bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Safety of embedded software
Authors: Leveson Nancy , Fleming Cody Harrison , Thomas John
Published: April 2020

Traditional safety techniques were created 40-50 years ago for electro-mechanical systems. The underlying assumptions of these techniques about the cause of accidents (e.g., component failure) do not match software nor do they match the types of accidents we are having that are related to software. As a result, a large number of accidents are now related to software, although usually the pilot (for aircraft) or other human operators are blamed. Often, the software design leads to the operator errors. We will describe the problems with software that are leading to accidents (primarily in the requirements) and how to deal with them. Most of the current approaches rely on reducing "failures" although software does not fail. Something else is needed.

In the tutorial we will present a new accident causality model (STAMP) and teach how to use a new hazard analysis technique (STPA) based on it that can be used on complex, software-intensive systems. The topics will include how to generate software safety requirements from an STPA hazard analysis and how to design software that does not induce human error. The tutorial will be based on a new book, Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson and published in January 2012 by MIT Press.
Tutorial
Authors: Taft S. Tucker
Published: April 2020

This tutorial is aimed at engineers and students who are interested in learning more about parallel programming, particularly for systems with growing numbers of physical processors or cores.
Program proving using intermediate verification languages (IVLs) like boogie and why3
Authors: Leino K. Rustan M.
Published: April 2020

A program verifier is a complex piece of software. To deal with this complexity, a standard architecture of a modern program verifier consists of two basic parts: a front end and a back end, separated by an intermediate verification language (IVL). The separation of concerns obtained by this architecture is analogous to that in compilers: the front end is concerned with breaking down the semantics of given source-language programs into the more primitive operations of the intermediate language, and the back end is concerned with encoding the meaning of the intermediate program as efficient theorem-prover input.

Two prevalent IVLs today are Boogie~2 and Why3. In this invited talk, I will give a tour of the Boogie language. Through a set of examples, I will illustrate how a verifier may translate common source-program features into an IVL. A verification engine for the IVL is then applied to perform the actual verification. In this way, you can obtain a program verifier for your own language by building a new front end and reusing an existing verification engine.
A new robust and efficient implementation of controlled types in the GNAT compiler
Authors: Kirtchev Hristian Hristov
Published: April 2020

This paper discusses a new implementation model for supporting Ada controlled types in the GNAT compiler. After reviewing the semantics of controlled types, we revisit the original implementation from 1995 and discuss its performance issues. We then describe a new model which addresses all existing limitations and is shown to be superior to its predecessor. Finally, we conclude the paper with the status of the new implementation and possible future enhancements.
Real-time Java in modernization of the aegis weapon system
Authors: Nilsen Kelvin
Published: April 2020

The U.S. Navy's Aegis system, considered to be the "shield of the fleet", provides area air defense for a carrier battle group in addition to providing long-range ballistic missile defense. A typical Aegis deployment consists of about 100 computers, many of which have multiple cores. The application is distributed, with typical real-time threads spanning 4 or 5 different computers. End-to-end distributed thread timing constraints measured from stimulus to response are typically under 100 ms. The target jitter constraints on the individual contributions of processors to the end-to-end deadline constraint are well below 1 ms. The system is fully redundant to support fault tolerance. The software is considered to be safety critical because it aims and fires weapons.

The Aegis Weapons System software was recently rewritten into real-time Java as part of the Aegis Modernization activity. This project involved replacement of about 200,000 lines of CMS-2 and Ada code with roughly 500,000 lines of Java. The effort began in 2003 and the new Java implementation of Aegis Weapons System is now being deployed on warships. This paper describes the motivation for the modernization effort and provides a summary of Lockheed Martin's experiences with this project.
Panel on compiler certification
Authors: Beringer Lennart , Brukardt Randall , Plum Thomas , Taft S. Tucker
Published: April 2020

Whether programming in a high-level modeling language providing automatic code generation, in a formally-verifiable language, in a language with advanced static analysis tools, or directly in a normal third-generation programming language, we ultimately depend on a compiler to generate the actual machine code that is executed by the target machine. This panel will discuss the issue of how we build trust in our compilers, using a commercial test suite, a standardized test suite, or a formal verification process.
The Mystery of the switched titles: A Review of The Soft Side of Software, A Management Approach to Computer Documentation by Theresa Foehr and Thomas B. Cross & Creating Effective Documentation for Computer Programs by G. Prentice Hastings and Kathryn J. King
Authors: Brockmann R. John
Published: April 2020

Late one night, after I had put to bed what I thought was my last review of computer user documentation books I could hear a faint rustling at my front door. I rushed to the door pulled it open quickly, and found no one. After glancing to the left and right. I chanced to look down. There they were two more books on computer user documentation. But what intrigued me most was that word "management" had fallen off the titles of one of the books. To which book did the word belong. I pondered to myself, Well, better get them inside and investigate.
Honu
Authors: Rafkind Jon , Flatt Matthew
Published: April 2020

