Organizations are required to adhere to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) Respiratory Protection Standard (29 CFR 1910.134) if they have workers that wear a respirator on the job. They must also have an employee "suitably trained" to administer their program. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and its National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory have worked to champion the occupational health nurse in this role by collaborating with the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses to develop free, online respiratory protection training and resources (RPP Webkit). This article describes the development, content, and success of this training. To date, 724 participants have completed the training, 32.6% of whom lead their organization's respiratory protection program, 15.3% who indicated they will lead a program in the near future, and 52% who did not lead a program, but indicated that the training was relevant to their work. The majority "strongly agreed" the training was applicable to their work and it enhanced their professional expertise.
In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards distributed software development teams is being challenged by emerging collaboration issues. On this matter, the open-source phenomenon may shed some light, as successful cases on distributed collaboration in the open-source community have been recurrently reported. In this paper, we explore the collaboration networks in the WebKit open-source project, by mining WebKit's source-code version-control-system data with Social Network Analysis (SNA). Our approach allows us to observe how key events in the mobile-device industry have affected the WebKit collaboration network over time. With our findings, we show the explanation power from network visualizations capturing the collaborative dynamics of a high-networked software project over time; and highlight the power of the open-source fork concept as a nexus enabling both features of competition and collaboration. We also reveal the WebKit project as a valuable research site manifesting the novel notion of open-coopetition, where rival firms collaborate with competitors in the open-source community.
Websites today routinely combine JavaScript from multiple sources, both trusted and untrusted. Hence, JavaScript security is of paramount importance. A specific interesting problem is information flow control (IFC) for JavaScript. In this paper, we develop, formalize and implement a dynamic IFC mechanism for the JavaScript engine of a production Web browser (specifically, Safari's WebKit engine). Our IFC mechanism works at the level of JavaScript bytecode and hence leverages years of industrial effort on optimizing both the source to bytecode compiler and the bytecode interpreter. We track both explicit and implicit flows and observe only moderate overhead. Working with bytecode results in new challenges including the extensive use of unstructured control flow in bytecode (which complicates lowering of program context taints), unstructured exceptions (which complicate the matter further) and the need to make IFC analysis permissive. We explain how we address these challenges, formally model the JavaScript bytecode semantics and our instrumentation, prove the standard property of termination-insensitive non-interference, and present experimental results on an optimized prototype.
In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards geographically-distributed software development teams is being challenged by collaboration issues. On this matter, the open-source phenomenon may shed some light, as successful cases on distributed collaboration in the open-source community have been recurrently reported. While practitioners move with difficulties towards globally distributed software development, there is a lack of research addressing the collaboration dynamics of large-scale distributed software projects. More particularly, even if there are empirical manifestations of collaboration among software-houses that market rival-software products within the same market, there is a clear lack of research addressing the development of information systems by coopetitive manners. While addressing a previous call for the advancement of methods and techniques to support the visualization of temporal aspects to represent change and evolution in ecosystems, we combined and virtual-ethnography (VA) with a Social Network Analysis (SNA) over publicly-available and naturally-occurring data that allowed us to re-construct and visualize the evolution of the WebKit collaboration
The analysis of electronic evidence from smartphones is essential in modern criminal investigations. This study evaluates the performance of three widely used mobile forensic tools, Cellebrite UFED, MSAB XRY, and Magnet AXIOM, using logical extraction on two iOS and two Android devices, and assesses examiner-perceived usability through the System Usability Scale. On the iPhone 11 Pro, UFED (8539 artifacts) extracted more artifacts than XRY (6542 artifacts) and AXIOM (4220 artifacts). On the iPhone 13 Mini, total artifact counts were UFED (135,024 artifacts), XRY (173,140 artifacts), and AXIOM (355,671 artifacts), with the higher AXIOM volume largely influenced by cache-based and WebKit-related data, including web history (32,614 entries) and SMS artifacts (9101 entries). On the Xiaomi Redmi A3, extraction results were comparable across UFED (285 artifacts), XRY (280 artifacts), and AXIOM (329 artifacts). Greater variation was observed on the Samsung Galaxy A32, with UFED (28,214 artifacts), XRY (15,007 artifacts), and AXIOM (79,088 artifacts), primarily due to differences in artifact classification and provenance rather than disparities in access to core communication data. Usability evaluation showed mean System Usability Scale scores of AXIOM (71.0), UFED (69.2), and XRY (59.7). These findings indicate that artifact volume alone does not necessarily reflect evidentiary value and that forensic tool selection should balance decoding capability, artifact provenance, and usability to ensure reliable and defensible digital evidence analysis.
