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Internet of Things - protocols and access keys

I've just read this article from Mark O'Neill on the 10 concerns for the Internet of Things. Mark brings up some very interesting aspects and concerns. I'd like to comment on two of those: protocols and access keys.

His primary concern is protocol proliferation. I agree this is an issue. Mark explicitly mentions CoAP, MQTT, AMQP and XMPP. Interestingly he doesn't mention HTTP, which I have found to be heavily used by devices, especially the new generation of Raspberry Pi based systems. Many Arduino's also use HTTP.

I will admit to a strong bias. I think that MQTT is the best of these protocols for IoT devices, with CoAP a distant second.

Let's get XMPP out of the way. I love XMPP. I think its a fantastic protocol. Do I want to create XML packets on my Arduino? Er... nope. Even on 32-bit controllers, there is still the network traffic to consider: suppose I'm using a GPRS connection and I have thousands of devices deployed: minimizing network traffic is important for cost and efficiency, and XMPP was not designed for that.

AMQP is not an appropriate protocol for IoT devices and was not designed for that. It is designed for "the efficient exchange of information within and between enterprises". It was certainly not designed for lightweight, non-persistent, non-transactional systems. To that end, my own system (WSO2) will be providing efficient bridging for AMQP and MQTT to enable lightweight systems to get their data into wider enterprise contexts. I also demonstrated HTTP to MQTT bridging with the WSO2 ESB at the MQTT Interop held last week at EclipseCon.

How about CoAP vs MQTT. Firstly, CoAP is more appropriate to compare to MQTT-SN. It is UDP only, and designed to emulate a RESTful model over UDP. My biggest concern with CoAP is this: most people don't actually understand REST - they understand HTTP. If I had a dollar for every time I've come across supposedly RESTful interfaces that are really HTTP interfaces, I'd be a rich man! 

Interestingly, despite MQTT having been around for 10 years, the Google Trend shows that it has only recently hit the public notice:
However, as you can see, it has quickly overtaken CoAP. In terms of traffic, it is a clear winner: every Facebook mobile app uses MQTT to communicate with the Facebook servers.

The other area I'd like to comment on is access keys. I agree this is a big issue, and that is the reason I've been working on using OAuth2 access keys with MQTT and IoT devices. I recently gave talks about this at FOSDEM, QCon London, and EclipseCon.  The EclipseCon talk also covered a set of wider security concerns and the slides are available here. OAuth2 and OpenID Connect are important standards that have got incredible traction in a short period of time. They have evolved out of 10+ years of trying to solve the distributed, federated identity and access control problems of the Internet. 

In my presentation I strongly argued that passwords are bad for users, but worse for devices. Tokens are the correct model, and the OAuth2 token is the best available token to use at this point. There was considerable interest in the MQTT interop session on standardizing the use of OAuth2 tokens with the protocol. 

My personal prediction is that we will see MQTT and HTTP become the most-used IoT protocols, and I strongly urge (and hope) that OAuth2 tokens will become the de-facto model across both of these.







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Treat For Legal Interpreters and an Archive for Translators As Well

OpenCourt is an experimental project run by WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, that uses digital technology to make Quincy District Court more accessible to the public.

Full Article

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Translating notary terms 2: What are public-form and private-form notarial acts?

A public-form notarial act is a document drafted by a notary that contains the entire notarial act. It is narrated from the notary’s perspective and includes all the details and circumstances of the act. All Spanish notarial acts are in public form (documents elevados a público). In England and Wales, notarial acts are usually in […]




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How to translate de una parte and de otra parte into English (contract translation tip 9)

How should you translate into English the terms de una parte and de otra parte that you find at the start of Spanish contracts?   What’s the job of de una parte and de otra parte in a Spanish contract? If you’ve read a couple of Spanish contracts, this seems obvious. But there is a […]




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Spain’s main registros: translations and background info

This post looks at the main public registers (registros) in Spain. It outlines what they are for and lists common translations and similar entities in English-speaking countries. Whether each registro is more a list or a place (or both) is also covered. This key distinction (described in this post) can affect the translation or at […]




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De Trump à Villiers, quand sonnent les cloches

L'EDITO DE FOG. Trump, rempart contre l'ideologie des elites. En France, une partie de la classe politique, en pleine deconstruction, serait-elle en train de pratiquer l'<< ablation de la memoire >>, selon la formule de Philippe de Villiers ?




