bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Late Pleistocene to Recent ostracod assemblages from the western Black Sea
Authors: Boomer Ian , Guichard Francois , Lericolais Gilles
Published: December 2010

Abstract. During the last glacial phase the Black Sea basin was isolated from the world's oceans due to the lowering of global sea-levels. As sea-levels rose during the latest glacial and early Holocene period, the Black Sea was once again connected to the eastern Mediterranean via the Dardanelles–Marmara–Bosporus seaway. In recent years, trace element and stable isotope analyses of ostracod assemblages have yielded important details regarding the hydrological evolution of the Black Sea during these events. Despite this focus on the geochemical signatures of the ostracods, little if any attention has been paid to the taxonomic composition of the ostracod assemblages themselves and there are notably few publications on the sub-littoral fauna of this important water body. We present a summary of the most abundant ostracod taxa of the Black Sea during the late glacial to early Holocene phase (dominated by the Candonidae, Leptocytheridae and Loxoconchidae) and chart their response to the subsequent environmental changes in the early Holocene with the pre-connection, low salinity ‘lacustrine’ fauna being replaced by one with a more Mediterranean aspect. Many of these taxa are illustrated using SEM for the first time, providing an important initial step in establishing taxonomic stability within Black Sea ostracod studies and noting faunal similarities with neighbouring areas, such as the Caspian Sea.
Evolutionary classification of the Upper Cretaceous (Turonian–lower Campanian) planktic foraminifera with incipient meridional ornamentation
Authors: Georgescu M. Dan
Published: December 2010

Abstract. A new genus, Fingeria, is recognized among the globular-chambered trochospiral planktic foraminifera of the Upper Cretaceous (upper Cenomanian–lower Campanian). It consists of two pre-existing species: F. loetterlei (Nauss, 1947) and F. kingi (Trujillo, 1960). The ornamentation consists of scattered pustules, which can often fuse to form rugosities and, occasionally, costellae, especially over the earlier chambers of the test. Meridional ornamentation pattern is occasionally developed over isolated chambers. Fingeria is the only lineage of the whiteinellid stock that exhibits ornamentation coarsening and preferential orientation, which can be meridional or parallel to the periphery.
Praecypridea: a new non-marine ostracod genus from the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous of Europe, North and South America, and Africa
Authors: Sames Benjamin , Whatley Robin , Schudack Michael E.
Published: December 2010

Abstract. The genus Praecypridea gen. nov. (Cypridoidea, Family Cyprideidae Martin, 1940) is described and thus far comprises four species: the type species Praecypridea acuticyatha (Schudack, 1998) comb. nov., Praecypridea postelongata (Oertli, 1957) comb. nov., Praecypridea suprajurassica (Mojon, Haddoumi & Charriére, 2009) comb. nov. and Praecypridea acuta (Moos, 1959 in Wicher, 1959) comb. nov. Representatives of the new genus have been described from the Middle to Late Jurassic of Europe, North America and Africa and the Early Cretaceous of South America, with other presumed representatives also occurring in the Early Cretaceous. Species of Praecypridea are considered to represent members of the ancestral lineage of the extinct genus Cypridea Bosquet, representatives of which flourished in non-marine habitats of latest Jurassic to Early Cretaceous age and account for the first period of abundance of the non-marine Cypridoidea.
Transliteration for Resource-Scarce Languages
Authors: Chinnakotla Manoj K. , Damani Om P. , Satoskar Avijit
Published: December 2010

Today, parallel corpus-based systems dominate the transliteration landscape. But the resource-scarce languages do not enjoy the luxury of large parallel transliteration corpus. For these languages, rule-based transliteration is the only viable option. In this article, we show that by properly harnessing the monolingual resources in conjunction with manually created rule base, one can achieve reasonable transliteration performance. We achieve this performance by exploiting the power of Character Sequence Modeling (CSM), which requires only monolingual resources. We present the results of our rule-based system for Hindi to English, English to Hindi, and Persian to English transliteration tasks. We also perform extrinsic evaluation of transliteration systems in the context of Cross Lingual Information Retrieval. Another important contribution of our work is to explain the widely varying accuracy numbers reported in transliteration literature, in terms of the entropy of the language pairs and the datasets involved.
Design Assurance Strategy and Toolset for Partially Reconfigurable FPGA Systems
Authors: Kępa K. , Morgan F. , Kościuszkiewicz K. , Braun L. , Hübner M. , Becker J.
Published: December 2010

The growth of the Reconfigurable Computing (RC) systems community exposes diverse requirements with regard to functionality of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. Low-level design tools are increasingly required for RC bitstream debugging and IP core design assurance, particularly in multiparty Partially Reconfigurable (PR) designs. While tools for low-level analysis of design netlists do exist, there is increasing demand for automated and customisable bitstream analysis tools.

