Malwise-an effective and efficient classification system for packed and polymorphic malware

Signature-based malware detection systems have been a much used response to the pervasive problem of malware. Identification of malware variants is essential to a detection system and is made possible by identifying invariant characteristics in related samples. To classify the packed and polymorphic malware, this paper proposes a novel system, named Malwise, for malware classification using a fast application-level emulator to reverse the code packing transformation, and two flowgraph matching algorithms to perform classification. An exact flowgraph matching algorithm is employed that uses string-based signatures, and is able to detect malware with near real-time performance. Additionally, a more effective approximate flowgraph matching algorithm is proposed that uses the decompilation technique of structuring to generate string-based signatures amenable to the string edit distance. We use real and synthetic malware to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Malwise. Using more than 15,000 real malware, collected from honeypots, the effectiveness is validated by showing that there is an 88 percent probability that new malware is detected as a variant of existing malware. The efficiency is demonstrated from a smaller sample set of malware where 86 percent of the samples can be classified in under 1.3 seconds.

Controlling the philosophical imaginary: reading Pierre Hadot with Luiz Costa Lima

This essay proffers a critical complement to Luiz Costa Lima's claims concerning the nature, history, and control of the imagination in Western culture. Accepting the wide scope of Costa Lima's critical claim about the socio-political control of imaginative literature in Western history, we claim that Pierre Hadot's work on philosophy as a bios in the ancient West cautions us lest we position philosophy in this history as always and necessarily an agency of control. At different times, philosophy has rather stood as an ally in practicing and promoting forms of criticity, and the playful, creative, and transformative envisaging of alternative ways of experiencing the world Costa Lima theoretically celebrates in literary fiction. Any critique of philosophy as always opposed to the critical imagination can only stand, we have argued, relative to philosophy as conceived on what Hadot suggests is but one, albeit the now hegemonic model: namely, as a body of systematic rational discourses, including discourses about the literary, poetics, and imaginary. What this vision of philosophy misses, Hadot shows, is how the ancient conception of philosophy (which survives in figures like Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Goethe) as a way of life promoted distinctly literary, aesthetic, and imaginative practices; first, to assist in the existential internalisation of the schools' ideas; secondly, to envisage in the sage and utopias edifying counterfactuals to help students critically reimagine accepted norms; and thirdly, in the conception of a transformed way of living and perceiving ‘according to nature’, whose parameters of autonomy and pleasurable contemplation of the singularity of the present experiences anticipate the experiences delineated in modern aesthetic theory.

The influence of cover on nesting Red-capped Plovers: a trade-off between thermoregulation and predation risk?

 Some ground-nesting birds adopt a mixed strategy of nesting in the open, or under cover (e.g. vegetation). This may represent a trade-off between thermally favourable nest sites (covered) and those that enable the early detection and avoidance of predators (open). This study examined whether such a trade-off exists for Redcapped Plover Charadrius ruficapillus, whose eggs are preyed upon principally by Little Raven Corvus mellori. For real and artificial nests, nest temperatures under cover (real, 25.9 ± 0.1°C; false, 16.2 ± 0.5°C) were cooler than those in the open (real, 26.8 ± 0.1°C; false, 17.4 ± 0.9°C). Covered nests had more visual obstructions than open nests (covered, 65.5% ± 11.4%; open, 7.4% ± 2.8%) and a standardised measure of incubator escape distance, initiated by experimental human approaches, indicated incubators fled open nests at longer distances than for covered nests. Nests under cover showed a slightly (non-significant) higher probability of surviving one day (Daily Survival Rate [DSR] = 0.978) than those in the open (DSR = 0.950). For false nests containing model eggs, covered nests exhibited better survival to 10 days compared with open nests (20.4% vs. 4.7%). Thus, covered nests are associated with enhanced thermal environments and egg survival, but predators can approach the incubator more closely. Overall, the proposed trade-off between thermal and predation risks associated with nest sites appears to exist and explains the ongoing occurrence of nests in open and covered locations.

Words Between Worlds: Portal Fantasy as Dialogic in Gaiman and Miéville

Step through the looking-glass and where do you go? Inherently, every text exposes the reader to other worlds. However, the fantastic, like no other mode, not only exposes, but explores, explains, and employs other worlds (and how we enter them) to question what is real and unreal, possible and impossible.Using Farah Mendelsohn’s (2008) examination of portal fantasy, this paper argues that when you step into another world you leave something behind and bring something back. This Bakhtinian dialogic will then frame an analysis of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) and China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) which explore notions of organic subjectivity, reader expectations, and if gaps actually exist between textual and extra-textual, real and unreal.These atypical, self- reflexive, satirical portal fantasies express how writers position readers (not unlike their protagonists) in alternative conceptual realms, disturbing the everyday, the commonplace realities we often take for granted. As such, both texts and the discursive strategies they use ask: what do we see, or, as may be the case, un-see? Significantly, this paper suggests that, via self-conscious world-building, portal fantasies allow reader and writer the opportunity to inhabit those spaces between textual, ideological, generic, metaphorical, irrational, fantastic worlds.

