text:
Nicho Plowman exudes a near elemental wisdom. Like spiritual seekers throughout history, the Australian meditation teacher spent years wandering, experimenting, exploring both inner-self and outer-world in search of the mysterious place where the dual aspects of existence merge. Though we doubt Nicho would cop to it, seems like he's found the exact place.
CONVICTS' fearless leader, Peter "Dad" Maiden, recently sat down with Nicho in Chinatown. Serene amongst the pigeons and chaos, Nicho spat high-grade wisdom re:the self-service of our current political moment, the gnarls of life in a stressful world, and the source of world religion.
Morning, I'm Pete from Convicts, and I'm here with Nicho Plowman. How's New York treating you?
It's good, it's always good to get back. It's the place where so much happens, it's the center of the world for a lot of people. You always think of the idea that if you get things happening in New York you can get them to happen anywhere.
What is it that makes New York such a unique place?
It's an energy. I came here first in my twenties, I was working for a US television company and – whatever age you are – there's something going on.
So you're based in Paris now. How did you get there?
I was born in Sydney, I have two brothers. I went to boarding school at a young age, went to school in Sydney, then when I left school I took off and travelled, left Sydney for a few years then went back to university and didn't do much there. I had a lot of fun, then after that I took off again. I was in Hong Kong for some time, working for ESPN and then I travelled after that and back to Australia in my early 30's. I got married when I was thirty-two, I have two daughters and for the last few years I've been living in Paris. It's been a life of lots of different places. Sydney, London, Melbourne, Hong Kong, here, Paris.
What's drawn you to travel?
It's not so much the idea of travel. To use the word "charm", that often pops up in the meditation world – I think I'm just open minded about things that seem interesting or charming to me. If someone says, "let's take off and live in Paris" I'll say, "fantastic, let's do it."
How did you get into the meditation world?
I was always looking for something to alleviate stress or anxiety. That started for me at about thirty. Sitting here, in Chinatown, watching people do Tai Chi – I tried that for a while. In all seriousness, I've tried different types of yoga and meditation since the age of thirty. I'd also go to those retreats in Australia and elsewhere, where they featured beautiful food, really nice massages, and for about seven to ten days you feel fantastic. But when you get back to your real life, a month later, you're back to your old patterns of behavior, you're drinking again, eating bad food. Regardless of what I tried, nothing was maintainable. So I guess up until a point, six years ago now, when I learned the meditation practice that I now teach called "Vedic Meditation", meditation was just not that simple to me.
How did you develop the discipline to stick with your practice?
To me, discipline may be a word that suggests more effort than is required if you have a regular meditation practice. If you meditate once and you think about how you feel for that one hour after you've meditated, it is unquestionable that you feel better. You can either get to the afternoon and be like "Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and have a coffee or a beer," that's just not discipline, that's just deciding that you can't be bothered and that you're gonna put it off till tomorrow. That's laziness. But once you've meditated once, twice, for a week, a month, then it's no longer discipline it's second nature. For me now meditation is second nature. I don't think about it when I do it because it's become a way of life.
How does meditation alleviate your stress? Can you talk generally about stress a bit?
Stress is a byproduct of an approach to life. Stress is a really valid and powerful human condition. When we have to engage to go and do something, our body turns on. Just think, it's twenty thousand years ago and I'm lying by a fire and a bear's coming at me. I want my body to be stressed because it's gonna put me into fight mode or it will put me into flight mode. It's an incredibly physiological reaction.
Think about what a female body needs to do to give birth, it says "let's take everything on and push". So our most fundamental, monumental human experience is birth and that is a body going through a full engagement.We don't turn around and say 'hey let's avoid stress.' It's more, 'hey if I do get stressed, how do I bounce back?' Meditation is one of the ways we can do that.
Can you talk a bit about Vedic meditation specifically?
Vedic meditation is a traditional form of meditation that dates back thousands of years. It's a mantra-based practice that's practiced for twenty minutes, twice a day. There is an idea that humanity has lost its connection with a state of consciousness that's very simple and very dynamic. We're not sitting there thinking, we are not sitting there stressing, we're not sitting there worrying, we're sitting there with our eyes closed with the body at rest, releasing stress. Vedic meditation gives us the ability to access that other state of consciousness.
Back-stepping a bit to stress, but on a larger scale. Do you think macro-levels of stress are causing all this turmoil in the world right now?
Self preservation is what's happening in the world, I think. Look what happened in Britain, what happened in the US. There's a self-serving movement that probably comes from fear and stress. It says, I want to look after my own so I'm going to turn inward. I can't worry about the world because I've got to pay my rent. In some ways that's almost a flight mode mentality.
So what's to be done about it?
We have to remember that we react to the drama. Even while we might be sitting around thinking 'Geez the world is looking a bit challenged', sitting here in this park this morning, there is creativity. Creativity is dominant right here. I can look at the trees, I can look at the people, I can look at children, the whole thing is creatively dominant. But what we're thinking about is a climate accord that might be about to get ripped up because that's what's in the newspaper.
How do you go about turning people onto meditation?
Ultimately, I'm never going to talk to someone about meditation unless they ask me. Because there is the idea that advice offered is never often very welcomed. However, once someone has asked me about meditation, I will talk to them about what I think will relate to them. I will talk to them about insomnia or anxiety or stress and emotions but it will always come back around to something that they can relate to.
How does that relatability translate to your teaching method overall?
I have found that the process is better served in New York holding a meditation course in a nice space in SoHo, because that's what people can relate to. They will not relate to me if I shave my head, put on robes, grow a beard and sit somewhere un-accessible. That's not relatable. And then there is an exchange of value. People support my ability to engage and in return they take away meditation practices that you will have for life. In my experience, most people never regret the decision.
What do you think about the mass popularity of the mindfulness movement?
So now, I think we have seen the evolution of two types of Mindfulness. The first is the attempt to bring meditation to the masses faster and it has been bottled up in this word called Mindfulness – a repackaged form of the traditional meditation that gets dropped into ten minute bite-sized things you listen to in your headphones. The busy guy and busy girl can just sit there and take a little bit of time out of their hectic day and everything will be fine. The second is the more traditional Mindfulness, which has lasted alongside other original forms of meditation. They've all ebbed and flowed, we've seen other things come and go, but they're still here. We don't yet know what the impact of this existing meditation movement may have on the future because we're also judging things on a very, very limited time frame. We're playing a really really long game on a planet that has been around for a long long time.
Could mindfulness be a sort of gateway drug to deeper meditative practice?
I think the intention of Mindfulness is really nice start and, if taken deeper with proper instruction, will produce transformative results. I own a meditation app with my brother Christopher called Insight Timer – we have over two million meditators now and Mindfulness is a really lovely part of the mix. People come along, listen to a guided meditation on Insight, or maybe they check out an app like Headspace. You have to start somewhere, and then after a month they'll be like, "I think there's more to this" and that will lead them on a journey to a teacher, or a traditional practice and then maybe down the funnel – boom, they're having a transitional meditation experience and a life-changing conscious shift.
We're gonna end on a deep one. What's the relationship between meditation and religion?
If we go back to the source of all religions, to the people who founded those religions, they would probably have said 'Go beyond thought.' Transcend. Access the God within. Christianity started with a simple message, which is that "within us, is God" as its religious connotation. Think about what Jesus said. His message was "I am the son of God" and that got him crucified, because of course that ran against all the rules of the time that people wanted to believe. He died for that. Now, thousands of years later it feels like some of these traditional messages have been lost. In America, it has been explained to me that there are hundreds of different, registered forms of Christianity in this country alone. In Buddhism, Buddha first learned to go beyond thought. He learned to transcend. So yes, the branches of the true religion have one core base: the one source, the one I, "I am that."
Boom. Right on Nicho and thanks. Really enjoyed this.


text:
Our scheduled training courses are available to employees from any organisation, and are perfect when you want to train up to four staff. They are run regularly and provide effective training allowing staff to network with peers from different industries. We can also deliver training on your site.
Our workshops are delivered by trainers and consultants who are knowledgeable in the subject matter and skilled in getting their knowledge across. They vary from one day introductory courses through to multi-part courses which may be 16 days in duration. Some of our workshops lead to examinations and nationally recognised certificates or accreditation.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Facial Plastic Surgery & Cosmetic Anti-Aging Resources
About Us
Contact Us
RSS Feeds
Plastic Surgery
Anti-Aging Treatments
Chemical Peel
Fraxel Laser Treatments
Laser Skin Resurfacing
Blepharoplasty (Eyelid Surgery)
Browlift (Forehead Lift)
Cheek Augmentation
Chemical Peel
Chin Implants
Dermal Fillers (Injectables)
Eyelid Surgery (Blepharoplasty)
Facelift (Rhytidectomy)
Fraxel Laser Treatments
Laser Skin Resurfacing
Liquid Facelift
Nose Surgery (Rhinoplasty & Septoplasty)
Other Plastic Surgery Procedures
Find a Plastic
United States
Recommend Your Plastic Surgeon
Before &
After Photos
Surgeons' Facial Plastic Surgery Photos
Other Plastic Surgery Photos
News &
Terri's Nose Surgery
Visitors' Stories
Submit Your Story
Find a Plastic Surgeon
Plastic Surgery Financing Information
Products &
CO - Dermabrasion Colorado Surgeons
plastic surgery procedures
Colorado Dermabrasion Research Info:
This page was created to offer supplemental information to people from Colorado who are researching dermabrasion procedure. Regardless of where you live, it is important to do your dermabrasion homework up front. It can save you both in terms of cost and in terms of your time.
