Peer List Research Articles

A Bluetooth-Based Smartphone App for Detecting Peer Proximity: Protocol for Evaluating Functionality and Validity.

While ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is commonly used to study social contexts and social influence in the real world, EMA almost exclusively relies on participant self-report of present circumstances, including the proximity to influential peers. There is the potential for developing a proximity sensing approach that uses small Bluetooth beacons and smartphone-based detection and data collection to collect information about interactions between individuals passively in real time. This paper aims to describe the methods for evaluating the functionality and validity of a Bluetooth-based beacon and a smartphone app to identify when ≥2 individuals are physically proximal. We will recruit 20 participants aged 18 to 29 years with Android smartphones to complete a 3-week study during which beacon detection and self-report data will be collected using a smartphone app (MEI Research). Using an interviewer-administered social network interview, participants will identify up to 3 peers of the same age who are influential on health behavior (alcohol use in this study). These peers will be asked to carry a Bluetooth beacon (Kontakt asset tag) for the duration of the study; each beacon has a unique ID that, when detected, will be recorded by the app on the participant's phone. Participants will be prompted to respond to EMA surveys (signal-contingent reports) when a peer beacon encounter meets our criteria and randomly 3 times daily (random reports) and every morning (morning reports) to collect information about the presence of peers. In all reports, the individualized list of peers will be presented to participants, followed by questions about peer and participant behavior, including alcohol use. Data from multiple app data sets, including beacon encounter specifications, notification, and app logs, participant EMA self-reports and postparticipation interviews, and peer surveys, will be used to evaluate project goals. We will examine the functionality of the technology, including the stability of the app (eg, app crashes and issues opening the app), beacon-to-app detection (ie, does the app detect proximal beacons?), and beacon encounter notification when encounter criteria are met. The validity of the technology will be defined as the concordance between passive detection of peers via beacon-to-app communication and the participant's EMA report of peer presence. Disagreement between the beacon and self-report data (ie, false negatives and false positives) will be investigated in multiple ways (ie, to determine if the reason was technology-related or participant compliance-related) using encounter data and information collected from participants and peers. Participant recruitment began in February 2023, and enrollment was completed in December 2023. Results will be reported in 2025. This Bluetooth-based technology has important applications and clinical implications for various health behaviors, including the potential for just-in-time adaptive interventions that target high-risk behavior in real time. DERR1-10.2196/50241.

Detecting and Understanding Social Influence During Drinking Situations: Protocol for a Bluetooth-Based Sensor Feasibility and Acceptability Study.

High-risk alcohol consumption among young adults frequently occurs in the presence of peers who are also drinking. A high-risk drinking situation may consist of particular social network members who have a primary association with drinking. Fine-grained approaches such as ecological momentary assessment (EMA) are growing in popularity for studying real-time social influence, but studies using these approaches exclusively rely on participant self-report. Passive indicators of peer presence using Bluetooth-based technology to detect real-time interactions have the potential to assist in the development of just-in-time interventions. This study seeks to examine the feasibility and acceptability of using a Bluetooth-based sensor and smartphone app to measure social contact in real-world drinking situations. Young adults (N=20) who drink heavily and report social drinking will be recruited from the community to participate in a 3-week EMA study. Using a social network interview, index participants will identify and recruit 3 of their friends to carry a Bluetooth beacon. Participants will complete a series of EMA reports on their own personal Android devices including random reports; morning reports; first-drink reports; and signal-contingent reports, which are triggered following the detection of a beacon carried by a peer participant. EMA will assess alcohol use and characteristics of the social environment, including who is nearby and who is drinking. For items about peer proximity and peer drinking, a customized peer list will be presented to participants. Feedback about the study protocol will be ascertained through weekly contact with both index and peer participants, followed by a qualitative interview at the end of the study. We will examine the feasibility and acceptability of recruitment, enrollment of participants and peers, and retention. Feasibility will be determined using indexes of eligibility, enrollment, and recruitment. Acceptability will be determined through participant enrollment and retention, protocol compliance, and participant-reported measures of acceptability. Feasibility and acceptability for peer participants will be informed by enrollment rates, latency to enrollment, compliance with carrying the beacon, and self-reported reasons for compliance or noncompliance with beacon procedures. Finally, EMA data about peer proximity and peer drinking will support the validity of the peer selection process. Participant recruitment began in February 2023, and enrollment was completed in December 2023. Results will be reported in 2025. The protocol allows us to examine the feasibility and acceptability of a Bluetooth-based sensor for the detection of social contact between index participants and their friends, including social interactions during real-world drinking situations. Data from this study will inform just-in-time adaptive interventions seeking to address drinking in the natural environment by providing personalized feedback about a high-risk social context and alerting an individual that they are in a potentially unsafe situation. DERR1-10.2196/50650.

