Software often crashes. Once a crash happens, a crash report could be sent to software developers for investigation upon user permission. To facilitate efficient handling of crashes, crash reports received by Microsoft's Windows Error Reporting (WER) system are organized into a set of “buckets”. Each bucket contains duplicate crash reports that are deemed as manifestations of the same bug. The bucket information is important for prioritizing efforts to resolve crashing bugs. To improve the accuracy of bucketing, we propose ReBucket, a method for clustering crash reports based on call stack matching. ReBucket measures the similarities of call stacks in crash reports and then assigns the reports to appropriate buckets based on the similarity values. We evaluate ReBucket using crash data collected from five widely-used Microsoft products. The results show that ReBucket achieves better overall performance than the existing methods. On average, the F-measure obtained by ReBucket is about 0.88.

Perhaps surprisingly, no practical performance models exist for popular (and complex) client applications such as Adobe's Designer suite, Microsoft's Office suite and Visual Studio, Mozilla, Halo 3, etc. There is currently no tool that automatically answers program developers', IT administrators' and end-users' simple what-if questions like "what happens to the performance of my favorite application X if I upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7?". This paper describes directions we are taking for constructing practical, versatile performance models to address this problem. The directions we have taken have two paths. The first path involves instrumenting applications better to export their state and associated metrics. This application-specific monitoring is always on and interesting data is collected from real, "in-the-wild" deployments. The second path involves statistical modeling techniques. The models we are experimenting with require no modifications to the OS or applications beyond the above instrumentation, and no explicit a priori model on how an OS or application should behave. We are in the process of learning from models we have constructed for several Microsoft products, including the Office suite, Visual Studio and Media Player. This paper presents preliminary findings from a large user deployment (several hundred thousand user sessions) of these applications that show the coverage and limitations of such models. Early indications from this work point towards future modeling strategies based on large amounts of data collected in the field. We present our thoughts on what this could imply for the SIGMETRICS community.

Perhaps surprisingly, no practical performance models exist for popular (and complex) client applications such as Adobe's Creative Suite, Microsoft's Office and Visual Studio, Mozilla, Halo 3, etc. There is currently no tool that automatically answers program developers', IT administrators' and end-users' simple what-if questions like "what happens to the performance of my favorite application X if I upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7?". This paper describes our approach towards constructing practical, versatile performance models to address this problem. The goal is to have these models be useful for application developers to help expand application testing coverage and for IT administrators to assist with understanding the performance consequences of a software, hardware or configuration change. This paper's main contributions are in system building and performance modeling. We believe we have built applications that are easier to model because we have proactively instrumented them to export their state and associated metrics. This application-specific monitoring is always on and interesting data is collected from real, "in-the-wild" deployments. The models we are experimenting with are based on statistical techniques. They require no modifications to the OS or applications beyond the above instrumentation, and no explicit a priori model on how an OS or application should behave. We are in the process of learning from models we have constructed for several Microsoft products, including the Office suite, Visual Studio and Media Player. This paper presents preliminary findings from a large user deployment (several hundred thousand user sessions) of these applications that show the coverage and limitations of such models. These findings pushed us to move beyond averages/means and go into some depth into why client application performance has an inherently large variance.

Fragt man einen Juristen, was ihm spontan zur Unternehmenskommunikation aus rechtlicher Sicht einfalle, so wird er mit einiger Wahrscheinlichkeit sagen, dass diese wahrheitsgetreu und korrekt sein müsse und nicht irreführend sein dürfe. Damit wird bereits der Kern der Sache getroffen. Beim weiteren Überlegen wird er wohl darauf hinweisen, welche grosse Bedeutung das Recht der Publizität und der Transparenz einräumt. So wird oft an das berühmte Wort des amerikanischen Richters Brandeis erinnert: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman" (Brandeis, 1913, S.92).

Phänomen und Begriff von Corporate Governance sind nicht einfach zu erläutern, wenn man nicht schlicht — aber doch ins Zentrum zielend — feststellen will, dass es um die Leitung von Unternehmen gehe. „Corporate“ hängt gewiss mit „corporation“, also einer juristischen Verkörperung — sprich Körperschaft — zusammen, die zur juristischen Person wurde und damit zum umfassenden Zurechnungspunkt von Rechten und Pflichten. Im Wort „Governance“ steckt nicht nur der Kern des Regierens, sondern gar der griechische Begriff des „kybernetes“, also des Steuermannes1.