Honu is a new language that fuses traditional algebraic notation (e.g., infix binary operators) with Scheme-style language extensibility. A key element of Honu's design is an
enforestation
parsing step, which converts a flat stream of tokens into an S-expression-like tree, in addition to the initial "read" phase of parsing and interleaved with the "macro-expand" phase. We present the design of Honu, explain its parsing and macro-extension algorithm, and show example syntactic extensions.
Maintaining verified software
Authors: Leslie-Hurd Joe
Published: April 2020

Maintaining software in the face of evolving dependencies is a challenging problem, and in addition to good release practices there is a need for automatic dependency analysis tools to avoid errors creeping in. Verified software reveals more semantic information in the form of mechanized proofs of functional specifications, and this can be used for dependency analysis. In this paper we present a scheme for automatic dependency analysis of verified software, which for each program checks that the collection of installed libraries is sufficient to guarantee its functional correctness. We illustrate the scheme with a case study of Haskell packages verified in higher order logic. The dependency analysis reduces the burden of maintaining verified Haskell packages by automatically computing version ranges for the packages they depend on, such that any combination provides the functionality required for correct operation.
Polymorphic functions with set-theoretic types
Authors: Castagna Giuseppe , Nguyen Kim , Xu Zhiwu , Im Hyeonseung , Lenglet Sergueï , Padovani Luca
Published: April 2020

This article is the first part of a two articles series about a calculus with higher-order polymorphic functions, recursive types with arrow and product type constructors and set-theoretic type connectives (union, intersection, and negation).

In this first part we define and study the explicitly-typed version of the calculus in which type instantiation is driven by explicit instantiation annotations. In particular, we define an explicitly-typed lambda-calculus with intersection types and an efficient evaluation model for it. In the second part, presented in a companion paper, we define a local type inference system that allows the programmer to omit explicit instantiation annotations, and a type reconstruction system that allows the programmer to omit explicit type annotations.

The work presented in the two articles provides the theoretical foundations and technical machinery needed to design and implement higher-order polymorphic functional languages for semi-structured data.
Replicated data types
Authors: Burckhardt Sebastian , Gotsman Alexey , Yang Hongseok , Zawirski Marek
Published: April 2020

Geographically distributed systems often rely on replicated eventually consistent data stores to achieve availability and performance. To resolve conflicting updates at different replicas, researchers and practitioners have proposed specialized consistency protocols, called replicated data types, that implement objects such as registers, counters, sets or lists. Reasoning about replicated data types has however not been on par with comparable work on abstract data types and concurrent data types, lacking specifications, correctness proofs, and optimality results.

To fill in this gap, we propose a framework for specifying replicated data types using relations over events and verifying their implementations using replication-aware simulations. We apply it to 7 existing implementations of 4 data types with nontrivial conflict-resolution strategies and optimizations (last-writer-wins register, counter, multi-value register and observed-remove set). We also present a novel technique for obtaining lower bounds on the worst-case space overhead of data type implementations and use it to prove optimality of 4 implementations. Finally, we show how to specify consistency of replicated stores with multiple objects axiomatically, in analogy to prior work on weak memory models. Overall, our work provides foundational reasoning tools to support research on replicated eventually consistent stores.
Fissile type analysis
Authors: Coughlin Devin , Chang Bor-Yuh Evan
Published: April 2020

We present a generic analysis approach to the
imperative relationship update problem
, in which destructive updates temporarily violate a global invariant of interest. Such invariants can be conveniently and concisely specified with dependent refinement types, which are efficient to check flow-insensitively. Unfortunately, while traditional flow-insensitive type checking is fast, it is inapplicable when the desired invariants can be temporarily broken. To overcome this limitation, past works have directly ratcheted up the complexity of the type analysis and associated type invariants, leading to inefficient analysis and verbose specifications. In contrast, we propose a
generic lifting
of modular refinement type analyses with a symbolic analysis to efficiently and effectively check concise invariants that hold
almost everywhere
. The result is an efficient, highly modular flow-insensitive type analysis to
optimistically
check the preservation of global relationship invariants that can fall back to a precise, disjunctive symbolic analysis when the optimistic assumption is violated. This technique permits programmers to temporarily break and then re-establish relationship invariants--a flexibility that is crucial for checking relationships in real-world, imperative languages. A significant challenge is selectively violating the global type consistency invariant over heap locations, which we achieve via
almost type-consistent heaps
. To evaluate our approach, we have encoded the problem of verifying the safety of reflective method calls in dynamic languages as a refinement type checking problem. Our analysis is capable of validating reflective call safety at interactive speeds on commonly-used Objective-C libraries and applications.
A constraint-based approach to solving games on infinite graphs
Authors: Beyene Tewodros , Chaudhuri Swarat , Popeea Corneliu , Rybalchenko Andrey
Published: April 2020

