Penultimate Level Research Articles

Unknown Network Attack Detection Based on Open Set Recognition

Abstract The rapid development of the Internet of Things has led to a series of security and privacy issues. Although existing network intrusion detection technologies can identify abnormal traffic, they are mostly focused on detecting in closed sets. For a real open network environment, when an unknown attack occurs, the existing detection system cannot recognize it correctly, which will severely threaten network security. In order to solve this problem, this paper investigates how the Extreme Value Theory (EVT) is applied to unknown network attack detection system and proposes a network intrusion detection method based on open set recognition. By fitting the known classes’ post recognition activations to a Weibull distribution, we build the Open-CNN model to recalculate each activation at the penultimate level, then the pseudo-probability of unknown classes can be estimated from the activation scores of known classes, realizing the detection purpose of unknown attacks. We perform experiments on multiple datasets with different types and feature distributions. All of them obtain high detection accuracy, which proves the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

The James Joyce Digital Archive

The James Joyce Digital Archive Danis Rose (bio), John O'Hanlon (bio), and Stacey Herbert (bio) I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. Samuel Johnson Launched out of the blue in June 2018, The James Joyce Digital Archive is the culmination of more than forty years of meticulous research into James Joyce's manuscripts for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The JJDA (jjda.ie) aspires to provide a detailed, accurate, interactive account of two of the most complex compositional histories in literary history. It also provides a dynamic model of the creative process of composition itself. As an advanced model for the study and presentation of literary works in general, it will hopefully serve as an extensible template for an almost limitless range of textual studies. The James Joyce Digital Archive presents in two volumes the (nearly) exhaustive compositional histories of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in an interactive format for scholars, students, and general readers. In each volume, the final text contains within it a representation of the penultimate level (the page proofs), within that a depiction of the preceding level (the galleys), and so on all the way down to an image of the earliest draft and notebook entries. It effectively provides an edition of each draft level (in itself an invaluable tool for textual studies) linked to the relevant sections of the notebooks and notesheets Joyce used to augment the text. Thus a user of the JJDA can watch the text compose itself out of the thousands of its constitutive notes. These materials, and the details of the variation between levels, allow readers to make informed judgments regarding the various printed editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in addition to providing them with the means to create editions based on new editorial approaches. A further use of the JJDA—which has come into prominence since its launch—is to provide a contextual reference, a second resting-place so to speak, for the substantial amount of work on the notebooks and notesheets published both in print and in digital format by other scholars. Work on the JJDA began in earnest in 1976.1 In the mid-1970s, the computer revolution was neonatal. We had no browsers nor the World Wide Web or HTML, and the application of digital technology to humanities studies was not yet common practice. Setting out in these relatively uncharted waters, and without the aid of a personal computer, we began preparing the text with an automated generation of individual draft stages in mind.2 Working alongside Hans Walter [End Page 158] Gabler, who had independently conceived a similar notation, we perfected the mark-up for rendering the successive drafts of the Joyce oeuvre. The coding we developed then still serves as the base markup for the JJDA today. Basically, we developed an abstract "program" (a kind of Turing machine) to read, character by character, a long, linear representation of the text (the "isotext") written in straight ASCII form, which we coded with a defined set of symbols that the "machine" would interpret as instructions. For example, consider this fragment from the isotext of Book III, Chapter 3, known as "Haveth Childers Everywhere": It is 8[truly most] ernst terooly 14a14* most moresome8* 5[amusin.] 13[immusin.] 14[amusin.] |a[entertenmont!] intartenmont!|a*14*13*5* 4Colt's tooth!4*3 The numbers above refer to draft levels, extant or missing individual documents revised by Joyce.4 Our machine, for example, can generate level 8 (the eighth revision of the episode, a large typescript dated December 1928-January 1929). The instructions are: "type out the individual characters until you come to a number. If the number is less than 8, skip past the material in the brackets and carry on. If greater than 8, type out the material in the brackets but skip everything else till you come to that number asterisked. If 8, include everything but mark the material in the brackets as crossed out." The result is this: It is |8truly most ernst terooly most moresome8| immusin. Colt's tooth! It indicates that, at...