Bitcoin P2P Network Measurements: A Testbed Study of the Effect of Peer Selection on Transaction Propagation and Confirmation Times

Bitcoin is the first and the most extensive decentralized electronic cryptocurrency system that uses blockchain technology. It uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to operate without a central authority and propagate system information such as transactions or blockchain updates. The communication between participating nodes is highly relying on the underlying network infrastructure to facilitate a platform. Understanding the impact of peer formation strategies, peer list, and delay is vital in understanding node to node communication and the system performance. Therefore, we performed an extensive study on the transaction characteristics of Bitcoin through a testbed. The analysis shows that peer selection strategies affect the transaction propagation and confirmation times. In particular, better performance, in terms of smaller transaction confirmation time and lower number of temporary forks, may be achieved by adjusting the default nearby-based peer selection strategy.

Temporal perspective on the gender-related differences in online learning behaviour

ABSTRACT Although several studies suggested considering gender in online learning, the literature about how male and female students would behave is fragmented. Little attention has been paid to the effect of gender on online learning behavioural patterns. This study aimed at investigating the roles of gender in online learning behaviours by analyzing the gender-related differences of students’ online learning behavioural patterns. We used the case study approach with descriptive statistical analysis, lag sequential analysis, and temporal log data analysis to investigate gender-related differences in students’ online learning behaviours. The results indicated no significant difference in the counts of occurrence of online single learning behaviours between female and male students. However, differences were observed in online learning behaviour patterns and how the online learning activities were performed over time. Females were more active in learning behaviours associated with achievement reports and peer list viewing. They tended to view their achievement reports before starting the main course learning activities, indicating that female students might be achievement-oriented. The findings provide further insights from a temporal perspective about how gender is associated with online learning. Implications on designing personalized online learning interventions based on considering gender-related differences are also discussed.

DUSTBot: A duplex and stealthy P2P-based botnet in the Bitcoin network.

As the root cause of illegal cyber activities, botnets are evolving continuously over the last two decades. Current researches on botnet command and control mechanism based on blockchain network suffer from high economic cost, single point of failure, and limited scalability. In this paper, we present DUSTBot, a novel P2P botnet model based on Bitcoin transactions to prepare for new cyber threats. Specifically, a covert, duplex, and low-cost command and control (C&C) channel in the Bitcoin network is presented in our work. DUSTBot uses the Bitcoin main network as the downstream channel while using the Bitcoin testnet as the upstream channel. Furthermore, the peer list exchange algorithm based on the Ethereum block hash proposed in this paper is effective against routing table poisoning attack and P2P botnet crawling. The robustness of DUSTBot against node removal is studied through constructing the botnet with a P2P simulator. We deploy the implementation of DUSTBot on cloud platforms to test its feasibility and performance. Moreover, the stealthiness of DUSTBot and the effectiveness of the proposed peer list exchange algorithm are evaluated. The results demonstrate the feasibility, performance, stealthiness, and robustness of DUSTBot. In the end, possible countermeasures are discussed to mitigate similar threats in the future.

