bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Lessons Learned From the Implementation of a Technology-Focused Professional Learning Community
Authors: Taylor D. Bruce , Hartshorne Richard , Eneman Sam , Wilkins Patti , Polly Drew
Published: February 2012

In this chapter, “lessons learned” and best practices that have resulted from the implementation of technology-focused professional learning community in a College of Education, as well as recommendations for future implementations are addressed. The Technology & Teaching Professional Learning Community, which was created by faculty in the College of Education at UNC Charlotte, provided professional development to faculty engaged in teaching hybrid and online courses. This was one of several professional development efforts at UNC Charlotte, but one, the authors suggest, that created a safe and effective space for scaffolding instructors less familiar with online learning technologies and tools.
Globalization, Information and Communication Technologies, and Women’s Lives
Authors: Youngs Gillian
Published: February 2012

In considering women’s relationship to information and communication technologies (ICTs), it is important to look at the historically embedded gender inequalities that exist in the areas of science and technology as well as examining the creative and entrepreneurial uses of ICTs in which women around the world are engaged. The picture of globalization and ICTs and women’s lives is highly complex, reflecting structural problems but also new dynamics that have contributed to empowering women and global women’s movements.
Gender, Culture, and ICT use
Authors: Kumari B. Ratna
Published: February 2012

The advent of the new technology was originally seen as a positive development for women’s work. India is one of the largest providers of off- shored BPO activities such as Call Centres services and others which have become emerging workspaces. To a large extent, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) hold great promise in the drive for development and poverty reeducation in the global south under the globalization process. It has been dubbed “the great equalizer,” and the spread of IT – enabled services are beneficial for both men and women, those who have limited skills, or a lack of resources. In spite of gender discrimination and gender bias, employees of ICT companies are facing various challenges in their day to day life such as work family interface, health status, mobility in odd hours, and decision making levels. Especially Call Centre jobs have a direct impact on people’s health, interpersonal relationships, and stress on the work environment; they may suffer from loneliness, depression, and anxiety related problems. Therefore, urgent attention should be given towards the increased rate of mental disorders, suicides, and family distortions. Initiation of family counseling centres and other coping and intervention strategies should be implemented for the empowerment of women workers in ICTs.
The Case of the U.S. Mother / Cyberspy / Undercover Iraqi Militant
Authors: Poster Winifred R.
Published: February 2012

While literature on women in technology and women in the military are well-developed, the field of cybersecurity has yet to be addressed within either of them. Therefore, this analysis charts a typology of work in global ICTs, an “information hierarchy,” and explores the presence and contributions of women at multiple levels. It identifies selected jobs for women in cybersecurity as illustrations of these dynamics. This starts with “networkers” at the top: the infoczars who lead the nation’s agencies for military and information security, and engineers who design the military technology systems. In the middle “networked” level, this includes cyber spies (posing from their homes as Al Qaeda militants on the internet) and customer service workers (enforcing US homeland security on the phone with the public). At the bottom, it includes “switched off” workers: flight attendants and transit screeners, who use security information embedded in computers for the surveillance of people’s bodies. This chapter takes focus on the middle level of the hierarchy in particular. The discussion considers the transformations women make in this field, as well as their political tradeoffs in supporting US political campaigns in the Global South.
Strategies for Enhancing and Evaluating Interactivity in Web-Based Learning and Teaching
Authors: Bodomo Adams B.
Published: February 2012

Interactivity is often discussed in constructivist approaches to education, which enable the student to evolve, understand, or construct new ideas from existing concepts. Constructivist approaches rely on active participation in the learning situation. Interaction and participation are crucial ingredients in the learning process. But interactivity, as a specific learning concept that underlies the general notions of interaction and participation, is not easily tracked and evaluated. This paper examines how to evaluate interactivity. It outlines a number of criteria and student activities to evaluate success in interactive web-based teaching. These theoretical issues are illustrated in the context of two linguistics courses that involve both web-based course delivery and face-to-face course delivery. Measures taken to achieve interactivity in these courses are discussed before proposing qualitative and quantitative criteria for evaluating interactivity. Teachers in higher education can encourage students to have a more positive attitude through effective ways of increasing interaction, such as structuring the learning environment in such a way achieve a ’conversational learning community’, a learning model that promotes informal, relaxed, and interactive communities of learners and teachers.
The Impact of Blogging and Scaffolding on Primary School Pupils’ Narrative Writing
Authors: Wong Ruth Mei Fen , Hew Khe Foon
Published: February 2012