This article discusses the need for low-level IP core verification within PR-enabled FPGA systems and reports FDAT (FPGA Design Analysis Tool), a versatile, modular and open tools framework for low-level analysis and verification of FPGA designs. FDAT provides a set of high-level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) abstracting the Xilinx FPGA fabric, the implemented design (e.g., placed and routed netlist) and the related bitstream. A lightweight graphic front-end allows custom visualisation of the design within the FPGA fabric. The operation of FDAT is governed by “recipe” scripts which support rapid prototyping of the abstract algorithms for system-level design verification. FDAT recipes, being Python scripts, can be ported to embedded FPGA systems, for example, the previously reported Secure Reconfiguration Controller (SeReCon) which enforces an IP core spatial isolation policy in order to provide run-time protection to the PR system.

The paper illustrates the application of FDAT for bit-pattern analysis of Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-5 inter-tile routing and verification of the spatial isolation between designs.
Scheduling and Placement of Hardware/Software Real-Time Relocatable Tasks in Dynamically Partially Reconfigurable Systems
Authors: Hsiung Pao-Ann , Huang Chun-Hsian , Shen Jih-Sheng , Chiang Chen-Chi
Published: December 2010

With the gradually fading distinction between hardware and software, it is now possible to relocate tasks from a microprocessor to reconfigurable logic and vice versa. However, existing hardware-software scheduling can rarely cope with such runtime task relocation. In this work, we propose a new Relocatable Hardware-Software Scheduling (RHSS) method that not only can be applied to dynamically relocatable hardware-software tasks, but also increases the reconfigurable hardware resource utilization, reduces the reconfigurable hardware resource fragmentation with realistic placement methods, and makes best efforts at meeting the real-time constraints of tasks. The feasibility of the proposed relocatable hardware-software scheduling algorithm was proved by applying it to some randomly generated examples and a real dynamically reconfigurable network security system example. Compared to the quadratic time complexity of the state-of-the-art Adaptive Hardware-Software Allocation (AHSA) method, RHSS is linear in time complexity, and improves the reconfigurable hardware utilization by as much as 117.8%. The scheduling and placement time and the memory usage are also drastically reduced by as much as 89.5% and 96.4%, respectively.
An Approach for Solving Large SAT Problems on FPGA
Authors: Kanazawa Kenji , Maruyama Tsutomu
Published: December 2010

WSAT and its variants are one of the best performing stochastic local search algorithms for the satisfiability (SAT) problem. In this article, we propose an approach for solving large 3-SAT problems on FPGA using a WSAT algorithm. In hardware solvers, it is important to solve large problems efficiently. In WSAT algorithms, an assignment of binary values to the variables that satisfy all clauses is searched by repeatedly choosing a variable in an unsatisfied clause using a heuristic, and flipping its value. In our solver, (1) only the clauses that may be unsatisfied by the flipping are evaluated in parallel to minimize the circuit size, and (2) several independent tries are executed at the same time on the pipelined circuit to achieve high performance. Our FPGA solver can solve larger problems than previous works with less hardware resources, and shows higher performance.
An architecture for recycling intermediates in a column-store
Authors: Ivanova Milena G. , Kersten Martin L. , Nes Niels J. , Gonçalves Romulo A.P.
Published: December 2010

Automatic recycling of intermediate results to improve both query response time and throughput is a grand challenge for state-of-the-art databases. Tuples are loaded and streamed through a tuple-at-a-time processing pipeline, avoiding materialization of intermediates as much as possible. This limits the opportunities for reuse of overlapping computations to DBA-defined materialized views and function/result cache tuning. In contrast, the operator-at-a-time execution paradigm produces fully materialized results in each step of the query plan. To avoid resource contention, these intermediates are evicted as soon as possible.

In this article we study an architecture that harvests the byproducts of the operator-at-a-time paradigm in a column-store system using a lightweight mechanism, the recycler. The key challenge then becomes the selection of the policies to admit intermediates to the resource pool, to determine their retention period, and devise the eviction strategy when facing resource limitations. The proposed recycling architecture has been implemented in an open-source system. An experimental analysis against the TPC-H ad-hoc decision support benchmark and a complex, real-world application (SkyServer) demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of self-organizing behavior and its significant performance gains. The results indicate the potentials of recycling intermediates and charts a route for further development of database kernels.
I/O efficient algorithms for serial and parallel suffix tree construction
Authors: Ghoting Amol , Makarychev Konstantin
Published: December 2010

Over the past three decades, the suffix tree has served as a fundamental data structure in string processing. However, its widespread applicability has been hindered due to the fact that suffix tree construction does not scale well with the size of the input string. With advances in data collection and storage technologies, large strings have become ubiquitous, especially across emerging applications involving text, time series, and biological sequence data. To benefit from these advances, it is imperative that we have a scalable suffix tree construction algorithm.