Here at FaceForum, we have compiled some general information on choosing a dermabrasion surgeon that applies regardless of which state you live in, as well as specific information for each US State. If you haven't read through the
"General Considerations for Choosing Your Dermabrasion Surgeon"
, then please do so.
Every state has an organization which is responsible for medical licensure and discipline. In Colorado, it's the Colorado Board of Medical Examiners which is located in Denver. The Colorado Board operates a website at
FaceForum has compiled some contact information and some links that dermabrasion patients from Colorado may find helpful.
Contact Information:
Colorado Board of Medical Examiners
1560 Broadway
Suite 1300
Denver, CO 80202-5140
Tel: (303) 894-7690 / Fax:(303) 894-7692
Helpful links for researching the credentials of Colorado surgeons who perform the dermabrasion procedure:
Colorado Medical License Verification
Medical Examiner's Record of Disciplinary Actions
We do our best to keep this information up to date, but states sometimes make changes to their websites. If you find that any of our information is incorrect or has been updated, please be so kind as to send us an e-mail. If you can provide us with the correct information, that would be very helpful.
[email protected]
State by State Resources for Dermabrasion Patients:
AK - Dermabrasion Alaska Surgeons
AL - Dermabrasion Alabama Surgeons
AR - Dermabrasion Arkansas Surgeons
AZ - Dermabrasion Arizona Surgeons
CA - Dermabrasion California Surgeons
CO - Dermabrasion Colorado Surgeons
CT - Dermabrasion Connecticut Surgeons
DC - Dermabrasion Washington DC Surgeons
DE - Dermabrasion Delaware Surgeons
FL - Dermabrasion Florida Surgeons
GA - Dermabrasion Georgia Surgeons
HI - Dermabrasion Hawaii Surgeons
IA - Dermabrasion Iowa Surgeons
ID - Dermabrasion Idaho Surgeons
IL - Dermabrasion Illinois Surgeons
IN - Dermabrasion Indiana Surgeons
KS - Dermabrasion Kansas Surgeons
KY - Dermabrasion Kentucky Surgeons
LA - Dermabrasion Louisiana Surgeons
MA - Dermabrasion Massachusetts Surgeons
MD - Dermabrasion Maryland Surgeons
ME - Dermabrasion Maine Surgeons
MI - Dermabrasion Michigan Surgeons
MN - Dermabrasion Minnesota Surgeons
MO - Dermabrasion Missouri Surgeons
MS - Dermabrasion Mississippi Surgeons
MT - Dermabrasion Montana Surgeons
NC - Dermabrasion North Carolina Surgeons
ND - Dermabrasion North Dakota Surgeons
NE - Dermabrasion Nebraska Surgeons
NH - Dermabrasion New Hampshire Surgeons
NJ - Dermabrasion New Jersey Surgeons
NM - Dermabrasion New Mexico Surgeons
NV - Dermabrasion Nevada Surgeons
NY - Dermabrasion New York Surgeons
OH - Dermabrasion Ohio Surgeons
OK - Dermabrasion Oklahoma Surgeons
OR - Dermabrasion Oregon Surgeons
PA - Dermabrasion Pennsylvania Surgeons
RI - Dermabrasion Rhode Island Surgeons
SC - Dermabrasion South Carolina Surgeons
SD - Dermabrasion South Dakota Surgeons
TN - Dermabrasion Tennessee Surgeons
TX - Dermabrasion Texas Surgeons
UT - Dermabrasion Utah Surgeons
VA - Dermabrasion Virginia Surgeons
VT - Dermabrasion Vermont Surgeons
WA - Dermabrasion Washington Surgeons
WI - Dermabrasion Wisconsin Surgeons
WV - Dermabrasion West Virginia Surgeons
WY - Dermabrasion Wyoming Surgeons
FaceForum Featured Practices
Skin M.D. and Beyond
Plano , Texas (TX) Facial Cosmetic Surgery by
Skin M.D. and Beyond
Dr. Fiona Wright , Dr. Tim Wright Board Certified Plastic Surgeons
Paul Silverstein, M.D., F.A.C.S.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (OK) Facial Cosmetic Surgery by
Paul Silverstein, M.D., F.A.C.S.
Dr. Paul Silverstein Board Certified Plastic Surgeon
Saltz Plastic Surgery
Park City , Utah (UT), Salt Lake City , Utah (UT) Facial Cosmetic Surgery by
Saltz Plastic Surgery
Dr. Renato Saltz Board Certified Plastic Surgeon
Site Map
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Contact Us
©1999-2012 Advice Media


text:
Mary's Relatives Elizabeth & Zechariah and Their Baby
Having been told she was going to have a baby, Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth. She was also having a baby and found out about in an unusual way.
The Story in the Bible
In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren; and they were both well along in years.
Once when Zechariah's division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: 'Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth. Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous--to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.'
Zechariah asked the angel, 'How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.'
The angel answered, 'I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time.'
Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering why he stayed so long in the temple. When he came out, he could not speak to them. They realised he had seen a vision in the temple, for he kept making signs to them but remained unable to speak. When his time of service was completed, he returned home. After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion. 'The Lord has done this for me,' she said. 'In these days he has shown his favour and taken away my disgrace among the people.'
Luke 1:5-25
At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!'
And Mary said: 'My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me--holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers.'
Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months and then returned home.
When it was time for Elizabeth to have her baby, she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy. On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him after his father Zechariah, but his mother spoke up and said, 'No! He is to be called John.' They said to her, 'There is no one among your relatives who has that name.' Then they made signs to his father, to find out what he would like to name the child. He asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone's astonishment he wrote, 'His name is John.'
Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue was loosed, and he began to speak, praising God. The neighbors were all filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things. Everyone who heard this wondered about it, asking, 'What then is this child going to be?' For the Lord's hand was with him.
His father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied: 'Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us-- to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham: to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.'
And the child grew and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the desert until he appeared publicly to Israel.
Luke 1: 39-80
The History behind an Elizabeth and Zechariah in the Christmas Story
Elizabeth was Mary's cousin and a descendant of the Priest families of Israel and her father was a temple priest. Zechariah was also a temple priest. This may have been because he was married to the daughter of a priest rather than coming from a family of priests. He was thought of as a very holy and kind man, although because he came from a small village some priests though of him as a bit of a 'village hick'. Both Zechariah and Elizabeth would have been over 60 when this story took place, because people didn't think you could have children after the age of 60. Not having any children was a big social problem and sometimes seen as a neglect of a Priest's religious duty!
Zechariah was not a very important priest in the temple and this was the first time that he had the very important job of sprinkling incense on the altar to burn it. At this place in the Jewish service only Zechariah, as the incense priest, would have been in this part of the temple. His role was to pour the incense onto the golden altar and then bow in worship to God and then leave that part of the temple and say the final prayer of the service. Zechariah poured the incense on to the altar but before he could bow and leave, an angel appeared by the altar. In all the history of the Jewish religion, an angel had never appeared to someone in that part of the temple. The angel was Gabriel, the same angel that had visited Mary. If you'd like to know more about the angel Gabriel and his role as God's chief messenger, go to the section on whychristmas?com's sister site whyangels?com about Gabriel.
The name John (Jehochanan or Jochanan) means 'The Lord is Gracious'. He was to be called this because God had been kind to Elizabeth and Zechariah, giving them a child. Gabriel's words to Zechariah meant that when John was a man, he would tell the people about Jesus. Zechariah didn't really believe the angel and asked him to prove this to him, so Gabriel made Zechariah dumb, until he believed what the angel had said to him.
The other priests, waiting outside that part of the temple, would have wondered what was happening because Zechariah had taken much longer than he should have done to pour the incense. When he came out, they knew something had happened because he couldn't speak the final prayer.
Elizabeth did become pregnant as the angel had told Zechariah. She stayed in hiding for the first five months, because people might not have believed that she could become pregnant.
The words that Elizabeth spoke to Mary when they met, show that Elizabeth knew that Mary had a very important baby growing inside her; and that her baby would also have something to do with Mary's baby. The words that Mary said in reply are known as the 'Magnificat' and are a 'thank you' and worship prayer to God. When Mary left Elizabeth and Zechariah and went home to Nazareth, Elizabeth would have been about nine months pregnant and Mary would have been about three months pregnant. Mary may have gone home then because she did not want to get involved with the publicity of John's birth.
So it would not have been long after this that Elizabeth did give birth to John. When it was time to name the baby, it was natural for the family to think that it would be called Zechariah after his father, as this was normally how baby boys were named. But Elizabeth knew that he had to be called John. The family would have doubted this, so they asked the still dumb Zechariah what he should be called. As soon as he wrote down John, as the angel had said, he could speak again.
The prayer that Zechariah said then was the same one that he should have said when he came out of the temple but was unable to say. Now Zechariah could see what the words really meant. Christians believe these words are about Jesus.