Narrative writing is a skill that all primary (elementary) school pupils in Singapore are required to develop in their learning of the English language. However, this is an area in which not all pupils excel. This study investigates if the use of blogging and scaffolding can improve pupils’ narrative writing. Data were gathered from 36 primary five (grade five) pupils through pre-post writing tests, reflection sheets, and interviews. The pre-post writing tests were administered before and after the pupils had completed their blogging activities, while the blogs were used to draft their narrative writings and to comment on their peers’ writings. The teacher also used a writing guide that served as a scaffold to help pupils plan their writing on their blogs. Overall, results showed a statistically significant difference of medium effect size between the pre-post test scores. Pupils’ perceptions of using blogs as a tool for writing were also explored.
The Blended Learning Ecosystem of an Academic Institution in Greece
Authors: Nikolaidou Mara , Sofianopoulou Chryssa , Alexopoulou Nancy , Abeliotis Kostas , Detsis Vassilis , Chalkias Christos , Lasaridi Katia
Published: February 2012

Blended learning has been recognized as the most promising emerging trend in higher education, offering new capabilities, as it may significantly enhance the interaction and communication between instructors and students. The challenge of blended learning is to balance weaknesses and strengths of face-to-face and e-learning teaching environments and effectively combining them to provide enhanced learning capabilities. Its success should benefit instructor-student relation. To this end, the authors adopt ecosystem-based approach to model the blended learning environment and identify its constituents, i.e., instructors, students, consultants, technology. and their evolving relations. The proposed concept was utilized to explore the potential of blended learning in the academic environment. A study was conducted at Harokopio University of Athens over a period of three years to explore the relations between blended learning ecosystem constituents, focusing on instructor -student relation.
A Beaconless Minimum Interference Based Routing Protocol to Minimize End-to-End Delay per Packet for Mobile Ad hoc Networks
Authors: Meghanathan Natarajan , Sugumar Meena
Published: February 2012

The authors propose a beaconless, on-demand, mobile ad hoc network routing protocol called minimum interference based routing protocol (MIF) that minimizes the end-to-end delay per data packet. During route discovery, each node inserts its identification and location information before broadcasting the Route-Request (RREQ) message in its neighborhood. The weight of a link, called the interference index, is the number of interfering links surrounding it. Two links are said to interfere with each other, if the distance between the mid points of the two links is within the interference range. The interference index of a path is the sum of the interference index values of the constituent links. The destination selects the path with the minimum interference index value and notifies the source through the Route-Reply packet. Simulation results demonstrate that MIF incurs a significant reduction in the end-to-end delay per data packet vis-à-vis the interference-aware load balancing routing protocol.
A Mobile Service Recommendation System Using Multi-Criteria Ratings
Authors: Shao Zhuang , Chen Zhikui , Huang Xiaodi
Published: February 2012

With the rapid advancement of wireless technologies and mobile devices, mobile services offer great convenience and huge opportunities for service creation. However, information overload make service recommendation become a crucial issue in mobile services. Although traditional single-criteria recommendation systems have been successful in a number of personalization applications, obviously individual criterion cannot satisfy consumers’ demands. Relying on multi-criteria ratings, this paper presents a novel recommendation system using the multi-agent technology. In this system, the ratings with respect to the three criteria are aggregated into an overall service ranking list by a rank aggregation algorithm. Furthermore, all of the services are classified into several clusters to reduce information overload further. Finally, Based on multi-criteria rank aggregation, the prototype of a recommendation system is implemented. Successful applications of this recommendation system have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approach.
Mobile Technology in the Classroom
Authors: Barnes Jimmy
Published: February 2012

Today’s educators must deal with a tremendous gap between how students live and how they learn. While technology is a vital part of most students’ lives, their schools frequently fall critically behind in utilizing these emerging technologies for educational purposes. As new technologies become available, educators have tried with varying degrees of success to incorporate these technologies into the curriculum. Individual computers in classrooms were tried first and while they have shown themselves to be beneficial in the classroom, their applications are limited. Computer labs have also proved to be problematic in terms of cost and their availability is limited by scheduling issues. Laptop computers have addressed a number of the problems associated with desktop computers, but there are still many issues which limit their effectiveness. Mobile handheld technology is the latest evolution of personal computing and it has demonstrated that these new devices have the power to transition occasional, supplemental use of computers for instruction to more frequent use allowing educators to make them an integral part of the curriculum.
Interference Mitigation in Femtocell using Optimized Power Control
Authors: Al-Hmoudi Mutieb I. , Saeed Rashid
Published: February 2012

The femtocell network is a new technology that uses the advantage of an Internet backbone to enhance the cellular coverage in residential or small business areas. However, due to the expected random deployment of the Femtocell Access Point (FAP), there is a strong probability of interference among the femtocell nodes and between the femtocells and the macrocell nodes. In this chapter, an interference enhancement for OFDMA systems is developed and designed for two tiered macro-femtocell networks. An adaptive power control is calculated based on selecting the minimum interference channel with the optimized channel gain. In the simulation a number of the FAPs, the distance between the macrocell and the femtocell, and the path loss between the macrocell node and the FAPs are used as design parameters. By using optimized power control performance enhancement the interference degradation ratio can be observed.
Improving Throughput of Starved TCP Flow by Sidestepping Bottleneck Nodes Using Concurrent Transmission
Authors: Verma Rajesh , Prakash Arun , Tripathi Rajeev , Tyagi Neeraj
Published: February 2012