The past few years have seen the emergence of several disk-based suffix tree construction algorithms. However, construction times continue to be daunting—for example, indexing the entire human genome still takes over 30 hours on a system with 2 gigabytes of physical memory. In this article, we will empirically demonstrate and argue that all existing suffix tree construction algorithms have a severe limitation—to glean reasonable disk I/O efficiency, the input string being indexed must fit in main memory. This limitation is attributed to the poor locality exhibited by existing suffix tree construction algorithms and inhibits both sequential and parallel scalability. To deal with this limitation, we will show that through careful algorithm design, one of the simplest suffix tree construction algorithms can be rearchitected to build a suffix tree in a tiled manner, allowing the execution to operate within a fixed main memory budget when indexing strings of any size. We will also present a parallel extension of our algorithm that is designed for massively parallel systems like the IBM Blue Gene. An experimental evaluation will show that the proposed approach affords an improvement of several orders of magnitude in serial performance when indexing large strings. Furthermore, the proposed parallel extension is shown to be scalable—it is now possible to index the entire human genome on a 1024 processor IBM Blue Gene system in under 15 minutes.
Space-optimal heavy hitters with strong error bounds
Authors: Berinde Radu , Indyk Piotr , Cormode Graham , Strauss Martin J.
Published: December 2010

The problem of finding heavy hitters and approximating the frequencies of items is at the heart of many problems in data stream analysis. It has been observed that several proposed solutions to this problem can outperform their worst-case guarantees on real data. This leads to the question of whether some stronger bounds can be guaranteed. We answer this in the positive by showing that a class of counter-based algorithms (including the popular and very space-efficient
Frequent
and
SpacesSaving
algorithms) provides much stronger approximation guarantees than previously known. Specifically, we show that errors in the approximation of individual elements do not depend on the frequencies of the most frequent elements, but only on the frequency of the remaining tail. This shows that counter-based methods are the most space-efficient (in fact, space-optimal) algorithms having this strong error bound.

This tail guarantee allows these algorithms to solve the sparse recovery problem. Here, the goal is to recover a faithful representation of the vector of frequencies,
f
. We prove that using space
O
(
k
), the algorithms construct an approximation
f
* to the frequency vector
f
so that the
L
1
error ∥∥
f
−∥
f
*∥
1
is close to the best possible error min

f
′

∥
f
′ −
f
∥
1
, where
f′
ranges over all vectors with at most
k
non-zero entries. This improves the previously best known space bound of about
O
(
k
log
n
) for streams without element deletions (where
n
is the size of the domain from which stream elements are drawn). Other consequences of the tail guarantees are results for skewed (Zipfian) data, and guarantees for accuracy of merging multiple summarized streams.
Relative information completeness
Authors: Fan Wenfei , Geerts Floris
Published: December 2010

This article investigates the question of whether a partially closed database has complete information to answer a query. In practice an enterprise often maintains master data

D
m

, a closed-world database. We say that a database
D
is
partially closed
if it satisfies a set
V
of containment constraints of the form
q
(
D
) ⊆
p
(
D

m

), where
q
is a query in a language L

C

and
p
is a projection query. The part of
D
not constrained by (
D

m

,
V
) is open, from which some tuples may be missing. The database
D
is said to be
complete
for a query
Q
relative to (
D

m

,
V
) if for all partially closed extensions
D
' of
D
,
Q
(
D
') =
Q
(
D
), i.e., adding tuples to
D
either violates some constraints in
V
or does not change the answer to
Q
.

We first show that the proposed model can also capture the consistency of data, in addition to its relative completeness. Indeed, integrity constraints studied for data consistency can be expressed as containment constraints. We then study two problems. One is to decide, given
D

m

,
V
, a query
Q
in a language L

Q

, and a partially closed database
D
, whether
D
is complete for
Q
relative to (
D

m

,
V
). The other is to determine, given
D

m

,
V
and
Q
, whether there exists a partially closed database that is complete for
Q
relative to (
D

m

,
V
). We establish matching lower and upper bounds on these problems for a variety of languages L

Q

and L

C

. We also provide characterizations for a database to be relatively complete, and for a query to allow a relatively complete database, when L

Q

and L

C

are conjunctive queries.
The evolution of an x86 virtual machine monitor
Authors: Agesen Ole , Garthwaite Alex , Sheldon Jeffrey , Subrahmanyam Pratap
Published: December 2010

Twelve years have passed since VMware engineers first virtualized the x86 architecture. This technological breakthrough kicked off a transformation of an entire industry, and virtualization is now (once again) a thriving business with a wide range of solutions being deployed, developed and proposed. But at the base of it all, the fundamental quest is still the same: running virtual machines as well as we possibly can on top of a virtual machine monitor.