There is an excellent article on the dating of Christmas based on the dates of Zechariah's experience, on the blog of theologian, Ian Paul.


text:
CROI 2014: Short 6-Week Oral Treatment Works for Most Hepatitis C Patients
- Details
- Category: Experimental HCV Drugs
- Published on Tuesday, 04 March 2014 00:00
- Written by Liz Highleyman
Interferon- and ribavirin-free treatment using sofosbuvir, ledipasvir, and a third drug for as little as 6 weeks can cure a majority of previously untreated people with genotype 1 hepatitis C, including those with traditional predictors of poor response, according to results from the SYNERGY trial presented at the 21st Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2014) this week in Boston.
The old standard-of-care hepatitis C treatment using pegylated interferon plus ribavirin lasts 12 to 24 weeks, requires weekly injections, causes difficult side effects, and fails to cure many patients. The advent of direct-acting antiviral agents (DAAs) now allows for interferon-free, all-oral treatment that is better tolerated and has higher sustained response rates.
While most clinical trials of next-generation hepatitis C drugs are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is conducting parallel studies in underserved populations, looking for simple, well-tolerated treatments for people prone to difficulties with poor adherence and side effects. Many people with hepatitis C belong to marginalized groups that have limited access to health care. In addition, many have a history of injection drug use, and people in recovery are often hesitant to undergo treatment that involves needles
In the NIAID SYNERGY study, Anita Kohlifrom the National Institutes of Health and colleagues evaluated brief interferon- and ribavirin-free oral DAA regimens using a fixed-dose coformulation of Gilead Science's recently approved HCV polymerase inhibitor sofosbuvir (Sovaldi, formerly GS-7977) and NS5A inhibitor ledipasvir (formerly GS-5885).
Participants were randomly assigned to receive either dual therapy with sofosbuvir/ledipasvir alone for 12 weeks, or the coformulation plus a third direct-acting drug -- either the non-nucleoside HCV polymerase inhibitor GS-9669 or the HCV protease inhibitor GS-9451 -- for six weeks.
The previous NIAID SPARE study showed that 24 weeks of sofosbuvir plus weight-based or low-dose ribavirin (used in an effort to reduce anemia) was generally safe and well tolerated, with 24-week post-treatment sustained virological response (SVR24) rates of 68% and 48%, respectively. But recent trials have shown much higher cure rates with combinations of DAAs that target different steps of the HCV lifecycle.
SYNERGY enrolled 60 mostly low-income chronic hepatitis C patients in Washington, DC. Most had factors traditionally associated with poor treatment response: about 70% were men, around 90% were African-American, about 85% had unfavorable non-CC IL28B gene variants, and 70% had hard-to-treat HCV subtype 1a. About one-quarter had advanced liver fibrosis or cirrhosis (stage F3-F4), but people with cirrhosis were excluded from the six-week arms. People with hepatitis B or HIV coinfection were excluded.
"We believe this population is really reflective of the hepatitis C population in the U.S., which historically has been a difficult-to-treat population," Kohli said.Kohli reported 12-week post-treatment sustained virological response (SVR12) rates at CROI, following presentation of SVR4 rates at last year's AASLD Liver Meeting. Though relapse sometimes still occurs after SVR4, SVR12 is considered a cure.
- HCV viral load declined rapidly, yielding end-of-treatment response rates of 100% in all arms.
- SVR4 and SVR12 rates were the same:
o 100% for patients taking sofosbuvir/ledipasvir alone;
o 95% for those who took sofosbuvir/ledipasvir with GS-9669;
o 100% for those who took sofosbuvir/ledipasvir plus GS-9451.
- 1 patient in the GS-9669 arm relapsed after stopping therapy.
- 90%, 100%, and 95% of patients in the 3 arms, respectively, experienced alanine aminotransferase (ALT) normalization by day 14.
- All regimens were generally safe and well-tolerated.
- There were no serious adverse events or study discontinuations related to study drugs.
- The most common side effects were headache, fatigue, and diarrhea, the latter occurring more often in the arm using GS-9669.
"Hepatitis C can be successfully and safely treated in 6 weeks using 3 direct acting agents with different mechanisms of action," the researchers concluded. "This short duration, simple therapy for HCV may prove relevant for the global elimination of hepatitis C, where uncomplicated, well-tolerated therapy is required to ensure adherence and minimize health care expenditures."
Kohi explained that SYNERGY was designed as an 8-arm trial. Future arms will enroll people with cirrhosis to receive sofosbuvir/ledipasvir plus GS-9451. Researchers will also look at an even shorter triple regimen taken for only 4 weeks.
Session co-moderator Jürgen Rockstroh said that most treatment failures seen in oral DAA combination trials have been related to lack of adherence, which brief therapy could improve. But he cautioned that adding a third drug could increase the cost of treatment, even if it is taken for a shorter period.
A Kohli, Z Sims, A Nelson, et al. Combination Oral Hepatitis C Antiviral Therapy for 6 or 12 Weeks: Final Results of the SYNERGY Trial. 21st Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2014). Boston, March 3-6, 2014. Abstract 27LB.


text:
Bonham's Entertainment AuctionAdd to Cart Download
© Licensed to London News Pictures. 10/12/2012. London, UK. A Bonham's employee adjusts the hat of a 'Captain Brown' puppet (est. GB£12,500-13,500) from the 1960's TV series 'Captain Scarlet' t an auction press view in Knightsbridge, London, today (10/12/12). The entertainment memorabilia auction, set to take place at Bonham's Knightsbridge auction house on the 12th of December, features props and costumes from film and TV as well as important Beatles pieces. Photo credit: Matt Cetti-Roberts/LNP
- Filename
- Copyright
- ©under licence to London News Pictures. +44 (0)208 354 4272
- Image Size
- 3000x2000 / 1.1MB
- Contained in galleries


text:
Market Highlights
The global Heat shields market is expected to grow at a CAGR of about 5% during the forecast period, 2017 to 2022.
Commenting on the report, an analyst from Market Research Future (MRFR)'s team said: Rapid growth in automotive industry with the growing number of temperature sensitive components in the modern vehicle, which ultimately increases the demand of heat shield market. Heat shields are commonly used to protect parts of a device from heat generated by its energy source. It may attach at top of the vehicle or in the car.
Major Key Players
- Morgan Advanced Materials (U.K.),
- Dana Holding Corporation (U.S.),
- Federal Mogul Holding Corporation (U.S.),
- Lydall Inc. (U.S.),
- UGN Inc. (U.S.),
- ThermoTec Automotive (U.S.),
- Zircotec (U.K.)
- Autoneum Holdings AG (Switzerland),
- Elringklinger AG (Germany),
- Progress-Werk Oberkirch AG (Germany),
Request a Sample Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2012
Intended Audience
- Heat Shield manufacturers
- Distributer & Supplier companies
- End Users
- consultants and Investment bankers
- Government as well as Independent Regulatory Authorities
Due to raising the customer focus on safety & luxury vehicles as well as rapid growth in automotive sector and growing the adoption of temperature sensitive components driving the Heat shields market. Increasing rate of industrialization & urbanization in countries like China, Japan and India, increases the demand of commercial as well as passenger vehicles, that ultimately driving the growth of heat shield market. On the basis of product, exhaust heat shield insulation is dominants the product segment because exhaust heat shields can stop upto 60% of radiant heat from the exhaust system.
Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 30 market data tables and figures spread over 100 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on "Heat Shield Market Research Report – Global Forecast to 2022".
Factors such as minimal cooling air flow, tightly packed components and others resulted in high temperature in the engine compartment and across the exhaust system. Lot of countries increasing their spending on defense sector which increase the consumption of firearms also fueling the growth of this market. Raising the safety concern among the consumers also fueling the growth of heat shield market. However, fluctuating cost of raw materials may hamper the growth of heat shield market.
On the Basis of material, the market can be segmented into metallic, and non-metallic. Non-metallic heat shield dominates the material segment of heat shield market. These heat shields are made up of carbon-fiber reinforced plastics, ceramics, silica fibers, silicon carbide and others. It is expected to show significant growth during the forecast because of its good thermal capabilities.
On the basis of product, heat shield market is segmented as Exhaust Heat Shield Insulation, Turbo heat shield, Spark plug boot heat shield, Thermal & Heat shield sleeving, Fire arm heat shield and others. Exhaust heat shield insulation is dominants the product segment because exhaust heat shields can stop upto 60% of radiant heat from the exhaust system. Exhaust heat shield insulation accounts over 18% share of total revenue generated in 2016.
On basis of region, heat shield market is segmented as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa. Asia-Pacific region is a major shareholder of the Heat shields market followed by North America. Increasing rate of industrialization & urbanization with increasing demand of commercial and passenger vehicles as well as increasing the disposable income among the individuals ultimately increases the demand of luxury vehicles.
Access Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/heat-shield-market
Scope of the report
This study provides an overview of the Heat shields industry, tracking market segments across the categorized five geographic regions. The report provides a six-year forecast for the market size in terms of value for North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and South America. The scope of the study segments the Heat shields market based on Material, Product, & End User.
