Product Code Research Articles

Understanding Test Convention Consistency as a Dimension of Test Quality

Unit tests must be readable to help developers understand and evolve production code. Most existing test quality metrics assess test code's ability to detect bugs. Few metrics focus on test code's readability. One standard approach to improve readability is the consistent application of conventions. We investigated test convention consistency as a dimension of test quality. We formalized test suite consistency as the extent to which alternatives are used within a code base and introduce two complementary metrics to capture this extent. We elaborated a catalog of over 30 test conventions for the Java language organized in 10 convention classes that group mutual alternatives. We developed tool support to detect occurrences of conventions, compute consistency metrics over a test suite, and view occurrences of conventions in the corresponding code. We applied our tools to study the consistency of the test suites of 20 large open-source Java projects. The study validates the design of the test convention classes, provides descriptive statistics on the range of consistency values for ten different convention classes, and enables us to link observed changes in consistency values to specific events in the change history of our target systems, thus providing evidence of the construct validity of the metrics. We conclude that analyzing test suite consistency via static analysis shows promise as a practical approach to help improve test suite quality.

Some Warners Musicals and the Spirit of the Production Code

Warners backstage musicals of 1933 appear regularly in accounts of “pre-Code Hollywood” that highlight their apparent violations of the Production Code. Those films are often contrasted with the RKO Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers romantic dance musicals, largely produced after the Code's supposed “enforcement” from 1934. This article argues, however, that the apparently dramatic contrast between the decade's two major cycles and their relationship to the Code is better understood as a process that Richard Maltby argues was characteristic of early 1930s Hollywood: “the more gradual, more complex and less melodramatic evolution of systems of convention in representation.” Placing the aesthetics of Warners musicals in dialogue with Production Code files and internal studio documents, this article contends that the musical's shift towards a romantic model was a pragmatic response to the Code, one that was already in progress before July 1934. Genre—if understood as an historical process rather than one essential definition or a set of monolithic subgenres—can make such aesthetic shifts and institutional renegotiations visible.

Shopee Marketplace Promotion on TikTok: AIDA Model Study on the Impact of Purchasing Behavior of Young Women in Makassar City, Indonesia

This study analyzes the impact of young women’s purchasing behavior on user activity driven by Shopee marketplace promotions on TikTok. This study adopts the Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA) model to evaluate purchasing behavior. A quantitative, cross-sectional survey method was employed, involving 283 female adolescent respondents from Makassar City. This study utilizes the AIDA model to assess the independent variables, namely frequency, duration, and consistency, and their influence on the dependent variable, the purchasing behavior process. The findings reveal that purchasing behavior, as measured through the AIDA model, has a positive and significant effect on Shopee marketplace promotions on TikTok. The result of the hypothesis test confirms that Shopee marketplace promotions on TikTok social media influence the product purchasing behavior process. This study further explores various Shopee promotion strategies on TikTok, including discounts, flash sales, cashback offers, free shipping, and product codes. This study offers a new perspective on investigating popular e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, particularly among young digital-native consumers. The practical implications suggest that online marketplaces can utilize social media promotions to drive purchases through diverse and engaging promotional strategies.

Weight-Reduced Stabilizer Codes with Lower Overhead

Stabilizer codes are the most widely studied class of quantum error-correcting codes and form the basis of most proposals for a fault-tolerant quantum computer. A stabilizer code is defined by a set of parity-check operators, which are measured in order to infer information about errors that may have occurred. In typical settings, measuring these operators is itself a noisy process and the noise strength scales with the number of qubits involved in a given parity check, or its weight. Hastings has proposed a method for reducing the weights of the parity checks of a stabilizer code, though it has previously only been studied in the asymptotic regime. Here, we instead focus on the regime of small to medium-size codes suitable for quantum computing hardware. We both provide a fully explicit description of Hastings’s method and propose a substantially simplified weight-reduction method that is applicable to the class of quantum product codes. Our simplified method allows us to reduce the check weights of hypergraph- and lifted-product codes to at most six, while preserving the number of logical qubits and at least retaining (in fact, often increasing) the code distance. The price we pay is an increase in the number of physical qubits by a constant factor but we find that our method is much more efficient than Hastings’s method in this regard. We benchmark the performance of our codes on a simulated photonic quantum computing architecture based on Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill qubits and passive linear optics, finding that our weight-reduction method substantially improves code performance. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

The “Pre-Codeness” of Only Yesterday (1933) in the Light of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948): Discrepant Consciousness, Sexual Morality and the Hollywood Production Code

The “Pre-Codeness” of Only Yesterday (1933) in the Light of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948): Discrepant Consciousness, Sexual Morality and the Hollywood Production Code

Hybrid Decoding of Asymmetric Product Codes With Systematic Polar and BCH Codes

Hybrid Decoding of Asymmetric Product Codes With Systematic Polar and BCH Codes

Customs Tariff: Digital Product Codes and Customs Duty Rates

Customs Tariff: Digital Product Codes and Customs Duty Rates

Class I Recalls of Cardiovascular Devices Between 2013 and 2022 : A Cross-Sectional Analysis.