Genomics analyses often rely on command-line tools executed via remote servers, imposing usability barriers for non-technical users and raising privacy concerns. WebAssembly (WASM) enables native-code execution directly in web browsers, eliminating installations and data transfers. We introduce BioChef, a client-side genomic workflow platform that uses WASM. BioChef compiles a genomics toolkit into browser-executable modules and exposes them through a drag-and-drop GUI designed to be intuitive. The system provides real-time validation, flexible input methods (form-based and JSON), intermediate step inspections, and reproducible workflows exportable as bash scripts or configuration files. Performance benchmarks across major browsers (Chromium, Gecko, WebKit) demonstrate rapid initialization (LCP 0.583 s), responsive interactivity (INP 30.5 ms), minimal layout shifts (CLS 0.01), and acceptable overhead (average 181.5 ms initial WASM module load). Although browser execution introduced performance penalties ( ∼ 130 × slower than native), BioChef workflows still significantly outperformed traditional web services such as Galaxy by avoiding network delays and server-side queueing (11.3 × faster in a standard pipeline benchmark). BioChef shows how WebAssembly on the client side can democratize genomic data processing, ensuring privacy, reproducibility and ease of use without external dependencies. To our knowledge, this is the first fully client-side, graphical genomic workflow environment powered by WASM.
Fluorescence guided surgery (FGS) has been progressively and globally adapted by multiple surgical disciplines over the last decade. Determining its reach and rate of expansion as a navigational surgical technique is challenging from traditional surveys. Google-trends (GT) was introduced as an ongoing-developing web-kit providing data on search trends to analyze the general population interest on specific topics. The purpose of this study is to implement GT data as an indicator for the world's interest in FGS. GT was used to access data for specific medical subject headings (MeSH) terms associated with FGS, from 2019 to 2024. Collected data included interest over time, interest by country/continent, and related queries. Data were represented as search interest relative to the highest point on global charts for a given region and time. A value of 100% was set as peak popularity for searched term (s). Multiple correlation analyzes were performed between MeSH terms and surgical subspecialties. The number of worldwide searches related to the MeSH terms indocyanine green (ICG) and fluorescence imaging (FI) have consistently increased over time, from 47 and 64% in 2019, to 88 and 69% by the end of 2024, respectively. America withholds the continent with the highest interest for ICG and FI, followed by Europe and Asia with 50 and 45%, respectively. Correlation analyzes with surgical subspecialties showed a significant positive relationship between the interest over time for ICG and fluorescent imaging when paired with endocrine surgery (p < 0.0001; p < 0.0001), urologic surgery (p = 0.003; p = 0.002), and gynecologic surgery (p < 0.0001; p = 0.005). The data conveyed by GT complements the outlook of FGS across the world. Implementing these trends alongside healthcare advocacy and patient therapeutic education, FGS can further expand its applications and potentials to practice safe surgery.
Objective: To investigate the association between psoas muscle mass (PMM) and failure of ureteral access sheath (UAS) insertion and complications from retrograde intrarenal surgery (RIRS). Materials and Methods: A multicenter retrospective case-control study was conducted that included patients who underwent RIRS despite failure of UAS insertion (Cohort 1) and confounder-matched control patients who underwent RIRS after successful UAS insertion (Cohort 2). For morphometric analysis of PMM, ipsilateral psoas muscle areas (iPMAs) were measured using the coreslicer.com webkit. After comparing demographic, clinical, and complication rates and iPMAs between cohorts, gender-specific median iPMAs were also determined to further subdivide patients in each cohort as either low iPMAs or high iPMAs. Thereafter, patients were also compared in terms of RIRS complications. Results: Cohort 1 included 86 patients whereas Cohort 2 consisted of 124 matched cases. The median (interquartile range) iPMAs were similar between the cohorts: Cohort 1, 11.05 (6.82-14.44) cm2 versus 11.12 (6.97-13.69) cm2 for Cohort 2 (P ˃ .05). There was a significant inverse relationship between iPMAs with age (r = -0.222) and Charlson comorbidity index (r = -0.180) for all patients (P ˂ .05). Perioperative and postoperative complication rates were 8.1% and 16.3% for Cohort 1 and 6.5% and 21% for Cohort 2, respectively. The complication rates were not statistically different between patients with high iPMAs and those with low iPMAs, in male or female patients (P > .05). Conclusions: These results show that failure of UAS was not associated with PMM. Furthermore, since the complication rates were similar between patients with high PMM and low PMM, RIRS may be a reliable treatment choice for sarcopenic patients as well as in nonsarcopenic patients.