We present a constraint-based approach to computing winning strategies in two-player graph games over the state space of infinite-state programs. Such games have numerous applications in program verification and synthesis, including the synthesis of infinite-state reactive programs and branching-time verification of infinite-state programs. Our method handles games with winning conditions given by safety, reachability, and general Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) properties. For each property class, we give a deductive proof rule that --- provided a symbolic representation of the game players --- describes a winning strategy for a particular player. Our rules are sound and relatively complete. We show that these rules can be automated by using an off-the-shelf Horn constraint solver that supports existential quantification in clause heads. The practical promise of the rules is demonstrated through several case studies, including a challenging "Cinderella-Stepmother game" that allows infinite alternation of discrete and continuous choices by two players, as well as examples derived from prior work on program repair and synthesis.
Tracing compilation by abstract interpretation
Authors: Dissegna Stefano , Logozzo Francesco , Ranzato Francesco
Published: April 2020

Tracing just-in-time compilation is a popular compilation schema for the efficient implementation of dynamic languages, which is commonly used for JavaScript, Python, and PHP. It relies on two key ideas. First, it monitors the execution of the program to detect so-called hot paths, i.e., the most frequently executed paths. Then, it uses some store information available at runtime to optimize hot paths. The result is a residual program where the optimized hot paths are guarded by sufficient conditions ensuring the equivalence of the optimized path and the original program. The residual program is persistently mutated during its execution, e.g., to add new optimized paths or to merge existing paths. Tracing compilation is thus fundamentally different than traditional static compilation. Nevertheless, despite the remarkable practical success of tracing compilation, very little is known about its theoretical foundations.

We formalize tracing compilation of programs using abstract interpretation. The monitoring (viz., hot path detection) phase corresponds to an abstraction of the trace semantics that captures the most frequent occurrences of sequences of program points together with an abstraction of their corresponding stores, e.g., a type environment. The optimization (viz., residual program generation) phase corresponds to a transform of the original program that preserves its trace semantics up to a given observation as modeled by some abstraction. We provide a generic framework to express dynamic optimizations and to prove them correct. We instantiate it to prove the correctness of dynamic type specialization. We show that our framework is more general than a recent model of tracing compilation introduced in POPL~2011 by Guo and Palsberg (based on operational bisimulations). In our model we can naturally express hot path reentrance and common optimizations like dead-store elimination, which are either excluded or unsound in Guo and Palsberg's framework.
The essence of Reynolds
Authors: Brookes Stephen , O'Hearn Peter W. , Reddy Uday
Published: April 2020

John Reynolds (1935-2013) was a pioneer of programming languages research. In this paper we pay tribute to the man, his ideas, and his influence.
Whalesong
Authors: Yoo Danny , Krishnamurthi Shriram
Published: April 2020

JavaScript is the language of the ubiquitous Web, but it only poorly supports event-driven functional programs due to its single-threaded, asynchronous nature and lack of rich control flow operators. We present Whalesong, a compiler from Racket that generates JavaScript code that masks these problems. We discuss the implementation strategy using delimited continuations, an interface to the DOM, and an FFI for adapting JavaScript libraries to add new platform-dependent reactive features. In the process, we also describe extensions to Racket's functional event-driven programming model. We also briefly discuss the implementation details.
Optimizing MATLAB feval with dynamic techniques
Authors: Lameed Nurudeen A. , Hendren Laurie J.
Published: April 2020

MATLAB is a popular dynamic array-based language used by engineers, scientists and students worldwide. The built-in function feval is an important MATLAB feature for certain classes of numerical programs and solvers which benefit from having functions as parameters. Programmers may pass a function name or function handle to the solver and then the solver uses feval to indirectly call the function. In this paper, we show that there are significant performance overheads for function calls via feval, in both MATLAB interpreters and JITs. The paper then proposes, implements and compares two on-the-fly mechanisms for specialization of feval calls. The first approach uses on-stack replacement technology, as supported by McVM/McOSR. The second approach specializes calls of functions with feval using a combination of runtime input argument types and values. Experimental results on seven numerical solvers show that the techniques provide good performance improvements.
Security & privacy column
Authors: Maffei Matteo
Published: April 2020

Security and data privacy play today a central role in the digital society. For instance, cyber attacks against nuclear power plants, such as the Stuxnet virus, shed a light on the disruptive potential of cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism on our society, pushing governments and industries to make plans to protect a large spectrum of critical sectors. As a further example, the widespread adoption of web and mobile technologies for carrying on commercial activities has made client devices as well as service providers a profitable, and unfortunately frequent, target of hackers and cyber criminals. Finally, privacy scandals systematically gain the headlines of newspapers, making the public opinion more and more conscious and critical about the exposure of sensitive data in the digital world. The complexity of the digital ecosystem makes the definition and enforcement of security and privacy properties a formidable challenge, which manual design and analysis techniques proved inadequate to tackle. This state of affairs calls for rigorous approaches, backed up by a formal reasoning and supported by mechanized procedures. The scientific research has shown, in particular, how logical frameworks and program verification techniques, originally developed to define and certify the correctness of programs, constitute a solid basis on top of which it is possible to build powerful and innovative tools for rigorously reasoning about security and privacy in the digital society. Indeed, the design of formal methods for security and privacy proved over the years a flowering and extraordinarily active research area, which has seen exciting contributions from a variety of disciplines at the core of SIGLOG, such as logic, semantics, automated deduction, and verification. This research field has tons of success stories and many open challenges on its horizon: among the former, I like to mention cryptographic protocol analysis, access control models, and information flow security, while the latter include, for instance, web security, mobile security, data privacy, and cybersecurity.
Automata column
Authors: Bojańczyk Mikołaj
Published: April 2020