We review how the x86 architecture was originally virtualized in the days of the Pentium II (1998), and follow the evolution of the virtual machine monitor forward through the introduction of virtual SMP, 64 bit (x64), and hardware support for virtualization to finish with a contemporary challenge, nested virtualization.
Online cache modeling for commodity multicore processors
Authors: West Richard , Zaroo Puneet , Waldspurger Carl A. , Zhang Xiao
Published: December 2010

Modern chip-level multiprocessors (CMPs) contain multiple processor cores sharing a common last-level cache, memory interconnects, and other hardware resources. Workloads running on separate cores compete for these resources, often resulting in highlyvariable performance. It is generally desirable to co-schedule workloads that have minimal resource contention, in order to improve both performance and fairness. Unfortunately, commodity processors expose only limited information about the state of shared resources such as caches to the software responsible for scheduling workloads that execute concurrently. To make informed resourcemanagement decisions, it is important to obtain accurate measurements of per-workload cache occupancies and their impact on performance, often summarized by utility functions such as miss-ratio curves (MRCs)

In this paper, we first introduce an efficient online technique for estimating the cache occupancy of individual software threads using only commonly-available hardware performance counters. We derive an analytical model as the basis of our occupancy estimation, and extend it for improved accuracy on modern cache configurations, considering the impact of set-associativity, line replacement policy, and memory locality effects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of occupancy estimation with a series of CMP simulations in which SPEC benchmarks execute concurrently on multiple cores. Leveraging our occupancy estimation technique, we also introduce a lightweight approach for online MRC construction, and demonstrate its effectiveness using a prototype implementation in the VMware ESX Server hypervisor. We present a series of experiments involving SPEC benchmarks, comparing the MRCs we construct online with MRCs generated offline in which various cache sizes are enforced via static page coloring
The design of a practical system for fault-tolerant virtual machines
Authors: Scales Daniel J. , Nelson Mike , Venkitachalam Ganesh
Published: December 2010

We have implemented a commercial enterprise-grade system for providing fault-tolerant virtual machines, based on the approach of replicating the execution of a primary virtual machine (VM) via a backup virtual machine on another server. We have designed a complete system in VMware vSphere 4.0 that is easy to use, runs on commodity servers, and typically reduces performance of real applications by less than 10%. In addition, the data bandwidth needed to keep the primary and secondary VM executing in lockstep is less than 20 Mbit/s for several real applications, which allows for the possibility of implementing fault tolerance over longer distances. An easy-to-use, commercial system that automatically restores redundancy after failure requires many additional components beyond replicated VM execution. We have designed and implemented these extra components and addressed many practical issues encountered in supporting VMs running enterprise applications. In this paper, we describe our basic design, discuss alternate design choices and a number of the implementation details, and provide performance results for both micro-benchmarks and real applications
Virtualization performance
Authors: McDougall Richard , Anderson Jennifer
Published: December 2010

Performance is a central requirement to the wide-spread adoption of virtualization. To deliver on the promise of simplifying IT via virtualization, the virtualization platform must provide excellent performance with minimal effort. Virtualization performance encompasses several different dimensions. An application running in a virtual machine must perform on-par with the same application natively. Multiple virtual machines running on the same host must scale well and share resources effectively. In this paper we will describe how virtualization performance at all of these levels has progressed with advances in software and hardware. We then discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as we move into the era of cloud computing
Virtual machine file system
Authors: Vaghani Satyam B.
Published: December 2010

The Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a scalable and high performance symmetric clustered file system for hosting virtual machines (VMs) on shared block storage. It implements a clustered locking protocol exclusively using storage links, and does not require network-based inter-node communication between hosts participating in a VMFS cluster. VMFS layout and IO algorithms are optimized towards providing raw device speed IO throughput to VMs. An adaptive IO mechanism masks errors on the physical fabric using contextual information from the fabric. The VMFS lock service forms the basis of VMware's clustered applications such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduling, High Availability, and Fault Tolerance. Virtual machine metadata is serialized to files and VMFS provides a POSIX interface for cluster-safe virtual machine management operations. It also contains a pipelined data mover for bulk data initialization and movement. In recent years, VMFS has inspired changes to diskarray firmware and the SCSI protocol. These changes enable the file system to implement a hardware accelerated data mover and lock manager, among other things. In this paper, we present the VMFS architecture and its evolution over the years
Virtual networking
Authors: Zhou Shudong
Published: December 2010

Over a decade ago, virtual networking started with a simple bridging of VM's virtual network adapter to host's physical network adapter in VMware's Workstation product. With VMware's vSphere 4 product, virtual networking has evolved to a distributed virtual networking infrastructure with pluggable packet switching and filtering modules, under the umbrella marketing name of vNetwork. It is clear that in a virtualized environment, traditional network access layer has migrated from physical switches to virtual switches in the hypervisor. We are beginning to see virtualized solutions in layer 3 to 7 network services and we expect this trend of service migration from physical to virtual to continue in the coming years
Challenges in building scalable virtualized datacenter management
Authors: Soundararajan Vijayaraghavan , Govil Kinshuk
Published: December 2010

Virtualization drives higher resource utilization and makes provisioning new systems very easy and cheap. This combination has led to an ever-increasing number of virtual machines: the largest data centers will likely have more than 100K in few years, and many deployments will span multiple data centers. Virtual machines are also getting increasingly more capable, consisting of more vCPUs, more memory, and higher-bandwidth virtual I/O devices with a variety of capabilities like bandwidth throttling and traffic mirroring

