Standard state-machine replication involves consensus on a sequence of totally ordered requests through, for example, the Paxos protocol. Serialized request processing seriously limits our ability to leverage prevalent multicore servers. This tension between concurrency and consistency is not inherent because the total-ordering of requests is merely a simplifying convenience that is unnecessary...

This paper describes the interaction and object representation features of the visual database editor ESCHER which is based on the nested relational data model. In particular we like to indicate the multiple two-dimensional cursors and their way of moving in and out of nested objects, cut-and-paste operations, the QBE-like query mechanism, interactive schema design, and the unusual, self-refere...

With the explosion in the number of images and videos on the Internet and ongoing amassing of huge volumes of visual data from digital cameras and mobile devices, we are unknowingly logging our own history. Consider that the number of digital cameras and camera phones in the world has surpassed one billion and that 500 billion consumer photos are taken each year. Given the world’s population of...

eukocytes have a better chance of sticking to neighboring cells with the right ligands if they rotate on their way by, based on results from Dwir et al. (page 649). Flowing leukocytes are captured via L-selectin interactions with carbohydrate ligands on vessel walls and subsets of other leukocytes. L-selectin is an unusual adhesive molecule—shear stress improves its adherance to ligands, wherea...

At the start of Convention (1969) Lewis says that it is "a platitude that language is ruled by convention" and that he proposes to give us "an analysis of convention in its full generality, including tacit convention not created by agreement." Almost no clause, however, of Lewis's analysis has withstood the barrage of counter examples over the years, and a glance at the big dictionary suggests ...

attention to interesting aspects of natural history. In most of my research projects I try to reserve a little bit of time for taking photographs. Our projects on waterbirds are ideal for combining data collection with a bit of photography — we observe our focal broods from floating, mobile blinds, in wetlands teeming with waterbirds. With a really good blind, it’s like being invisible — we oft...

The Internet design is vulnerable to numerous attacks, including source address spoofing, denial of service flooding, prefix hijacking, and route forgery attacks. Despite much research, this situation does not seem to improve: prefix hijacking or denial of service attacks continue to make headline news [10, 25]. This disheartening fact has prompted researchers to propose a radically different I...

Scientifically sound network studies require the execution of large series of experiments. Researchers usually have to execute experiments manually, a labor-intensive and error-prone task, since there is no automation of the overall experimentation process. This task becomes especially hard on a distributed testbed and the researcher has to deal with additional challenges. In this paper we intr...