Cardiovascular devices account for one third of all Class I recalls, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) most severe designation, indicating a reasonable probability of "serious adverse health consequences or death." Understanding recalls and their causes is important for patient safety. To characterize Class I recalls of cardiovascular devices and the clinical evidence supporting authorization. In this cross-sectional study, cardiovascular device recalls from 1 January 2013 through 31 December 2022 were identified using the FDA's annual log. Information about devices was extracted from publicly available FDA decision summaries. The FDA Medical Device Recalls database. Cardiovascular devices with Class I recalls. Recalls were characterized by their causes and scope. Devices were characterized by their regulatory history (product code, special designations) and clinical evidence (premarket testing, postmarket surveillance). Clinical studies were analyzed for quality, including end point selection (clinical vs. surrogate, use of composites). From 2013 to 2022, there were 137 Class I recall events affecting 157 unique cardiovascular devices, of which 112 (71.3%) were moderate-risk 510(k) devices and 45 (28.7%) were high-risk premarket approval (PMA) devices. Recalls affected a median of 7649 units (IQR, 953 to 28 446) and were most commonly attributed to device design (43 [31.4%]). Forty-two (26.8%) devices had multiple Class I recalls. Thirty (19.1%) devices underwent premarket clinical testing (7 [6.2%] 510(k) devices, 17 [85.0%] PMA devices, and 6 [24.0%] PMA supplement devices). Most studies used surrogate (27 [79.4%]) and composite (24 [70.6%]) measures as primary end points. Twenty-two (48.9%) PMA devices had required postapproval studies, with 14 reporting delays. No 510(k) devices were subject to postmarket surveillance. Details about clinical testing may be missing from FDA summaries. Cardiovascular devices with Class I recalls were infrequently subjected to premarket or postmarket testing, with recalls affecting thousands of patients annually. None.

Qualitative Interviews with Stakeholders in Herbal Pharmacovigilance and Recommendations for Best Practices to be Applied Worldwide.

The use of herbal products globally is substantial, but varying definitions and regulatory frameworks have led to differences in their status as medicinal products and in approaches to monitoring their safety. This article explores the current landscape of herbal pharmacovigilance, drawing insights from interviews with global experts in the field, and offers recommendations for best practices to enhance the safety and benefit-to-harm balance of herbal products. This study comprised semi-structured interviews with members of the International Society of Pharmacovigilance-Herbal and Traditional Medicines Special Interest Group and the Nutrivigilance Information Exchange Network, recruited using purposive sampling. Data were stored and coded using NVIVO® and analysed thematically using a qualitative inductive approach. Sixteen participants from 11 countries were interviewed, revealing diverse regulatory approaches and challenges in herbal pharmacovigilance. Key themes included legal status, awareness, identification and coding of herbal products, pre-/post-marketing product control, reporting of adverse drug reactions, causality assessment and signals of herbal products. This study yielded five general recommendations to further improve herbal pharmacovigilance worldwide. This study offers an overview of the global landscape of herbal pharmacovigilance, highlighting challenges in monitoring herbal products and presenting universal recommendations. These recommendations encompass increasing awareness, enhancing education and improving legislative frameworks. Given the growing use of herbal products, the implementation of strong pharmacovigilance practices is crucial to ensure consumer safety.