Seamless Connectivity for Adaptive Multimedia Provisioning over P2P-enabled IP Multimedia Subsystem

The subsystem multimedia internet network (IMS) has been upgraded to support peer-to-peer content distribution services, the peer heterogeneity constraint imposes a challenge that is the guarantee of a certain level of QOS of the video for the different pairs, and the transfer poses a challenge for maintaining quality of service (QoS) in IMS. In this article, we we have extended a scalable Video Coding (SVC) peer-to-peer streaming adaptation model and our extension allows to add another parameter for this adaptation scheme which is the IP address of the peers, so to manage multiple network accesses to a peer when the user changes the type of access, due to a transfer or a loss of connectivity, this model is used to adapt the video quality to the static resources of the peers in order to avoid long start times, and to compare the results obtained for changing the type of network access, we performed two simulation scenarios, one with multiple peers that are connected to the network until the end of the video download by the peers and the other scenario with the change of the address of a peer during the operation of downloading the video sequence by peers. We quantified streaming performance using two metrics of evaluation (peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)) and video quality metrics (VQM)), and also we extracted from the values of PLR (Packets loss rate). Our results show that our model has a better adaptation of the quality according to the network resources of the peers in term of bandwidth available in the network and the performances of the users (CPU, RAM, autonomy of the battery) and also allows a continuity of service in the network by ensuring that the list of peers is updated after each change. The results show a clear quality adaptation with heterogeneous terminals.

High throughput solid phase microextraction: A new alternative for analysis of cellular lipidome?

A new SPME method for untargeted lipidomic study of cell line cultures was proposed for the first time. In this study the feasibility to monitor changes in lipid profile after external stimuli was demonstrated and compared to the conventional Bligh & Dyer method. The human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell line was used as a model. The obtained results provided a list of up-regulated and down-regulated lipids through a comparison between control (non-stimulated) cells versus the group of cells treated with polyunsaturated fatty acid (20:5). Use of the SPME technique yielded a list of 77 lipid species whose concentrations were recognized to be significantly different between control and treated cells, from which 63 lipids were up-regulated in treated cells. In general, the list was comparable to the peer list obtained by the Bligh & Dyer method. However, more diversity of lipid classes and subclasses such as LPC, sphingomyelins, ceramides, and prenol lipids were observed with the application of the SPME method. Method precision for the SPME approach was within the acceptable analytical range (5-18% RSD) for all detected lipids, which was advantageous over solvent extraction applied. The evaluation of ionization efficiency indicated no matrix effect for the SPME technique, while Bligh & Dyer presented significant ionization suppression for low abundant species such as LysoPC, PG, ceramides, and sphingomyelins, and ionization enhancement for high abundant phospholipids such as PE.

Chapter 3. A List of Representative Peers for Scotland, 1707 to 1963, and for Ireland, 1800 to 1961

Parliamentary HistoryVolume 34, Issue S1 p. 47-84 Chapter Chapter 3. A List of Representative Peers for Scotland, 1707 to 1963, and for Ireland, 1800 to 1961 First published: 21 July 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-0206.12129Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume34, IssueS1Texts & Studies Series 10: A Parliamentary Miscellany: Papers on the History of the House of Lords, Published 1964-1991, by J.C. SaintyOctober 2015Pages 47-84 RelatedInformation

On the impact of the initial peer list in P2P live streaming applications: the case of Sopcast

The acronym P2PTV, which stands for Peer-to-Peer Television, refers to P2P applications that enable multimedia contents broadcasting through the Internet. These applications have become very popular due to their capability of delivering material with or without copyright protection to a large audience. In P2PTV applications, the start-up phase - from the moment the client joins an existing channel to the moment she can start viewing the content - is crucial. A long time before showing the first images of a video, can make a user switch to another channel or to an alternative P2P application. Later on, the same user behavior is expected in case of frozen images. In this paper, we consider the case of Sopcast, which is currently one of the most popular P2PTV applications. Sopcast recently modified its start-up algorithms. We uncover the details of the new strategy adopted by Sopcast and evaluate its performance as a function of the swarm size and the geographic source of the content.

