Unexpected Message Research Articles

Testing rational hypotheses in signaling games

We introduce a solution concept for signaling games, called Rational Hypothesis Testing Equilibrium (RHTE). Beliefs are updated via Ortoleva’s (2012) Hypothesis Testing model, allowing for conditioning on information sets off the path. Hypotheses are conjectures by the uninformed player about opponent’s strategies that rationalize sending an unexpected message. Each RHTE is a Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium, but not vice versa. RHTE features a number of desirable properties: First, beliefs are structurally consistent in the spirit of Kreps and Wilson (1982). Second, beliefs are consistent with mutual knowledge of rationality. Third, RHTE can be related to the prominent refinement concepts, including the Intuitive Criterion, strategic stability, and undefeated equilibrium. In the Spence game, RHTE restricts the admissible wages, significantly reducing the number of equilibria. Finally, we show that our equilibrium notion offers an alternative explanation for the experimental results in Brandts and Holt (1992, 1993).

Unexpected Message from the Boss: How Supervisor Work Intrusion Leads to Subordinate Work Engagement

Unexpected Message from the Boss: How Supervisor Work Intrusion Leads to Subordinate Work Engagement

Игнорирование сообщений в цифровой среде: Анализ флешмоба #неотвечатьгрубо

This article provides an analysis of the statistical data of the flash mob #неотвечатьгрубо. Its essence lies in the fact that one has to respond to a long-forgotten and ignored social media messages. According to the research 79% of the people ignored strangers. 66% of those who ignored were women, the largest number (41%) of ignored messages included messages from acquaintances who shared their plans or were interested in the life of the interlocutor, the most popular reaction to an unexpected message (53%), unfortunately, was ignoring this message. The reason for this might be the fact that the majority of the participants took a snapshot of the chats immediately after sending the message. Most likely, the addressees have not yet had time to read it.

CloudRaid: Detecting Distributed Concurrency Bugs via Log Mining and Enhancement

Cloud systems suffer from distributed concurrency bugs, which often lead to data loss and service outage. This paper presents <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CloudRaid</small> , a new automatical tool for finding distributed concurrency bugs efficiently and effectively. Distributed concurrency bugs are notoriously difficult to find as they are triggered by untimely interaction among nodes, i.e., unexpected message orderings. To detect concurrency bugs in cloud systems efficiently and effectively, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CloudRaid</small> analyzes and tests automatically only the message orderings that are likely to expose errors. Specifically, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CloudRaid</small> mines the logs from previous executions to uncover the message orderings that are feasible but inadequately tested. In addition, we also propose a log enhancing technique to introduce new logs automatically in the system being tested. These extra logs added improve further the effectiveness of <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CloudRaid</small> without introducing any noticeable performance overhead. Our log-based approach makes it well-suited for live systems. We have applied <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CloudRaid</small> to analyze six representative distributed systems: Hadoop2/Yarn, HBase, HDFS, Cassandra, Zookeeper, and Flink. <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CloudRaid</small> has succeeded in testing 60 different versions of these six systems (10 versions per system) in 35 hours, uncovering 31 concurrency bugs, including nine new bugs that have never been reported before. For these nine new bugs detected, which have all been confirmed by their original developers, three are critical and have already been fixed.

Comprehensive Multiparty Session Types

Multiparty session types (MST) are a well-established type theory that describes the interactive structure of a fixed number of components from a global point of view and type-checks the components through projection of the global type onto the participants of the session. They guarantee communicationsafety for a language of multiparty sessions (LMS), i.e., distributed, parallel components can exchange values without deadlocking and unexpected message types. Several variants of MST and LMS have been proposed to study key features of distributed and parallel programming. We observe that the population of the considered variants follows from only one ancestor, i.e., the original LMS/MST, and there are overlapping traits between features of the considered variants and the original. These hamper evolution of session types and languages and their adoption in practice. This paper addresses the following question: What are the essential features for MST and LMS, and how can these be modelled with simple constructs? To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this question has been addressed. We performed a systematic analysis of the features and the constructs in MST, LMS, and the considered variants to identify the essential features. The variants are among the most influential (according to Google Scholar) and well-established systems that cover a wide set of areas in distributed, parallel programming. We used classical techniques of formal models such as BNF, structural congruence, small step operational semantics and typing judgments to build our language and type system. Lastly, the coherence of operational semantics and type system is proven by induction. This paper proposes a set of essential features, a language of structured interactions and a type theory of comprehensive multiparty session types, including global types and type system. The analysis removes overlapping features and captures the shared traits, thereby introducing the essential features. The constructs of the language are simple and fundamental, based on the $\lambda$ and $\pi$ calculi. Analogously, our global types reflect what is omitted and introduced in the language. Our system covers all the features of the original and variants, with a better ratio of the number of language and type constructs over the number of covered features. The features of the original, variants, and our system along with the number of constructs in the respective language and global types to model them are presented through a table. The syntax, operational semantics, meta-theory and type system of our system are given. We modelled all the motivating examples of the variants in our model, describing the reduction and typing steps. The work discusses how new features, in particular the non-essential ones (formerly excluded) and advanced ones can be either modelled atop the essential ones or added with minimal efforts, i.e. without modifying the existing ones. The fundamental properties of typed processes such as subject reduction, communication safety, and progress are established.