Browse Related Report
Vehicle camera Market Information Report by Vehicle Type (Commercial Vehicle & Passenger Vehicle), by Camera Type ( Front View, Rear View, Front & Rear View and Interior Cam), by Technology (Night Vision Recording, Accident Sensor, Built-in GPS and others) and by Region – Global Forecast to 2022
About Market Research Future:
At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.
MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.
In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.
Akash Anand,
Market Research Future
+1 646 845 9312
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Media Contact
Company Name: Market Research Future
Contact Person: Akash Anand
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Phone: +1 646 845 9312
Address:Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar, Pune – 411028 Maharashtra, India
City: Pune
State: Maharashtra
Country: India
Website: https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/heat-shield-market


text:
The advent of widely available digital computers completely changed the possibility horizon for those who wished to simulate real-world and theoretical problems. Instead of using analytical mathematics with all its inherent simplifications people were able to use credible approximations and get agreeable results within reasonable time-scales. One class of models called Cellular Automaton (CA) models are particularly interesting because they operate by the repeated application of an apparently simple set of rules and can appear to deliver results which are incredibly close to what is observed in nature. Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame did a pretty good job of cleaning up the entire subject in one-dimension. Conway's Game of Life is the classic example of a two-dimensional CA. Of course, there is still the question of whether these are real or just like a murmuration of starlings at dusk.
TLM (Transmission Line Matrix) is a set of transition rules that can be thought of as an automaton modelling scheme, but it is more than that, because unlike most CAs these rules are firmly grounded in the laws of electromagnetics. The Theory of TLM and some simple Implemenation of TLM can be accessed in my books.


text:
Stand at the Cross Roads and look,ask what the Good way is and walk in it.Jer. 6:16
10/26/2020 - 10/31/2020
12:00 am
It has been a wonderful experience for me. I was blessed by the retreat center, the food, the excellent bathrooms, mattresses and living conditions.
Cross Roads is a 501(c)3 organization and is not affiliated with any denomination or other group.


text:
The Numbers Confirm 2014's Booty Boom
The 2014 U.S. plastic surgery statistics have arrived. So, was it really
"The Year of Booty," as many predicted?
It certainly was!The numbers from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons show that butt procedures were among the fastest-growing cosmetic surgeries in 2014:
* Buttock augmentation with fat grafting (11,505 procedures, up 15 percent in 2014)
* Buttock implants (1,863 procedures, up 98 percent in 2014)
* Buttock lift (3,505 procedures, up 44 percent in 2014)
The reasons are both external — admiring popular celebrity butts like Kim Kardashian's — and instinctual, as scientists explain the genetic reasons for the attraction.
New York City Brazilian butt lift surgery expert
Dr. Matthew Schulman performs six to eight butt augmentations a week.
Dr. Schulman takes unwanted fat from other areas of your body and processes it to extract the best fat cells to enhance your backside. Superior to implants, this method is safer, more natural looking and longer lasting — the results will last forever.
Dr. Schulman refined the traditional Brazilian butt lift, creating his exclusive SCOOP Lift® procedure, which combines the best aspects of a number of different buttock contouring techniques.
View our before-and-after Brazilian butt lift photos to see examples of Dr. Schulman's clients.
For a personal consultation to find out how you can use your own fat to safely enhance your buttocks, contact Matthew Schulman Plastic Surgery online or call 212-289-1851.


text:
First Tipperary Irish Derby - 100 years ago
Sunday next sees the running of the one hundred and forty fifth Irish Derby at the Curragh. Recently an interesting tidbit surfaced concerning 1911 renewal and its Cashel connection.
For the first time in the fifty-odd years of its existence, the 1911 Irish Derby was borne off by a Tipperary team with their ugly duckling Shanballymore.
Bred and owned by John Kelly of Chadville, Cappawhite, Co. Tipperary, although twice a winner from four starts as a two-year-old from John Dwyer's country stable in Commons, (Ryan O'Connors) near Cashel, Shanballymore was given little chance against the sleek Curragh contenders not to mention the English challenger trained by the legendary Atty Persses ( trainer of the Tetrarch) .
Shanballymore returned to a great ovation from the large Tipperary contingent, who had travelled up to the Curragh to support their local champion.
After the race the bizarre origins of the winner began to come to light. His sire, Popoff, was an own-brother to the good steeplechaser Romanoff. Popoff was given away as a yearling, owing to his having a dropped hip.
Sold to a short-sighted farmer for £25, he was later raffled for 6d. tickets, played for in a card game as a thirty-shilling stake and exchanged for a barrel of porter! He was finally owned by Charles Maxwell of Scarrough, Annacarty.
Shanballymore's dam, Calyce, was purchased by John Kelly for £6. Tipperary bookmaker, Bryan O'Donnell, offered Kelly 100 to 1 against Shanballymore one day winning the Derby. Kelly accepted his offer ... Partly for this reason Kelly refused several attractive offers for his colt prior to the Derby.
For John Kelly, a farmer from Cappawhite, the 1911 Derby was a fairytale come true, while for John Dwyer, the small-time trainer from the shores of Loughfedora (Lake of the Weaver), Cahir Road, Cashel, it provided the highlight of a lifetime's devotion to racing.
John Doyle, who rode Shanballymore, was one of a family of celebrated Irish jockeys, He was winning his second consecutive Irish Derby. In later years he had no less than five sons all riding as jockeys, one became a trainer in the North of England another Jimmy, with his race riding behind him became a work rider with Vincent O'Brien, in Ballydoyle, he live for some years near the Rock and later in Boherclough Street. In December 1911 Doyle purchased Rossmore Lodge for £1300, where he trained successfully for many years.
In more recent years Paddy (Darkie) Prendergast has upheld the tradition of this famous establishment.


text:
Eighth Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011)
Powered by
Conference Publishing Consulting
Eighth Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011)
May 21–22, 2011
Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA
MSR 2011 – Proceedings
Title Page
Welcome to MSR 2011, the Eighth International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, held May 21-22 in Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii, and co-located with the 2011 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011).
Fantasy, Farms, and Freemium: What Game Data Mining Teaches Us About Retention, Conversion, and Virality (Keynote Abstract)
Jim Whitehead
(UC Santa Cruz, USA)
In December of 2010, the new game CityVille achieved 6 million daily active users in just 8 days. Clearly the success of CityVille owes something to the fun gameplay experience it provides. That said, it was far from the best game released in 2010. Why did it grow so fast? In this talk the key factors behind the dramatic success of social network games are explained. Social network games build word-of-mouth player acquisition directly into the gameplay experience via friend invitations and game mechanics that require contributions by friends to succeed. Software analytics (mined data about player sessions) yield detailed models of factors that affect player retention and engagement. Player engagement is directly related to conversion, shifting a free player into a paying player, the critical move in a freemium business model. Analytics also permit tracking of player virality, the degree to which one player invites other players into the game.
Social network games offer multiple lessons for software engineers in general, and software mining researchers in particular. Since software is in competition for people's attention along with a wide range of other media and software, it is important to design software for high engagement and retention. Retention engineering requires constant attention to mined user experience data, and this data is easiest to acquire with web-based software. Building user acquisition directly into software provides powerful benefits, especially when it is integrated deeply into the experience delivered by the software. Since retention engineering and viral user acquisition are much easier with web-based software, the trend of software applications migrating to the web will accelerate.
@InProceedings{MSR11p1, author = {Jim Whitehead}, title = {Fantasy, Farms, and Freemium: What Game Data Mining Teaches Us About Retention, Conversion, and Virality (Keynote Abstract)}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {1--1}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Connecting Technology with Real-world Problems - From Copy-paste Detection to Detecting Known Bugs (Keynote Abstract)
Yuanyuan Zhou
(UC San Diego, USA)
In my talk, I will share with you our experience in applying and deploying our source code mining technology in industry. In particular, the most valuable lesson we have learned is that sometimes there is a bigger problem in the real world that can really benefit from our technology but unfortunately we do not know about it until we closely work with industry. In 2004, motivated from some previous research work that pointed out copy-pasting as a major reason for majority of the bugs in device driver code, my students and I applied data mining technology (specifically frequent subsequence mining algorithms) in identifying copy-pasted code and also detecting forget-to-change bugs introduced during copy-pasting. The benefit of using data mining is that it is highly scalable (20 minutes for 4-5 millions lines of code), and can tolerate changes such as statement insertion/deletion/modification as well as variable name changes. When we released our tool called CP-Miner to the open source community, it attracted some inquiries from industry. These inquiries have motivated us to start a company to commercialize our tools.
@InProceedings{MSR11p2, author = {Yuanyuan Zhou}, title = {Connecting Technology with Real-world Problems - From Copy-paste Detection to Detecting Known Bugs (Keynote Abstract)}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {2--2}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Language Evolution
Java Generics Adoption: How New Features are Introduced, Championed, or Ignored
Chris Parnin, Christian Bird, and
Emerson Murphy-Hill
(Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; Microsoft Research, USA; North Carolina State University, USA)
Support for generic programming was added to the Java language in 2004, representing perhaps the most significant change to one of the most widely used programming languages today. Researchers and language designers anticipated this addition would relieve many long-standing problems plaguing developers, but surprisingly, no one has yet measured whether generics actually provide such relief. In this paper, we report on the first empirical investigation into how Java generics have been integrated into open source software by automatically mining the history of 20 popular open source Java programs, traversing more than 500 million lines of code in the process. We evaluate five hypotheses, each based on assertions made by prior researchers, about how Java developers use generics. For example, our results suggest that generics do not significantly reduce the number of type casts and that generics are usually adopted by a single champion in a project, rather than all committers.
