Massive Attack Research Articles

Massive sulfate attack to cement-treated railway embankments

Two access embankments to a railway bridge, having a maximum height of 18 m, experienced a continuous and severe heave shortly after construction. Vertical displacements reached 120 mm in a 2-year period. The embankments were designed, by including soil–cement-treated transition wedges, to provide an increasingly rigid support as the trains approach the stiff bridge abutments. A grid of 10 m deep jet-grouting columns was also built, with the purpose of stabilising the embankments. Instead, a sustained swelling deformation, which extended to depths of 8–10 m, was activated. The compacted soil was low-plasticity clayey material, with a variable percentage of gypsum. The embankments suffered a massive ettringite–thaumasite attack, which was triggered by the simultaneous presence of cement, clay, sulfates and an external supply of water (rain). The paper describes the field extensometer and inclinometer records, the long-term laboratory tests performed, some mineralogical observations and the reactions leading to the growth of expansive crystals, and presents a model that simulates the measured heave. Forces acting against the bridge, which was seriously damaged, were estimated. Remedial measures include removal of the active upper zone of the embankments, and the construction in stages of slabs supporting the rails and founded on piles built on both sides of the embankments. The case is considered unique because of the magnitude of the reaction developed in the embankments, and its damaging action on the nearby bridge structure.

Robust evaluation of products and reviewers in social rating systems

Social rating systems are widely used to harvest user feedback and to support making decisions by users on the Web. Web users may try to exploit such systems by posting unfair or false evaluations for fame or profit reasons. Detecting the real rating scores of products as well as the trustworthiness of reviewers is an important and a very challenging problem. Existing approaches use majority-based methods along with temporal analysis and clustering techniques to tackle this problem, but they are vulnerable to massive intelligent collaborative attacks. In this paper, we propose a set of novel algorithms for robust computation of product rating scores and reviewer trust ranks. We introduce a supporting framework consisting of three main components responsible for calculating a robust rating score for product, behavior analysis of reviewers and trust computation for reviewers. We propose a novel algorithm for calculating robust rating scores for products, in presence of unfair reviews. We introduce a method to analyze the reviewing behavior of users by building a vector reflecting three important aspects of reviewers' behavior. Finally, we combine these behavior factors using a fuzzy inference method to arrive at a final trust score for every reviewer. Extensive evaluation results shows accuracy of our calculated rating and trust scores as well as robustness of our methods against collusive attacks.

Ronald Ogier Ward, urologist, hero & first president of BAUS

Ronald Ogier Ward, urologist, hero &amp; first president of <scp>BAUS</scp>

When Humanitarianism Turns Realistic

On March 19, 2011, French and British forces, with the military support of the United States, launched a massive attack against the Libyan army. The official objective of the air and naval strikes was to impose a no-fl y zone to protect the civilians of Misrata, Ajdabiya, and Benghazi from massacres predicted by the head of the Libyan National Transitional Council. Nine days later, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister David Cameron jointly declared that "hundreds of thousands of people had thus been saved from a humanitarian disaster"—but, they added, "Libya was still confronted with a humanitarian crisis."

Moth herbivory enhances resource turnover in subarctic mountain birch forests?

Massive moth outbreaks cause large-scale damage in subarctic mountain birch forests with a concomitant decrease in carbon flux to mycorrhizal fungi and an increased deposition of dissolved carbon and nutrients as moth frass into soil. We investigated impacts of moth herbivory along three replicated gradients with three levels of moth herbivory (undamaged, once damaged, repeatedly damaged) on soil nutrient levels and biological parameters. We found an increase in soil nutrients and in the biomass of enchytraeid worms, which are key faunal decomposers. Fungi bacteria ratio and C:N ratio decreased in humus with increasing severity of herbivory. Our findings suggest enhanced resource turnover in mountain birch forests due to massive moth herbivory. This may provide a shortcut for carbon and nutrient input to subarctic soils, which largely bypasses the main routes of carbon from plants to soil via mycorrhizal and litter-decomposing fungi. Moreover, a temporal shift occurs in carbon allocation to soil, providing decomposers an opportunity to use an early-season peak in resource availability. Our results suggest a hitherto unappreciated role of massive insect herbivore attacks on resource dynamics in subarctic ecosystems.