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Gauche radicale : demandez le pogrom !

CHRONIQUE. Les accusations de << genocide >> contre Israel se multiplient, revelant la derive antisioniste d'une partie de la gauche radicale.





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Impact of CPU-bound Processes on IP Forwarding of Linux and Windows XP

These days, commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software are used to build high-end and powerful workstations and servers to be deployed in today's local area networks of private homes and small- to medium-sized business. Typically, these servers are multipurpose and shared - running networking functionalities involving IP packet forwarding in addition to other CPU intensive applications. In this paper we study and investigate the impact of running CPU-bound applications on the performance of IP packet forwarding. We measure and compare the impact and performance for the two operating systems of choice for home and small-business users, namely Linux and Windows XP. The performance is studied in terms of key performance metrics which include throughput, packet loss, round-trip delay, and CPU availability. For our measurements, we consider today's typical home network hosts of modern processors and Gigabit network cards. We also consider different configuration setups and utilize open-source tools to generate relatively high traffic rates. Our empirical results show that Linux exhibits superior performance over Windows XP in terms of IP forwarding performance. Results also show that, unlike Windows XP, the IP forwarding performance of Linux is not significantly impacted by running CPU-bound applications.




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Text Line Detection and Segmentation: Uneven Skew Angles and Hill-and-Dale Writing

In this paper a line detection and segmentation technique is presented. The proposed technique is an improved version of an older one. The experiments have been performed on the training dataset of the ICDAR 2009 handwriting segmentation contest in order to be able to compare, objectively, the performance of the two techniques. The improvement between the older and newer version is more than 24% while the average extra CPU time cost is less than 200 ms per page.




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Fusion of Complementary Online and Offline Strategies for Recognition of Handwritten Kannada Characters

This work describes an online handwritten character recognition system working in combination with an offline recognition system. The online input data is also converted into an offline image, and in parallel recognized by both online and offline strategies. Features are proposed for offline recognition and a disambiguation step is employed in the offline system for the samples for which the confidence level of the classier is low. The outputs are then combined probabilistically resulting in a classier out-performing both individual systems. Experiments are performed for Kannada, a South Indian Language, over a database of 295 classes. The accuracy of the online recognizer improves by 11% when the combination with offline system is used.




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Visualizing and Analyzing the Quality of XML Documents

In this paper we introduce eXVisXML, a visual tool to explore documents annotated with the mark-up language XML, in order to easily perform over them tasks as knowledge extraction or document engineering.

eXVisXML was designed mainly for two kind of users. Those who want to analyze an annotated document to explore the information contained-for them a visual inspection tool can be of great help, and a slicing functionality can be an effective complement.

The other target group is composed by document engineers who might be interested in assessing the quality of the annotation created. This can be achieved through the measurements of some parameters that will allow to compare the elements and attributes of the DTD/Schema against those effectively used in the document instances.

Both functionalities and the way they were delineated and implemented will be discussed along the paper.




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Choice of Classifiers in Hierarchical Recognition of Online Handwritten Kannada and Tamil Aksharas

In this paper, we propose a novel dexterous technique for fast and accurate recognition of online handwritten Kannada and Tamil characters. Based on the primary classifier output and prior knowledge, the best classifier is chosen from set of three classifiers for second stage classification. Prior knowledge is obtained through analysis of the confusion matrix of primary classifier which helped in identifying the multiple sets of confused characters. Further, studies were carried out to check the performance of secondary classifiers in disambiguating among the confusion sets. Using this technique we have achieved an average accuracy of 92.6% for Kannada characters on the MILE lab dataset and 90.2% for Tamil characters on the HP Labs dataset.