@InProceedings{MSR11p3, author = {Chris Parnin and Christian Bird and Emerson Murphy-Hill}, title = {Java Generics Adoption: How New Features are Introduced, Championed, or Ignored}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {3--12}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
A Study of Language Usage Evolution in Open Source Software
Siim Karus and Harald Gall
(University of Tartu, Estonia; University of Zurich, Switzerland)
The use of programming languages such as Java and C in Open Source Software (OSS) has been well studied. However, many other popular languages such as XSL or XML have received minor attention. In this paper, we discuss some trends in OSS development that we observed when considering multiple programming language evolution of OSS. Based on the revision data of 22 OSS projects, we tracked the evolution of language usage and other artefacts such as documentation files, binaries and graphics files. In these systems several different languages and artefact types including C/C++, Java, XML, XSL, Makefile, Groovy, HTML, Shell scripts, CSS, Graphics files, JavaScript, JSP, Ruby, Phyton, XQuery, OpenDocument files, PHP, etc. have been used. We found that the amount of code written in different languages differs substantially. Some of our findings can be summarized as follows: (1) JavaScript and CSS files most often co-evolve with XSL; (2) Most Java developers but only every second C/C++ developer work with XML; (3) and more generally, we observed a significant increase of usage of XML and XSL during recent years and found that Java or C are hardly ever the only language used by a developer. In fact, a developer works with more than 5 different artefact types (or 4 different languages) in a project on average.
@InProceedings{MSR11p13, author = {Siim Karus and Harald Gall}, title = {A Study of Language Usage Evolution in Open Source Software}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {13--22}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
How Developers Use the Dynamic Features of Programming Languages: The Case of Smalltalk
Oscar Callaú,
Romain Robbes
Éric Tanter
, and David Röthlisberger
(University of Chile, Chile; University of Bern, Switzerland)
The dynamic and reflective features of programming languages are powerful constructs that programmers often mention as extremely useful. However, the ability to modify a program at runtime can be both a boon---in terms of flexibility---, and a curse---in terms of tool support. For instance, usage of these features hampers the design of type systems, the accuracy of static analysis techniques, or the introduction of optimizations by compilers. In this paper, we perform an empirical study of a large Smalltalk codebase---often regarded as the poster-child in terms of availability of these features---, in order to assess how much these features are actually used in practice, whether some are used more than others, and in which kinds of projects. These results are useful to make informed decisions about which features to consider when designing language extensions or tool support.
@InProceedings{MSR11p23, author = {Oscar Callaú and Romain Robbes and Éric Tanter and David Röthlisberger}, title = {How Developers Use the Dynamic Features of Programming Languages: The Case of Smalltalk}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {23--32}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
An Exploratory Study of Identifier Renamings
Laleh M. Eshkevari, Venera Arnaoudova,
Massimiliano Di Penta
Rocco Oliveto
, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, and Giuliano Antoniol
(École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada; University of Sannio, Italy; University of Molise, Italy)
Identifiers play an important role in source code understandability, maintainability, and fault-proneness. This paper reports a study of identifier renamings in software systems, studying how terms (identifier atomic components) change in source code identifiers. Specifically, the paper (i) proposes a term renaming taxonomy, (ii) presents an approximate lightweight code analysis approach to detect and classify term renamings automatically into the taxonomy dimensions, and (iii) reports an exploratory study of term renamings in two open-source systems, Eclipse-JDT and Tomcat. We thus report evidence that not only synonyms are involved in renamings but also (in a small fraction) more unexpected changes occur: surprisingly, we detected hypernym (a more abstract term, e.g., size vs. length) and hyponym (a more concrete term, e.g., restriction vs. rule) renamings, and antonym renamings (a term replaced with one having the opposite meaning, e.g., closing vs. opening). Despite being only a fraction of all renamings, synonym, hyponym, hypernym, and antonym renamings may hint at some program understanding issues and, thus, could be used in a renaming-recommendation system to improve code quality.
@InProceedings{MSR11p33, author = {Laleh M. Eshkevari and Venera Arnaoudova and Massimiliano Di Penta and Rocco Oliveto and Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc and Giuliano Antoniol}, title = {An Exploratory Study of Identifier Renamings}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {33--42}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Retrieval, Refactoring, Clones, Readability
Retrieval from Software Libraries for Bug Localization: A Comparative Study of Generic and Composite Text Models
Shivani Rao and Avinash Kak
(Purdue University, USA)
From the standpoint of retrieval from large software libraries for the purpose of bug localization, we compare five generic text models and certain composite variations thereof. The generic models are: the Unigram Model (UM), the Vector Space Model (VSM), the Latent Semantic Analysis Model (LSA), the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model (LDA), and the Cluster Based Document Model (CBDM). The task is to locate the files that are relevant to a bug reported in the form of a textual description by a software user/developer. We use for our study iBUGS, a benchmarked bug localization dataset with 75 KLOC and a large number of bugs (291). A major conclusion of our comparative study is that simple text models such as UM and VSM are more effective at correctly retrieving the relevant files from a library as compared to the more sophisticated models such as LDA. The retrieval effectiveness for the various models was measured using the following two metrics: (1) Mean Average Precision; and (2) Rank-based metrics. Using the SCORE metric, we also compare the retrieval effectiveness of the models in our study with some other bug localization tools.
@InProceedings{MSR11p43, author = {Shivani Rao and Avinash Kak}, title = {Retrieval from Software Libraries for Bug Localization: A Comparative Study of Generic and Composite Text Models}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {43--52}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Comparison of Similarity Metrics for Refactoring Detection
Benjamin Biegel
, Quinten David Soetens, Willi Hornig, Stephan Diehl, and
Serge Demeyer
(University of Trier, Germany; University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Identifying refactorings in software archives has been an active research topic in the last decade, mainly because it is a prerequisite for various software evolution analyses (e.g., error detection, capturing intent of change, capturing and replaying changes, and relating refactorings and software metrics). Many of these techniques rely on similarity measures to identify structurally equivalent code, however, up until now the effect of this similarity measure on the performance of the refactoring identification algorithm is largely unexplored. In this paper we replicate a well-known experiment from Weißgerber and Diehl, plugging in three different similarity measures (text-based, AST-based, token-based). We look at the overlap of the results obtained by the different metrics, and we compare the results using recall and the computation time. We conclude that the different result sets have a large overlap and that the three metrics perform with a comparable quality.
@InProceedings{MSR11p53, author = {Benjamin Biegel and Quinten David Soetens and Willi Hornig and Stephan Diehl and Serge Demeyer}, title = {Comparison of Similarity Metrics for Refactoring Detection}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {53--62}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Finding Software License Violations Through Binary Code Clone Detection
Armijn Hemel, Karl Trygve Kalleberg, Rob Vermaas, and Eelco Dolstra
(gpl-violations.org, Netherlands; KolibriFX, Norway; Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
Software released in binary form frequently uses third-party packages without respecting their licensing terms. For instance, many consumer devices have firmware containing the Linux kernel, without the suppliers following the requirements of the GNU General Public License. Such license violations are often accidental, e.g., when vendors receive binary code from their suppliers with no indication of its provenance. To help find such violations, we have developed the Binary Analysis Tool (BAT), a system for code clone detection in binaries. Given a binary, such as a firmware image, it attempts to detect cloning of code from repositories of packages in source and binary form. We evaluate and compare the effectiveness of three of BAT's clone detection techniques: scanning for string literals, detecting similarity through data compression, and detecting similarity by computing binary deltas.
@InProceedings{MSR11p63, author = {Armijn Hemel and Karl Trygve Kalleberg and Rob Vermaas and Eelco Dolstra}, title = {Finding Software License Violations Through Binary Code Clone Detection}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {63--72}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
A Simpler Model of Software Readability
Daryl Posnett, Abram Hindle, and Premkumar Devanbu
(UC Davis, USA)
Software readability is a property that influences how easily a given piece of code can be read and understood. Since readability can affect maintainability, quality, etc., programmers are very concerned about the readability of code. If automatic readability checkers could be built, they could be integrated into development tool-chains, and thus continually inform developers about the readability level of the code. Unfortunately, readability is a subjective code property, and not amenable to direct automated measurement. In a recently published study, Buse et al. asked 100 participants to rate code snippets by readability, yielding arguably reliable mean readability scores of each snippet; they then built a fairly complex predictive model for these mean scores using a large, diverse set of directly measurable source code properties. We build on this work: we present a simple, intuitive theory of readability, based on size and code entropy, and show how this theory leads to a much sparser, yet statistically significant, model of the mean readability scores produced in Buse's studies. Our model uses well-known size metrics and Halstead metrics, which are easily extracted using a variety of tools. We argue that this approach provides a more theoretically well-founded, practically usable, approach to readability measurement.