The Threat of Mega-terrorism: Availability, Inhibitors and Motivation

The prospect of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism poses a danger for contemporary societies. However, the incidents related to an application of weapons of mass destruction (that is, nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons) by non-state actors are relatively rare. The aim of the paper is to present recent incidents and to estimate the threat from particular types of WMD. The author focuses both on the question of motivation to undertake these operations and on the problem of technological capabilities. To sum up, the risk of a massive WMD terrorist attack should be perceived as quite moderate due to the technological barrier, but selective attacks carry a greater potential risk because of their higher probability and significant psychological effect.

Fabrication of Electrospun Poly (Lactide-co-Glycolide)–Fibrin Multiscale Scaffold for Myocardial RegenerationIn Vitro

Myocardial tissue engineering is one of the most promising treatment strategies to restore heart function after a massive heart attack. The biomaterials, cells, and scaffold design play important roles in engineering of heart tissue. In this study, we have developed a fibrin-based multiscale electrospun composite scaffold for myocardial regeneration. Fibrin is the natural wound-healing matrix having angiogenic potential and comprehensively used for tissue engineering applications. It provides a natural environment for cell attachment, migration, and proliferation. Morphological, chemical, and mechanical characterization of the scaffolds was done by scanning electron microscopy, fibrin-specific phosphotungstic acid hematoxylin staining, and mechanical testing. The fiber diameters of fibrin nanofibers range from 50 to 300 nm and that of poly (lactide-co-glycolide) microfibers range from 2 to 4 μm, which mimics the structural hierarchy of native myocardial tissue. Our results indicate that this scaffold enhances the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into cardiomyocytes. The cardiac phenotype of the cells was confirmed by the presence of cardiac-specific proteins like α-sarcomeric actinin, troponin, tropomyosin, desmin, and atrial natriuretic peptide Estimation of D-Dimer in the culture supernatant for 2 weeks and analysis of scaffold for 3 weeks of in vitro culture of cardiomyocytes indicated the degradation of fibrin and presence of newly synthesized collagen respectively. Our results demonstrate the promising potential of this scaffold for myocardial tissue engineering applications.

SEVERE OUTBREAK OF FUSARIUM SOLANI ON QUERCUS ILEX VECTORED BY XYLOSANDRUS COMPACTUS

The black twig borer Xylosandrus compactus (Eichhoff) (Coleoptera: Scolytinae) causes severe damages to its hosts (Chong et al., 2011) because it also vectors Fusarium solani, which induces wilting of twigs and terminal branches (Ngoan et al., 1976). In two urban parks in Naples and Portici (southern Italy) an evident flagging of the leaves of holm oak (Quercus ilex) was observed, followed by a rapid wilting of shoots and twigs of saplings and mature trees (Garonna et al., 2012). A fungus isolat- ed from the beetle’s reproductive galleries, entry holes and the adjacent black-stained woody tissues, was grown on potato dex- trose agar (PDA) at 25°C, and identified by sequencing the ITS 1-4 region of rDNA. The sequence showed 99% identity with that of Fusarium solani from GenBank (accession No. EU719658.1). In pathogenicity tests, holm oak branches were in- oculated with a 2-mm PDA dish collected from a 7-day-old cul- ture of the F. solani isolate (FS1). Control branches were inocu- lated with plugs of sterile PDA. All branches were incubated at 25±1°C. After five days, symptoms resembling those exhibited by naturally infected plants developed only on the branches inocu- lated with FS1, from whose tissues this fungus was re-isolated, thus proving to be a Q. ilex pathogen. Symptoms recalling those observed in the two sites surveyed are spreading through the holm oak woodlands of Campania (southern Italy), so the geo- graphical distribution of the outbreak may already be consider- able. To the best of our knowledge this represents the first Euro- pean record of a severe outbreak of F. solani on Q. ilex following a massive attack by X. compactus.

Concetti e strumenti per l’analisi critica dell’arretramento del modello sociale europeo

Professor Gallino’s explanation of the downsizing of the European social model presupposes a conceptual endowment which here is resumed under two key headings: the “double movement” of marketization and de-marketization, as theorized by Polanyi in The Great Transformation; the “performativity” of economics as conceptually developed especially by Callon and Mackenzie. When used together they deploy their heuristic potentiality and contribute to the understanding both of the massive attack inferred to the European social model and the difficulty to effectively contrasting its downsizing by theoretical and especially political responses, as expressed in Gallino’s vivid reconstruction.

