RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN TONI MORRISON’S “THE BLUEST EYE” A POSTCOLONIAL STUDY

Racism is a faithful depiction of one race’s superiority to another, resulting in discrimination and prejudice towards the black nation based on race or ethnicity. For centuries, the life of the Afro-American community has been affected, tormented, maltreated due to racial conflicts. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison presents a community in which racial conflicts are internalized. Morrison delivers a faithful message relating to the black woman’s identity crisis by presenting the emancipation of mind and soul of the black community. The Afro-American women have been exploited in American male-dominated society, where white people are the decision-maker and arbiters of all the concerns. For this purpose, the paper aims to look at the politics of the postmodern culture of capitalism in a racist society and culture. It seeks to investigate the sadomasochist attitude of the characters in the theoretical framework of internalized racism in the African-American community presented in The Bluest Eye. It would like to foster a little black girl Pecola’s sufferings and agonies in a white-dominated society and the tribulations black families’ experience.Keywords: Afro-American Community, Racial Discrimination, Pecola, Morrison, The Bluest Eye, and Postcolonialism.

Deception in Authorship Attribution

In digital forensics, questions often arise about the authors of documents: their identity, demographic background, and whether they can be linked to other documents. The field of stylometry uses linguistic features and machine learning techniques to answer these questions. While stylometry techniques can identify authors with high accuracy in non-adversarial scenarios, their accuracy is reduced to random guessing when faced with authors who intentionally obfuscate their writing style or attempt to imitate that of another author. Most authorship attribution methods were not evaluated in challenging real-world datasets with foreign language and unconventional spelling (e.g. l33tsp3ak). In this thesis we explore the performance of authorship attribution methods in adversarial settings where authors take measures to hide their identity by changing their writing style and by creating multiple identities. We show that using a large feature set, it is possible to distinguish regular documents from deceptive documents with high accuracy and present an analysis of linguistic features that can be modified to hide writing style. We show how to adapt regular authorship attribution to difficult datasets such as leaked underground forum and present a method for detecting multiple identities of authors. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with a case study that includes applying our technique to an underground forum and manual analysis to validate the results, enabling the discovery of previously undetected multiple accounts.Ph.D., Computer Science -- Drexel University, 201

On Modeling the Costs of Censorship

We argue that the evaluation of censorship evasion tools should depend upon economic models of censorship. We illustrate our position with a simple model of the costs of censorship. We show how this model makes suggestions for how to evade censorship. In particular, from it, we develop evaluation criteria. We examine how our criteria compare to the traditional methods of evaluation employed in prior works

Bacterial pathogens in wound infection and their antimicrobial susceptibility pattern in a medical college hospital, in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Background: Wound infection is a major health problem that results in prolong hospital stay, increased treatment cost and are responsible for significant mortality and morbidity worldwide. The aim of the present study was to isolate and identify the bacterial pathogens causing wound infection and to determine their antimicrobial susceptibility profile.Methods: This cross sectional study was conducted at the Department of Microbiology, Sir Salimullah Medical College, Dhaka from January 2016 to December 2016. Wound swab samples were collected and inoculated into appropriate media. The bacterial pathogens were identified by using standard microbiological methods. Antimicrobial susceptibility test were performed using disc diffusion technique following Kirby-Bauer method.Results: Out of 239 wound swab samples analyzed 173 (72.4%) were culture positive. Majority (35.3%) of culture positive cases were in age group 16-30 years and 60.1% were male. Staphylococcus aureus (36.9%) was the predominant isolate, followed by Escherichia coli (35.8%), Pseudomonas spp. (17.3%) and Proteus spp. (5.8%). Bacterial isolates were highly resistant Amoxicillin (89-100%), Cephalosporin (60-100%), Ciprofloxacin (53-71%), while they were least resistant to Imipenem (0-14%) and Amikacin (17-30%).  Conclusions: In the present study most of the isolates showed high rate of resistance to commonly used antibiotics. Therefore regular monitoring and rational use of antibiotic should be practiced

Whipple's pancreaticoduodenectomy: perioperative outcomes in a tertiary care hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Background: Pancreaticoduodenectomy is one of the most complex surgery with significant mortality and morbidity. Though the mortality rate has steadily improved, morbidity continues to be high. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the perioperative outcome following this procedure at our hospital.Methods: This retrospective study was conducted in the department of Surgery, Sir Salimullah medical college and Mitford hospital from July 2018 to December 2019. A total of 29 patients who undergone pancreaticoduodenectomy were included in the study. Preoperative, intra-operative and post-operative data were analyzed with emphasis on the morbidity and mortality rates. None of the operated patients received any types of neoadjuvant therapy.Results: Out of 29 patients who underwent PD, 18 (62.1%) were male and 11 (37.9%) were female with a median age of 53.7 years. The most common (34.5%) age group of the patients were 51-60 years. Jaundice was the commonest (89.7%) presenting symptoms followed by anorexia (75.9%) and abdominal pain (48.3%). Overall complications occurred in 37.9% patients, including wound infections (31.0%) and post-operative pancreatic fistula (6.9%). The post-operative mortality rate was 6.9%.Conclusions: PD still causes considerable morbidity and mortality. With careful patient selection, adequate preoperative preparation, surgical technique, excellent critical care management PD can be performed safely. At our center we have a reasonable volume and our data are comparable to literature data.

Reviewer Integration and Performance Measurement for Malware Detection

We present and evaluate a large-scale malware detection system integrating machine learning with expert reviewers, treating reviewers as a limited labeling resource. We demonstrate that even in small numbers, reviewers can vastly improve the system's ability to keep pace with evolving threats. We conduct our evaluation on a sample of VirusTotal submissions spanning 2.5 years and containing 1.1 million binaries with 778GB of raw feature data. Without reviewer assistance, we achieve 72% detection at a 0.5% false positive rate, performing comparable to the best vendors on VirusTotal. Given a budget of 80 accurate reviews daily, we improve detection to 89% and are able to detect 42% of malicious binaries undetected upon initial submission to VirusTotal. Additionally, we identify a previously unnoticed temporal inconsistency in the labeling of training datasets. We compare the impact of training labels obtained at the same time training data is first seen with training labels obtained months later. We find that using training labels obtained well after samples appear, and thus unavailable in practice for current training data, inflates measured detection by almost 20 percentage points. We release our cluster-based implementation, as well as a list of all hashes in our evaluation and 3% of our entire dataset.Comment: 20 papers, 11 figures, accepted at the 13th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2016