The Portrayal of "The Other" in Foreign Policy Discourse and Public Consciousness in Armenia (2008-present)

Conventional wisdom posits that the evocation of "the other" in a state's foreign policy discourse is indicative of the core characteristics of its foreign policy identity. "The other" is largely deemed to be a symbol in the definition of who "we" are - our identity. A discourse analysis of Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan's conceptions of "the other," coupled with public opinion surveys, sheds light on major ups and downs that the convoluted relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey have undergone since 2008. Evidence indicates that Sargsyan's determination to break the deadlock was not reciprocated by Azerbaijan and Turkey. The latter stepped back from its commitment to establishing unconditional relations with Armenia coupled with Baku's upgraded bellicose policy towards Armenia. All this led Armenia's president to toughen his position toward them, which found vivid expression in Armenia's foreign policy discourse. Moreover, the tough resonated with Armenian society and further cemented negative social attitudes towards Azerbaijan and Turkey

3PO: Programmed Far-Memory Prefetching for Oblivious Applications

Using memory located on remote machines, or far memory, as a swap space is a promising approach to meet the increasing memory demands of modern datacenter applications. Operating systems have long relied on prefetchers to mask the increased latency of fetching pages from swap space to main memory. Unfortunately, with traditional prefetching heuristics, performance still degrades when applications use far memory. In this paper we propose a new prefetching technique for far-memory applications. We focus our efforts on memory-intensive, oblivious applications whose memory access patterns are independent of their inputs, such as matrix multiplication. For this class of applications we observe that we can perfectly prefetch pages without relying on heuristics. However, prefetching perfectly without requiring significant application modifications is challenging. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of 3PO, a system that provides pre-planned prefetching for general oblivious applications. We demonstrate that 3PO can accelerate applications, e.g., running them 30-150% faster than with Linux's prefetcher with 20% local memory. We also use 3PO to understand the fundamental software overheads of prefetching in a paging-based system, and the minimum performance penalty that they impose when we run applications under constrained local memory.Comment: 14 page

КАРДИООНКОЛОГИЯ: СОВРЕМЕННЫЙ ВЗГЛЯД НА ПРОБЛЕМУ ВЫБОРА ОПТИМАЛЬНОЙ СТРАТЕГИИ ЛЕЧЕНИЯ ИШЕМИЧЕСКОЙ БОЛЕЗНИ СЕРДЦА В СОЧЕТАНИИ С ОНКОЛОГИЧЕСКИМ ЗАБОЛЕВАНИЕМ

HighlightsThe article presents an overview of the main studies on the treatment of patients with coronary artery disease and cancer. Abstract Cardiovascular and oncological diseases remain the leading causes of death globally. The combination of coronary artery disease and cancer is becoming more common in clinical practice. Despite the achievements in the treatment of both of these diseases separately, their combination is a considerable issue for specialists. This review article discusses the main issues of managing patients with cancer and coronary artery disease. Moreover, the article presents various treatment strategies, including simultaneous and step-by-step interventions, and shows the current trends of endovascular approach to the treatment of these patients.Основные положенияПредставлен обзор основных исследований по лечению пациентов с ишемической болезнью сердца и онкопатологией. Резюме:Сердечно-сосудистые и онкологические заболевания занимают лидирующие позиции в структуре смертности во всем мире. Сочетание ишемической болезни сердца и онкологического заболевания встречается в клинической практике все чаще. Несмотря на достижения в лечении обеих нозологий по отдельности, их сочетание представляет большую проблему для врачей. В данной обзорной статье обсуждены основные вопросы ведения пациентов с онкологическим заболеванием и ишемической болезнью сердца. В статье описаны разные стратегии лечения, включающие симультанные и этапные вмешательства, показаны современные тенденции эндоваскулярного подхода в лечении данной группы больных

Rust Implementations and Performance of Safe and Pluggable OS Schedulers in Context of TockOS"

Since its first implementation in 1970s, multi-programming system abstraction provided by operating system kernels has been a crucial part of many digital systems. While the first computers had only a handful of almost always cooperative tasks to be scheduled, nowadays kernels in typical household computers schedule 100s and 1000s of processes and need to provide access and safety guarantees to each one regardless of the others' actions. This exponential growth has been possible partly due to the Moor's Law, advances in hardware protection mechanisms and partly due to more advanced scheduling algorithms. In the growing IoT world the effect of Moor's Law is minimal and hardware protection is often non-existent because of cost and resource constraints while a safe multi-programming environment is still necessary since IoT gadgets are becoming software platforms rather than single purpose devices. Tock and other embedded operating systems address many of the safety and isolation constraints through programming language level protection mechanisms. Currently, however, the Tock trusted codebase includes the scheduling algorithm inside the kernel thereby exposing the whole system to potential vulnerabilities originating from complex scheduling algorithms. The aim of this project is to explore, propose and evaluate approaches for a safe scheduler interface that will not require the scheduler implementation to be trusted by the applications. The project proposes designs for an abstract scheduler interface in the kernel that provides a safe abstraction with minimal overhead to scheduling algorithm developer. Unlike the PC world, IoT devices are quite heterogeneous thus may have wildly different hardware capabilities and scheduling goals. So the paper also presents a survey of most common scheduling algorithms used in embedded systems and designs the abstract interface to fit most of these schedulers