The TCP congestion control mechanism along with unfairness problem poses poor performance when IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used in multi-hop ad hoc networks because the traditional TCP has poor interaction with the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Because of the greedy nature of TCP, starvation problem of TCP flows with longer paths is severe. In this paper, we first illustrate that the fairness, congestion control and medium contention are closely coupled issues and the spatial reuse of the channel can improve the performance of wireless ad hoc network. By using concurrent transmission protocol at the MAC layer, like CTMAC, in multi-hop networks we can achieve simultaneous transmissions within the interference regions. Further, we illustrate with extensive simulations in ns-2 that by scheduling multiple concurrent transmissions along the path links, the starvation problem due to greedy nature of TCP can be eliminated and ensuing higher flow throughput and lower end-to-end delay.
Options for WiMAX Uplink Media Streaming
Authors: Saleh Salah , Fleury Martin
Published: February 2012

IEEE 802.16e (mobile WiMAX) uplink behavior is a relatively neglected area of investigation, but emerging interactive media services have highlighted the need for closer investigation of uplink issues. In this simulation study of uplink queue management, the authors found that media streaming by TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) has advantages. However, temporal behavior of the queuing disciplines exhibits oscillations in buffer occupancy with build-up of delay during video streaming. This paper suggests a possible remedy lies in the choice of the more complex H.264/AVC Main profile, but this will impact upon mobile devices. It was also found that WiMAX video delivery is sensitive to choice of transmission frame size.
Automatic Speaker Localization and Tracking
Authors: Ouamour Siham , Sayoud Halim , Khennouf Salah
Published: February 2012

This paper presents a system of speaker localization for a purpose of speaker tracking by camera. The authors use the information given by the two microphones, placed in opposition, to determine the position of the active speaker in trying to supervise the audio-visual recording. To achieve the speaker localization task, the authors have proposed and employed two methods, which are called respectively: the filtered correlation method and the energy differential method. The principle of the first method is based on the calculation of the correlation between the two signals collected by the two microphones and a special filtering. The second is based on the computation of the logarithmic energy differential between these two signals. However, when different methods are used simultaneously to make a decision, it is often interesting to use a fusion technique combining those estimations or decisions in order to enhance the system performances. For that purpose, this paper proposes two fusion techniques operating at the decision level which are used to fuse the two estimations into one that should be more precise.
Implementing ePortfolios
Authors: Balaban Igor , Divjak Blazenka , Grabar Darko , Zugec Bojan
Published: February 2012

The E-learning Strategy of the University of Zagreb was adopted in 2007 and covers the period 2007-2010. According to the report of the Centre for E-Learning at the University of Zagreb, 11 of its faculties have announced a plan for conducting other activities defined by the E-learning strategy, among which is ePortfolio. To date, several researches within the Centre for E-Learning have dealt with certain professional aspects of ePortfolio; however, comprehensive research has neither been conducted by the Centre nor any university in Croatia. This chapter presents the most important steps in the process of ePortfolio implementation at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics (FOI).
EPortfolio Use in Africa
Authors: Sellami Hédia Mhiri
Published: February 2012

Electronic portfolios have become more popular in the wider community as learning tools, knowledge retention mechanisms, and forms of assessment (Lougheed, 2005). Researchers propose different structures for the ePortfolio. To examine the extent of portfolio use in Africa, the author conducted an experiment using google.com with four results that were less illuminating than originally hoped. Although this kind of experiment is not a rigorous one, it points to the range of significance of portfolios in Africa in relation to other places.
Efficient and Interoperable E-Business –Based on Frameworks, Standards and Protocols
Authors: Dorloff Frank-Dieter , Kajan Ejub
Published: February 2012

The reality of E-Business today means E-Commerce, E-Collaboration, E-Government, E-Procurement, Social Networks, et cetera. Independent of the selected area E-Business will only work if interoperability in all its facets and visible E-benefits are ensured. This includes common agreements about the targets, objects, and rules of the E-Business, concepts, frameworks, and models that are well understood, accepted, and provide additional E-Benefits for all participating partners. In addition, ICT systems, tools, and other instruments must be compliant with political and legal restrictions and support the work properly and efficiently, and last but not least, ensure trust and minimize E-Business risks. With the rise of the Internet, its online-service, manifold techniques, and E-Business applications, people expected quick, usable, and efficient solutions for these problems. Really, many profitable and well-working individual solutions on the market may be found. But there still is a gap in looking for generally well-working interoperability solutions like standards, harmonized E-Business legal regulations, easy to understan, and useable ICT infrastructures and tools, and for general solutions to guaranty security and trust in E-Business. This handbook aims to show the state of the art in research and practice in building, managing, and maintaining E-Business solutions under the focus of enhancing interoperability based on standards, protocols, and other helpful concepts, instruments, and examples. To get a better understanding also for non-specialists, the authors systemize the complex and interdisciplinary content and offer additional helpful explanations.
Tool Based Integration of Requirements Modeling and Validation into Business Process Modeling
Authors: Feja Sven , Witt Sören , Speck Andreas
Published: February 2012