A Threshold-Based Binary Message Passing Decoder With Memory for Product Codes

A Threshold-Based Binary Message Passing Decoder With Memory for Product Codes

Identification and Analysis of Credit Card Fraud Based on Machine Learning Methods

Credit card has become an indispensable payment tool in People's Daily life. However, credit card fraud has also increased, resulting in huge financial losses for banks and individuals. Based on the real world credit card transaction data, this paper uses a variety of machine learning algorithms to identify and analyze credit card fraud. Firstly, the problem of missing and unbalanced data is solved through data preprocessing and feature selection, and important features are screened out, Such as transaction amount, product code, payment card type, etc. Then, integrated logistic regression, random forest, LightGBM, XGBoost, and Stacking models were constructed, and the models were trained and evaluated through cross-validation and parameter optimization. The experimental results show that the integrated Stacking model performs best in credit card fraud detection, with an AUC(Area Under the Curve) value of 0.960, which can accurately identify fraudulent transactions and provide an effective fraud warning mechanism for financial institutions. This mechanism significantly benefits both financial institutions and credit card users by reducing fraud losses and enhancing transaction security. However, it is acknowledged that the study has limitations, including the potential impact of data imbalance on model performance, the need for further testing of model generalization ability to new fraud patterns, and the importance of optimizing real-time performance to ensure practical applicability.

Fast erasure decoder for hypergraph product codes

We propose a decoder for the correction of erasures with hypergraph product codes, which form one of the most popular families of quantum LDPC codes. Our numerical simulations show that this decoder provides a close approximation of the maximum likelihood decoder that can be implemented in O(N2) bit operations where N is the length of the quantum code. A probabilistic version of this decoder can be implemented in O(N1.5) bit operations.

Optimizing order picking processes in warehouses: strategies for efficient routing and clustering

The study employed a simulation based on a detailed dataset containing over 307,046 unique order identifiers and 1,050 unique product identifiers. This dataset included information such as order placement dates, product codes, quantities, and precise locations within the warehouse, including coordinates. The simulation modeled the order-picking route using the Single-Picker Routing Problem (SPRP) algorithms to minimize distance and travel time. The methods compared various wave-picking strategies and grouping methods (single-line and multi-line) for their effectiveness.The applied method significantly reduced the travel distance required by the order picker in the warehouse. The key to this optimization was consolidating orders into waves of specific sizes, achieving a fourfold distance reduction for the studied dataset. Additionally, the solution proposed grouping products by location within the warehouse, either in a single aisle or across multiple aisles based on proximity. Although this method often enhances efficiency, it did not in this particular case. However, it was included as it may yield better results with different datasets and further reduce travel distances in the warehouse. The research underscored the critical role of efficient routing and grouping strategies in warehouse operations. Although wave picking significantly reduced travel distances, the effectiveness of clustering strategies depended on the characteristics of the specific dataset, suggesting the need for tailored solutions based on the warehouse layout and the features of the orders. Future research could extend to integrating product volume and weight variations, which may further optimize order-picking strategies.

Monte Carlo coupled Multi-Physics with spatially continuous material properties

In this study, we performed Monte Carlo coupled multi-physics simulations with spatially continuous material properties via Functional Expansion Tally combined with delta-tracking. The proposed multi-physics coupling framework significantly reduces the need for spatial discretization in the problem geometry, potentially decreasing simulation time as macroscopic cross section reconstructions are performed less frequently. The proposed method has been tested on pin-cell and assembly levels at hot full power to evaluate its applicability. At both pin and assembly levels, numerical experiments have demonstrated that the proposed framework can produce solutions that asymptotically approach those from conventional cell-based discretized simulations with infinitesimal cells. Furthermore, the proposed method accelerates the simulation time by over four times compared to the cell-based discretized approach with very small cells for cases without neutron absorbers. Therefore, the proposed method has the potential to be integrated into future Monte Carlo production codes, to meet the demanding requirements for improved reactor safety.

Analysis of antibiotic resistant infections associated with hirudotherapy

ObjectiveGiven rising concern regarding antibiotic resistance, our objective was to evaluate antibiotic-resistant infections following leech therapy and to characterize the use of prophylactic antibiotics. MethodsAll reports of adverse events involving hirudotherapy (product code “NRN”) were retrieved from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration MAUDE database between 2012 and 2021. Antibiotic resistance was defined by bacterial culture or infection after antibiotic administration. ResultsNineteen cases of antibiotic resistance involving hirudotherapy were identified. Only three cases of antibiotic resistance were discovered on routine testing and the remaining 16 cases were associated with patient injury. Positive blood cultures or fever were present in 26.3 % (n = 5) of cases. Cultures of the infection grew Aeromonas hydrophilia (n = 13; 68.4 %), Vibrio vulnificus (n = 3; 15.8 %), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (n = 2; 10.5 %), and Proteus vulgaris (n = 1; 5.3 %). There were nine (47.4 %) multi-drug resistant infections. Infection was most commonly resistant to fluoroquinolones (n = 9; 47.4 %), trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (n = 9; 47.4 %) and ertapenem (n = 4; 21.1 %). ConclusionAntibiotic-resistant infections involving hirudotherapy are frequently resistant to multiple drugs, including fluoroquinolones and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. Resistance to ertapenem, a drug of last resort, was also documented. The findings presented in this study support growing literature that the trend in multi-drug resistance is more severe than previously reported.