The list in this paper is, of course, a personal selection of open problems that are connected to both automata and logic. The problems are listed in no particular order.
Complexity column
Authors: Immerman Neil
Published: April 2020

Monadic Second-Order Logic (MSO) expresses many natural NP Complete problems as well as problems complete for all levels of the Polynomial-Time Hierarchy. Thus, it was surprising when Bruno Courcelle proved that for inputs of any fixed tree width, all MSO properties are checkable in linear time [Courcelle 1990].
Security & privacy column
Authors: Maffei Matteo
Published: April 2020

We continue to discuss on differential privacy, one of the central privacy definitions in the modern literature. After the great introduction to the topic provided by Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Catuscia Palamidessi, and Marco Stronati, we are ready to dive into the fascinating connection between differential privacy and programming languages. Given the increasing deployment of differential privacy in modern systems and the complexity of the respective security proofs, the challenge emerged in the last years is how to streamline the verification task.
Security & privacy column
Authors: Maffei Matteo
Published: April 2020

The present column is dedicated to
non-interference
, a fundamental security property that is used in the literature to reason about information flow in a variety of different settings, such as imperative languages, Java bytecode, JavaScript, web applications, mobile applications, and interactive systems, just to name a few. This property can be enforced using several program verification techniques, such as run-time monitoring and static analysis. Among these, type systems are perhaps the most popular approach.
Type systems for information flow control
Authors: Rajani Vineet , Bastys Iulia , Rafnsson Willard , Garg Deepak
Published: April 2020

Information flow control is central to computer security. The objective of information flow control is to prevent unauthorized flows of secret information to the public outputs of a computation. This task is often accomplished using type systems that rely on modal operators to label and track information and, hence, this style of enforcing information flow control is deeply ingrained in logic. One key choice in designing a type system for information flow control, or dependence analysis in general, is the granularity at which dependencies are tracked. This article considers two extreme design points in this vast design space and examines their relative expressiveness.
Conference reports
Authors: Pérez Jorge A
Published: April 2020

This installment of the conference report column includes two reports:

--- Paweł Sobociński (University of Southampton, UK) reports on LICS 2016, which took place in New York, July 5--8, 2016.
1

As you may know, the LICS Symposium is an annual international forum on theoretical and practical topics in computer science that relate to logic. This year, the symposium was sponsored by ACM SIGLOG and the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing, in cooperation with the Association for Symbolic Logic and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

--- I report on the "CWI Lectures in honor of Adriaan van Wijngaarden", which took place in Amsterdam, November 3, 2016.
2

This event celebrated both the 100th anniversary of the birth of Adriaan van Wijngaarden (who is considered by many as the founding father of computer science in the Netherlands) and the 70th founding anniversary of the CWI (the Dutch research institute for mathematics and computer science).
Report on LiCS 2016
Authors: Sobociński Paweł
Published: April 2020

A sweltering New York city welcomed participants of the thirty-first ACM/IEEE symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LiCS 2016), held July 5--8. Those who flew in a day earlier got to enjoy the 4th of July fireworks. The conference took place on the campus of Columbia University, in the leafy part of western Harlem between the north-western corner of Central Park and the Hudson river.
Complexity column
Authors: Immerman Neil
Published: April 2020

Computational Complexity Questions, such as trying to prove that the NP-complete problem three colorability of graphs (3COLOR) cannot be checked in polynomial time, seemed deceptively simple when I first encountered them as a grad student in the 1970's. So many years later, we still don't even know whether 3COLOR is in the uniform circuit class ACC
0
6
, or equivalently, whether it is expressible in first-order logic with sum mod 6 quantifiers and numeric relations +, *.
Stone duality for languages and complexity
Authors: Gehrke Mai , Krebs Andreas
Published: April 2020

Complexity theory and the theory of regular languages both belong to the branch of computer science where the use of resources in computing is the main focus. However, they operate at different levels. While complexity theory seeks to classify computational problems by resource use, such as space and time, regular language theory remains at the very base of this hierarchy and is concerned with classes of computational problems for which membership is (potentially) decidable.
CIVL solutions to verifythis 2016 challenges
Authors: Siegel Stephen F.
Published: April 2020