Chestnut-sided warblers use rare song types in extreme aggressive contexts

Songbirds of a number of species use song repertoires that contain some song types that are uttered only rarely, and are therefore unlikely to be heard by the typical listener. Singing patterns that hide song types are difficult to reconcile with putative repertoire functions that require listeners to evaluate the size or diversity of singers' repertoires. Perhaps in species with repertoires that include rarely used song types, the rare types serve a function that is required only rarely. Based on observations of chestnut-sided warblers, Setophaga pensylvanica , I hypothesized that in this species, rarely used song types are reserved for use in extreme aggressive contexts. I experimentally simulated such a context (a prolonged territorial intrusion by a male competitor) by presenting song playback and a taxidermic mount on chestnut-sided warbler territories. The targeted males were much more likely to use their rare song types during the simulated intrusions than during natural baseline singing. A similar but smaller effect was evident in an analysis of natural singing that compared songs associated with fighting and chasing with songs that were not. Use of rare song types by experimental subjects did not predict their likelihood of attacking the simulated intruder. If this lack of predictive value is not an experimental artefact and extends to natural interactions, it suggests that despite their association with highly aggressive contexts, rarely used song types might not represent the strongest possible signal of aggressive motivation in chestnut-sided warblers. Perhaps use of rare types instead represents the penultimate level in a graded series of aggressive signals that culminates with a signal variant that went undetected in this experiment.

Multilevel Coded Modulation With Reduced Latency Decoding Based on Novel Set Partitioning for APSK

We address the use of a multilevel coding (MLC) to the amplitude phase-shift keying (APSK) modulations that consist of multiple PSK rings of different radii with a distinct number of constellation points. Such modulations have been adopted in the satellite broadcasting standards since they have a significant advantage over commonly used square-type quadrature amplitude modulations; their signals exhibit lower peak-to-average power ratio and thus enhance the power amplifier efficiency at the transmitter. A common low-complexity approach for decoding of MLC is the multi-stage decoding (MSD). However, MSD in general leads to severe latency at the decoder since the binary decisions on the higher levels should wait for those of the lower levels. Furthermore, this latency issue is even more salient for APSK signaling due to its circular nature of constellations that does not allow its decomposition into in-phase and quadrature components (i.e., I-Q decomposition). Therefore, in this paper we introduce a new MLC design for APSK that enables the decoder to reduce its latency without any increase in terms of complexity. The proposed approach consists of a novel labeling with an unconventional set partitioning that allows the detector to make use of I-Q decomposition. Specifically, the proposed set partitioning results in a quadrature-PSK constellation at the penultimate level, which can be decomposed into a pair of separately decodable binary-PSK constellations at the final level. The resulting decoder consists of a combination of MSD and parallel independent decoding that can be implemented with lower latency. The simulation results together with the theoretical analyses demonstrate that the reduction of not only the decoding latency but also the complexity in bit metric calculation can be achieved without noticeable degradation in terms of error performance compared to the conventional set partitioning approach.

Higher-level supercompilation as a metasystem transition

Issues related to metasystem transitions in the context of supercompilation are discussed. Manifestations of the law of branching growth of the penultimate level in the case of higher-level supercompilation are considered. Based on this law, some approaches to the construction of metasystems by combining supercompilers are proposed. In particular, the usefulness of multi-result supercompilation for proving the equivalence of expressions and for two-level supercompilation is shown.

OC-120 The “nutrition support pyramid”—composition and trends in a regional paediatric cohort from South East Scotland

IntroductionWithin nutrition support (NS) there is a spectrum of complexity ranging from oral supplements via enteral tube feeding (ETF) to parenteral nutrition (PN) for intestinal failure (IF). Nutrition support teams...