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An Empirical Study on Human and Information Technology Aspects in Collaborative Enterprise Networks

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face new challenges in the global market as customers require more complete and flexible solutions and continue to drastically reduce the number of suppliers. SMEs are trying to address these challenges through cooperation within collaborative enterprise networks (CENs). Human aspects constitute a fundamental issue in these networks as people, as opposed to organizations or Information Technology (IT) systems, cooperate. Since there is a lack of empirical studies on the role of human factors in IT-supported collaborative enterprise networks, this paper addresses the major human aspects encountered in this type of organization. These human aspects include trust issues, knowledge and know-how sharing, coordination and planning activities, and communication and mutual understanding, as well as their influence on the business processes of CENs supported by IT tools. This paper empirically proves that these aspects constitute key factors for the success or the failure of CENs. Two case studies performed on two different CENs in Switzerland are presented and the roles of human factors are identified with respect to the IT support systems. Results show that specific human factors, namely trust and communication and mutual understanding have to be well addressed in order to design and develop adequate software solutions for CENs.




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A Petri Nets based Approach to Specify Individual and Collaborative Interaction in 3D Virtual Environments

This work describes a methodology that supports the design and implementation of software modules, which represent the individual and collaborative three-dimensional interaction process phases. The presented methodology integrates three modeling approaches: Petri Nets, a collaborative manipulation model based on the combination of single user interaction techniques taxonomy, and object-oriented programming concepts. The combination of these elements allows for the description of interaction tasks, the sequence of interaction processes being controlled by Petri Nets with the codes generated automatically. By the integration of these approaches, the present work addresses not only the entire development cycle of both individual and collaborative three-dimensional interaction, but also the reuse of developed interaction blocks in new virtual environment projects.




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Security and Privacy Preservation for Mobile E-Learning via Digital Identity Attributes

This paper systematically discusses the security and privacy concerns for e-learning systems. A five-layer architecture of e-learning system is proposed. The security and privacy concerns are addressed respectively for five layers. This paper further examines the relationship among the security and privacy policy, the available security and privacy technology, and the degree of e-learning privacy and security. The digital identity attributes are introduced to e-learning portable devices to enhance the security and privacy of e-learning systems. This will provide significant contributions to the knowledge of e-learning security and privacy research communities and will generate more research interests.




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CSCWD: Applications and Challenges




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On Compound Purposes and Compound Reasons for Enabling Privacy

This paper puts forward a verification method for compound purposes and compound reasons to be used during purpose limitation.

When it is absolutely necessary to collect privacy related information, it is essential that privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) protect access to data - in general accomplished by using the concept of purposes bound to data. Compound purposes and reasons are an enhancement of purposes used during purpose limitation and binding and are more expressive than purposes in their general form. Data users specify their access needs by making use of compound reasons which are defined in terms of (compound) purposes. Purposes are organised in a lattice with purposes near the greatest lower bound (GLB) considered weak (less specific) and purposes near the least upper bound (LUB) considered strong (most specific).

Access is granted based on the verification of the statement of intent (from the data user) against the compound purpose bound to the data; however, because purposes are in a lattice, the data user is not limited to a statement of intent that matches the purposes bound to the data exactly - the statement can be a true reflection of their intent with the data. Hence, the verification of compound reasons against compound purposes cannot be accomplished by current published verification algorithms.

Before presenting the verification method, compound purposes and reasons, as well as the structures used to represent them, and the operators that are used to define compounds is presented. Finally, some thoughts on implementation are provided.




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Markup upon Video - towards Dynamic and Interactive Video Annotations

Interactive video is increasingly becoming a more and more dominant feature of our media platforms. Especially due to the popular YouTube annotations framework, integrating graphical annotations in a video has become very fashionable these days. However, the current options are limited to a few graphical shapes for which the user can define as good as no dynamic behaviour. Despite the enormous demand for easy-creatable, interactive video there are no such advanced tools available.