The VerifyThis 2016 program verification competition was held in April, 2016. The competition presented three verification challenges: the first dealt with matrix multiplication, including the correctness of Strassen's algorithm; the second dealt with Morris' tree traversal algorithm, and the third required verification of a multithreaded tree barrier. In this paper I present solutions using the CIVL (Concurrency Intermediate Verification Language) verifier. CIVL is able to verify each program within small but non-trivial bounds. The solutions are relatively simple, and are presented in full.
Conference reports
Authors: Pérez Jorge A
Published: April 2020

This installment of the conference report column includes a report by Bernardo Toninho (Imperial College London) on POPL 2017, which took place in Paris, France on January 15--21, 2017.
1
Automata column
Authors: Bojańczyk Mikołaj
Published: April 2020

The accepted narrative about the automata/logic connection is that it was discovered independently by Büchi, Elgot and Trakhtenbrot in the late 1950's. While this narrative remains essentially correct, this issue's column by Wolfgang Thomas adds a nuance, which highlights a connection with the prior work of Ehrenfeucht on ordinal numbers.
Verification column
Authors: Rungta Neha
Published: April 2020

I say goodbye to my position as the Verification editor for the SIGLOG newsletter. Thank you to all the guests who have contributed to the Verification columns. Working with them has been a pleasure and an amazing learning experience. Also a special thanks to the SIGLOG team especially Andrzej Murawski. It's been a great ride! Looking forward to future exciting issues of the SIGLOG newsletter.
Brasilia Spring on Automated Reasoning
Authors: Nalon Cláudia , Sobrinho Daniele Nantes , Pimentel Elaine , Marcos João
Published: April 2020

The first day of Spring in the south hemisphere welcomed to Brasília, the UNESCO World Heritage Site for its modernistic design, a worldwide audience for an entire week of conferences, workshops, and tutorials on Automated Reasoning. All the events were hosted by the University of Brasília and organised in conjunction with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. The Association for Automated Reasoning (AAR), the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL), and the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) provided scientific support. Financial support was given by the Brazilian research agencies CNPq (ARC 03/2016), CAPES (PAEP 03/2017), and FAP-DF (02/2017), and by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).
Soul Dancer
Authors: Hou Yuxin , Yao Hongxun , Sun Xiaoshuai , Li Haoran
Published: April 2020

Body language is one of the most common ways of expressing human emotion. In this article, we make the first attempt to generate an action video with a specific emotion from a single person image. The goal of the emotion-based action generation task (EBAG) is to generate action videos expressing a specific type of emotion given a single reference image with a full human body. We divide the task into two parts and propose a two-stage framework to generate action videos with specified emotions. At the first stage, we propose an emotion-based pose sequence generation approach (EPOSE-GAN) for translating the emotion to a pose sequence. At the second stage, we generate the target video frames according to the three inputs including the source pose and the target pose as the motion information and the source image as the appearance reference by using conditional GAN model with an online training strategy. Our framework produces the pose sequence and transforms the action independently, which highlights the fundamental role that the high-level pose feature plays in generating action video with a specific emotion. The proposed method has been evaluated on the “Soul Dancer” dataset which is built for action emotion analysis and generation. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework can effectively solve the emotion-based action generation task. However, the gap in the details of the appearance between the generated action video and the real-world video still exists, which indicates that the emotion-based action generation task has great research potential.
Single Crystal Electrochemistry as an In Situ Analytical Characterization Tool
Authors: Climent Víctor , Feliu Juan
Published: April 2020

The electrochemical behavior of platinum single crystal surfaces can be taken as a model response for the interpretation of the activity of heterogeneous electrodes. The cyclic voltammogram of a given platinum electrode can be considered a fingerprint characteristic of the distribution of sites on its surface. We start this review by providing some simple mathematical descriptions of the voltammetric response in the presence of adsorption processes. We then describe the voltammogram of platinum basal planes, followed by the response of stepped surfaces. The voltammogram of polycrystalline materials can be understood as a composition of the response of the different basal contributions. Further resolution in the discrimination of different surface sites can be achieved with the aid of surface modification using adatoms such as bismuth or germanium. The application of these ideas is exemplified with the consideration of real catalysts composed of platinum nanoparticles with preferential shapes.
Peripartum Severe Acute Pancreatitis with Rare Complications: Case Report and Review of Literature
Authors: Ali Syed Muhammad , Shaikh Nissar Ahmed , Aftab Zia , Latif Ejaz , Sameer Muhammad , Khan Muhammad Burhan , Al-Tarakji Mohannad
Published: April 2020