The First Generation of β‐Galactosidase‐Responsive Prodrugs Designed for the Selective Treatment of Solid Tumors in Prodrug Monotherapy

Massive attack: Galactoside prodrugs have been designed that can be selectively activated by lysosomal β-galactosidase located inside cancer cells expressing a specific tumor-associated receptor. This efficient enzymatic process triggers a potent cytotoxic effect, releasing the potent antimitotic agent MMAE and allowing the destruction of both receptor-positive and surrounding receptor-negative tumor cells.

Middle East oil firms hit by massive attacks

Middle East oil firms hit by massive attacks

Going to Extremes

Research Article| September 01 2012 Going to Extremes Brad Prager (ed.), A Companion to Werner HerzogMalden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. $199.95 cloth. 644 pages.Alan Greenberg, Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of “Heart of Glass.”Chicago IL: Chicago Review Press, 2012. $24.95 cloth. 224 pages. Paul Thomas Paul Thomas PAUL THOMAS teaches politics and American cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2012) 66 (1): 77–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.77 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paul Thomas; Going to Extremes. Film Quarterly 1 September 2012; 66 (1): 77–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.77 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

What Use Overwhelming Air Superiority? A Tale of Two Campaigns

Longer wars between mismatched opponents often end with the militarily weaker side showing unexpected strengths. This article tests this tendency in two short wars in which overwhelming force superiority was applied in massive air attacks. Operation Enduring Freedom (the 2001 American campaign in Afghanistan) and Operation Cast Lead (the 2008–2009 Israeli campaign in Gaza) both began with air offensives that shifted to air-supported ground combat, but Enduring Freedom (a Type A operation) gave priority to aerial attack, while in Cast Lead (Type B) air operations primarily paved the way for ground combat. Neither campaign was fully decisive, suggesting that the residual capabilities of weaker combatants apply to short as well as protracted hostilities. The Type A attack was decisive against the Taliban, but not against al Qaeda. The more intensive Type B case, Cast Lead, did not lead to greater decisiveness than its counterpart, with Israel emphasizing force demonstration to enhance deterrence of attack, yet not seeking to destroy Hamas's residual military capability. The problem of translating large military superiority into decisive war results is also evident recently in more common, stretched out, and restrained airpower use supporting higher-priority ground combat, as in NATO's 2011 intervention in Libya and the aerial drone campaign in Pakistan supporting NATO war making in Afghanistan.

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (review)

Reviewed by: An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War Jonathan Kirshner (bio) An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman. New Press 2011. $29.95 cloth. 383 pages In An Army of Phantoms, J. Hoberman, formerly the senior film critic for the Village Voice, offers an overview and interpretation of Hollywood films in the first decade of the Cold War, 1946-1956. As such, he offers the book as a prequel to his invaluable The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, published in 2003.1 This new book is a worthy and highly readable follow-up to the earlier book. For Hoberman, born in 1948, the sixties were observed firsthand, and Dream Life was a hip, fast-paced, and implicitly personal as well as critical history. Army of Phantoms is a work of more scholarly detachment; well researched, the book reflects hours logged at archives and libraries and close readings of FBI files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. As with many great books, the footnotes are littered with priceless gems. Phantoms is dedicated to John Garfield (and Marilyn Monroe), the charismatic left-wing actor whose massive heart attack, which took his life at the age of thirty-nine, was considered by many to be the result of his being hounded during the hysteria of the anticommunist witch hunts. But despite this tipping of loyalties, Hoberman's analysis is evenhanded—at times to a fault, as when the book suggests but ultimately underemphasizes the extent to which Elia Kazan's infamous friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was motivated by fears for his own career. Phantoms starts before the beginning, with the origins of the left-leaning message movies of the immediate postwar era that attracted the attention of HUAC after the Republicans were swept into power in 1946. Hoberman nicely juxtaposes the sudden, new vulnerabilities faced by Hollywood and America: the United States lost its nuclear monopoly just as the studios lost their own monopoly power, forced by the Supreme Court to divest themselves of their theater chains. With a dwindling audience, the [End Page 215] existential threat of television, and uncertain economic prospects, Hollywood cowered before HUAC, enforcing the blacklist and churning out a tidal wave of (mostly awful) anticommunist potboilers in an effort to prove its patriotism. Hoberman dutifully puts these turkeys under the microscope; one drawback of this diligence is that readers are left spending more time with these films than they might desire. The book gets off to a slow start; its first major chapter, on 1946-1947, is handicapped by covering this most familiar part of the period. The first round of HUAC hearings, the Hollywood Ten, and the emergence of the blacklist are well retold, and, throughout, there is an excellent accounting, especially in the footnotes, of who comported themselves honorably during those difficult times and who did not. The early part of the book is also written at a breathless pace; in one paragraph Charlie Chaplin is threatened with deportation, Bugsy Siegel is rubbed out, the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act is passed, and Orson Welles begins shooting Macbeth (1948). But the book soon finds its more scholarly (though still entertaining) voice, with chapters grouped around clusters of years. The history is well handled, although, for the late 1940s, Hoberman underplays the extent to which the pathological anxieties that led to a mob mentality in America were at least rooted in real-world, plausibly frightening events. As he recounts, within one week in 1949 the Soviets surprised the world with their A-bomb test and China "fell" to the communists. Moreover, a few months later North Korea would launch its surprise attack on the South, and it did not help matters that 1949 was a recession year in the United States. Phantoms does viscerally capture the vehemence of the new burst of anticommunism that came with the Korean War and the intensified browbeating of suspected Hollywood leftists that followed. The book's most novel contributions come here, in the 1950s, as it engages genres such as science-fiction and alien...