To reduce the work for IT administrators managing these environments, VMware and other companies provide several monitoring, automation, and policy-driven tools. These tools require a lot of information about various aspects of each VM and other objects in the system, such as physical hosts, storage infrastructure, and networking. To support these tools and the hundreds of simultaneous users who manage the environment, the management software needs to provide secure access to the data in real-time with some degree of consistency and backwardcompatibility, and very high availability under a variety of failures and planned maintenance. Such software must satisfy a continuum of designs: it must perform well at large-scale to accommodate the largest datacenters, but it must also accommodate smaller deployments by limiting its resource consumption and overhead according to demand. The need for high-performance, robust management tools that scale from a few hosts to cloud-scale poses interesting challenges for the management software. This paper presents some of the techniques we have employed to address these challenges
Enabling a marketplace of clouds
Authors: Krieger Orran , McGachey Phil , Kanevsky Arkady
Published: December 2010

Cloud computing promises to bring about a fundamental shift in the computer industry where consumers of IT enjoy on-demand access to massive compute capacity and producers of IT benefit from economies of scale and automation. We believe that the advantages of cloud computing will be best realized if there is a highly competitive marketplace. We describe our vision of a marketplace of clouds, discuss what is needed to make this vision a reality, and then describe what VMware is doing to help enable this marketplace model of cloud computing
vApp
Authors: Schmidt René W. , Grarup Steffen
Published: December 2010

In the past decade, virtualization has swept through the x86 server landscape and caused a dramatic change in how enterprise datacenters are organized both from a physical infrastructure level and an organizational level. This has lead to a datacenter where all resources and services are virtualized, paving the way for a complete decoupling of the applications from the physical infrastructure. This is known as cloud computing or more specifically, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

The decoupling of the application from the deployment platform is a fundamental shift from previous generations of datacenter infrastructure. To utilize this decoupling, a well-defined interface between the application and the cloud provider must exist. We describe the core requirements for this interface and introduce a concrete implementation of such an interface, called the vApp container. The vApp container is built on top of the Open Virtualization Format. We also introduce the concept of a vService dependency that is used to decouple a vApp from infrastructure services and to support mobility between cloud providers. Finally, the paper provides several examples of vApps and service integrations and discusses how development tools can be optimized for the vApp container
The VMware mobile virtualization platform
Authors: Barr Ken , Bungale Prashanth , Deasy Stephen , Gyuris Viktor , Hung Perry , Newell Craig , Tuch Harvey , Zoppis Bruno
Published: December 2010

The virtualization of mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and MIDs offers significant potential in addressing the mobile manageability, security, cost, compliance, application development and deployment challenges that exist in the enterprise today. Advances in mobile processor performance, memory and storage capacities have led to the availability of many of the virtualization techniques that have previously been applied in the desktop and server domains. Leveraging these opportunities, VMware's Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) makes use of system virtualization to deliver an end-to-end solution for facilitating employee-owned mobile phones in the enterprise. In this paper we describe the use case behind MVP, and provide an overview of the hypervisor's design and implementation. We present a novel system architecture for mobile virtualization and describe key aspects of both core and platform virtualization on mobile devices
Virtualizing high performance computing
Authors: Simons Joshua E. , Buell Jeffrey
Published: December 2010

While virtualization is widely used in commercial enterprise environments, it has not to date played any significant role in High Performance Computing (HPC). However, with the rise of cloud computing and its promise of computing on demand, the HPC community's interest in virtualization (a key cloud enabler) is increasing. Beyond cloud computing, virtualization offers additional potential benefits for HPC, among them reactive and proactive application fault tolerance, secure and fault-isolated use of shared-resource clusters, dynamic provisioning, job migration, and support for heterogeneous HPC facilities. This paper describes both the promises and challenges in this new, emerging area, including a discussion of performance-related issues
Transactional memory, linking theory and practice
Authors: Ravi Srivatsan , Gramoli Vincent , Luchangco Victor
Published: December 2010

Transactional memory appears promising for democratizing concurrent programming. Its potential lies in producing code that is extensible as atomicity is preserved under composition of transactions. This new abstraction raises several challenges such as the compliance of transactions with alternative synchronization techniques of legacy code and memory consistency models that favor transactional programming. The objective of the Second Workshop on the Theory of Transactional Memory was to discuss new theoretical challenges and recent achievements in the context of transactional computing. We report on some of the issues raised during this workshop.
An Improved Harvest andin VitroExpansion Protocol for Murine Bone Marrow-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells
Authors: Xu Song , De Becker Ann , Van Camp Ben , Vanderkerken Karin , Van Riet Ivan
Published: December 2010