Peripartum pancreatitis is a rare clinical condition that occurs usually in the third trimester of pregnancy. Pancreatitis is usually secondary to gallstones, and it can lead to life-threatening and rare complications. We report a case of necrotizing postpartum pancreatitis that developed abdominal compartment syndrome (ACS) in early course, posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome (PRES), and splanchnic and extrasplanchnic thrombosis later on. Case. 31-year-old female, one week after delivery, presented to the emergency department with abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, tenderness in the epigastrium, and raised pancreatic enzymes. Ultrasound (USG) showed bulky pancreas with gallstones. She was diagnosed as having acute biliary pancreatitis and started to be hydrated and was supplemented with analgesia. Her condition deteriorated on the 2nd day, and she was shifted to the surgical intensive care unit (SICU) where she developed abdominal compartment syndrome (ACS), respiratory distress, and acute kidney injury, requiring endotracheal intubation and ventilation. Computerized tomography (CT) showed pancreatic necrosis with multiple fluid collections and significant left-sided pleural effusion. Percutaneous drainage of pleural effusion was done, and she was stabilized to be weaned off from mechanical ventilation. On day 15, she underwent USG-guided drainage of the pancreatic collection and ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography) on day 19. Post-ERCP, she had tonic colonic convulsions which were treated with benzodiazepines and phenytoin. It was diagnosed by imaging studies as posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome (PRES). Her abdomen was still distended and tender; CT showed a significant pseudocyst with splanchnic and extrasplanchnic thrombosis. She had laparotomy, gastrocystostomy, and cholecystectomy on day 28th. She made uncomplicated recovery and discharged in good health. Conclusion. Peripartum pancreatitis can be complicated by ACS, PRES, and splanchnic and extrasplanchnic thrombosis.
Molecular Imaging of the Tumor Microenvironment Reveals the Relationship between Tumor Oxygenation, Glucose Uptake, and Glycolysis in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma
Authors: Yamamoto Kazutoshi , Brender Jeffrey R. , Seki Tomohiro , Kishimoto Shun , Oshima Nobu , Choudhuri Rajani , Adler Stephen S. , Jagoda Elaine M. , Saito Keita , Devasahayam Nallathamby , Choyke Peter L. , Mitchell James B. , Krishna Murali C.
Published: April 2020

Molecular imaging approaches for metabolic and physiologic imaging of tumors have become important for treatment planning and response monitoring. However, the relationship between the physiologic and metabolic aspects of tumors is not fully understood. Here, we developed new hyperpolarized MRI and electron paramagnetic resonance imaging procedures that allow more direct assessment of tumor glycolysis and oxygenation status quantitatively. We investigated the spatial relationship between hypoxia, glucose uptake, and glycolysis in three human pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tumor xenografts with differing physiologic and metabolic characteristics. At the bulk tumor level, there was a strong positive correlation between 18F-FDG-PET and lactate production, while pO2 was inversely related to lactate production and 18F-2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (18F-FDG) uptake. However, metabolism was not uniform throughout the tumors, and the whole tumor results masked different localizations that became apparent while imaging. 18F-FDG uptake negatively correlated with pO2 in the center of the tumor and positively correlated with pO2 on the periphery. In contrast to pO2 and 18F-FDG uptake, lactate dehydrogenase activity was distributed relatively evenly throughout the tumor. The heterogeneity revealed by each measure suggests a multimodal molecular imaging approach can improve tumor characterization, potentially leading to better prognostics in cancer treatment.

Significance:

Novel multimodal molecular imaging techniques reveal the potential of three interrelated imaging biomarkers to profile the tumor microenvironment and interrelationships of hypoxia, glucose uptake, and glycolysis.
The Influence of Cancer Molecular Subtypes and Treatment on the Mutation Spectrum in Metastatic Breast Cancers
Authors: Verret Benjamin , Sourisseau Tony , Stefanovska Bojana , Mosele Fernanda , Tran-Dien Alicia , André Fabrice
Published: April 2020

Next-generation sequencing has sparked the exploration of cancer genomes, with the aim of discovering the genetic etiology of the disease and proposing rationally designed therapeutic interventions. Driver gene alterations have been comprehensively charted, but the improvement of cancer patient management somewhat lags behind these basic breakthroughs. Recently, large-scale sequencing that focused on metastasis, the main cause of cancer-related deaths, has shed new light on the driving forces at work during disease progression, particularly in breast cancer. Despite a fairly stable pool of driver genetic alterations between early and late disease, a number of therapeutically targetable mutations have been found enriched in metastatic samples. The molecular processes fueling disease progression have been delineated in recent studies and the clonal composition of breast cancer samples can be examined in detail. Here we discuss how these findings may be combined to improve the diagnosis of breast cancer to better select patients at risk, and to identify targeted agents to treat advanced diseases and to design therapeutic strategies exploiting vulnerabilities of cancer cells rooted in their ability to evolve and drive disease progression.
Validating Breast Cancer Risk Prediction Models in the Korean Cancer Prevention Study-II Biobank
Authors: Jee Yon Ho , Gao Chi , Kim Jihye , Park Seho , Jee Sun Ha , Kraft Peter
Published: April 2020

Background:

Risk prediction models may be useful for precision breast cancer screening. We aimed to evaluate the performance of breast cancer risk models developed in European-ancestry studies in a Korean population.

