Deconstructing Little Richard

Deconstructing SYNtax

There are at least two distinct ways of conceiving of syntax: the set of rules that enable speakers and listeners to combine the meaning of expressions (compositional syntax), or the set of formal constraints on the combinations of expressions (formal syntax). The question that occupies us in this paper is whether all languages include a significant formal syntax component or whether there are ...

Deconstructing stemness.

Stem cells are unique in their capacity to self-renew and generate differentiated progeny to maintain tissues throughout life. A common molecular program for stem cells has remained elusive. We discuss what the molecular logic of stemness may be. We suggest that it may not be coupled to distinct cellular properties such as self-renewal or multipotency, but rather to the stable suspension at a s...

Remembering Richard [Obituary, Richard A.Newton]

Deconstructing Xen

Hypervisors have quickly become essential but are vulnerable to attack. Unfortunately, efficiently hardening hypervisors is challenging because they lack a privileged security monitor and decomposition strategies. In this work we systematically analyze the 191 Xen hypervisor vulnerabilities from Xen Security Advisories, revealing that the majority (144) are in the core hypervisor not Dom0. We t...

Deconstructing SPECweb99

SPECweb99 has become the de-facto standard workload generator used to evaluate Web server performance in the computer industry. In this paper, we examine how well SPECweb99 captures the server performance characteristics that have been identified by the research community, such as URL popularity and the distributions of request methods, response codes, and transfer sizes. We compare these chara...