Dado que las violaciones de los derechos humanos preocupan cada vez más en todo el mundo, y como quienes cometen dichas violaciones no sólo son los Gobiernos y sus agentes sino todo tipo de partidos a distintos niveles, es primordial para una gran organización humanitaria como el Movimiento Internacional de la Cruz Roja y de la Media Luna Roja centrar sus esfuerzos en combatir este mal. De no hacerlo, su imagen puede verse seriamente dañada y, lo que es mucho peor, significaría abandonar a los grupos y las comunidades más vulnerables.

B. B. Murdock and M. J. Kahana (1993a) presented a continuous memory version of the theory of distributed associative memory (TODAM) model; they claimed that this model predicts list-strength and list-length findings, including those reported by R. Ratcliff, S. E. Clark, and R. M. Shiffrin (1990) and K. Murnane and R. M. Shiffrin (1991a). This model is quite similar to one discussed by R. M. Shiffrin, R. Ratcliff, and S. Clark (1990), who rejected the model on the basis of its inability to predict both an absent or negative list-strength effect (when strength is varied by repetitions) and a present list-length effect. In this comment we elaborate the earlier discussion and demonstrate that the version of TODAM proposed by B. B. Murdock and M. J. Kahana (1993a) indeed fails for this reason. We show this first for a somewhat simplified version of the model for which derivations are obvious and then in a simulation of the complete version using the parameter values suggested by B. B. Murdock and M. J. Kahana (1993a).

Les violations des droits de l'homme constituent de plus en plus un sujet de préoccupation dans le monde entier et sont commises non seulement par des gouvernements ou leurs agents, mais aussi par toutes sortes de groupes à différents niveaux: il est done essentiel qu'une grande organisation humanitaire comme le Mouvement international de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge axe ses efforts sur la lutte contre ce fléau. Si elle se dérobe, elle risque d'affaiblir dangereusement son image et, ce qui serait pire encore, d'abandonner un grand nombre de groupes et de communautés parmi les plus vulnérables.

As violations of human rights are a growing concern all over the world, and as the perpetrators are not only governments and their agents but all sorts of parties on many levels, it is essential for a major humanitarian organization like the Red Cross and Red Crescent to focus its efforts on counteracting this evil. If it fails to do so it might dangerously weaken its profile and, what is much worse, it will be deserting many of the most vulnerable groups and communities.

In December 1989, the Swedish Government announced a drastically restricted refugee policy, as a result ofproblems due to the increasing numbers of asylum-seekers, of whom some 30,000 arrived in during 1989. Under the new policy, dt facto refugees and war resisters would no longer be granted asylum in Sweden. This report gives an account of the development ofthe concept o^defacto refugee in Sweden and other Nordic countries, the legal background to the new restrictions, an account of an earlier precedent concerning Turkish Assyrians, and the exact significance of the recent events

AbstractThere is no official refugee declaration in Sweden. The procedure is the same for asylum seekers and for other aliens applying for residence permissions. It starts with interrogation by the police, the protocole of which is submitted to the Central Immigration Authority, Statens Invandrarverk SIV. A well functioning legal aid system grants the asylum seeker threatened by expulsion free legal counsel and representation from the stage of the police hearing until the case is finally decided. SIV handles the cases in camera without hearings or contradictionary proceedings. This - according to the author - is the root of a certain credibility gap concerning the information available to SIV and how and to what extent it should be communicated to the applicant. The same is said about the interpretation of refugee law tending to be too restrictive. Negative decisions are combined with an order of expulsion. They do often give some explanation of the reasons for the decision. There is an absolute right of appeal to be lodged with the Government within three weeks. In spite of the absence of a refugee declaration there is categorizing into A- or convention refugees — entitled to CTDs, B-refugees and others. This is important for the refugees opportunity to employmant, education etc. but there is no appeal or appropriate remedy in these issues. Considering this and the psychological feeling of safety for the asylum seeker, it is felt that refugee declarations should be introduced in the swedish system. A proposal to establish a special board of appeal for refugee- and other alien cases separated from the Government, has been rejected in Sweden. Therefore the last resort remains the Government, a political instance. This is considered to be to the advantage of refugees - but only as long as the political climate in the country is favourable to them.