In-situ aberration correction for Laguerre-Gaussian optical tweezers via optimization of orbit shape

We introduce a concept of aberration correction under microscopy that is based on observation of circular Brownian motion of an object driven by orbital angular momentum of a Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam. Following the concept, we establish an aberration-correction scheme by using a holographic optical tweezers setup equipped with a spatial light modulator that produces the LG beam as well as corrects the light wavefront. The light wavefront is modified adaptively to improve circular symmetry and uniformity of the orbit of a colloidal dielectric sphere revolving in mid-water under the irradiation of the LG beam. We reveal that the proposed scheme is sensitive to tiny phase difference of less than the accuracy of a highest-grade optical flat, 0.05λ, and is applicable to aberrations of up to the first 21 terms of the Zernike series expansion. The scheme not only improves the quality of optical tweezers but also enables to distinguish individual objective lenses assigned a common product code from difference in aberration-correction patterns. The present contribution therefore provides a useful tool for microscopy and laser fabrication in addition to the immediate application to optical trapping.

Efficient turbo product code decoder with Build‐In SRAM‐based transpose memory

AbstractTurbo product codes (TPCs) have been widely used for bit error correction in high‐speed applications such as data storage. This letter introduces an efficient hard‐input hard‐output iterating TPC decoder module. A transpose memory utilizing static random access memory (SRAM) is integrated into the decoder to achieve a low hardware overhead. The transpose memory, based on an 8T SRAM bit‐cell, supports both horizontal (row‐wise), and vertical (column‐wise) read/write operations. It is prototyped under a 28nm high‐k/metal gate stack process with bit‐cell size of 0.582 µm2. This specialized SRAM significantly reduces the hardware overhead when compared with a register‐array‐based transpose memory without significant throughput loss. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) evaluation platform is utilized to emulate the TPC decoder module, and the maximum decoder throughput is up to 6.49 Gbps at 250 MHz.

Classical product code constructions for quantum Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes

Several notions of code products are known in quantum error correction, such as hypergraph products, homological products, lifted products, balanced products, to name a few. In this paper we introduce a new product code construction which is a natural generalization of classical product codes to quantum codes: starting from a set of component Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes, a larger CSS code is obtained where both X parity checks and Z parity checks are associated to classical product codes. We deduce several properties of product CSS codes from the properties of the component codes, including bounds to the code distance, and show that built-in redundancies in the parity checks result in so-called meta-checks which can be exploited to correct syndrome read-out errors. We then specialize to the case of single-parity-check (SPC) product codes which in the classical domain are a common choice for constructing product codes. Logical error rate simulations of a SPC 3-fold product CSS code having parameters [[512,174,8]] are shown under both a maximum likelihood decoder for the erasure channel and belief propagation decoding for depolarizing noise. We compare the results with other codes of comparable length and dimension, including a code from the family of asymptotically good Tanner codes. We observe that our reference product CSS code outperforms all the other examined codes.

Some self-dual codes and isodual codes constructed by matrix product codes

Some self-dual codes and isodual codes constructed by matrix product codes

Use of patent term extensions to restore regulatory time for medical devices in the United States

ABSTRACT Background Medical devices can seek patent term extensions (PTEs), which extend market exclusivity to compensate for delays related to clinical trials and regulatory review. Pharmaceutical companies commonly use PTEs, but their use by medical device companies has not been clear. Research Design and Methods We examined the use of PTEs by medical device companies between 1984 and 2024 using a database published in the Federal Register and a list published by the Patent and Trademark Office. Results Only 178 medical device submissions were linked to a PTE application. They were mostly concentrated in 116 product codes associated with 15 medical specialties; nearly half were associated with cardiovascular devices. Numbers increased significantly in the past decade. Successful applications restored 987 days on average. Conclusions The patent restoration opportunity appears underutilized. It is unclear whether some companies do not recognize the opportunity it promises, or whether it does not meet their needs. Different business features and marketing strategies in device versus pharmaceutical industries may decrease the usefulness of the PTE program for these types of medical products. However, the finding that a small subset of manufacturers operating in competitive markets adopted patent extension strategies more commonly suggests a significant competitive advantage when competition increases.