Compared to bone marrow (BM) derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from human origin or from other species, the in vitro expansion and purification of murine MSCs (mMSCs) is much more difficult because of the low MSC yield and the unwanted growth of non-MSCs in the in vitro expansion cultures. We describe a modified protocol to isolate and expand murine BM derived MSCs based on the combination of mechanical crushing and collagenase digestion at the moment of harvest, followed by an immunodepletion step using microbeads coated with CD11b, CD45 and CD34 antibodies. The number of isolated mMSCs as estimated by colony forming unit-fibroblast (CFU-F) assay showed that this modified isolation method could yield 70.0% more primary colonies. After immunodepletion, a homogenous mMSC population could already be obtained after two passages. Immunodepleted mMSCs (ID-mMSCs) are uniformly positive for stem cell antigen-1 (Sca-1), CD90, CD105 and CD73 cell surface markers, but negative for the hematopoietic surface markers CD14, CD34 and CD45. Moreover the immunodepleted cell population exhibits more differentiation potential into adipogenic, osteogenic and chondrogenic lineages. Our data illustrate the development of an efficient and reliable expansion protocol increasing the yield and purity of mMSCs and reducing the overall expansion time.
A Phenomenological Study on the Synergistic Role of Precious Metals in the Steam Reforming of Logistic Fuels on Trimetal-Supported Catalysts
Authors: Azad Abdul-Majeed , Sundararajan Desikan
Published: December 2010

Fuel processors are required to convert sulfur-laden logistic fuels (jet fuels, diesel, and coal) into fuel cell quality hydrogen-rich reformate with little or no sulfur for extended periods. Sulfur poisons and deactivates the reforming catalyst, therefore, sulfur-tolerant catalysts ought to be developed. In this paper, the development, characterization, and evaluation of a series of nanoscale ceria-supported reforming catalysts containing three noble metals in low concentration (1 wt% ≤ total metal loading ≤ 1.33 wt%) for the steam-reforming of kerosene (a JP-8 surrogate) are reported. Their performance is quantified in terms of H2yield, tolerance towards sulfur in the fuel, and the on-stream stability and compared with that of monometal and bimetal analogs under identical conditions. Due to the inherent cooperative synergy, a trimetal catalyst was found far superior to its mono- and bimetallic analog containing same amount of the precious metal loading in terms of quality of the reformate (measured by H2level in steady-state) as well as the catalyst longevity on-stream prior to deactivation. At the same time a mechanistic correlation between the distinct role of a given precious metal and the extent of its loading in each of the formulations and quality of the corresponding desulfurized H2-rich reformate was discovered.
Diffusion Approximations of the Geometric Markov Renewal Processes and Option Price Formulas
Authors: Swishchuk Anatoliy , Islam M. Shafiqul
Published: December 2010

We consider the geometric Markov renewal processes as a model for a security
market and study this processes in a diffusion approximation scheme. Weak convergence
analysis and rates of convergence of ergodic geometric Markov renewal processes in diffusion
scheme are presented. We present European call option pricing formulas in the case of
ergodic, double‐averaged, and merged diffusion geometric Markov renewal processes.
Exact Solutions for Certain Nonlinear Autonomous Ordinary Differential Equations of the Second Order and Families of Two‐Dimensional Autonomous Systems
Authors: Markakis M. P.
Published: December 2010

Certain nonlinear autonomous ordinary differential equations of the second order are reduced to Abel equations of the first kind ((Ab‐1) equations). Based on the results of a previous work, concerning a closed‐form solution of a general (Ab‐1) equation, and introducing an arbitrary function, exact one‐parameter families of solutions are derived for the original autonomous equations, for the most of which only first integrals (in closed or parametric form) have been obtained so far. Two‐dimensional autonomous systems of differential equations of the first order, equivalent to the considered herein autonomous forms, are constructed and solved by means of the developed analysis.
Investigation of Antiphosphatidyl‐Serine Antibody and Antiphosphatidyl‐Inositol Antibody in Ischemic Stroke Patients
Authors: Okuma Hirohisa , Kitagawa Yasuhisa , Takagi Shigeharu
Published: December 2010

Antiphospholipid syndrome is characterized by arterial or venous thrombosis and the presence of antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL). We measured β2‐GPI aCL, IgGaCL, LA, antiphosphatidyl‐serine antibody (PS), and antiphosphatidyl‐inositol antibody (PI) in each patient at one month after the onset of stroke. In addition, carotid artery echography was performed in patients positive for PI or PS. Among the 250 patients, 13.6% (34/250) were positive for either PI or PS, and 6.8% (17/250) were positive for both. Carotid artery echography performed on these 34 patients showed that the frequencies of increased intimal‐medial thickness (IMT) of 1.1 mm or more, plaque, and carotid artery stenosis of 50% or more were all significantly higher in patients positive for antinuclear antibody than those negative for the antibody (P < .05). PI and PS are associated with antinuclear antibody and precipitation of atherosclerosis. Ischemic stroke patients with SLE frequently showed a variety of antiphospholipid‐protein antibodies.
Growth of 1‐D TiO2 Nanowires on Ti and Ti Alloys by Oxidation
Authors: Lee Huyong , Dregia Suliman , Akbar Sheikh , Alhoshan Mansour
Published: December 2010

