This document describes our analysis of Internet outages during the October 2012 Hurricane Sandy. We assess network reliability by pinging a sample of networks and observing those that respond and then stop responding. While there are always occasional network outages, we see that the outage rate in U.S. networks doubled when the hurricane made landfall, then took about four days to recover. We...

The recent rise of Social Media services has created huge streams of information which can be very valuable in a variety of scenarios. One specific scenario that has received interest is how Social Media analytics can be beneficial in crisis situations. In this paper, we describe our vision for a Social Media-ready command and control center. As motivation for our work, we present a short analy...

“triggering event.” At trial, Mr. Baze had to point to a “triggering event,” prompting a reaction that was so “enraged,” “inflamed,” or “disturbed” as to be uncontrollable, before he could present a defense under that theory. Mr. Baze may have been distraught at the ongoing feud with his wife’s family, but he could not point to a dramatic, isolated event in that conflict that could have caused ...

This paper describes a branch-and-cut procedure for an extension of the bounded colouring problem, generally known as curriculum-based university course timetabling. In particular, we focus on Udine Course Timetabling [di Gaspero and Schaerf, J. Math. Model. Algorithms 5:1], which has been used in Track 3 of the 2007 International Timetabling Competition. First, we present an alternative intege...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Translocation of intestinal bacteria to ascitic fluid is probably the first step in the development of episodes of spontaneous bacterial peritonitis in patients with cirrhosis. We have recently reported the detection of bacterial DNA in blood and ascitic fluid from patients with advanced cirrhosis, what we consider as molecular evidence of bacterial translocation. Several st...