Rust Implementations and Performance of Safe and Pluggable OS Schedulers in Context of TockOS"

Since its first implementation in 1970s, multi-programming system abstraction provided by operating system kernels has been a crucial part of many digital systems. While the first computers had only a handful of almost always cooperative tasks to be scheduled, nowadays kernels in typical household computers schedule 100s and 1000s of processes and need to provide access and safety guarantees to each one regardless of the others' actions. This exponential growth has been possible partly due to the Moor's Law, advances in hardware protection mechanisms and partly due to more advanced scheduling algorithms. In the growing IoT world the effect of Moor's Law is minimal and hardware protection is often non-existent because of cost and resource constraints while a safe multi-programming environment is still necessary since IoT gadgets are becoming software platforms rather than single purpose devices. Tock and other embedded operating systems address many of the safety and isolation constraints through programming language level protection mechanisms. Currently, however, the Tock trusted codebase includes the scheduling algorithm inside the kernel thereby exposing the whole system to potential vulnerabilities originating from complex scheduling algorithms. The aim of this project is to explore, propose and evaluate approaches for a safe scheduler interface that will not require the scheduler implementation to be trusted by the applications. The project proposes designs for an abstract scheduler interface in the kernel that provides a safe abstraction with minimal overhead to scheduling algorithm developer. Unlike the PC world, IoT devices are quite heterogeneous thus may have wildly different hardware capabilities and scheduling goals. So the paper also presents a survey of most common scheduling algorithms used in embedded systems and designs the abstract interface to fit most of these schedulers

Rust Implementations and Performance of Safe and Pluggable OS Schedulers in Context of TockOS

Since its first implementation in 1970s, multi-programming system abstraction provided by operating system kernels has been a crucial part of many digital systems. While the first computers had only a handful of almost always cooperative tasks to be scheduled, nowadays kernels in typical household computers schedule 100s and 1000s of processes and need to provide access and safety guarantees to each one regardless of the others' actions. This exponential growth has been possible partly due to the Moor's Law, advances in hardware protection mechanisms and partly due to more advanced scheduling algorithms. In the growing IoT world the effect of Moor's Law is minimal and hardware protection is often non-existent because of cost and resource constraints while a safe multi-programming environment is still necessary since IoT gadgets are becoming software platforms rather than single purpose devices. Tock and other embedded operating systems address many of the safety and isolation constraints through programming language level protection mechanisms. Currently, however, the Tock trusted codebase includes the scheduling algorithm inside the kernel thereby exposing the whole system to potential vulnerabilities originating from complex scheduling algorithms. The aim of this project is to explore, propose and evaluate approaches for a safe scheduler interface that will not require the scheduler implementation to be trusted by the applications. The project proposes designs for an abstract scheduler interface in the kernel that provides a safe abstraction with minimal overhead to scheduling algorithm developer. Unlike the PC world, IoT devices are quite heterogeneous thus may have wildly different hardware capabilities and scheduling goals. So the paper also presents a survey of most common scheduling algorithms used in embedded systems and designs the abstract interface to fit most of these schedulers

Assessment of Lockdown Effectiveness during COVID-19 Pandemic Using Air Pollution Data in Armenia in March–June 2019 and 2020: A Cross-Sectional Study

Various methods used by different countries’ governments to control the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the cause of pandemic in 2020, affected air quality. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of lockdown in Armenia on the content of the main air pollutants—dust, SO2 and NO2. This was a cross-sectional study. We analyzed data on the concentrations of SO2, NO2 and dust from March to June, 2019 and the same period in 2020 as well as data on positive COVID-19 cases from Yerevan, Vanadzor and Hrazdan. In 2020, dust was found to be lower in Yerevan and in Hrazdan and higher in Vanadzor than in the same period in 2019. The same pattern was present for SO2 concentrations: in Yerevan and Hrazdan there was a decrease, and there was an increase in Vanadzor. The concentrations of NO2 increased in Yerevan and Hrazdan, with a slight decrease in Vanadzor. New cases of COVID-19 had a negative correlation with dust and a positive correlation with SO2. The strict quarantine measures were effective in containing the spread of COVID-19

Assessment of Lockdown Effectiveness during COVID-19 Pandemic Using Air Pollution Data in Armenia in March–June 2019 and 2020: A Cross-Sectional Study

Various methods used by different countries’ governments to control the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the cause of pandemic in 2020, affected air quality. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of lockdown in Armenia on the content of the main air pollutants—dust, SO2 and NO2. This was a cross-sectional study. We analyzed data on the concentrations of SO2, NO2 and dust from March to June, 2019 and the same period in 2020 as well as data on positive COVID-19 cases from Yerevan, Vanadzor and Hrazdan. In 2020, dust was found to be lower in Yerevan and in Hrazdan and higher in Vanadzor than in the same period in 2019. The same pattern was present for SO2 concentrations: in Yerevan and Hrazdan there was a decrease, and there was an increase in Vanadzor. The concentrations of NO2 increased in Yerevan and Hrazdan, with a slight decrease in Vanadzor. New cases of COVID-19 had a negative correlation with dust and a positive correlation with SO2. The strict quarantine measures were effective in containing the spread of COVID-19