Detecting P2P bots by mining the regional periodicity

Peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets outperform the traditional Internet relay chat (IRC) botnets in evading detection and they have become a prevailing type of threat to the Internet nowadays. Current methods for detecting P2P botnets, such as similarity analysis of network behavior and machine-learning based classification, cannot handle the challenges brought about by different network scenarios and botnet variants. We noticed that one important but neglected characteristic of P2P bots is that they periodically send requests to update their peer lists or receive commands from botmasters in the command-and-control (C&C) phase. In this paper, we propose a novel detection model named detection by mining regional periodicity (DMRP), including capturing the event time series, mining the hidden periodicity of host behaviors, and evaluating the mined periodic patterns to identify P2P bot traffic. As our detection model is built based on the basic properties of P2P protocols, it is difficult for P2P bots to avoid being detected as long as P2P protocols are employed in their C&C. For hidden periodicity mining, we introduce the so-called regional periodic pattern mining in a time series and present our algorithms to solve the mining problem. The experimental evaluation on public datasets demonstrates that the algorithms are promising for efficient P2P bot detection in the C&C phase.

A detailed examination of the overlay construction and maintenance mechanism in BitTorrent

BitTorrent is one of the most important applications on the Internet. Statistics show that it has accounted for more than 1/3 of the Internet bandwidth. Part of BitTorrent’s immense success may be attributed to its simple design and effective peer choking and piece selection mechanisms for distributing large files over the Internet. As these mechanisms are performed on the application overlay, how the overlay is constructed and maintained is crucial to their performance.In this paper we divide the overlay construction process into three stages: initial peer set selection, peer set update, and connection management, representing how a peer obtains an initial list of peers in the overlay, how it updates the list, and how it maintains its overlay links. In each stage, several strategies can be selected, yielding a variety of design choices to build and maintain an overlay. The purpose of the paper is to sort them out and find the key choices that improve the performance.

Unraveling the BitTorrent Ecosystem

BitTorrent is the most successful open Internet application for content distribution. Despite its importance, both in terms of its footprint in the Internet and the influence it has on emerging P2P applications, the BitTorrent Ecosystem is only partially understood. We seek to provide a nearly complete picture of the entire public BitTorrent Ecosystem. To this end, we crawl five of the most popular torrent-discovery sites over a ine-month period, identifying all of 4.6 million and 38,996 trackers that the sites reference. We also develop a high-performance tracker crawler, and over a narrow window of 12 hours, crawl essentially all of the public Ecosystem's trackers, obtaining peer lists for all referenced torrents. Complementing the torrent-discovery site and tracker crawling, we further crawl Azureus and Mainline DHTs for a random sample of torrents. Our resulting measurement data are more than an order of magnitude larger (in terms of number of torrents, trackers, or peers) than any earlier study. Using this extensive data set, we study in-depth the Ecosystem's torrent-discovery, tracker, peer, user behavior, and content landscapes. For peer statistics, the analysis is based on one typical snapshot obtained over 12 hours. We further analyze the fragility of the Ecosystem upon the removal of its most important tracker service.

Appendix 2: List of Peers and Members of the House of Commons Mentioned in the Texts

Parliamentary HistoryVolume 27, Issue s2 p. 389-411 Appendix 2: List of Peers and Members of the House of Commons Mentioned in the Texts First published: 15 October 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-0206.2008.00056.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume27, Issues2Special Issue: Texts & Studies 2: Parliamentarians at Law – Select Legal Proceedings of the Long Fifteenth Century Relating to Parliament, Edited by Hannes KleinekeOctober 2008Pages 389-411 RelatedInformation

CBT: A proximity-aware peer clustering system in large-scale BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer networks