Business process models (BPM) are widely used for specification of software systems, as the basis for model driven software development. Hence, it is crucial to ensure that these BPMs fulfill the requirements they have to comply with. These requirements may originate from various domains. Many may be considered non-functional requirements. They are affecting privacy, security, as well as compliance or economic aspects. In order to avoid error-prone manual checking, automated checking techniques should be applied wherever possible. This requires expressing requirements in a formal manner. The common textual representations for such formal requirements are not well accepted in the modeling domain, since they are settled on a lower level of abstraction, compared to BPMs. In this chapter, the authors present the Business Application Modeler (BAM), which integrates formal requirement specification and automated checking with process modeling. On the one hand BAM supports different notations for process modeling. On the other hand a graphical notation, called G-CTL, for the formal specification of requirements is provided. G-CTL is based on temporal logic, and statements are expressed on the level of abstraction of the graphical process models. Furthermore BAM provides the ability to define selective views on process models. This allows complex domain specific annotations of processes as well as the assignment of responsibilities regarding functional domains. Moreover, BAM integrates into common requirements engineering processes.
A Tool Suite to Enable Web Designers, Web Application Developers and End-users to Handle Semantic Data
Authors: Rico Mariano , Corcho Óscar , Macías José Antonio , Camacho David
Published: February 2012

Current web application development requires highly qualified staff, dealing with an extensive number of architectures and technologies. When these applications incorporate semantic data, the list of skill requirements becomes even larger, leading to a high adoption barrier for the development of semantically enabled Web applications. This paper describes VPOET, a tool focused mainly on two types of users: web designers and web application developers. By using this tool, web designers do not need specific skills in semantic web technologies to create web templates to handle semantic data. Web application developers incorporate those templates into their web applications, by means of a simple mechanism based in HTTP messages. End-users can use these templates through a Google Gadget. As web designers play a key role in the system, an experimental evaluation has been conducted, showing that VPOET provides good usability features for a representative group of web designers in a wide range of competencies in client-side technologies, ranging from amateur HTML developers to professional web designers.
Succeeding in Transnational Distance Learning
Authors: Hogan Robert
Published: February 2012

This chapter reviews issues universities must consider to be successful in Transnational Distance Learning (TDL), as well as challenges. New technology, finances, competition for students, and enrollment opportunities make now the right time for transnational distance learning. Businesses and nations need increased numbers of workers with skills needed in the international economy. Transnational distance learning is a profitable way to train such workers. It opens new markets by expanding university enrollment to students in Asian, American, European, and African nations, reducing the need for student visas. This chapter discusses the growth of online learning, and new global markets that are emerging. Opportunities include enhanced academic reputation, partnerships, added income, and a multicultural student body. The challenges include acceptance, accreditation, competition, culture, technology, tuition, and the establishment of a business model.
Open and Distance Learning in Asia
Authors: Belawati Tian , Kusmawan Udan , Isman Suci M.
Published: February 2012

Universitas Terbuka (UT) is committed to making higher education open to all Indonesians. All efforts are directed to address and maintain UT’s openness, flexibility, and accessibility. As a result, UT successfully provides higher education to about 600,000 students who come from various social and economic backgrounds. Due to limited ICT infrastructure in Indonesia, UT still uses printed materials as the main learning media, supplemented with various non-printed materials. UT also provides learning support in the form of face-to-face and online tutorials, digital libraries, and other online resources. The advancement of ICT and greater public access to the Internet has allowed students to have easier access to UT’s programs and services. The remaining challenge for UT is balancing the quality of materials and learning supports for different students with different learning circumstances. It is very important for UT that no potential students are marginalized due to their lack of access to certain technologies. Nevertheless, it is envisioned that UT will increase the utilization of ICT in its future system.
Business Process Portfolio Management
Authors: Clark Shawn , Cameron Brian
Published: February 2012

Business process portfolio management is an emerging field of research and practice, opening the door to new and ever more exciting process-oriented modes of management, tracking, planning, and knowledge management. This paper focuses on the strategic alignment of strategic, social, processual, and technical factors as enablers of business process portfolio development and management, and highlights the linkages associated with the alignment and integration of these factors. The authors also pose a combination of key questions and decision criteria that may be taken into account when planning and structuring business process portfolio initiatives.
On Flexibility in Business Process Management Systems
Authors: Deokar Amit V. , Taskin Nazim
Published: February 2012