Study of the combat capabilities of the enemy air assault means

A variant of massive space attack design, main types and armaments of enemy air assault means - a high-precision weapon of Land and AD forces, as well as navy and aviation has been considered.

A Study on Various protocols Developed under Intrusion Detection System in Adhoc Networks

In Computer Networks a number of security techniques provide security consolation but not up to optimal security extent. There are massive attacks and efficient viruses travel across the network which incapacitates computer system and default configuration of the operating system. Preceding techniques can capture anomalous activities and previous known attacks but unknown Security attacks have learned to survive in a high secure precinct, it must be noticed that virus has an augmenting influence, so it is very difficult to detect unknown attacks at application layer on the run time. This paper presents some of the best well known Intrusion detection techniques and appropriate protocols which were proposed for intrusion detection and anomaly detection in the recent years under various parameters.

IP traceback with sparsely-tagged fragment marking scheme under massively multiple attack paths

IP traceback is known to be one of the most effective measures to deter Internet attacks. Various techniques for IP traceback have been suggested. Among them, we focus on Probabilistic Packet Marking scheme (PPM) with tagging. We believe PPM is more advantageous than others because it does not generate additional network traffic and requires minimal protocol change. However, three parameters need to be optimized to make PPM practical under massively multiple attack paths: the number of packets to collect, the number of fragment combinations to recover the IP addresses, and the false positive error rate. Tagging is an effective way to reduce the number of combinations but it increases the false positive error rates when the number of routers in the attack paths grows. Other PPM-related techniques suggested in the past have similar problems. They improve one or two parameters at the expense of others, or they require additional data structures such as an upstream router map. In this paper, we propose a method that optimizes the three parameters at the same time and recovers original IPs quickly and correctly even in the presence of massive multiple attack paths. Our method does not need either a combinatorial process to recover IPs or additional information such as an upstream router map. Our result shows that our method recovers 95% of the original IPs correctly with no fragment combinations and with zero false positives. It needs to collect only 8N packets per router where N is the number of routers involved in the attack paths.

A Tribute to Professor Lothar Bernd Zimmerhackl, M.D., Ph.D. (1952–2010)

Professor Dr. Lothar Bernd Zimmerhackl, M.D., Ph.D. (Fig. [1]), who devoted his scientific and medical life to pediatric renal diseases, and who directed the Innsbruck Medical University children's clinic (Pädiatrie I, Dept. f. Kinder-und Jugendheilkunde) for almost a decade, died on August 27, 2010, at the intensive care unit of Innsbruck Medical Hospital due to a massive (second) heart attack, at age 57.

…To the Shores of Tripoli

…To the Shores of Tripoli

Bilateral Ptosis in a Child Following Massive Attack by a Swarm of Wasps

Neurological manifestations of wasp sting are rare and the etiopathogenesis is not completely understood. We report a 2-year-old girl who developed bilateral ptosis after multiple wasp stings, which responded partially to pyridostigmine. This is the first reported case of wasp venom-induced ptosis in a child. We discuss the possible pathogenetic mechanisms behind this phenomenon.