In a large-scale BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer file sharing system, the track server could be overloaded to update the state information of constantly arriving and leaving peers. Upon the connection request from a peer, the track server responses with a random list of peers and such randomly selected peers among the whole peer-to-peer network could create a long delay of file sharing between two peers. To improve the file sharing performance, we propose a hierarchical architecture to group peers into clusters according to their proximity in the underlying overlay network in such a way that clusters are evenly distributed and that the peers within each cluster are relatively close to each other. We achieve this by constructing the CBT (Clustered BitTorrent) system with two novel algorithms: a peer joining algorithm and a super-peer selection algorithm. We develop a fluid model to compare the performance of the proposed CBT system with a original BitTorrent system. With this model, we find that the CBT system quite effectively improves the performance of the system. Finally, simulation results are given, which demonstrate that the CBT system achieves better results than a randomly organized BitTorrent network, improving the system scalability and efficiency while retaining the robustness and incentives of the original BitTorrent paradigm.

A Trace Label Based Consistency Maintenance Algorithm in Unstructured P2P Systems

Replication is an effective way to improve the scalability, fault-tolerance, and availability as well as to reduce the query responding time in P2P system. With the P2P applications transferring from read-only static files sharing to read-write dynamical files interacting, maintaining consistency between frequently-updated files and their replicas is a fundamental reliability requirement for P2P system. This paper presents a trace label based consistency maintenance algorithm. It modifies the message datagram by attaching the address list of peers to which message has been sent. This can help to tell the duplicated message from the source peer by the aid of the attached address list in message datagram. Considering that the address list can become longer with the update time lapsing and the degree of P2P increasing, this paper presents a new Bloom Filter denoting the address list algorithm. The Bloom Filter can succinctly present the address list and simplify the query actions in the list by “OR” operations. The experimental results show that the new trace label based consistency maintenance algorithm can largely reduce the number of the duplicated messages. Moreover, the higher the degree of P2P, the more reduction of the number of duplicated messages and bandwidth utilization. The idea of consistency maintenance in this paper can also be applied to sensor network and other ad hoc networks.

Multicultural Iberia: Language, Literature and Music by Dru Dougherty , Milton M. Azevedo (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 229 Martin Murphy, 'Luis Gutierrez, Novelist and Impostor'; Donald L. Shaw, 'Rivas and Tragedy: The Cases of El Duque de Aquitania and Malek-AdheV; Margaret A. Rees, 'More on El moro exposito'; J.E. Varey,' "The Bleeding Nun" and "Our Lady of Paros"'; Joan Estruch Tobella, 'Becquer, autor de Dona Manuela'; Luis Caparros Esperante , ' "Hoy es siempre todavia"; la plasticidad del ayer en los poemas de Antonio Machado'; Colin Smith, 'Alvaro Cunquiero, Britain and Ireland'; Patricia McDermott , A Missing Link in the Dis-affiliation of a Post-Romantic Expatriate in Revolt ?' The essays vary considerably in quality. The most interesting are perhaps those that cover the early modern era: the contributions of Deyermond and Michael on the pre-Romantic hispanomedievalists Tomas Antonio Sanchez and Juan Antonio Pellicer are illuminating, and Martin Murphy's essay on the little-known novelist Luis Gutierrez, executed in 1809 as a French spy, has more than mere curiosity value. The volume concludes with two contrasting but well-researched pieces: in what, sadly, would have been one of his final writings, the breadth of Colin Smith's scholarship is amply demonstrated in his account of Alvaro Cunquiero's debt to English literature, in particular, his rewriting of Hamlet; and Patricia McDermott supplies a concise but penetrating insight into the politico-cultural impact of Revindicacion del conde Don Julian, though her conclusion is somewhat marred by her unqualified acceptance of Peers's notion that the Romantic Movement in Spain was a 'failure'?an untenable assumption in the wake of Flitter's research in this area. Caparros Esperante's article on time in Machado is over-long, while Estruch Tobella's case for Becquer's authorship of Dona Manuela is unconvincing: he over states the significance ofthe 'Advertencia' (reproduced in full) as a political satire, and the intertextual information supplied as evidence of authorship is hardly conclusive. But the uneven quality of the volume is most apparent in the period covering the Golden Age. It is surprising that in none of the essays on the religious and mystic writers of the period is there a reference to researchers such as Colin Thompson and Terry O'Reilly or, for that matter, A. A. Parker; indeed, there is barely a reference in the six essays devoted to the Siglo de Oro to any critical writing after 1980. If the volume was meant to reflectthe diversity of Peers's interests, then the absence of an essay on Catalonia is an unfortunate omission, especially as it could be argued that his advocacy of Catalan culture and institutions represented a more enduring legacy than his contributions to Spanish mysticism or to Romanticism, both fully represented here. The volume also contains a list of Peers's publications?essentially a reprintof an item in the 'Memorial Number' ofthe Bulletinof Hispanic Studies irom 1953?and a finelyjudged appraisal of his achievements by Geoffrey Ribbans in which he draws attention to Peers's shortcomings as a literary critic, betraying as he did 'a late-Romantic outlook typical of the Edwardian era against which the best minds of the coming generation were already reacting' (p. 25). Apart from covering some ofthe same ground as Ribbans's reappraisal, the introduction supplies over-long summaries of the essays to follow, frequently with extensive quotation, and with gratuitous obervations on the quality of the contributions ('surmises [. . .] persuasively'; 'succeeds admirably'; 'argues convincingly'). It could surely have been assumed that the con? tributors would speak forthemselves and that the readers would judge forthemselves. University of Exeter D. Gareth Walters Multicultural Iberia: Language, Literature and Music. Ed. by Dru Dougherty and Milton M. Azevedo. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999. vii + 258 pp. $26.50. ISBN 0-87725-003-0. The title of this extremely varied collection of essays is perhaps its least useful aspect, in that they all originate from a Catalonian Studies Programme conference held at the 230 Reviews University of California in 1997 and are, in fact, quite monocultural in focus. Indeed, Catalan studies are really the only common thread in this volume: approaches range from the highly technical methodologies of digitalized medieval texts in the firstes? say, 'The Digital Scriptorium: A New Way to Study Medieval...

