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1. A Look into Programmers' Heads

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2863303  

   Peitek, Norman; Siegmund, Janet; Apel, Sven; Kästner, Christian; Parnin, Chris; Bethmann, Anja; Leich, Thomas; Saake, Gunter; Brechmann, André (January 2018, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering)

   Program comprehension is an important, but hard to measure cognitive process. This makes it difficult to provide suitable programming languages, tools, or coding conventions to support developers in their everyday work. Here, we explore whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is feasible for soundly measuring program comprehension. To this end, we observed 17 participants inside an fMRI scanner while they were comprehending source code. The results show a clear, distinct activation of five brain regions, which are related to working memory, attention, and language processing, which all fit well to our understanding of program comprehension. Furthermore, we found reduced activity in the default mode network, indicating the cognitive effort necessary for program comprehension. We also observed that familiarity with Java as underlying programming language reduced cognitive effort during program comprehension. To gain confidence in the results and the method, we replicated the study with 11 new participants and largely confirmed our findings. Our results encourage us and, hopefully, others to use fMRI to observe programmers and, in the long run, answer questions, such as: How should we train programmers? Can we train someone to become an excellent programmer? How effective are new languages and tools for program comprehension? 

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2. A First Look at Zoombombing

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SP40001.2021.00061  

   Ling, Chen; Balci, Utkucan; Blackburn, Jeremy; Stringhini, Gianluca (January 2021, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy)
3. Polyfolds: A first and second look

   https://doi.org/10.4171/EMSS/16  

   Fabert, Oliver; Fish, Joel; Golovko, Roman; Wehrheim, Katrin (January 2016, EMS Surveys in Mathematical Sciences)
4. A closer look at spin textures

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-022-01262-6  

   Miao, Jianwei; Murnane, Margaret M. (January 2023, Nature Nanotechnology)
5. Testing Product Distributions: A Closer Look

   Bhattacharyya, Arnab; Gayen, Sutanu; Kandasamy, Saravanan; Vinodchandran, N. V. (March 2021, International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory)

   null (Ed.)

   We study the problems of identity and closeness testing of n-dimensional product distributions. Prior works of Canonne et al. (2017) and Daskalakis and Pan (2017) have established tight sample complexity bounds for non-tolerant testing over a binary alphabet: given two product distributions P and Q over a binary alphabet, distinguish between the cases P = Q and dTV(P;Q) > epsilon . We build on this prior work to give a more comprehensive map of the complexity of testing of product distributions by investigating tolerant testing with respect to several natural distance measures and over an arbitrary alphabet. Our study gives a fine-grained understanding of how the sample complexity of tolerant testing varies with the distance measures for product distributions. In addition, we also extend one of our upper bounds on product distributions to bounded-degree Bayes nets. 

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