@InProceedings{MSR11p73, author = {Daryl Posnett and Abram Hindle and Premkumar Devanbu}, title = {A Simpler Model of Software Readability}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {73--82}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Software Quality
Comparing Fine-Grained Source Code Changes And Code Churn For Bug Prediction
Emanuel Giger, Martin Pinzger, and Harald Gall
(University of Zurich, Switzerland; Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
A significant amount of research effort has been dedicated to learning prediction models that allow project managers to efficiently allocate resources to those parts of a software system that most likely are bug-prone and therefore critical. Prominent measures for building bug prediction models are product measures, e.g., complexity or process measures, such as code churn. Code churn in terms of lines modified (LM) and past changes turned out to be significant indicators of bugs. However, these measures are rather imprecise and do not reflect all the detailed changes of particular source code entities during maintenance activities. In this paper, we explore the advantage of using fine-grained source code changes (SCC) for bug prediction. SCC captures the exact code changes and their semantics down to statement level. We present a series of experiments using different machine learning algorithms with a dataset from the Eclipse platform to empirically evaluate the performance of SCC and LM. The results show that SCC outperforms LM for learning bug prediction models.
@InProceedings{MSR11p83, author = {Emanuel Giger and Martin Pinzger and Harald Gall}, title = {Comparing Fine-Grained Source Code Changes And Code Churn For Bug Prediction}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {83--92}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Security Versus Performance Bugs: A Case Study on Firefox
Shahed Zaman, Bram Adams, and Ahmed E. Hassan
(Queen's University, Canada)
A good understanding of the impact of different types of bugs on various project aspects is essential to improve software quality research and practice. For instance, we would expect that security bugs are fixed faster than other types of bugs due to their critical nature. However, prior research has often treated all bugs as similar when studying various aspects of software quality (e.g., predicting the time to fix a bug), or has focused on one particular type of bug (e.g., security bugs) with little comparison to other types. In this paper, we study how different types of bugs (performance and security bugs) differ from each other and from the rest of the bugs in a software project. Through a case study on the Firefox project, we find that security bugs are fixed and triaged much faster, but are reopened and tossed more frequently. Furthermore, we also find that security bugs involve more developers and impact more files in a project. Our work is the first work to ever empirically study performance bugs and compare it to frequently-studied security bugs. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the different types of bugs in software quality research and practice.
@InProceedings{MSR11p93, author = {Shahed Zaman and Bram Adams and Ahmed E. Hassan}, title = {Security Versus Performance Bugs: A Case Study on Firefox}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {93--102}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Empirical Evaluation of Reliability Improvement in an Evolving Software Product Line
Sandeep Krishnan,
Robyn R. Lutz
, and Katerina Goševa-Popstojanova
(Iowa State University, USA; West Virginia University, USA)
Reliability is important to software product-line developers since many product lines require reliable operation. It is typically assumed that as a software product line matures, its reliability improves. Since post-deployment failures impact reliability, we study this claim on an open-source software product line, Eclipse. We investigate the failure trend of common components (reused across all products), high-reuse variation components (reused in five or six products) and low-reuse variation components (reused in one or two products) as Eclipse evolves. We also study how much the common and variation components change over time both in terms of addition of new files and modification of existing files. Quantitative results from mining and analysis of the Eclipse bug and release repositories show that as the product line evolves, fewer serious failures occur in components implementing commonality, and that these components also exhibit less change over time. These results were roughly as expected. However, contrary to expectation, components implementing variations, even when reused in five or more products, continue to evolve fairly rapidly. Perhaps as a result, the number of severe failures in variation components shows no uniform pattern of decrease over time. The paper describes and discusses this and related results.
@InProceedings{MSR11p103, author = {Sandeep Krishnan and Robyn R. Lutz and Katerina Goševa-Popstojanova}, title = {Empirical Evaluation of Reliability Improvement in an Evolving Software Product Line}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {103--112}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Implementing Quality Metrics and Goals at the Corporate Level
Pete Rotella and Sunita Chulani
(Cisco Systems Inc., USA)
Over the past eight years, Cisco Systems, Inc., has implemented software quality goals for most groups engaged in software development, including development for both customer and internal use. This corporate implementation has proven to be a long and difficult process for many reasons, including opposition from many groups, uncertainties as to how to proceed with key aspects of the goaling, and the many unanticipated modifications needed to adapt the program to a large and diverse development and test environment. This paper describes what has worked, what has not work so well, and what levels of improvement the Engineering organization has experienced in part as a result of these efforts. Key customer experience metrics have improved 30% to 70% over the past six years, partly as a result of metrics and process standardization, dashboarding, and goaling. As one would expect with such a large endeavor, some of the results shown are not statistically provable, but are nevertheless generally accepted within the corporation as valid. Other important results do have strong statistical substantiation, and we will also describe these. But whether or not the results are statistically provable, Cisco has in fact improved its software quality substantially over the past eight years, and the corporate goaling mechanism is generally recognized as having been a necessary (but of course not sufficient) part of this improvement effort.
@InProceedings{MSR11p113, author = {Pete Rotella and Sunita Chulani}, title = {Implementing Quality Metrics and Goals at the Corporate Level}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {113--122}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
How Do Developers Blog? An Exploratory Study
Dennis Pagano and Walid Maalej
(Technische Universität München, Germany)
We report on an exploratory study, which aims at understanding how software developers use social media compared to conventional development infrastructures. We analyzed the blogging and the committing behavior of 1,100 developers in four large open source communities. We observed that these communities intensively use blogs with one new entry about every 8 hours. A blog entry includes 14 times more words than a commit message. When analyzing the content of the blogs, we found that most popular topics represent high-level concepts such as functional requirements and domain concepts. Source code related topics are covered in less than 15% of the posts. Our results also show that developers are more likely to blog after corrective engineering and management activities than after forward engineering and re-engineering activities. Our findings call for a hypothesis-driven research to further understand the role of social media in software engineering and integrate it into development processes and tools.
@InProceedings{MSR11p123, author = {Dennis Pagano and Walid Maalej}, title = {How Do Developers Blog? An Exploratory Study}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {123--132}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Entering the Circle of Trust: Developer Initiation as Committers in Open-Source Projects
Vibha Singhal Sinha, Senthil Mani, and Saurabh Sinha
(IBM Research, India)
The success of an open-source project depends to a large degree on the proactive and constructive participation by the developer community. An important role that developers play in a project is that of a code committer. However, code-commit privilege is typically restricted to the core group of a project. In this paper, we study the phenomenon of the induction of external developers as code committers. The trustworthiness of an external developer is one of the key factors that determines the granting of commit privileges. Therefore, we formulate different hypotheses to explain how the trust is established in practice. To investigate our hypotheses, we developed an automated approach based on mining code repositories and bug-tracking systems. We implemented the approach and performed an empirical study, using the Eclipse projects, to test the hypotheses. Our results indicate that, most frequently, developers establish trust and credibility in a project by contributing to the project in a non-committer role. Moreover, the employing organization of a developer is another factor—although a less significant one—that influences trust.
@InProceedings{MSR11p133, author = {Vibha Singhal Sinha and Senthil Mani and Saurabh Sinha}, title = {Entering the Circle of Trust: Developer Initiation as Committers in Open-Source Projects}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {133--142}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Social Interactions around Cross-System Bug Fixings: The Case of FreeBSD and OpenBSD
Gerardo Canfora
, Luigi Cerulo, Marta Cimitile, and
Massimiliano Di Penta
(University of Sannio, Italy; Unitelma Sapienza, Italy)
Cross-system bug fixing propagation is frequent among systems having similar characteristics, using a common framework, or, in general, systems with cloned source code fragments. While previous studies showed that clones tend to be properly maintained within a single system, very little is known about cross-system bug management.
This paper describes an approach to mine explicitly documented cross-system bug fixings, and to relate their occurrences to social characteristics of contributors discussing through the project mailing lists-e.g., degree, betweenness, and brokerage-as well as to the contributors' activity on source code.
The paper reports results of an empirical study carried out on FreeBSD and OpenBSD kernels. The study shows that the phenomenon of cross-system bug fixing between these two projects occurs often, despite the limited overlap of contributors. The study also shows that cross-system bug fixings mainly involve contributors with the highest degree, betweenness and brokerage level, as well as contributors that change the source code more than others.
@InProceedings{MSR11p143, author = {Gerardo Canfora and Luigi Cerulo and Marta Cimitile and Massimiliano Di Penta}, title = {Social Interactions around Cross-System Bug Fixings: The Case of FreeBSD and OpenBSD}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {143--152}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Do Time of Day and Developer Experience Affect Commit Bugginess?
Jon Eyolfson,
Lin Tan
, and Patrick Lam
(University of Waterloo, Canada)
Modern software is often developed over many years with hundreds of thousands of commits. Commit metadata is a rich source of social characteristics, including the commit's time of day and the experience and commit frequency of its author. The "bugginess" of a commit is also a critical property of that commit. In this paper, we investigate the correlation between a commit's social characteristics and its "bugginess"; such results can be very useful for software developers and software engineering researchers. For instance, developers or code reviewers might be well-advised to thoroughly verify commits that are more likely to be buggy.
In this paper, we study the correlation between a commit's bugginess and the time of day of the commit, the day of week of the commit, and the experience and commit frequency of the commit authors. We survey two widely-used open source projects: the Linux kernel and PostgreSQL.