Methods:

We compared discrimination and calibration of three multivariable risk models in a cohort of 77,457 women from the Korean Cancer Prevention Study (KCPS)-II. The first incorporated U.S. breast cancer incidence and mortality rates, U.S. risk factor distributions, and RR estimates from European-ancestry studies. The second recalibrated the first by using Korean incidence and mortality rates and Korean risk factor distributions, while retaining the European-ancestry RR estimates. Finally, we derived a Korea-specific model incorporating the RR estimates from KCPS.

Results:

The U.S. European-ancestry breast cancer risk model was well calibrated among Korean women <50 years [expected/observed = 1.124 (0.989, 1.278)] but markedly overestimated the risk for those ≥50 years [E/O = 2.472 (2.005, 3.049)]. Recalibrating absolute risk estimates using Korean breast cancer rates and risk distributions markedly improved the calibration in women ≥50 [E/O = 1.018 (0.825, 1.255)]. The model incorporating Korean-based RRs had similar but not clearly improved performance relative to the recalibrated model.

Conclusions:

The poor performance of the U.S. European-ancestry breast cancer risk model among older Korean women highlights the importance of tailoring absolute risk models to specific populations. Recalibrating the model using Korean incidence and mortality rates and risk factor distributions greatly improved performance.

Impact:

The data will provide valuable information to plan and evaluate actions against breast cancer focused on primary prevention and early detection in Korean women.
In vitro Effects of CD8+ Regulatory T Cells on Human B Cell Subpopulations
Authors: Gupta Sudhir , Agrawal Sudhanshu
Published: April 2020

Background: CD8+ regulatory T cells (CD8+ Tregs) are relatively recently described T cell subsets that have been shown to regulate various T cell responses and appear to play a role in autoimmunity. However, their effects on B cells have not been explored. Objectives: In this investigation we examine the effect of CD8+ Tregs on various subsets of peripheral B cells include naïve B cells, transitional B cells, marginal zone B cells, IgM memory B cells, class switched memory B cells, and plasmablasts, and on the expression of B cell-activating factor receptor (BAFF-R). Methods: CD8+ T cells were first purified and then activated with anti-CD3/CD28 beads to generate CD8+ Tregs. Purified CD19+ B cells were cultured alone or with sorted CD8+ Tregs (CD8+CD183+CCR7+CD45RA–) and activated with anti-CD40 monoclonal antibody and CpG. B cell subsets and the expression of BAFF-R on naïve and memory B cells were analyzed using various monoclonal antibodies and corresponding control isotypes. Ten thousand cells were acquired and analyzed by FACSCalibur using the FlowJo software. Results: CD8+ Tregs selectively and significantly suppressed plasmablasts without any significant effect on other B cell subsets or on the expression of BAFF-R. Conclusion: CD8+ Tregs may play a role in autoimmunity by regulating antibody production via suppression of plasmablasts.
Analysis of the Origin of Double Mosaic Aneuploidy in Two Cases
Authors: Kato Takema , Kawai Miki , Miyai Shunsuke , Suzuki Fumihiko , Tsutsumi Makiko , Mizuno Seiji , Ikeda Toshiro , Kurahashi Hiroki
Published: April 2020

We present 2 cases of double mosaic aneuploidy harboring 2 or more different aneuploid cell lines, but no line with a normal chromosome constitution. One of these cases presented mosaicism of sex chromosome aneuploid cell lines (47,XXX/45,X) along with another line containing an autosomal trisomy (47,XX,+8), while the other case showed mosaicism of 2 different autosomal trisomy cell lines (47,XY,+5 and 47,XY,+8). To elucidate the mechanisms underlying these mosaicisms, we conducted molecular cytogenetic analyses. Genotyping data from the SNP microarray indicated that 2 sequential meiotic or early postzygotic segregation errors likely had occurred followed by natural selection. These cases suggest that frequent segregation errors and selection events in the meiotic and early postzygotic stages lead to this condition.
O movimento linguístico discursivo na aquisição da escrita: uma abordagem dos mecanismos de junção aditivos na construção de sentidos no texto
Authors: Damasio Lúcia Regiane Lopes
Published: April 2020

Neste artigo, investigam-se os mecanismos de junção com acepção aditiva, em diferentes tradições discursivas produzidas por sujeitos em aquisição da escrita, com o objetivo de perseguir a hipótese de que o sujeito se movimenta pelo que (re)conhece como fixo e lacunar do texto, deixando rastros dessa circulação no modo escrito de enunciar. Para isso, adota-se um quadro teórico-metodológico em que a descrição da escrita infantil é pautada na consideração conjunta de aspectos linguísticos e discursivos, que permitem o reconhecimento, na escrita, desses rastros por meio do funcionamento dos mecanismos de junção. Os resultados alcançados, a partir de uma análise qualitativo-quantitativa, evidenciam que as práticas discursivas orais, em tradições textuais que se constituem no modo falado de enunciar, estão na origem das relações estabelecidas entre o sujeito e o (seu) texto escrito, no que diz respeito aos eixos vertical e horizontal de análise dos mecanismos de junção, ilustrando o movimento linguístico-discursivo na aquisição da escrita.
On Global Corporate Control: Review of an Article
Authors: Parry Bruce
Published: April 2020