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide the necessary infrastructure for managing business processes, in both intra-organizational and inter-organizational contexts. These process support systems also provide the technical support for managing changes in business processes, either at design time or run-time. Consequently, it is necessary for a BPMS to be flexible and amenable to changes at various levels. This chapter highlights key dimensions along which process support systems such as BPMS can be made more flexible, provides an overview of the existing body of knowledge on these dimensions, and motivates the future work in this direction. The intention is to provide the reader a strong starting point for either conducting a more detailed literature study or pursuing further research along any of these dimensions.
Extending Workflows for Knowledge Flow Automation
Authors: Sarnikar Surendra , Zhao J. Leon
Published: February 2012

Effective execution of business processes also requires the provisioning of relevant knowledge to workers in various business contexts. Knowledge flow automation aims to enable seamless transfer of knowledge by supporting the capture and sharing of organizational knowledge related to business processes. Given the strong correlation between the flow of work and the flow of knowledge, workflow systems are a natural platform for supporting knowledge flow. However, existing workflow technology does not yet provide the needed mechanisms suitable for supporting knowledge flow. This chapter presents an overview of different types of workflow-based knowledge management systems that provide knowledge workers with the required knowledge while supporting the flow of work. In addition, a new perspective is presented on extending workflows to support knowledge transfer processes by introducing the concept of “knowledge workflows” and outline future research directions in this area.
Business Process Management in Financial Services
Authors: Duran Randall E.
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the context, benefits, and challenges of applying business process management (BPM) to financial services. First, it reviews how processes and technology have evolved in the financial services industry, and identifies how BPM technologies can improve efficiency and profitability of financial institutions. Next, the chapter discusses the strategic benefits that BPM can provide. Agile development of new business ideas, standardization and reuse of processes, and management of business environment complexity are three strategic benefits that are explored. Finally, practical concerns related to applying BPM in banks are examined along with approaches for overcoming common challenges. The observations and analysis presented are based on experiences implementing BPM projects for financial institutions based in Asia, Europe, and North America.
TagClusters
Authors: Chen Ya-Xi , Santamaría Rodrigo , Butz Andreas , Therón Roberto
Published: February 2012

Many online communities use TagClouds, an aesthetic and easy to understand visualization, to represent popular tags collaboratively generated by their users. However, due to the free nature of tagging, such collaborative tags have linguistic problems and limitations, such as high semantic density. Moreover, the alphabetical order of TagClouds poorly supports a hierarchical exploration among tags. This paper presents an exploration to support semantic understanding of collaborative tags beyond TagClouds. Based on the results of the authors’ survey of practical usages of collaborative tags, they developed a visualization named TagClusters, in which tags are clustered into different groups, with font size representing tag popularity and the spatial distance indicating the semantic similarity between tags. The subgroups in each group and the overlap between groups are highlighted, illustrating the underlying hierarchical structure and semantic relations between groups. The authors conducted a comparative evaluation with TagClouds and TagClusters based on the same tag set. The results confirmed the advantage of TagClusters in facilitating browsing, comparing and comprehending semantic relations between tags.
An Assistant Interface to Design and Produce a Pop-Up Card
Authors: Okamura Sosuke , Igarashi Takeo
Published: February 2012

This article describes an assistant interface to design and produce pop-up cards. A pop-up card is a piece of folded paper from which a three-dimensional structure pops up when opened. The authors propose an interface to assist the user in the design and production of a pop-up card. During the design process, the system examines whether the parts protrude from the card or whether the parts collide with one another when the card is closed. The user can concentrate on the design activity because the error occurrence and the error resolution are continuously fed to the user in real time. The authors demonstrate the features of their system by creating two pop-up card examples and perform an informal preliminary user study, showing that automatic protrusion and collision detection are effective in the design process.
Organ Augmented Reality
Authors: Jacquemin Christian , Ajaj Rami , Le Beux Sylvain , d’Alessandro Christophe , Noisternig Markus , Katz Brian F.G. , Planes Bertrand
Published: February 2012

This paper discusses the Organ Augmented Reality (ORA) project, which considers an audio and visual augmentation of an historical church organ to enhance the understanding and perception of the instrument through intuitive and familiar mappings and outputs. ORA has been presented to public audiences at two immersive concerts. The visual part of the installation was based on a spectral analysis of the music. The visuals were projections of LED-bar VU-meters on the organ pipes. The audio part was an immersive periphonic sound field, created from the live capture of the organ sounds, so that the listeners had the impression of being inside the augmented instrument. The graphical architecture of the installation is based on acoustic analysis, mapping from sound levels to synchronous graphics through visual calibration, real-time multi-layer graphical composition and animation. The ORA project is a new approach to musical instrument augmentation that combines enhanced instrument legibility and enhanced artistic content.
Materials of the Data Map
Authors: Evans Brian
Published: February 2012

