Pre-Congestion Notification Encoding Comparison

DiffServ mechanisms have been developed to support Quality of Service (QoS). However, the level of assurance that can be provided with DiffServ without substantial over-provisioning is limited. Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) investigates the use of per-flow admission control to provide the required service guarantees for the admitted traffic. While admission control will protect the QoS under\ud normal operating conditions, an additional flow termination mechanism is necessary in the times of heavy congestion (e.g. caused by route changes due to link or node failure).\ud Encoding and their transport are required to carry the congestion and pre-congestion information from the congestion and pre-congestion points to the decision points. This document provides a survey of\ud several encoding methods, using comparisons amongst them as a way to explain their strengths and weaknesses.\u

Investigation of drug distribution in tablets using surface enhanced Raman chemical imaging

This paper reports the first application of surface enhanced Raman chemical imaging on pharmaceutical tablets containing the active ingredient (API) in very low concentrations.Taking advantage of the extremely intensive Raman signals in the presence of silver colloids,image aquisition time was radically decreased. Moreover, the investigation of drug distribution below the detection limit of regular micro-Raman spectrometry was made feasible. The characteristics of different manufacturing technologies could be revealed at very low API concentrations by using chemometric methods for processing and evaluating the large number of varying spectra provided with this imaging method

From Consumer Resistance to Stakeholder Resistance The case of nanotechnology

The development of emerging technologies encounters resistance among heterogeneous actors. A good understanding of that resistance phenomenon may help leaders to take decisions reflecting multiple interests. In particular, a better understanding of tenants of resistance may help defining strategic choices for further responsible developments of emerging technology. However only resistance of some actors, mainly the consumers, and some social movements have been explored. This research proposes to study the resistance of stakeholders, by exploring the nanotech field. Nanotechnology is today the most scientifically and economically promising technology, but it is subject to high controversy. A better understanding of resistance may help designing a responsible path for further developments in the nanotech field. The main contributions of this article are the fundamentals of the resistance phenomena: the concepts of stakeholder resistance and stakeholder orientation are defined. Crossing this with Henriques and Sadorski (1999), we also define a check-list for managers to systematically consider stakeholders in the resistance contextNanotechnology; Resistance

Building-integrated rooftop greenhouses: an energy and environmental assessment in the mediterranean context

A sustainable and secure food supply within a low-carbon and resilient infrastructure is encapsulated in several of The United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals. The integration of urban agriculture in buildings can offer improved efficiencies; in recognition of this, the first south European example of a fully integrated rooftop greenhouse (iRTG) was designed and incorporated into the ICTA-ICP building by the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This design seeks to interchange heat, CO2 and rainwater between the building and its rooftop greenhouse. Average air temperatures for 2015 in the iRTG were 16.5 °C (winter) and 25.79 °C (summer), making the iRTG an ideal growing environment. Using detailed thermophysical fabric properties, 2015 site-specific weather data, exact control strategies and dynamic soil temperatures, the iRTG was modelled in EnergyPlus to assess the performance of an equivalent ‘freestanding’ greenhouse. The validated result shows that the thermal interchange between the iRTG and the ICTA-ICP building has considerable moderating effects on the iRTG’s indoor climate; since average hourly temperatures in an equivalent freestanding greenhouse would have been 4.1 °C colder in winter and 4.4 °C warmer in summer under the 2015 climatic conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that the iRTG case study recycled 43.78 MWh of thermal energy (or 341.93 kWh/m2/yr) from the main building in 2015. Assuming 100% energy conversion efficiency, compared to freestanding greenhouses heated with oil, gas or biomass systems, the iRTG delivered an equivalent carbon savings of 113.8, 82.4 or 5.5 kg CO2(eq)/m2/yr, respectively, and economic savings of 19.63, 15.88 or 17.33 €/m2/yr, respectively. Under similar climatic conditions, this symbiosis between buildings and urban agriculture makes an iRTG an efficient resource-management model and supports the promotion of a new typology or concept of buildings with a nexus or symbiosis between energy efficiency and food production.Postprint (published version

Regulation of Translesion Synthesis DNA Polymerase η by Monoubiquitination

DNA polymerase eta is a Y family polymerase involved in translesion synthesis (TLS). Its action is initiated by simultaneous interaction between the PIP box in pol eta and PCNA and between the UBZ in pol eta and monoubiquitin attached to PCNA. Whereas monoubiquitination of PCNA is required for its interaction with pol eta during TLS, we now show that monoubiquitination of pol eta inhibits this interaction, preventing its functions in undamaged cells. Identification of monoubiquitination sites within pol eta nuclear localization signal (NLS) led to the discovery that pol eta NLS directly contacts PCNA, forming an extended pol eta-PCNA interaction surface. We name this the PCNA-interacting region (PIR) and show that its monoubiquitination is downregulated by various DNA-damaging agents. We propose that this mechanism ensures optimal availability of nonubiquitinated, TLS-competent pol eta after DNA damage. Our work shows how monoubiquitination can either positively or negatively regulate the assembly of a protein complex, depending on which substrates are targeted by ubiquitin

Is Corporate R&D Investment in High-Tech Sectors More Effective? Some Guidelines for European Research Policy