This article reviews “The network of global corporate control” by Vitali et al. (2011) where the authors use modern network theory to analyze the centralization of global corporate control. Specifically, they calculate how a central core of transnational corporations (TNCs) have control over the total operating revenue of all transnational corporations. They find that out of 43,060 transnational corporations, 737 top shareholders control about 80 percent of the value of all TNCs. This control is centralized in the financial sector and extends to other sectors of the economy, including manufacturing and services. TNCs are more global than ever before. They are in virtually every country of the world and comprise a world capitalist system.
Asian Roboticism: Connecting Mechanized Labor to the Automation of Work
Authors: Bui Long
Published: April 2020

This article reconsiders the present-day automation of work and its transformation of who we are as humans. What has been missing from this important conversation are the social meanings surrounding Asian roboticism or how Asians have already been rendered as “robotic” subjects and labor. Through this racial gendered trope, I assess whether industrial automation will lessen, complicate, or exacerbate this modern archetype. By looking at corporate organizational practices and public media discourse, I believe that Asian roboticism will not simply vanish, but potentially continue to affect the ways such subjects are rendered as exploitable alienated robots without human rights or status.
The Green New Deal: What Makes It Necessary, What It Is, and How We Can Get It
Authors: Davidson Carl
Published: April 2020

This article serves as the content for a slide show presented at the Global Studies Association conference held at Loyola University in Chicago on June 6-8, 2019. The discussion emphasized the importance of establishing The Green New Deal by transitioning away from burning carbon and uranium to stop and reduce CO2 levels, building a Smart Grid, redesigning and rebuilding industries for zero waste, transitioning from agribusiness factory farms to organic, sustainable family-sized farms, redesigning new housing and retrofitting existing stock, increasing innovation and high design for all products and services, and curbing the production of poisons and removing pollutants from human consumption. The link to the presentation is http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Green-New-Deal-2.pdf.
Gendered Exploitation under Contemporary Capitalism
Authors: Jensen Nick , Dyett Jordan
Published: April 2020

With globalization as a catalyst, hegemonic powers dependent upon neoliberal capitalism continue to exploit resources, locations, and humans for economic benefit. This research explores how states and corporations strategically force already vulnerable populations into further lives of precarity, all to extract surplus value to feed the capitalist machine. Employing World Systems and Decolonial Theory we seek to uncover the paths that corporations take to cut corners, exploit labor, and avoid regulations. Specifically, we will be comparing the evolution of the semiconductor industry in Southeast Asia with the maquiladoras in Mexico to illuminate the methodical exploitation of labor and the earth in the name of economic gain.
Ocean Acidification: A Due Diligence Obligation under the LOSC
Authors: Scott Karen N
Published: April 2020

This article explores the extent to which ocean acidification is adequately addressed by the law of the sea. It will assess the various obligations under Part XII of the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (LOSC) to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment, and analyse the extent to which these obligations appropriately address ocean acidification. This article argues that LOSC Parties are subject to a due diligence obligation under Part XII of the Convention to prevent, reduce and control ocean acidification, and that this obligation is not satisfied by simply complying with their obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, unless those actions also deliberately address ocean acidification. This article goes on to examine whether and to what extent ocean acidification should be factored into decision-making associated with marine planning, fisheries management and area-based protection under the law of the sea.
The tadpoles of Murree Hills Frog Nanorana vicina (Anura: Dicroglossidae)
Authors: GILL SUMBUL , RAIS MUHAMMAD , SAEED MUHAMMAD , AHMED WASEEM , AKRAM AYESHA
Published: April 2020

The genus Nanorana, also called Yunnan Slow Frogs (Frank & Ramus 1995), belongs to the family Dicroglossidae. Murree Hills Frog N. vicina, is an endemic species of Southeast Asian uplands in Pakistan and India and was first reported by Stoliczka (1872) from Murree, Punjab Province, Pakistan. Later Rais et al. (2014) recaptured it from its type locality and described morphology of one juvenile female and one adult male. The species is listed as Least Concern in IUCN Red List of Threatened Species while the EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) score is 2.64. In Pakistan, it is reported from brook water springs and streams of Murree, Galiat (North Punjab), Ayubia (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and parts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (Rais et al. 2014). Although the adult form has been characterized (Khan 2006; Rais et al. 2014), the morphology of the tadpoles have not yet been described. The current study aimed to describe external morphology and morphometry of tadpoles of N. vicina.