In this article we describe an innovative approach, to realize dynamics and interactivity of video annotations. First we explain basic concepts of video-markup like the generic element model and visual descriptors. After that we introduce the event-tree model, which can be used to define event-handling in an interactive video formally as well as visually. By combining these basic concepts, we can give an effective tool to the video community for realizing interactive and dynamic video in a simple, intuitive and focused way.




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ODR, Ontologies, and Web 2.0

Online communities and institutions create new spaces for interaction, but also open new avenues for the emergence of grievances, claims, and disputes. Consequently, online dispute resolution (ODR) procedures are core to these new online worlds. But can ODR mechanisms provide sufficient levels of reputation, trust, and enforceability for it to become mainstream? This contribution introduces the new approaches to ODR and provides a description of the design and structure of Ontomedia, a web-based platform to facilitate online mediation in different domains.




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Web 2.0: Applications and Mechanisms




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Context-Aware Composition and Adaptation based on Model Transformation

Using pre-existing software components (COTS) to develop software systems requires the composition and adaptation of the component interfaces to solve mismatch problems. These mismatches may appear at different interoperability levels (signature, behavioural, quality of service and semantic). In this article, we define an approach which supports composition and adaptation of software components based on model transformation by taking into account the four levels. Signature and behavioural levels are addressed by means of transition systems. Context-awareness and semanticbased techniques are used to tackle quality of service and semantic, respectively, but also both consider the signature level. We have implemented and validated our proposal for the design and application of realistic and complex systems. Here, we illustrate the need to support the variability of the adaptation process in a context-aware pervasive system through a real-world case study, where software components are implemented using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). We apply our model transformation process to extract transition systems (CA-STS specifications) from WF components. These CA-STSs are used to tackle the composition and adaptation. Then, we generate a CASTS adaptor specification, which is transformed into its corresponding WF adaptor component with the purpose of interacting with all the WF components of the system, thereby avoiding mismatch problems.




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Software Components, Architectures and Reuse




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Hierarchical Graph-Grammar Model for Secure and Efficient Handwritten Signatures Classification

One important subject associated with personal authentication capabilities is the analysis of handwritten signatures. Among the many known techniques, algorithms based on linguistic formalisms are also possible. However, such techniques require a number of algorithms for intelligent image analysis to be applied, allowing the development of new solutions in the field of personal authentication and building modern security systems based on the advanced recognition of such patterns. The article presents the approach based on the usage of syntactic methods for the static analysis of handwritten signatures. The graph linguistic formalisms applied, such as the IE graph and ETPL(k) grammar, are characterised by considerable descriptive strength and a polynomial membership problem of the syntactic analysis. For the purposes of representing the analysed handwritten signatures, new hierarchical (two-layer) HIE graph structures based on IE graphs have been defined. The two-layer graph description makes it possible to take into consideration both local and global features of the signature. The usage of attributed graphs enables the storage of additional semantic information describing the properties of individual signature strokes. The verification and recognition of a signature consists in analysing the affiliation of its graph description to the language describing the specimen database. Initial assessments display a precision of the method at a average level of under 75%.




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Cost-Sensitive Spam Detection Using Parameters Optimization and Feature Selection