Data mapping is the essence of being human. This report follows the process of data mapping; the transmission of a structured utterance from one domain to another. It starts with signals in the world and moves through experience and engagement with the world through those signals. The paper develops descriptions of the materials and mechanisms of data mapping. The descriptions are aids and conveniences in the effort to understand the systemic workings of the process of communication. From a systems perspective one might find points of leverage in their own involvement with the processes of communication and data mapping. Recognizing these leverage points can help in activities of art making, information design and in simply living.
Data Management in Scientific Workflows
Authors: Deelman Ewa , Chervenak Ann
Published: February 2012

Scientific applications such as those in astronomy, earthquake science, gravitational-wave physics, and others have embraced workflow technologies to do large-scale science. Workflows enable researchers to collaboratively design, manage, and obtain results that involve hundreds of thousands of steps, access terabytes of data, and generate similar amounts of intermediate and final data products. Although workflow systems are able to facilitate the automated generation of data products, many issues still remain to be addressed. These issues exist in different forms in the workflow lifecycle. This chapter describes a workflow lifecycle as consisting of a workflow generation phase where the analysis is defined, the workflow planning phase where resources needed for execution are selected, the workflow execution part, where the actual computations take place, and the result, metadata, and provenance storing phase. The authors discuss the issues related to data management at each step of the workflow cycle. They describe challenge problems and illustrate them in the context of real-life applications. They discuss the challenges, possible solutions, and open issues faced when mapping and executing large-scale workflows on current cyberinfrastructure. They particularly emphasize the issues related to the management of data throughout the workflow lifecycle.
Replica Management in Data Intensive Distributed Science Applications
Authors: Chervenak Ann , Schuler Robert
Published: February 2012

Management of the large data sets produced by data-intensive scientific applications is complicated by the fact that participating institutions are often geographically distributed and separated by distinct administrative domains. A key data management problem in these distributed collaborations has been the creation and maintenance of replicated data sets. This chapter provides an overview of replica management schemes used in large, data-intensive, distributed scientific collaborations. Early replica management strategies focused on the development of robust, highly scalable catalogs for maintaining replica locations. In recent years, more sophisticated, application-specific replica management systems have been developed to support the requirements of scientific Virtual Organizations. These systems have motivated interest in application-independent, policy-driven schemes for replica management that can be tailored to meet the performance and reliability requirements of a range of scientific collaborations. The authors discuss the data replication solutions to meet the challenges associated with increasingly large data sets and the requirement to run data analysis at geographically distributed sites.
Thermomagnetic Properties Improved by Self‐Organized Flower‐Like Phase Separation of Ferromagnetic Co2Dy0.5Mn0.5Sn
Authors: Schwall Michael , Schoop Leslie M. , Ouardi Siham , Balke Benjamin , Felser Claudia , Klaer Peter , Elmers Hans‐Joachim
Published: February 2012

A thermodynamically stable phase separation of Co2Dy0.5Mn0.5Sn into the Heusler compound Co2MnSn and Co8Dy3Sn4 is induced by rapid cooling from the liquid phase. The phase separation forms an ordered flower‐like structure on the microscale. The increased scattering of phonons at the phase boundaries reduces the thermal conductivity and thus improves thermoelectric and spincaloric properties.
Spiro[chromane‐2,4′‐piperidine]‐Based Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors with Improved in vivo Activity
Authors: Thaler Florian , Varasi Mario , Carenzi Giacomo , Colombo Andrea , Abate Agnese , Bigogno Chiara , Boggio Roberto , Carrara Simone , Cataudella Tiziana , Dal Zuffo Roberto , Reali Veronica , Vultaggio Stefania , Dondio Giulio , Gagliardi Stefania , Minucci Saverio , Mercurio Ciro
Published: February 2012

A series of spiro[chromane‐2,4′‐piperidine] derivatives based on a previously published lead benzyl spirocycle 1 and bearing various N‐aryl and N‐alkylaryl substituents on the piperidine ring were prepared as novel histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors. The compounds were evaluated for their abilities to inhibit nuclear HDACs, their in vitro antiproliferative activities, and in vitro ADME profiles. Based on these activities, 4‐fluorobenzyl and 2‐phenylethyl spirocycles were selected for further characterization. In vivo pharmacokinetic (PK) studies showed that both compounds exhibit an overall lower clearance rate, an increased half‐life, and higher AUCs after intravenous and oral administration than spiropiperidine 1 under the conditions used. The improved PK behavior of these two compounds also correlated with superior in vivo antitumor activity in an HCT‐116 xenograft model.
Spiked Gold Beads as Substrates for Single‐Particle SERS
Authors: Aldeanueva‐Potel Paula , Carbó‐Argibay Enrique , Pazos‐Pérez Nicolás , Barbosa Silvia , Pastoriza‐Santos Isabel , Alvarez‐Puebla Ramón A. , Liz‐Marzán Luis M.
Published: February 2012