Increasing student persistence in Indonesian post‐secondary distance education

The primary intent of this study was to test the effectiveness of some transition stage interventions (e.g. five increasingly detailed sets of written contacts containing information, reminders, encouragement, a brochure about independent learning strategies, and a list of peers’ names and addresses) in increasing student persistence at the Indonesian Open Learning University (Universitas Terbuka – UT). The results show that the interventions did not significantly increase student persistence. Placing these results within the context, it seems that the interventions may have only been tinkering at the margin of an already problematic distance education system in Indonesia. Lack of persistence at UT may be related to aspects of the distance education model that were not adequately ‘adopted’.

Myth and reality: Using the OCLC/AMIGOS collection analysis CD to measure collections against peer collections and against institutional priorities

Faculty and administrators are quick to measure their institution's library collections against Association of Research Libraries (ARL) statistics and/or the collections of other academic libraries. Both faculty and administrators often choose unrealistic peers for comparison. Such comparisons bring the unrealistic expectation that the library will build collections at the level of better funded libraries without receiving equivalent funding. This paper describes the use of the OCLC/AMIGOS Collection Analysis CD in documenting the gap between myth and reality and in providing information that will be useful in the development of a rational system for allocating resources. The paper compares the actual acquisitions of a third quartile ARL library (the State University of New York at Stony Brook) during a 10-year period (1980–1990) with those of a “mythical” peer group named by the University President (15 university libraries with ARL rankings considerably higher than that of Stony Brook) and a more realistic peer group (the 29 ARL libraries ranked directly above and below Stony Brook in the 1990–1991 indexed rankings). Stony Brook acquired only 68% of the titles acquired by the mythical peer group, but 90% of those acquired by the average “realistic” peer. A more detailed subject by subject comparison against the two peer lists provides information useful in dealing with deans, department heads, and faculty. A comparison by subject revealed a discrepancy between the Library's collecting patterns and the goals and priorities of the University. Third priority programs were being supported at a higher level than first and second priority programs.