Our main findings include: (1) commits submitted between midnight and 4 AM (referred to as late-night commits) are significantly buggier and commits between 7 AM and noon are less buggy, implying that developers may want to double-check their own late-night commits; (2) daily-committing developers produce less-buggy commits, indicating that we may want to promote the practice of daily-committing developers reviewing other developers' commits; and (3) the bugginess of commits versus day-of-week varies for different software projects.
@InProceedings{MSR11p153, author = {Jon Eyolfson and Lin Tan and Patrick Lam}, title = {Do Time of Day and Developer Experience Affect Commit Bugginess?}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {153--162}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Development Support
Automated Topic Naming to Support Cross-project Analysis of Software Maintenance Activities
Abram Hindle, Neil A. Ernst,
Michael W. Godfrey
, and John Mylopoulos
(UC Davis, USA; University of Toronto, Canada; University of Waterloo, Canada; University of Trento, Italy)
Researchers have employed a variety of techniques to extract underlying topics that relate to software development artifacts. Typically, these techniques use semi-unsupervised machine-learning algorithms to suggest candidate word-lists. However, word-lists are difficult to interpret in the absence of meaningful summary labels. Current topic modeling techniques assume manual labelling and do not use domain-specific knowledge to improve, contextualize, or describe results for the developers. We propose a solution: automated labelled topic extraction. Topics are extracted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) from commit-log comments recovered from source control systems such as CVS and BitKeeper. These topics are given labels from a generalizable cross-project taxonomy, consisting of non-functional requirements. Our approach was evaluated with experiments and case studies on two large-scale RDBMS projects: MySQL and MaxDB. The case studies show that labelled topic extraction can produce appropriate, context-sensitive labels relevant to these projects, which provides fresh insight into their evolving software development activities.
@InProceedings{MSR11p163, author = {Abram Hindle and Neil A. Ernst and Michael W. Godfrey and John Mylopoulos}, title = {Automated Topic Naming to Support Cross-project Analysis of Software Maintenance Activities}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {163--172}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Modeling the Evolution of Topics in Source Code Histories
Stephen W. Thomas, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan, and Dorothea Blostein
(Queen's University, Canada)
Studying the evolution of topics (collections of co-occurring words) in a software project is an emerging technique to automatically shed light on how the project is changing over time: which topics are becoming more actively developed, which ones are dying down, or which topics are lately more error-prone and hence require more testing. Existing techniques for modeling the evolution of topics in software projects suffer from issues of data duplication, i.e., when the repository contains multiple copies of the same document, as is the case in source code histories. To address this issue, we propose the Diff model, which applies a topic model only to the changes of the documents in each version instead of to the whole document at each version. A comparative study with a state-of-the-art topic evolution model shows that the Diff model can detect more distinct topics as well as more sensitive and accurate topic evolutions, which are both useful for analyzing source code histories.
@InProceedings{MSR11p173, author = {Stephen W. Thomas and Bram Adams and Ahmed E. Hassan and Dorothea Blostein}, title = {Modeling the Evolution of Topics in Source Code Histories}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {173--182}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Software Bertillonage: Finding the Provenance of an Entity
Julius Davies, Daniel M. German,
Michael W. Godfrey
, and Abram Hindle
(University of Victoria, Canada; University of Waterloo, Canada; UC Davis, USA)
Deployed software systems are typically composed of many pieces, not all of which may have been created by the main development team. Often, the provenance of included components --- such as external libraries or cloned source code --- is not clearly stated, and this uncertainty can introduce technical and ethical concerns that make it difficult for system owners and other stakeholders to manage their software assets. In this work, we motivate the need for the recovery of the provenance of software entities by a broad set of techniques that could include signature matching, source code fact extraction, software clone detection, call flow graph matching, string matching, historical analyses, and other techniques. We liken our provenance goals to that of Bertillonage, a simple and approximate forensic analysis technique based on bio-metrics that was developed in 19th century France before the advent of fingerprints. As an example, we have developed a fast, simple, and approximate technique called anchored signature matching for identifying library version information within a given Java application. This technique involves a type of structured signature matching performed against a database of candidates drawn from the Maven2 repository, a 150GB collection of open source Java libraries. An exploratory case study using a proprietary e-commerce Java application illustrates that the approach is both feasible and effective.
@InProceedings{MSR11p183, author = {Julius Davies and Daniel M. German and Michael W. Godfrey and Abram Hindle}, title = {Software Bertillonage: Finding the Provenance of an Entity}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {183--192}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Supporting Software History Exploration
Alexander W. J. Bradley and
Gail C. Murphy
(University of British Columbia, Canada)
Software developers often confront questions such as "Why was the code implemented this way"? To answer such questions, developers make use of information in a software system's bug and source repositories. In this paper, we consider two user interfaces for helping a developer explore information from such repositories. One user interface, from Holmes and Begel's Deep Intellisense tool, exposes historical information across several integrated views, favouring exploration from a single code element to all of that element's historical information. The second user interface, in a tool called Rationalizer that we introduce in this paper, integrates historical information into the source code editor, favouring exploration from a particular code line to its immediate history. We introduce a model to express how software repository information is connected and use this model to compare the two interfaces. Through a lab experiment, we found that our model can help predict which interface is helpful for a particular kind of historical question. We also found deficiencies in the interfaces that hindered users in the exploration of historical information. These results can help inform tool developers who are presenting historical information either directly from or mined from software repositories.
@InProceedings{MSR11p193, author = {Alexander W. J. Bradley and Gail C. Murphy}, title = {Supporting Software History Exploration}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {193--202}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Short Papers
Improving Identifier Informativeness Using Part of Speech Information
David Binkley
, Matthew Hearn, and
Dawn Lawrie
(Loyola University Maryland, USA)
Recent software development tools have exploited the mining of natural language information found within software and its supporting documentation. To make the most of this information, researchers have drawn upon the work of the natural language processing community for tools and techniques. One such tool provides part-of-speech information, which finds application in improving the searching of software repositories and extracting domain information found in identifiers.
Unfortunately, the natural language found is software differs from that found in standard prose. This difference potentially limits the effectiveness of off-the-shelf tools. An empirical investigation finds that with minimal guidance an existing tagger was correct 88% of the time when tagging the words found in source code identifiers. The investigation then uses the improved part-of-speech information to tag a large corpus of over 145,000 structure-field names. From patterns in the tags several rules emerge that seek to understand past usage and to improve future naming.
@InProceedings{MSR11p203, author = {David Binkley and Matthew Hearn and Dawn Lawrie}, title = {Improving Identifier Informativeness Using Part of Speech Information}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {203--206}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Bug-fix Time Prediction Models: Can We Do Better?
Pamela Bhattacharya and Iulian Neamtiu
(UC Riverside, USA)
Predicting bug-fix time is useful in several areas of software evolution, such as predicting software quality or coordinating development effort during bug triaging. Prior work has proposed bug-fix time prediction models that use various bug report attributes (e.g., number of developers who participated in fixing the bug, bug severity, number of patches, bug-opener's reputation) for estimating the time it will take to fix a newly-reported bug. In this paper we take a step towards constructing more accurate and more general bug-fix time prediction models by showing how existing models fail to validate on large projects widely-used in bug studies. In particular, we used multivariate and univariate regression testing to test the prediction significance of existing models on 512,474 bug reports from five open source projects: Eclipse, Chrome and three products from the Mozilla project (Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird). The results of our regression testing indicate that the predictive power of existing models is between 30% and 49% and that there is a need for more independent variables (attributes) when constructing a prediction model. Additionally, we found that, unlike in prior recent studies on commercial software, in the projects we examined there is no correlation between bug-fix likelihood, bug-opener's reputation and the time it takes to fix a bug. These findings indicate three open research problems: (1) assessing whether prioritizing bugs using bug-opener's reputation is beneficial, (2) identifying attributes which are effective in predicting bug-fix time, and (3) constructing bug-fix time prediction models which can be validated on multiple projects.
@InProceedings{MSR11p207, author = {Pamela Bhattacharya and Iulian Neamtiu}, title = {Bug-fix Time Prediction Models: Can We Do Better?}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {207--210}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Integrating Software Engineering Data Using Semantic Web Technologies
Yuan-Fang Li and
Hongyu Zhang
(Monash University, Australia; Tsinghua University, China)
A plethora of software engineering data have been produced by different organizations and tools over time. These data may come from different sources, and are often disparate and distributed. The integration of these data may open up the possibility of conducting systemic, holistic study of software projects in ways previously unexplored. Semantic Web technologies have been used successfully in a wide array of domains such as health care and life sciences as a platform for information integration and knowledge management. The success is largely due to the open and extensible nature of ontology languages as well as growing tool support. We believe that Semantic Web technologies represent an ideal platform for the integration of software engineering data in a semantic repository. By querying and analyzing such a repository, researchers and practitioners can better understand and control software engineering activities and processes. In this paper, we describe how we apply Semantic Web techniques to integrate object-oriented software engineering data from different sources. We also show how the integrated data can help us answer complex queries about large-scale software projects through a case study on the Eclipse system.
