Deduplication is widely used to improve space efficiency in storage systems. While much attention has been paid to making the process of deduplication fast and scalable, the effectiveness of deduplication can vary dramatically depending on the data stored. We show that many file formats suffer from a fundamental design property that is incompatible with deduplication: they intersperse metadata ...

Planning research has returned to the issue of optimizing costs (rather than sizes) of plans. A prevalent perception, at least among non-experts in search, is that graph search for optimizing the size of paths generalizes more or less trivially to optimizing the cost of paths. While this kind of generalization is usually straightforward for graph theorems, graph algorithms are a different story...

MicroID is a deployed Internet standard designed for use as a lightweight, decentralized identity primitive in web applications and communities. This study presents the standard’s specification and deployment, and analyzes the security and privacy of MicroID, describing attacks that can be used to compromise the privacy of its users. Although it has been described by its designers as privacy-pr...

Delusional beliefs are typically pathological. Being pathological is clearly distinguished from being false or being irrational. Anna might falsely believe that his husband is having an affair but it might just be a simple mistake. Again, Sam might irrationally believe, without good evidence, that he is smarter than his colleagues, but it might just be a healthy self-deceptive belief. On the ot...

Introduction Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) tend to be liquids which readily give off vapour at room temperature1, such as solvents and fuels. At high concentrations, these vapours can explode. At extremely low levels, they can be toxic. While the impact of exposure can sometimes be felt immediately, frequently symptoms may not become apparent for months if not years afterwards. This type of...

For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. ...

Models used to study harmful algal blooms are a subset of those used to examine more general planktonic processes. Most models have been heuristic, examining the likelihood of certain processes generating a harmful algal bloom. Several models have been more closely coupled to field data and have been used to gain insights into the dynamics underlying the observations. As better physical and bio...

In this paper, we question the common practice of assigning security impact ratings to OS updates. Specifically, we present evidence that ranking updates by their perceived security importance, in order to defer applying some updates, exposes systems to significant risk. We argue that OS vendors and security groups should not focus on security updates to the detriment of other updates, but shou...

This paper discusses various disadvantages of having a program committee meeting.

Research on knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) has been impeded by a limited vision of knowledge, inherited from machine learning (ML) and other branches of computer science. In contrast with KDD and ML, research on automation of scientific discovery (SD) took from natural sciences a broader perspective on knowledge. We analyze the typical ML view of discovery as supervised and unsupervised...