Disruption and resonance in the personal essay

The personal essay, as one of the most delightfully subjective manifestations of creative nonfiction, explores what is real and tangible, refined through the intimate perspective and curiosity of the writer. In her best works, the personal essayist has the capacity to disrupt her narratives in ways that will resonate with readers who are themselves adjusting to the disruption of their own personal narrative interactions by social media tools. This paper explores the process by which fragmentary episodes become segments of a linked narrative through the capacity of the personal essayist to leap associatively from personal into universal ‘truths’. Segments coalesce into cogent entities, drawn together as a resonant narrative by themes as echoes, or the deliberate juxtaposition of fragments of story. Such segments-as-narrative are based on perceptions of the essay as a disruptive text, which by the nature of its structure reverberates metaphorically beyond the known and the familiar.

Investigating the effectiveness of teacher education for early career teachers in diverse settings: the longitudinal research we have to have

There have been more than 100 reports focusing on the effectiveness of teacher education in Australia over the last 35 years with many positioning teacher education as flawed and in need of reform. These frequent criticisms have drawn attention to the difficulty teacher educators can experience when trying to interrupt or contest this representation: a situation not unique to Australia. In the United States, for example, Pam Grossman has suggested that those in teacher education “seem ill prepared to respond to critics who question the value of professional education for teachers with evidence of our effectiveness” (Grossman in J Teach Educ 59(1):10–23, 2008). A key question facing teacher educators, therefore, concerns the kinds of research that will most effectively allow us to lead debates about teacher preparation. This paper outlines an approach to the conceptualization and conduct of research into the effectiveness of teacher education that seeks to move debates in new directions. Drawing upon the theoretical resources of Soja (Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places, 1996) and Lefebre (The production of space, 1991) we outline the ways in which a spatial approach to conceptualizing teacher education influenced the design and conduct of a large scale, longitudinal project that investigated the question of the effectiveness of teacher education in Australia. In exploring the design features of this ARC linkage grant the paper demonstrates how research changes when teacher education is conceptualised from a spatial point of view and illustrates the ways in which consideration of the conceived, perceived and lived spaces of teacher education can move research about effectiveness into new directions.

Robust optimal motion cueing algorithm based on the linear quadratic regulator method and a genetic algorithm

The aim of this paper is to design and develop an optimal motion cueing algorithm (MCA) based on the genetic algorithm (GA) that can generate high-fidelity motions within the motion simulator's physical limitations. Both, angular velocity and linear acceleration are adopted as the inputs to the MCA for producing the higher order optimal washout filter. The linear quadratic regulator (LQR) method is used to constrain the human perception error between the real and simulated driving tasks. To develop the optimal MCA, the latest mathematical models of the vestibular system and simulator motion are taken into account. A reference frame with the center of rotation at the driver's head to eliminate false motion cues caused by rotation of the simulator to the translational motion of the driver's head as well as to reduce the workspace displacement is employed. To improve the developed LQR-based optimal MCA, a new strategy based on optimal control theory and the GA is devised. The objective is to reproduce a signal that can follow closely the reference signal and avoid false motion cues by adjusting the parameters from the obtained LQR-based optimal washout filter. This is achieved by taking a series of factors into account, which include the vestibular sensation error between the real and simulated cases, the main dynamic limitations, the human threshold limiter in tilt coordination, the cross correlation coefficient, and the human sensation error fluctuation. It is worth pointing out that other related investigations in the literature normally do not consider the effects of these factors. The proposed optimized MCA based on the GA is implemented using the MATLAB/Simulink software. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed GA-based method in enhancing human sensation, maximizing the reference shape tracking, and reducing the workspace usage.

View of Geelong: ruin and viewin', transpanorama

Eugene von Guerard’s View of Geelong is iconic for a number of reasons, including its detailed interpretation of the landscape and its special place in the imagining of the region. Bishop and Reis seek to honour this by manipulating the science behind the view and at the same time question the viewer’s relationship to the scene and the work. We use the husk of a ruined fireplace to house a camera obscura and stereoscope – pressed concaved metal into which the viewer puts their head and looks through a divided hole into the unit. The camera obscura mimics the mechanics of the eye, and is able to capture the scene perfectly while the stereoscope splits the scene, makes it partial, layered and temporal. In doing this we layer von Guerard’s view with change, acknowledging the effects of European civilization and, peculiar to this historical panorama, suburbanization of the landscape. The creeping suburbs will be seen on the left side of the stereoscope through a camera obscura, which presents a real-time view of the scene from the point at which von Guerard allegedly painted it. On the right side, we again catch the light, but only to light a transparency of von Guerard’s original work. The technologies we draw upon – the camera obscura, stereoscope and landscape painting – create a confluence of images, both real and imagined.