A messy state of the union

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol supports various authentication modes, key exchange methods, and protocol extensions. Confusingly, each combination may prescribe a different message sequence between the client and the server, and thus a key challenge for TLS implementations is to define a composite state machine that correctly handles these combinations. If the state machine is too restrictive, the implementation may fail to interoperate with others; if it is too liberal, it may allow unexpected message sequences that break the security of the protocol. We systematically test popular TLS implementations and find unexpected transitions in many of their state machines that have stayed hidden for years. We show how some of these flaws lead to critical security vulnerabilities, such as FREAK. While testing can help find such bugs, formal verification can prevent them entirely. To this end, we implement and formally verify a new composite state machine for OpenSSL, a popular TLS library.

Child sexual abuse in early-childhood care and education settings

When the author was adviser to the Australian Minister for Education for writing the national Safe Schools Framework (2003), meetings were held with early-childhood care and education administrators from all state, Catholic and independent sectors. Their unexpected message was that educators were facing new problems, those of child sexual abuse in early-childhood settings including pupils forcing younger children to provide oral sex. In January 2013, the South Australian Minister for Education lost her position following well-publicised parental anger that the Education Department had concealed the sexual abuse of children in early-childhood centres and schools. Parental outrage led to a Royal Commission and ‘Report of Independent Education Inquiry’ (2013) conducted by former Justice Bruce Debelle QC. Public dissatisfaction with some aspects of the Commission led further to a Parliamentary Select Committee Inquiry (February 2014) ‘Matters Relating to the Independent Education Inquiry’1

Session-Based Programming for Parallel Algorithms: Expressiveness and Performance

This paper investigates session programming and typing of benchmark examples to compare productivity, safety and performance with other communications programming languages. Parallel algorithms are used to examine the above aspects due to their extensive use of message passing for interaction, and their increasing prominence in algorithmic research with the rising availability of hardware resources such as multicore machines and clusters. We contribute new benchmark results for SJ, an extension of Java for type-safe, binary session programming, against MPJ Express, a Java messaging system based on the MPI standard. In conclusion, we observe that (1) despite rich libraries and functionality, MPI remains a low-level API, and can suffer from commonly perceived disadvantages of explicit message passing such as deadlocks and unexpected message types, and (2) the benefits of high-level session abstraction, which has significant impact on program structure to improve readability and reliability, and session type-safety can greatly facilitate the task of communications programming whilst retaining competitive performance.

Original Sin: A Flawed Inheritance

The doctrine of original sin has left its negative mark not only on theology, but according to Nietzsche, on Western civilisation as a whole. Augustine generally takes the blame for this sombre tradition, not least because of his association of procreation with the transmission of original sin. Despite its apparent endorsement of pessimism, does the doctrine nonetheless conceal an unexpected message of hope?

Credible Proposals in Communication Games

We present a nonequilibrium theory for simple communication games and use this theory to construct a new way of examining the problem of equilibrium selection in signaling and communication games. Our approach differs from the current literature in that the beliefs of the receiver after receiving an unexpected message are independent of the equilibrium payoffs. This property makes our approach immune to criticisms of conventional refinements, such as the Stiglitz critique.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C72.

Panel Faults Research Consent Process

A presidential panel established to look into allegations of unethical studies of radiation effects during the Cold War era found plenty to criticize. For researchers conducting research on humans today, it carried an unexpected message: Current procedures for approving studies and gaining informed consent are too lax.

Meaning and Credibility in Cheap-Talk Games

I define neologism-proofness, a refinement of perfect Bayesian equilibrium in cheap-talk games. It applies when players have a preexisting common language, so that an unexpected message′s literal meaning is clear, and only credibility restricts communication. I show that certain implausible equilibria are not neologism-proof; in some games, no equilibrium is. Journal of Economic Literature classification numbers: D83 D82 C73.

We Interrupt This Program. Attention for Television Sequences.

This experiment assesses the variable amounts of attention that are required for a viewer to process two kinds of interruptions common to television: the shift from one message to a different, unexpected message and the reference to previously presented material that follows an interruption. Respondents viewed 24 television sequences composed of three segments: an initial segment drawn from one program, an interrupt segment drawn from a second program, and a reorient segment that continued the presentation from the first program. Initial and interrupt segment lengths were either 10 seconds or 30 seconds in length to produce a factorial combination of four message sequences. Attention to these interruptions was measured using reaction times to audio tones located 1 and 6 seconds after a shift. More attention was required to view the interrupt segments following 30-second initial sequences, especially at the 6-second tone location. For the reorient segments, sequences containing 30-second initial segments required more attention, as did 30-second interrupt segments. These results are interpreted in terms of limited capacity and attentional inertia models of attention.