E-mail spam is no more garbage but risk since it recently includes virus attachments and spyware agents which make the recipients' system ruined, therefore, there is an emerging need for spam detection. Many spam detection techniques based on machine learning techniques have been proposed. As the amount of spam has been increased tremendously using bulk mailing tools, spam detection techniques should counteract with it. To cope with this, parameters optimization and feature selection have been used to reduce processing overheads while guaranteeing high detection rates. However, previous approaches have not taken into account feature variable importance and optimal number of features. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there is no approach which uses both parameters optimization and feature selection together for spam detection. In this paper, we propose a spam detection model enabling both parameters optimization and optimal feature selection; we optimize two parameters of detection models using Random Forests (RF) so as to maximize the detection rates. We provide the variable importance of each feature so that it is easy to eliminate the irrelevant features. Furthermore, we decide an optimal number of selected features using two methods; (i) only one parameters optimization during overall feature selection and (ii) parameters optimization in every feature elimination phase. Finally, we evaluate our spam detection model with cost-sensitive measures to avoid misclassification of legitimate messages, since the cost of classifying a legitimate message as a spam far outweighs the cost of classifying a spam as a legitimate message. We perform experiments on Spambase dataset and show the feasibility of our approaches.




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Semantic Web: Theory and Applicationsns




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Algorithms for the Evaluation of Ontologies for Extended Error Taxonomy and their Application on Large Ontologies

Ontology evaluation is an integral and important part of the ontology development process. Errors in ontologies could be catastrophic for the information system based on those ontologies. As per our experiments, the existing ontology evaluation systems were unable to detect many errors (like, circulatory error in class and property hierarchy, common class and property in disjoint decomposition, redundancy of sub class and sub property, redundancy of disjoint relation and disjoint knowledge omission) as defined in the error taxonomy. We have formulated efficient algorithms for the evaluation of these and other errors as per the extended error taxonomy. These algorithms are implemented (named as OntEval) and the implementations are used to evaluate well-known ontologies including Gene Ontology (GO), WordNet Ontology and OntoSem. The ontologies are indexed using a variant of already proposed scheme Ontrel. A number of errors and warnings in these ontologies have been discovered using the OntEval. We have also reported the performance of our implementation, OntEval.




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Intelligence Artificielle : vers le grand déclassement des Classes Moyennes ?

Depuis quelques années, la théorie du grand remplacement, popularisée par Michel Houellbecq dans Soumissions ou par un Eric Zemmour, a fait son chemin dans les arcanes les moins visibles du Net. Pourtant, le danger n’est pas là, loin s’en faut, il est...




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Laurent Alexandre, les Gilets Jaunes et les Inutiles

Billet par Vincent Grenier. Il faut regarder cet extrait vidéo. Cela se passe devant nos futurs polytechniciens. Laurent Alexandre (heureux startuper millionnaire et apôtre du transhumanisme) nous explique pourquoi "les gilets jaunes sont des êtres substituables",...




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Bravo François Hollande !!! encore un effort.

Je n’avais pas vu venir cette analyse de haut vol de l’ancien Président de la République et l’ancien Premier Secrétaire du Pati Socialiste, je cite « La reconquête des classes populaires est donc, pour la gauche, un impératif démocratique ». Je salue...




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Serbie : des manifestants demandent la démission du gouvernement après le drame de Novi Sad

Serbie : des manifestants demandent la démission du gouvernement après le drame de Novi Sad




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Climat : la justice néerlandaise donne raison à Shell face aux ONG

Climat : la justice néerlandaise donne raison à Shell face aux ONG




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Le chef de l'Église anglicane démissionne en raison de sa gestion d'un scandale d'abus sexuels

Le chef de l'Église anglicane démissionne en raison de sa gestion d'un scandale d'abus sexuels




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An architectural view of VANETs cloud: its models, services, applications and challenges

This research explores vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and their extensive applications, such as enhancing traffic efficiency, infotainment, and passenger safety. Despite significant study, widespread deployment of VANETs has been hindered by security and privacy concerns. Challenges in implementation, including scalability, flexibility, poor connection, and insufficient intelligence, have further complicated VANETs. This study proposes leveraging cloud computing to address these challenges, marking a paradigm shift. Cloud computing, recognised for its cost-efficiency and virtualisation, is integrated with VANETs. The paper details the nomenclature, architecture, models, services, applications, and challenges of VANET-based cloud computing. Three architectures for VANET clouds - vehicular clouds (VCs), vehicles utilising clouds (VuCs), and hybrid vehicular clouds (HVCs) - are discussed in detail. The research provides an overview, delves into related work, and explores VANET cloud computing's architectural frameworks, models, and cloud services. It concludes with insights into future work and a comprehensive conclusion.




