Notes, summaries, assignments, exams, and problems for University

Durkheim's Theory of Social Facts and Religious Foundations

Firstly, Durkheim established that sociology is the science of social facts. These social facts have the following characteristics:

Characteristics of Social Facts

• Social facts are ways of thinking and acting.
• Social facts are normative: they rule and they are coercive.
• Social facts are external to the individual; they have an independent existence.
• Social facts are general because they encompass the whole society.

Religion as the Fundamental Social Fact

Durkheim also stated that religion is the social fact that makes society exist. To understand what religion is, his starting points for his investigation were:

• There are no true or false religions; they are all true in their own way.
• All religions

Master key terms and phrases for your next trip or career in the tourism industry. This comprehensive resource covers everything from basic travel logistics to advanced business concepts and cultural nuances.

Tourism & Travel Core Concepts

• Boom: A period of rapid economic growth.
• Demand: The desire of consumers for a good or service.
• Launch: To start or introduce something new.
• Market: The area of commercial dealing or a group of potential customers.
• Package: A set of related items or services sold together.
• Tour: A journey for pleasure in which several different places are visited.
• Supply: The amount of a good or service available (oferta).
• Supplier: A person or entity that provides goods or services (proveedor).
• Resort: A place where people go

Due to technological evolution, improved infrastructure, and decreasing prices, people are traveling more frequently and to more distant destinations. Travelers seek new places with diverse cultures, often preferring those vastly different from their own. They crave novel experiences and emotions, from exploring unique monuments unlike those in their home country to savoring unimaginable new flavors.

This trend of visiting new countries has evolved into a pursuit of exotic activities, moving beyond conventional tourism.

The Rise of Unconventional Travel Experiences

Today, the tourism industry offers a diverse array of options beyond the ordinary. Let's explore five distinct types of unconventional tourism.

Five Types of Niche Tourism

War Tourism:

SkinnerDB: Regret-Bounded Query Evaluation via Reinforcement Learning

INTRODUCTION AND PROBLEM DEFINITION:

The work is on query optimization, more specifically: SkinnerDB focuses on finding the optimal Join Order. Because it has the most impact in practice.

SkinnerDB aims to get expected near optimal results without needing any a-priori information. It does not make strong assumptions either.

CONTRIBUTIONS:

• Introduced a new quality criterion for query evaluation strategies that compares expected and optimal execution cost.
• Proposed several adaptive execution strategies based on reinforcement learning.
• Formally proved correctness and regret bounds for those execution strategies.
• Experimental comparisations of those strategies, implemented in SkinnerDB,

DeepBase: Deep Inspection of Neural Networks

Introduction

• Neural networks (NNs) are revolutionizing a wide range of machine intelligence tasks.
• However, it remains unclear how and why neural networks are so effective.
• One approach to understanding how NNs work is studying how and when neurons activate for test data; this class of analysis is called Deep Neural Inspection (DNI).

Deep Neural Inspection (DNI)

Given user-provided hypothesis logic (e.g., “detects nouns”, “detects keywords”), DNI seeks to quantify the extent that the behavior of hidden units (e.g., the magnitude or the derivative of their output) is similar to the hypothesis logic when running the model over a test set. This quantification is performed using statistical measures.... Continue reading "Deep Learning Analysis and Data Management Systems" »

Acid Rain: Concurrency-Related Attacks in Database-Backed Web Applications

Motivation:

• 12 popular self-hosted e-commerce applications (deployed over 2M websites, representing over 50% of all e-commerce websites)
• 22 critical ACIDRain attacks identified and verified
• Flexcoin -> Bankrupted

Problem Definition:

An application is vulnerable if:

• Anomalies Possible: Under concurrent API access, the application may exhibit behaviors (i.e., anomalies) that could not have arisen under serial execution.
• Sensitive Invariants: The anomalies arising from concurrent access lead to violations of application invariants.

Solution:

• Execute API calls against a live application and database to generate a (possibly sequential) trace of database activity.
• Analyze the trace

Global Biosensors Market Dynamics

Driven by the need for better methods for environmental monitoring and rapid pathogen detection, the biosensors industry has been expanding rapidly. This expansion encompasses non-clinical applications such as biodefense, environmental surveillance, and the food industry.

This is a diversified and competitive market with a large number of players. The Point-of-Care (POC) diagnostics market currently holds the largest presence among all end-user segments of biosensors.

Key Market Players

• Roche Diagnostics Limited (U.K.)
• Alere Inc. (U.S.)
• Siemens Healthcare (Germany)
• Beckman Coulter, Inc. (U.S.)

Market Segmentation by Product

• Wearable Biosensors:
  • Wrist wear
  • Eye wear
  • Foot wear
  • Neck wear
  • Body wear
  • Others (ingestible and smart

Paper-Based Biosensors

Immunosensors

Immunosensors are affinity ligand-based biosensor solid-state devices in which the immunochemical reaction is coupled to a transducer. The fundamental basis of all immunosensors is the specificity of the molecular recognition of antigens by antibodies to form a stable complex.

Paper-Based ELISA

There are different techniques for the design and development of immunoassays. For instance, combining ELISA (Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay) and patterned paper provides a beneficial protocol for performing immunoassays.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Paper-Based ELISA

Paper-based ELISA offers three principal advantages over conventional ELISA performed in plastic 96-well plates:

• More rapid detection.
• Requires only small