We introduce a new family of spiked particles resulting from the growth of high aspect ratio gold nanorods. Upon spike growth, elongated beads are obtained with sizes above 300 nm. Interestingly, and in contrast to smooth particles of the same size, these spiked‐particles are not only able to sustain localized surface plasmon resonances and consequently enhance Raman signals, but are also big enough to be recognized by standard confocal optical microscopy. These spiked beads have been engineered into thin films to test their surface‐enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) enhancing efficiency as a function of the particle density. Such films provide a high level of portability and easiness of use for “in‐field” optical ultrasensitive analysis.
Analytical approaches for monitoring exposure to organophosphorus and carbamate agents through analysis of protein adducts
Authors: Schopfer Lawrence M. , Lockridge Oksana
Published: February 2012

Appropriate treatment of a poisoned patient requires knowing the identity of the poison. This review summarizes the methods for identifying poisoning by organophosphorus and carbamate poisons. Mass spectrometry methods identify the poison from the adducts they form with proteins in blood. The most sensitive method uses potassium fluoride to release the organophosphorus agent from its covalent binding to serine 198 of human butyrylcholinesterase. The released poison is identified by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. The drawback of this method is that it does not detect exposure to agents such as soman, because butyrylcholinesterase adducts with these agents age to a non‐reactivatable form. A method that detects both aged and non‐aged organophosphylated adducts as well as carbamate adducts is one that digests butyrylcholinesterase with a protease and analyzes the modified peptide by mass spectrometry. This method does not distinguish between poisons that have the same mass after reaction with butyrylcholinesterase – for example, between exposure to chlorpyrifos oxon and paraoxon. Albumin forms a stable, covalent bond with organophosphates on tyrosine 411. The rate of reaction with albumin is much slower than with butyrylcholinesterase, but albumin adducts persist for a longer time in the circulation; they do not age; and they do not release the organophosphate when a patient is treated with an oxime. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Photostability of antidotal oxime HI‐6, impact on drug development
Authors: Bogan Reinhard , Worek Franz , Koller Marianne , Klaubert Bernd
Published: February 2012

HI‐6 exhibits superior efficacy in the therapy of intoxication by different highly toxic organophosphorus nerve agents. Therefore HI‐6 is a promising candidate for the development of new antidotes against nerve agents. For ethical and safety reasons antidotes containing HI‐6 should get marketing authorization. Active pharmaceutical ingredients of medicinal products have to fulfil regulatory conditions in terms of purity and stability. Photostability is an essential parameter in this testing strategy. HI‐6 was tested under conditions of ICH Q1B ‘Photostability testing of new drug substances and products’. The data showed a marked degradation of HI‐6 after exposure to daylight. The mechanism of degradation could be detected as photoisomerism. The light burden dependent rate of photoisomerism was followed quantitatively. Based on these quantitative results on the amount of light induced isomeric product a pharmacological qualification was made. A standardized in vitro test showed a decreased ability of light exposed HI‐6 to reactivate sarin‐ and paraoxon‐inhibited human acetylcholinesterase. These results have an impact on the further development of antidotes containing HI‐6, as light protection will probably be necessary during handling, packaging, storage and application. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The linear and nonlinear optical response of native‐oxide covered rippled Si templates with nanoscale periodicity
Authors: Persechini L. , Ranjan M. , Grossmann F. , Facsko S. , McGilp J. F.
Published: February 2012

Fabrication of dense arrays of nanowires by growth on nanostructured substrates appears to be a promising approach for producing functional nanoscale devices. Ion beam irradiation under carefully controlled conditions produces self‐organized ripple patterns on silicon substrates, on which Ag nanowire arrays with nanoscale periodicity have been grown successfully. Here, the linear and nonlinear optical response from native‐oxide‐covered Si(001) templates, with ripple periodicity between ∼20 and ∼50 nm, is reported. Reflection anisotropy spectroscopy (RAS) shows a small, broad peak at ∼2.5 eV of ∼1 × 10−3 amplitude. The RAS response decreases as the periodicity of the ripple structure increases. The nonlinear second‐harmonic (SH) response from the samples was also measured, using unamplified femtosecond excitation at 800 nm, by rotating the linear polarized input and detecting either the s‐ or p‐polarized SH output. A decrease in response with increased ripple structure periodicity was observed for the p‐in/p‐out configuration, when the plane of incidence was orthogonal to the average ripple orientation. Possible origins of the response and future experiments are discussed.
Efficient Ordering Heuristics in Binary Decision Diagram–based Fault Tree Analysis
Authors: Mo Yuchang , Zhong Farong , Liu Huawen , Yang Quansheng , Cui Gang
Published: February 2012