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Smart and adaptive website navigation recommendations based on reinforcement learning

Improving website structures is the main task of a website designer. In recent years, numerous web engineering researchers have investigated navigation recommendation systems. Page recommendation systems are critical for mobile website navigation. Accordingly, we propose a smart and adaptive navigation recommendation system based on reinforcement learning. In this system, user navigation history is used as the input for reinforcement learning model. The model calculates a surf value for each page of the website; this value is used to rank the pages. On the basis of this ranking, the website structure is modified to shorten the user navigation path length. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results revealed that user navigation paths could be decreased by up to 50% with training on 12 months of data, indicating that users could more easily find a target web page with the help of the proposed adaptive navigation recommendation system.




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International Journal of Web and Grid Services




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Diabète : trois grands rendez-vous à Nîmes cette semaine - Midi Libre

  1. Diabète : trois grands rendez-vous à Nîmes cette semaine  Midi Libre
  2. Journée mondiale du diabète : un dépistage gratuit près du Havre ce jeudi 14 novembre  actu.fr
  3. Orange. Des actions pour la journée du diabète et le mois sans tabac  Le Dauphiné Libéré
  4. Santé - Diabète et bien-être : une journée de prévention organisée à Guéret  La Montagne










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Premiers résultats de la grande enquête nationale « Contexte des sexualités en France 2023 - Inserm (salle de presse)

  1. Premiers résultats de la grande enquête nationale « Contexte des sexualités en France 2023  Inserm (salle de presse)
  2. La sexualité des Français a connu de gros changements en dix ans  L'Union
  3. Plus de partenaires, pratiques variées, numérique... Une grande étude dévoile les dessous de la sexualité...  BFMTV
  4. La vie sexuelle des Français, une journée spéciale sur France Inter, jeudi 14 novembre 2024  France Inter




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What is walking pneumonia? As cases rise in Canada, the symptoms to look out for - The Globe and Mail

  1. What is walking pneumonia? As cases rise in Canada, the symptoms to look out for  The Globe and Mail
  2. Walking pneumonia on the rise in Kingston, but treatable  The Kingston Whig-Standard
  3. What parents need to know about walking pneumonia in kids  FingerLakes1.com
  4. Pediatric pneumonia is surging in Central Ohio  MSN
  5. Walking Pneumonia is spiking right now. How do you know you have it?  CBS 6 News Richmond WTVR




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Hiking with a backpack is the workout of 2024. An exercise scientist says it’s worth the extra effort - The Globe and Mail

  1. Hiking with a backpack is the workout of 2024. An exercise scientist says it’s worth the extra effort  The Globe and Mail
  2. Military-Inspired Workout Has 'Huge Wins' for Women, Says Personal Trainer  MSN
  3. How Rucking Can Turn Your Walks into a Full-Body Workout  Verywell Health
  4. What Is Rucking and Is It Better Than Regular Walking? Here's What Personal Trainers Say  EatingWell
  5. Rucking: Why It’s a Great Workout & How to Get Started  Athletech News





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Senators make short work of listless Leafs in a flat Battle of Ontario - The Globe and Mail

  1. Senators make short work of listless Leafs in a flat Battle of Ontario  The Globe and Mail
  2. Tavares on Maple Leafs’ lifeless loss to Senators: ‘We should be disappointed’  Sportsnet.ca
  3. Ullmark records first shutout of season as Senators smother Maple Leafs  TSN
  4. TAKEAWAYS: Ottawa Senators draw first blood in Battle of Ontario  Ottawa Citizen
  5. Wednesday FTB: Lose to the Sens, why not?  Pension Plan Puppets