Lung transplant (LT) is a life-saving treatment for patients with end-stage lung disease. In the setting of COVID-19-associated acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), LT emerged as a therapeutic option for select cases. It is challenging to determine the extent of the knowledge and interest the United States (US) general population has on LT as salvage therapy during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. It is the authors' opinion that patient therapeutic education (PTE) can directly influence established practices by creating an open channel of communication based on needs and expectations for healthcare services. This perspective is a cursory reflection of the nuances between healthcare providers, their services, the interests and expectations of the general population, specifically on LT following COVID-19. The main endpoint of this study is to analyze the US general population's interest in LT as COVID-19 salvage therapy via the Google Trends (GT) web-kit tool.
The popularity and wide adoption of JavaScript both at the client and server side makes its code analysis more important than ever before. Most of the algorithms for vulnerability analysis, coding issue detection, or type inference rely on the call graph representation of the underlying program. Despite some obvious advantages of dynamic analysis, static algorithms should also be considered for call graph construction as they do not require extensive test beds for programs and their costly execution and tracing. In this paper, we systematically compare five widely adopted static algorithms - implemented by the npm call graph, IBM WALA, Google Closure Compiler, Approximate Call Graph, and Type Analyzer for JavaScript tools - for building JavaScript call graphs on 26 WebKit SunSpider benchmark programs and 6 real-world Node.js modules. We provide a performance analysis as well as a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the results. We found that there was a relatively large intersection of the found call edges among the algorithms, which proved to be 100 precise. However, most of the tools found edges that were missed by all others. ACG had the highest precision followed immedia
Browsers use security policies to block malicious behaviors. Cross-Origin Read Blocking (CORB) is a browser security policy for preventing side-channel attacks such as Spectre. We propose a web browser security policy fuzzer called CorbFuzz for checking CORB and similar policies. In implementing a security policy, the browser only has access to HTTP requests and responses, and takes policy actions based solely on those interactions. In checking the browser security policies, CorbFuzz uses a policy oracle that tracks the web application behavior and infers the desired policy action based on the web application state. By comparing the policy oracle with the browser behavior, CorbFuzz detects weaknesses in browser security policies. CorbFuzz checks the web browser policy by fuzzing a set of web applications where the state-related queries are symbolically evaluated for increased coverage and automation. CorbFuzz collects type information from database queries and branch conditions in order to prevent the generation of inconsistent data values during fuzzing. We evaluated CorbFuzz on CORB implementations of Chromium and Webkit, and Opaque Response Blocking (ORB) policy implementation o
A surprisingly simple change could make sodium-ion batteries far more powerful while opening the door to turning seawater into drinking water。 Researchers at the University of Surrey found that sodium vanadium oxide performs much better when its naturally occurring water is left inside instead of being removed during manufacturing
Hidden moon ice may reveal itself through the way it bends and reflects vibrations from moonquakes。 The technique could help astronauts locate vital water supplies and uncover clues about the origins of Earth’s oceans
Dark matter particles may exert a hidden force on one another, but its effects are stranger than expected。 An extra attraction helps the particles cluster, yet it also makes dark matter effectively lighter as the Universe expands。 That weakens its gravitational impact and usually slows the growth of cosmic structure rather than accelerating it
Mathematicians have shown that no electoral system can perfectly balance local representation, proportional national results, and a fixed-size parliament once enough parties compete。 A newly proposed voting method could soften these unavoidable trade-offs and produce outcomes that are much closer to fair
At $25,305, you won't find many new cars for less。 But you get what you pay for