In binary decision diagram–based fault tree analysis, the size of binary decision diagram encoding fault trees heavily depends on the chosen ordering. Heuristics are often used to obtain good orderings. The most important heuristics are depth‐first leftmost (DFLM) and its variants weighting DFLM (WDFLM) and repeated‐event‐priority DFLM (RDFLM). Although having been used widely, their performance is still only vaguely understood, and not much formal work has been done. This article firstly identifies some basic requirements for a reliable benchmark and gives a benchmark generation method. Then, using the generated benchmark, the performance of DFLM and its variants is studied. Both the experimental results and some interesting findings for our research questions are proposed. This article also presents a new weighting DFLM (NWDFLM) heuristic and the underlying basic ideas and gives both the experimental results and conclusions on the performance comparison. As a final synthesis of all previous results, a practical suggestion of the order of heuristic selection to process a large fault tree is NWDFLM < WDFLM < RDFLM. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Capturing and radio ear‐tagging neonatal vicuñas
Authors: Donadio Emiliano , Ruiz Blanco Mariel , Crego Ramiro D. , Buskirk Steven W. , Novaro Andrés J.
Published: February 2012

We used and evaluated the effectiveness of a hand‐capture technique to capture and mark neonatal vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna) at San Guillermo National Park, west‐central Argentina. We captured and marked 98 neonates during 5–31 January, 2008–2010. Capture success was 92% (106 attempts), with stationary marking teams being 2.5 times as successful in detecting and capturing neonates as mobile ones. Of neonates captured, 99% were <1 day old. Of these, average age at capture was 11.9 minutes (95% CI = 11–13 min); neonates >20 minutes old typically were too mobile to capture. Sex ratio at capture was biased toward males (1.5:1), while mean body weight and neck circumference were similar between sexes. Generally, mothers remained in sight during, and immediately reunited with their neonates after, capture. Four percent of the mothers ran out of sight but then returned, while 2% failed to return. Capture‐related mortality was 5%, with maternal abandonment in response to capture activities (n = 3) the leading cause. Ear‐tag transmitter had minimal effects on subsequent ear position. The success of our technique likely was based on terrain (flat) and vegetative conditions (short grass), high densities of animals for monitoring (particularly in a meadow), and a predictable, pulsed birth season. This hand‐capturing method was efficient for handling and marking neonatal vicuñas. Combined with the use of ear‐tag transmitters, it allows the study of important perinatal processes, including movement and mortality. © 2012 The Wildlife Society.
Repeated capture of a cytoplasmic linear plasmid by the host nucleus in Debaryomyces hansenii
Authors: Satwika Dhira , Klassen Roland , Meinhardt Friedhelm
Published: February 2012

Debaryomyces hansenii is a halotolerant yeast species that has been shown to carry various nuclear genes of plasmid or viral origin (NUPAVs). However, a recent ancestor of such NUPAVs has not been identified. Here we determined for the first time the molecular structure of an entire cytoplasmic linear plasmid, pDH1A, indigenous to this species. The element is related to non‐autonomous killer plasmids from Kluyveromyces lactis and Pichia acaciae and carries a B‐type DNA polymerase as well as remnants of a killer toxin system, a secreted chitin‐binding protein. Other essential toxin subunits or an immunity function, however, appear to be lost, while two additional small open reading frames are present. Transcripts for all four genes located on pDH1A could be verified by RT–PCR. Interestingly, all genes from pDH1A could be identified as ancestors of NUPAVs located at different chromosomes within the nucleus of D. hansenii, suggesting repeated nuclear capture of fragments originating from pDH1A. The sequence of pDH1A has been deposited in the GenBank data library, Accession No. JN624283. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Construction of two Novel 2D Coordination Frameworks with the Ligand H3nbtc: Synthesis, Crystal Structures, and Luminescence
Authors: Li Shi‐Jie , Liu Jian‐She , Guo Jian , Ji Li‐Li , Song Wen‐Dong , Ma De‐Yun
Published: February 2012

Two novel 2D coordination polymers, namely, {[Cu2(L)2][Cu(H2O)3]}n (1) and {Pb3(O2N‐btb)2}n (2) (O2N‐H3btb = 5‐nitro‐benzene‐1, 2, 3‐tricarboxylic acid, L = 5‐nitro‐2‐oxidoisophthalate), were synthesized under hydrothermal conditions and characterized by elemental analysis, IR spectroscopy, X‐ray diffraction, and thermogravimetric analysis. Compound 1 is an infinite 2D layer exhibiting an extended 3D supramolecular network structure. O–H···O hydrogen bonding interactions play a key role in forming the final 3D supramolecular framework. It is noted that 5‐nitro‐benzene‐1, 2, 3‐tricarboxylic acid (O2N‐H3btb) was in situ transformed to 5‐nitro‐2‐oxidoisophthalate in 1. Compound 2 is a 2D microporous lead‐containing metal‐organic framework made up of interconnected Pb‐carboxylate chains, involving three independent lead atoms with three different coordination arrangements. Furthermore, the solid‐state photoluminescence and lifetime characteristics of 2 reveal intense blue luminescence.