The growth of titania nanowires by a simple metal oxidation process was investigated for both commercially pure α‐Ti and Ti alloys including Ti64 and β‐Ti under a limited supply of oxygen. The effects of processing variables including heat treatment temperature, gas flow rate, and process duration on the growth of nanowires were explored. Similarities and differences in the growth of nanowires on pure Ti versus Ti alloys were observed. While the growth window in terms of temperature and flow rate is narrow in pure Ti, the window is much wider in the alloys. However, the trend towards high temperature is similar in all the samples promoting faceted oxide crystal growth rather than nanowires.
Robust Controller Design Using the Nevanlinna‐Pick Interpolation in Gyro Stabilized Pod
Authors: Liu Bin , Wang Chang-Hong , Li Wei , Li Zhuo
Published: December 2010

The sensitivity minimization of feedback system is solved based on the theory of Nevanlinna‐Pick interpolation with degree constraint without using weighting functions. More details of the dynamic characteristic of second‐order system investigated, which is determined by the location of spectral zeroes, the upper boundγofS, the length of the spectral radius and the additional interpolation constraints. And the guidelines on how to tune the design parameters are provided. Gyro stabilized pod as a typical tracking system is studied, which is based on the typical structure of two‐axis and four‐frame. The robust controller is designed based on Nevanlinna‐Pick interpolation with degree constraint. When both friction of LuGre model and disturbance exist, the closed‐loop system has stronger disturbance rejection ability and high tracking precision. Numerical examples illustrate the potential of the method in designing robust controllers with relatively low degrees.
A Parathyroid Adenoma: Benign Disease Presenting with Hyperparathyroid Crisis
Authors: Tahim A. S. , Saunders J. , Sinha P.
Published: December 2010

Hyperparathyroid crisis is a rare manifestation of parathyroid disease. We present the case of a 53-year-old gentleman with a review of the current literature. He presented in acute renal failure with epigastric pain and vomiting. His serum-corrected calcium (CCa2+) was raised at 5.2 mmol/L, in addition to a massively raised parathyroid hormone (PTH) level (3957 ng/L). Ultrasound studies of the neck revealed a 2 cm well-defined mass inferoposterior to right thyroid lobe. CT scans of the neck showed a normal mediastinum and confirmed no associated lymphadenopathy. Having undergone medical resuscitation for 9 days, a neck exploration revealed a cystic mass, which was excised. Histological investigations revealed a 9.25 g, cystic parathyroid adenoma with no features of malignancy. His PTH and CCa2+returned to normal postoperatively. This suspicious presentation of benign disease, including a marked elevation in PTH, highlights the challenges facing the endocrine surgeon in dealing with parathyroid disease.
An Alternative Scheme to Calculate the Strain Rate Tensor for the LES Applications in the LBM
Authors: Li Jun , Wang Zhengwei
Published: December 2010

Large eddy simulations (LES) based on the Smagorinsky model can be conveniently used in the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) because the strain rate tensor, Sij, used to determine the eddy kinematic viscosity can be calculated from the second‐order moment of the nonequilibrium distribution function, and the current total nondimensional relaxation time can be determined explicitly. A new method is developed where the distribution function after the relaxation subroutine differs from that after the motion subroutine leading to a similar method to determine Sij, but its application is inconvenient due to the implicit feature. However, the derivation also leads to an alternative explicit scheme for calculating Sij based on physical analysis of the momentum transport process, where the stress tensor, Tij, is calculated first, and then Sij is determined from Tij using the constitutive relationship for Newtonian fluid. The current total nondimensional relaxation time is also given explicitly so that this LES model can be easily used in the LBM.
Walk the Talk? The Effect of Voting and Excludability in Public Goods Experiments
Authors: Czap Hans J. , Czap Natalia V. , Bonakdarian Esmail
Published: December 2010

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of voting and excludability on individual contributions to group projects. We conducted two experiments on excludable and nonexcludable public goods, which provided several important results. First, contrary to our expectations, subjects are generally contributing more to the non‐excludable compared to the excludable public good. Second, participating in a vote to choose a public project per se makes no difference in contributions. However, if the project that the individual voted for also gets selected by the group, they contribute significantly more to that project. Third, empathy and locus of control are important driving forces of participation in common projects. Our results have implications on the procedural design of obtaining funding for public projects. First, the public should get involved and have a say in the determination of which project should be realized. Second, it might well pay off to attempt to develop a consensus among the population and obtain near unanimous votes, because in our experiment, subjects discriminate between the project they voted for and the project chosen by the majority. Third, the policy proposers should stress the other‐regarding interest of the public good rather than just pecuniary incentives.
Calculation of Some Integrals Arising in Heat Transfer in Geothermics
Authors: Santander J. L. G. , Castañeda Porras P. , Isidro J. M. , Fernández de Córdoba P.
Published: December 2010

We calculate some integrals involved in the temperature field evaluation of the ground, heated by a borehole heat exchanger. This calculation allows a faster computation of that component of the temperature field which involves the periodic oscillation of the ambient temperature or the ambient heat flux.
Emergent Pulmonary Embolectomy and Advanced Glioblastoma Multiforme
Authors: Firstenberg Michael S. , Blais Danielle , Abel Erik , Newton Herbert B. , Crestanello Juan
Published: December 2010