View of Geelong: ruin and viewin', transpanorama

Public Art installation by Cam Bishop and Simon Reis. Eugene von Guerard’s View of Geelong is iconic for a number of reasons, including its detailed interpretation of the landscape and its special place in the imagining of the region. Bishop and Reis seek to honour this by manipulating the science behind the view and at the same time question the viewer’s relationship to the scene and the work. We use the husk of a ruined fireplace to house a camera obscura and stereoscope – pressed concaved metal into which the viewer puts their head and looks through a divided hole into the unit. The camera obscura mimics the mechanics of the eye, and is able to capture the scene perfectly while the stereoscope splits the scene, makes it partial, layered and temporal. In doing this we layer von Guerard’s view with change, acknowledging the effects of European civilization and, peculiar to this historical panorama, suburbanization of the landscape. The creeping suburbs will be seen on the left side of the stereoscope through a camera obscura, which presents a real-time view of the scene from the point at which von Guerard allegedly painted it. On the right side, we again catch the light, but only to light a transparency of von Guerard’s original work. The technologies we draw upon – the camera obscura, stereoscope and landscape painting – create a confluence of images, both real and imagined. The iconic View of Geelong Painting can be seen at the Geelong Gallery.

Returns to scale, market power, and the nature of price rigidity in new keynesian models with self-fulfilling expectations

Increasing returns to scale and firms' market power are two potential sources of sunspot expectations in neoclassical models. We show that in New Keynesian models, returns to scale and market power can have fundamentally different implications for broad macroeconomic issues, including self-fulfilling expectations, depending on the nature of price rigidity. Our findings suggest that the design of stabilization monetary policy can depend on precise knowledge about the economy's real and nominal features. Therefore, a clear understanding of the specific economic environment and its relevance to monetary policymaking for ensuring macroeconomic stability can be an integrated part of monetary policy practice.

Robust control for power sharing in microgrids with low-inertia wind and PV generators

This paper presents a robust control design scheme for a multidistributed energy resource (DER) microgrid for power sharing in both interconnected and islanded modes. The scheme is proposed for micgrogrids consisting of photovoltaic (PV) units and wind turbine driven doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs). A battery is integrated with each of the wind and solar DER units. The control scheme has two levels: 1) one centralized multi-input–multi-output robust controller for regulating the set reference active and reactive powers and 2) local real and reactive power droop con-trollers, one on each DER unit. The robust control scheme utilizes multivariable H1 control to design controllers that are robust to the changes in the network and system nonlinearities. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated through large-distur-bance simulations, with complete nonlinear models, on a test micro-grid. It is found that the power sharing controllers provide excellent performance against large disturbances and load variations during islanding transients and interconnected operation.

A fragmented discourse of religious leadership in France: Muslim youth between citizenship and radicalization

At a time when public debates about radicalization of Muslim youth in the West are taking center stage and when questions about “home-grown” security threats are increasing in the wake of a number of terrorist attacks in many émigré societies, this article provides fresh empirical insights from the perspective of religious leadership. It outlines a picture of a highly diverse Muslim religious landscape where competing religious discourses are struggling to attract and support Muslim youth facing social dislocation and identity crises within increasingly contested social milieus. The article argues that a typology of religious leadership is clearly emerging where a spectrum of faith-based orientations and religious practice emphasize, to different degrees, notions of attachment to universal ethics and individual agency. The fact that conservative, sometimes radical, interpretations of such contestations represent a minority of voices is heartening even though the actual damage by such minority is often disproportionate to its actual size within the so-called silent majority. The empirical insights provided by the religious leaders interviewed for this study offer hope that the future of Western Muslims is more positive than we are led to think, if the possibility of combining devout faith with local political engagement becomes a real and sustainable conduit towards social inclusion and intercultural understanding and if necessary support and understanding are extended by the host communities.

A grid-based index method for time warping distance

Recently DTW (dynamic time warping) has been recognized as the most robust distance function to measure the similarity between two time series, and this fact has spawned a flurry of research on this topic. Most indexing methods proposed for DTW are based on the R-tree structure. Because of high dimensionality and loose lower bounds for time warping distance, the pruning power of these tree structures are quite weak, resulting in inefficient search. In this paper, we propose a dimensionality reduction method motivated by observations about the inherent character of each time series. A very compact index file is constructed. By scanning the index file, we can get a very small candidate set, so that the number of page access is dramatically reduced. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on real and synthetic datasets.

Scenes from another life (the paper)

What is my dance now? My body is saturated with images and details. My choreography has become an exorcism of ghosts of “opening-nights past” as I dance out memories and events inscribed on my body. A chorus of my other selves now accompanies my stage performance, live and virtual, real and imagined, past and present.

Traum a dream

"Traum A Dream ... can be designated as activating object, with all lines of thought and action leading through it. Traum A Dream is a film that comes out of a life-long experimental animation practice; a body of work that has been evolving over 35 years. This is now more than half the time I have carried a trace of the trauma in my real and lived-in body, some of the personal events, which I reveal here.
This film was produced at a time when I was coming to terms in my personal life, remembering abuse from childhood. Traum A Dream emerged after an unsuccessful attempt to lay bare that abuse in a previous project, which co-incided with the conclusion of my CD-Rom Diary V 3.2 production."

"A representaion of traumatised space depicting a person who is consumed by a body of pain, consumed by fire. Slowly something is remembered." www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn_films.html