Perspectives on Science 

About: Perspectives on Science is an academic journal published by The MIT Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Philosophy of science & Epistemology. It has an ISSN identifier of 1063-6145. Over the lifetime, 1043 publications have been published receiving 13576 citations.

Considerations for the design and reporting of enzyme assays in high-throughput screening applications

Abstract: This review describes the key steps and methods which are used to develop enzyme assays suitable for high-throughput screening (HTS) applications. The goals of HTS enzyme assays are defined relative to lower-throughput bench top assays and important aspects which go into constructing robust and sensitive enzyme assays are described. Methods that have been applied to common enzyme classes are reviewed and pitfalls related to assay artifacts are discussed. We also suggest a reporting format to describe the steps in HTS enzyme assays.

Dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis for network intrusion detection

Abstract: Summary Intrusion detection is the identification of malicious activities in a given network by analyzing its traffic. Data mining techniques used for this analysis study the traffic traces and identify hostile flows in the traffic. Dimensionality reduction in data mining focuses on representing data with minimum number of dimensions such that its properties are not lost and hence reducing the underlying complexity in processing the data. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the prominent dimensionality reduction techniques widely used in network traffic analysis. In this paper, we focus on the efficiency of PCA for intrusion detection and determine its Reduction Ratio (RR), ideal number of Principal Components needed for intrusion detection and the impact of noisy data on PCA. We carried out experiments with PCA using various classifier algorithms on two benchmark datasets namely, KDD CUP and UNB ISCX. Experiments show that the first 10 Principal Components are effective for classification. The classification accuracy for 10 Principal Components is about 99.7% and 98.8%, nearly same as the accuracy obtained using original 41 features for KDD and 28 features for ISCX, respectively.

Experiments in History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract: The increasing attention on experiment in the last two decades has led to important insights into its material, cultural and social dimensions. However, the role of experiment as a tool for generating knowledge has been comparatively poorly studied. What questions are asked in experimental research? How are they treated and eventually resolved? And how do questions, epistemic situations, and experimental activity cohere and shape each other? In my paper, I treat these problems on the basis of detailed studies of research practice. After presenting several cases from the history of electricity—Dufay, Ampere, and Faraday—I discuss a specific type of experiment—the “exploratory experiment”—and analyze how it works in concept formation. I argue that a fuller understanding of experiment can only be achieved by intertwining historical and philosophical perspectives in such a way that the very separation of the two become questioable.