Pulmonary emboli are frequent causes of morbidity and mortality in patients with brain tumors. Treatment options are limited in these complex patients. We report a case of successful acute pulmonary embolectomy in a patient with an advanced brain cancer.
On Fixed Point Theorems for Multivalued Contractions
Authors: Liu Zeqing , Sun Wei , Kang ShinMin , Ume JeongSheok
Published: December 2010

Three concepts of multivalued contractions in complete metric spaces are introduced, and the conditions guaranteeing the existence of fixed points for the multivalued contractions are established. The results obtained in this paper extend genuinely a few fixed point theorems due to Ćirić (2009) Feng and Liu (2006) and Klim and Wardowski (2007). Five examples are given to explain our results.
Clinic Attendance for Medication Refills and Medication Adherence amongst an Antiretroviral Treatment Cohort in Uganda: A Prospective Study
Authors: Kunutsor Setor , Walley John , Katabira Elly , Muchuro Simon , Balidawa Hudson , Namagala Elizabeth , Ikoona Eric
Published: December 2010

Background. Regular clinic attendance for antiretroviral (ARV) drug refills is important for successful clinical outcomes in HIV management.Methods. Clinic attendance for ARV drug refills and medication adherence using a clinic-based pill count in 392 adult patients receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) in a district hospital in Uganda were prospectively monitored over a 28-week period.Results. Of the 2267 total scheduled clinic visits, 40 (1.8%) were missed visits. Among the 392 clients, 361 (92%) attended all appointments for their refills (regular attendance). Clinic attendance for refills was statistically significantly associated with medication adherence with regular attendant clients having about fourfold greater odds of achieving optimal (≥95%) medication adherence [odds ratio(OR)=3.89, 95% CI: 1.48 to 10.25, exactP=.013]. In multivariate analysis, clients in age category 35 years and below were less likely to achieve regular clinic attendance.Conclusion. Monitoring of clinic attendance may be an objective and effective measure and could be a useful adjunct to an adherence measure such as pill counting in resource-constrained settings. Where human resource constraints do not allow pill counts or other time-consuming measures, then monitoring clinic attendance and acting on missed appointments may be an effective proxy measure.
On the Dimension of the Pullback Attractors for g‐Navier‐Stokes Equations
Authors: Wu Delin
Published: December 2010

We consider the asymptotic behaviour of nonautonomous 2D g‐Navier‐Stokes equations in bounded domain Ω. Assuming that , which is translation bounded, the existence of the pullback attractor is
proved in L2(Ω) and H1(Ω). It is proved that the fractal dimension of the
pullback attractor is finite.
Staphylococcus aureus Decolonization Protocol Decreases Surgical Site Infections for Total Joint Replacement
Authors: Hadley Scott , Immerman Igor , Hutzler Lorraine , Slover James , Bosco Joseph
Published: December 2010

We investigated the effects of implementation of an institution-wide screening and decolonization protocol on the rates of deep surgical site infections (SSIs) in patients undergoing primary knee and hip arthroplasties. 2058 patients were enrolled in this study: 1644 patients in the treatment group and 414 in the control group. The treatment group attended preoperative admission testing (PAT) clinic where they were screened for MSSA and MRSA colonization. All patients were provided a 5-day course of nasal mupirocin and a single preoperative chlorhexidine shower. Additionally, patients colonized with MRSA received Vancomycin perioperative prophylaxis. The control group did not attend PAT nor receive mupirocin treatment and received either Ancef or Clindamycin for perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis. There were a total of 6 deep infections in the control group (1.45%) and 21 in the treatment group (1.28%); this represented a decrease of 13% () in the treatment versus control group. This decrease represented a positive trend in favor of staphylococcus screening, decolonization with mupirocin, and perioperative Vancomycin for known MRSA carriers.
Lipidomics: The Function of Vital Lipids in Embryogenesis Preventing Autism Spectrum Disorders, Treating Sterile Inflammatory Diatheses with a Lymphopoietic Central Nervous System Component
Authors: Tallberg Thomas , Dabek Jan , Hallamaa Raija , Atroshi Faik
Published: December 2010

The central role performed by billions of vital central nervous system (CNS) lipids “lipidomics” in medical physiology is usually overlooked. A metabolic deficiency embracing these vital lipids can form the aetiology for a variety of diseases. CNS lipids regulate embryogenesis, cell induction, mental balance by preventing autism spectrum disorders, depression, burn-out syndromes like posttraumatic stress disease PTSD, by guarding normal immunity, treating sterile inflammatory diatheses with a titanium containing lymphopoietic CNS lipid component. The propaganda driving for unphysiological fat-free diets is dangerous and can cause serious health problems for a whole generation. This article presents a broad list of various mental and motor bodily functions of which the healthy function depends on these vital CNS lipids. A rigorous fat-free diet can provoke these metabolic lipid deficiencies but they can fortunately be compensated by dietary supplementation, but not by pharmacologic treatment.