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions are as follows. First, the R&D stock has a significant positive impact on labour productivity; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance and the magnitude of the estimated coefficients. More interestingly, both at sectoral and firm levels the R&D coefficient increases monotonically (both in significance and magnitude) when we move from the low-tech to the medium and high-tech sectors. This outcome means that corporate R&D investment is more effective in the high-tech sectors and this may need to be taken into account when designing policy instruments (subsidies, fiscal incentives, etc.) in support of private R&D. However, R&D investment is not the sole source of productivity gains; technological change embodied in gross investment is of comparable importance on aggregate and is the main determinant of productivity increase in the low-tech sectors. Hence, an economic policy aiming to increase productivity in the low-tech sectors should support overall capital formation.innovation, industrial policy, R&D, productivity, high-tech sectors

Corporate R&D and Firm Efficiency: Evidence from Europe’s Top R&D Investors

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities on firms' performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontier technique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal dataset consisting of 532 top European R&D investors over the period 2000–2005. R&D stocks are considered as pivotal input in order to control for their particular contribution to firm-level efficiency. Conceptually, the study quantifies the technical inefficiency of a given company and tests empirically whether R&D activities could explain the distance from the efficient boundary of the production possibility set, i.e. the production frontier. From a policy perspective, the results of this study suggest that – if the aim is to leverage companies' productivity – emphasis should be put on supporting corporate R&D in high-tech sectors and, to some extent, in medium-tech sectors. By contrast, supporting corporate R&D in the low-tech sector turns out to have a minor effect. Instead, encouraging investment in fixed assets appears vital for the productivity of low-tech industries. However, with regard to firms' technical efficiency, R&D matters for all industries (unlike capital intensity). Hence, the allocation of support for corporate R&D seems to be as important as its overall increase and an 'erga omnes' approach across all sectors appears inappropriate.corporate R&D, productivity, technical efficiency, stochastic frontier analysis

Usefulness of social tagging in organizing and providing access to the web: An analysis of indexing consistency and quality

This dissertation research points out major challenging problems with current Knowledge Organization (KO) systems, such as subject gateways or web directories: (1) the current systems use traditional knowledge organization systems based on controlled vocabulary which is not very well suited to web resources, and (2) information is organized by professionals not by users, which means it does not reflect intuitively and instantaneously expressed users’ current needs. In order to explore users’ needs, I examined social tags which are user-generated uncontrolled vocabulary. As investment in professionally-developed subject gateways and web directories diminishes (support for both BUBL and Intute, examined in this study, is being discontinued), understanding characteristics of social tagging becomes even more critical. Several researchers have discussed social tagging behavior and its usefulness for classification or retrieval; however, further research is needed to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate social tagging in order to verify its quality and benefit. This research particularly examined the indexing consistency of social tagging in comparison to professional indexing to examine the quality and efficacy of tagging. The data analysis was divided into three phases: analysis of indexing consistency, analysis of tagging effectiveness, and analysis of tag attributes. Most indexing consistency studies have been conducted with a small number of professional indexers, and they tended to exclude users. Furthermore, the studies mainly have focused on physical library collections. This dissertation research bridged these gaps by (1) extending the scope of resources to various web documents indexed by users and (2) employing the Information Retrieval (IR) Vector Space Model (VSM) - based indexing consistency method since it is suitable for dealing with a large number of indexers. As a second phase, an analysis of tagging effectiveness with tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity was conducted to ameliorate the drawbacks of consistency analysis based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Finally, to investigate tagging pattern and behaviors, a content analysis on tag attributes was conducted based on the FRBR model. The findings revealed that there was greater consistency over all subjects among taggers compared to that for two groups of professionals. The analysis of tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity in relation to tagging effectiveness was conducted to ameliorate difficulties associated with limitations in the analysis of indexing consistency based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Examination of exhaustivity and specificity of social tags provided insights into particular characteristics of tagging behavior and its variation across subjects. To further investigate the quality of tags, a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was conducted to determine to what extent tags are conceptually related to professionals’ keywords and it was found that tags of higher specificity tended to have a higher semantic relatedness to professionals’ keywords. This leads to the conclusion that the term’s power as a differentiator is related to its semantic relatedness to documents. The findings on tag attributes identified the important bibliographic attributes of tags beyond describing subjects or topics of a document. The findings also showed that tags have essential attributes matching those defined in FRBR. Furthermore, in terms of specific subject areas, the findings originally identified that taggers exhibited different tagging behaviors representing distinctive features and tendencies on web documents characterizing digital heterogeneous media resources. These results have led to the conclusion that there should be an increased awareness of diverse user needs by subject in order to improve metadata in practical applications. This dissertation research is the first necessary step to utilize social tagging in digital information organization by verifying the quality and efficacy of social tagging. This dissertation research combined both quantitative (statistics) and qualitative (content analysis using FRBR) approaches to vocabulary analysis of tags which provided a more complete examination of the quality of tags. Through the detailed analysis of tag properties undertaken in this dissertation, we have a clearer understanding of the extent to which social tagging can be used to replace (and in some cases to improve upon) professional indexing