Benchmarking and library quality maturity

PurposeIt remains unresolved from the literature whether benchmarking is a useful and appropriate tool for the library and information services sector. The aim of this research is to gather evidence to establish whether benchmarking provides a real and lasting benefit to library and information services.Design/methodology/approachThe study investigated the long‐term effects of a benchmarking exercise on the quality level of three UK academic libraries. However, an appropriate framework for assessing the quality level of libraries is not present in the literature, and it was therefore necessary for such a framework to be developed. This article describes and provides initial characterisation of the framework developed – the Quality Maturity Model (QMM).FindingsThe evidence from the investigation showed that the two libraries which were at stage one on the QMM before the benchmarking exercise remained there; and the library which scored at the penultimate level, level four, before benchmarking, was, four years afterwards, at level five. The tentative conclusion drawn was that benchmarking may only be appropriate for organisations with a existing high level of quality maturity. Much further work is proposed.Originality/valueThe research provides evidence which establishes whether benchmarking provides a real and lasting benefit to library and information services.

Improving Similarity Search in Time Series Using Wavelets

Sequences constitute a large portion of data stored in databases. Data mining applications require the ability to process similarity queries over a large amount of time series data. The query processing performance is an important factor that needs to be taken into consideration. This article proposes a similarity retrieval algorithm for time series. The proposed approach utilizes wavelet transformation in order to reduce the dimensionality of the time series. The transformed series are indexed using X-Trees, which is a spatial indexing technique able to efficiently index high-dimensional data. The article proves that this technique outperforms the usage of the Fourier transformation, since the wavelet transformation provides better approximation of the time series. Through the experiments, it can be concluded that the optimum performance is obtained using 16 to 20 wavelet coefficients. Furthermore, a novel mechanism for reducing the complexity of the calculation for the false alarms removal is proposed. Storing the approximation coefficients of the penultimate level of the decomposition tree, the Euclidean distance between the two sequences is calculated, thus reducing further the number of false alarms before calculating the actual Euclidean distance using the complete time series. The article concludes with a detailed performance evaluation of the proposed similarity retrieval algorithm using data from the Greek stock market and the temperature measurements from Athens. The comparison is done with techniques that use the Haar transform and the R*-Tree, and the proposed algorithm is shown to outperform them.

Features of the Value Function for Voice and Their Consistency across Participants from Four Countries: Great Britain, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States

This study investigated features of the value function for voice using subjects from four countries: Great Britain, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States. Across these four groups of subjects the shape of the value function was found to be similar, though differences in the estimated reference points were detected. Consistent with predictions derived from prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) the relationship between the value of voice and the magnitude of voice was found to be direct, monotonic, and nonlinear. The largest increment in value occurred when the magnitude of voice shifted from mute to some voice. Thereafter, increments in value tended to decline in magnitude suggesting diminishing marginal returns on the response measure of procedural fairness. An unexpected finding was that the final segment of the value function was convex indicating increasing marginal returns as the magnitude of voice shifted from its penultimate level to its maximum possible level. The study also investigated whether subjects' reported expectations of voice correspond to the value function reference point as theorized in the literature. Findings suggest that self-reported expectations of voice are higher than the estimated value function reference point.

(Meta)systems as constraints on variation— a classification and natural history of metasystem transitions

A new conceptual framework is proposed to situate and integrate the parallel theories of Turchin, Powers, Campbell and Simon. A system is defined as a constraint on variety. This entails a 2 × 2 × 2 classification scheme for “higher‐order” systems, using the dimensions of constraint, (static) variety, and (dynamic) variation. The scheme distinguishes two classes of metasystems from supersystems and other types of emergent phenomena. Metasystems are defined as constrained variations of constrained variety. Control is characterized as a constraint exerted by a separate system. The emergence of hierarchical systems is motivated by evolutionary principles. The positive feedback between variety and constraint, which underlies the “branching growth of the penultimate level,” leads to the interpretation of metasystem transitions as phases of accelerated change in a continuous evolutionary progression toward increasing variety. The most important MSTs in the history of evolution are reinterpreted in this framewor...