Putting Out the Broom

Broom: Sweeping Out Garbage Collection from Big Data Systems

Many popular systems for processing “big data” are implemented in high-level programming languages with automatic memory management via garbage collection (GC). However, high object churn and large heap sizes put severe strain on the garbage collector. As a result, applications underperform significantly: GC increases the runtime of typical data processing tasks by up to 40%. We propose to use ...

Putting Out a HIT: Crowdsourcing Malware Installs

Today, several actors within the Internet’s burgeoning underground economy specialize in providing services to like-minded criminals. At the same time, gray and white markets exist for services on the Internet providing reasonably similar products. In this paper we explore a hypothetical arbitrage between these two markets by purchasing “Human Intelligence” on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, ...

Putting out fat's fire with the cholinergic antiinflammatory pathway.

A compelling body of research over the last two decades has established that chronic inflammation in adipose tissue makes a key contribution to insulin resistance in obesity (reviewed in Ref. 1). Adipocyte expansion in obesity is frequently accompanied by an induction of inflammatory mediators and cytokines, including (but not limited to) TNF (2), IL-1 and IL-6, plasminogen activator inhibitor-...

Putting out the dark fire: constraining speculative physics disasters

Various speculative physics disaster scenarios have been proposed, but most can be defeated by the observable lack of large-scale disasters they predict. However, this paper introduces the “dark fire scenario” where baryonic matter is autocatalytically converted into dark matter. If this could happen, the resulting disasters would be quiet and hard to observe. Ruling out dark fire is challengin...

John Broom