@InProceedings{MSR11p211, author = {Yuan-Fang Li and Hongyu Zhang}, title = {Integrating Software Engineering Data Using Semantic Web Technologies}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {211--214}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Improving Efficiency in Software Maintenance
Sergey Zeltyn, Peri Tarr, Murray Cantor, Robert Delmonico, Sateesh Kannegala, Mila Keren, Ashok Pon Kumar, and Segev Wasserkrug
(IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, Israel; IBM Watson Research, USA; IBM Rational Software, USA; IBM India Software Laboratory, India)
Efficiency is critical to the profitability of software maintenance and support organizations. Managing such organizations effectively requires suitable measures of efficiency that are sensitive enough to detect significant changes, and accurate and timely in detecting them. Mean time to close problem reports is the most commonly used efficiency measure, but its suitability has not been evaluated carefully. We performed such an evaluation by mining and analyzing many years of support data on multiple IBM products. Our preliminary results suggest that the mean is less sensitive and accurate than another measure, percentiles, in cases that are particularly important in the maintenance and support domain. Using percentiles, we also identified statistical techniques to detect efficiency trends and evaluated their accuracy. Although preliminary, these results may have significant ramifications for effectively measuring and improving software maintenance and support processes.
@InProceedings{MSR11p215, author = {Sergey Zeltyn and Peri Tarr and Murray Cantor and Robert Delmonico and Sateesh Kannegala and Mila Keren and Ashok Pon Kumar and Segev Wasserkrug}, title = {Improving Efficiency in Software Maintenance}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {215--218}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
An Empirical Analysis of the FixCache Algorithm
Caitlin Sadowski, Chris Lewis, Zhongpeng Lin, Xiaoyan Zhu, and E. James Whitehead, Jr.
(UC Santa Cruz, USA; Xi'an Jiaotong University, China)
The FixCache algorithm, introduced in 2007, effectively identifies files or methods which are likely to contain bugs by analyzing source control repository history. However, many open questions remain about the behaviour of this algorithm. What is the variation in the hit rate over time? How long do files stay in the cache? Do buggy files tend to stay buggy, or can they be redeemed? This paper analyzes the behaviour of the FixCache algorithm on four open source projects. FixCache hit rate is found to generally increase over time for three of the four projects; file duration in cache follows a Zipf distribution; and topmost bug-fixed files go through periods of greater and lesser stability over a project's history.
@InProceedings{MSR11p219, author = {Caitlin Sadowski and Chris Lewis and Zhongpeng Lin and Xiaoyan Zhu and E. James Whitehead, Jr.}, title = {An Empirical Analysis of the FixCache Algorithm}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {219--222}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Visualizing Collaboration and Influence in the Open-Source Software Community
Brandon Heller, Eli Marschner, Evan Rosenfeld, and Jeffrey Heer
(Stanford University, USA)
We apply visualization techniques to user profiles and repository metadata from the GitHub source code hosting service. Our motivation is to identify patterns within this development community that might otherwise remain obscured. Such patterns include the effect of geographic distance on developer relationships, social connectivity and influence among cities, and variation in project-specific contribution styles (e.g., centralized vs. distributed). Our analysis examines directed graphs in which nodes represent users' geographic locations and edges represent (a) follower relationships, (b) successive commits, or (c) contributions to the same project. We inspect this data using a set of visualization techniques: geo-scatter maps, small multiple displays, and matrix diagrams. Using these representations, and tools based on them, we develop hypotheses about the larger GitHub community that would be difficult to discern using traditional lists, tables, or descriptive statistics. These methods are not intended to provide conclusive answers; instead, they provide a way for researchers to explore the question space and communicate initial insights.
@InProceedings{MSR11p223, author = {Brandon Heller and Eli Marschner and Evan Rosenfeld and Jeffrey Heer}, title = {Visualizing Collaboration and Influence in the Open-Source Software Community}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {223--226}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Mining Challenge
MSR Challenge 2011: Eclipse, Netbeans, Firefox, and Chrome
Adrian Schröter
(University of Victoria, Canada)
The MSR Challenge aims at offering researchers and practitioners in the area of Mining Software Repositories a shared set of software repositories, enabling them to compare their tools and approaches. This year, the main theme of the challenge was on the comparison of projects. We selected four open source projects, and challenged participants to use their brains, tools, computational power, and magic to compare them and uncover interesting similarities and differences. The projects were Eclipse and Netbeans, two popular IDEs written in Java (Group 1) and Firefox and Chrome, two web browsers written in C/C++ (Group 2). We encouraged participants to analyze more than one project, ideally in the same group but allowed them to analyze a single project.
@InProceedings{MSR11p227, author = {Adrian Schröter}, title = {MSR Challenge 2011: Eclipse, Netbeans, Firefox, and Chrome}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {227--229}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Operating System Compatibility Analysis of Eclipse and Netbeans Based on Bug Data
Xinlei (Oscar) Wang, Eilwoo Baik, and Premkumar Devanbu
(UC Davis, USA)
Eclipse and Netbeans are two top of the line Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for Java development. Both of them provide support for a wide variety of development tasks and have a large user base. This paper provides an analysis and comparison for the compatibility and stability of Eclipse and Netbeans on the three most commonly used operating systems, Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Both IDEs are programmed in Java and use a Bugzilla issue tracker to track reported bugs and feature requests. We looked into the Bugzilla repository databases of these two IDEs, which contains the bug records and histories of these two IDEs. We used some basic data mining techniques to analyze some historical statistics of the bug data. Based on the analysis, we try to answer certain stability-comparison oriented questions in the paper, so that users can have a better idea which of these two IDEs is designed better to work on different platforms.
@InProceedings{MSR11p230, author = {Xinlei (Oscar) Wang and Eilwoo Baik and Premkumar Devanbu}, title = {Operating System Compatibility Analysis of Eclipse and Netbeans Based on Bug Data}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {230--233}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
What Topics do Firefox and Chrome Contributors Discuss?
Mario Luca Bernardi, Carmine Sementa, Quirino Zagarese, Damiano Distante, and
Massimiliano Di Penta
(University of Sannio, Italy; Unitelma Sapienza University, Italy)
Firefox and Chrome are two very popular open source Web browsers, implemented in C/C++. This paper analyzes what topics were discussed in Firefox and Chrome bug reports over time. To this aim, we indexed the text contained in bug reports submitted each semester of the project history, and identified topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Then, we investigated to what extent Firefox and Chrome developers/contributors discussed similar topics, either in different periods, or over the same period. Results indicate a non-negligible overlap of topics, mainly on issues related to page layouting, user interaction, and multimedia contents.
@InProceedings{MSR11p234, author = {Mario Luca Bernardi and Carmine Sementa and Quirino Zagarese and Damiano Distante and Massimiliano Di Penta}, title = {What Topics do Firefox and Chrome Contributors Discuss?}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {234--237}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
A Tale of Two Browsers
Olga Baysal, Ian Davis, and
Michael W. Godfrey
(University of Waterloo, Canada)
We explore the space of open source systems and their user communities by examining the development artifact histories of two popular web browsers - Firefox and Chrome - as well as usage data. By examining the data and addressing a number of research questions, two very different profiles emerge: Firefox, as the older and established system, with long product version cycles but short bug fix cycles, and a user base that is slow to adopt newer versions; and Chrome, as the new and fast evolving system, with short version cycles, longer bug fix cycles, and a user base that very quickly adopts new versions as they become available (due largely to Chrome's mandatory automatic updates).
@InProceedings{MSR11p238, author = {Olga Baysal and Ian Davis and Michael W. Godfrey}, title = {A Tale of Two Browsers}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {238--241}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Do Comments Explain Codes Adequately? Investigation by Text Filtering
Yukinao Hirata and Osamu Mizuno
(Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan)
Comment lines in the software source code include descriptions of codes, usage of codes, copyrights, unused codes, comments, and so on. It is required for comments to explain the content of written code adequately, since the wrong description in the comment may causes further bug and confusion in maintenance.
In this paper, we try to clarify a research question: ``In which projects do comments describe the code adequately?'' To answer this question, we selected the group 1 of mining challenge and used data obtained from Eclipse and Netbeans. Since it is difficult to answer the above question directly, we define the distance between codes and comments. By utilizing the fault-prone module prediction technique, we can answer the alternative question from the data of two projects. The result shows that Eclipse project has relatively adequate comments.
@InProceedings{MSR11p242, author = {Yukinao Hirata and Osamu Mizuno}, title = {Do Comments Explain Codes Adequately? Investigation by Text Filtering}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {242--245}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
Apples vs. Oranges? An Exploration of the Challenges of Comparing the Source Code of Two Software Systems
Daniel M. German and Julius Davies
(University of Victoria, Canada)
We attempt to compare the source code of two Java IDE systems: Netbeans and Eclipse. The result of this experiment shows that many factors, if ignored, could risk a bias in the results, and we posit various observations that should be taken into consideration to minimize such risk.
@InProceedings{MSR11p246, author = {Daniel M. German and Julius Davies}, title = {Apples vs. Oranges? An Exploration of the Challenges of Comparing the Source Code of Two Software Systems}, booktitle = {Proc.\ MSR}, publisher = {ACM}, pages = {246--249}, doi = {}, year = {2011}, }
Article Search
proc time: 0.73