’ The perception or experience of time is an essential aspect of listeners’ engagement with music. As such listeners’ experience of rhythmic patterns and their aesthetic response can enhance our understanding of the perception of time. Studies by Berlyne suggest that aesthetic evaluations are low for stimuli that are too simple or too complex with a preference for intermediate level of complexity. In musical terms we would expect listeners to respond negatively to music that is purely repetitive or to music that seems incomprehensibly random and to prefer music that manages to balance familiarity with variation. We present a study that aims to match listeners’ evaluation of rhythmic complexity with computational measures of complexity. We selected five measures derived from information theory - Shannon's entropy, entropy rate, excess entropy, transient information, and Kolmogorov complexity. Rhythmic sequences, covering a wide spectrum of complexity levels according to these measures, were generated algorithmically as binary sequences. These sequences were synthesized as drum patterns with 1s as hits and 0s as rests. 32 participants were asked to guess whether the last beat of each sequence was supposed to be a drum hit or a rest. We averaged the participants’ scores in order to assign an implicit rating of rhythm complexity to each sequence. We also obtained an explicit rating of complexity by asking the participants to rate the perceived difficulty of guessing the last beat for each sequence. Finally, the participants completed the Gold-MSI questionnaire and a shortened version of the Raven's matrices, in order to investigate the effects of musicality and visual pattern identification on the perception of rhythm complexity. The Kolmogorov complexity of the sequences was correlated with the scores on the explicit task (r=.973, p<.001), and the entropy rate of the sequences was correlated with the scores on both implicit (r=.670, p=.012) and explicit tasks (r=.909, p<.001). There was also a Kolmogorov complexity-by-musicality interaction (F=5.498, p=.026), confirming the influence of musical expertise in the perception of rhythm complexity. There was no effect of the scores on the Raven's matrices, showing that auditory sequence perception and visual pattern identification seem to be different abilities. These results show that information-theoretical concepts capture some salient features of rhythm perception, and provide the framework for further studies on the aesthetic perception of rhythm

A Kristallnacht Commemoration Honoring the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust

A Kristallnacht Commemoration Honoring the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust presented through a community partnership between The Temple and the School of the Arts at Kennesaw State University.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1666/thumbnail.jp

Limit Theorems for Individual-Based Models in Economics and Finance

There is a widespread recent interest in using ideas from statistical physics to model certain types of problems in economics and finance. The main idea is to derive the macroscopic behavior of the market from the random local interactions between agents. Our purpose is to present a general framework that encompasses a broad range of models, by proving a law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for certain interacting particle systems with very general state spaces. To do this we draw inspiration from some work done in mathematical ecology and mathematical physics. The first result is proved for the system seen as a measure-valued process, while to prove the second one we will need to introduce a chain of embeddings of some abstract Banach and Hilbert spaces of test functions and prove that the fluctuations converge to the solution of a certain generalized Gaussian stochastic differential equation taking values in the dual of one of these spaces.Comment: To appear in Stochastic Processes and their Application

Keeping Secrets: Multi-objective Genetic Improvement for Detecting and Reducing Information Leakage

Information leaks in software can unintentionally reveal private data, yet they are hard to detect and fix. Although several methods have been proposed to detect leakage, such as static verificationbased approaches, they require specialist knowledge, and are timeconsuming. Recently, HyperGI introduced a dynamic, hypertestbased approach that detects and produces potential fixes for information leakage. Its fitness function tries to balance information leakage and program correctness, but as the authors of that work point out, there may be a tradeoff between keeping program semantics and reducing information leakage. In this work we ask if it is possible to automatically detect and repair information leakage in more realistic programs without requiring specialist knowledge. Our approach, called LeakReducer explicitly encodes the tradeoff between program correctness and information leakage as a multi-objective optimisation problem. We apply LeakReducer to a set of leaky programs including the well known Heartbleed bug. It is comparable with HyperGI on their toy applications. In addition, we demonstrate it can find and reduce leakage in real applications and we see diverse solutions on our Pareto front. Upon investigation we find that having a Pareto front helps with some types of information leakage, but not all