Building Scientific Clouds: The Distributed, Peer-to-Peer Approach

The Scientific community is constantly growing in size. The increase in personnel number and projects have resulted in the requirement of large amounts of storage, CPU power and other computing resources. It has also become necessary to acquire these resources in an affordable manner that is sensitive to work loads. In this thesis, the author presents a novel approach that provides the communication platform that will support such large scale scientific projects. These resources could be difficult to acquire due to NATs, firewalls and other site-based restrictions and policies. Methods used to overcome these hurdles have been discussed in detail along with other advantages of using such a system, which include: increased availability of necessary computing infrastructure; increased grid resource utilization; reduced user dependability; reduced job execution time. Experiments conducted included local infrastructure on the Clemson University Campus as well as resources provided by other federated grid sites

Advantages of plasmatic CXCL-10 as a prognostic and diagnostic biomarker for the risk of rejection and subclinical rejection in kidney transplantation

This study evaluate the potential of plasmatic CXCL-10 (pCXCL-10) as a pre&post transplantation prognostic and diagnostic biomarker of T-cell-mediated rejection (TCMR), antibody-mediated rejection (ABMR) and subclinical rejection (SCR) risk in adult kidney recipients considering BKV and CMV infections as possible clinical confounder factors. Twenty-eight of 100 patients included experienced rejection (TCMR:14; ABMR:14); 8 SCR; 13 and 16 were diagnosed with BKV and CMV infection, respectively. Pre-transplantation pCXCL-10 was significantly increased in TCMR and ABMR and post-transplantation in TCMR, ABMR and SCR compared with nonrejectors. All CMV+ patients showed pCXCL-10 levels above the cutoff values established for rejection whereas the 80% of BKV+ patients showed pCXCL-10 concentration < 100 pg/mL. pCXCL-10 could improve pre-transplantation patient stratification and immunosuppressive treatment selection according to rejection risk; and after kidney transplantation could be a potential early prognostic biomarker for rejection. Clinical confounding factor in BKV+ and particularly in CMV+ patients must be discarded

A World Full of Stereotypes? Further Investigation on Origin and Gender Bias in Multi-Lingual Word Embeddings

Publicly available off-the-shelf word embeddings that are often used in productive applications for natural language processing have been proven to be biased. We have previously shown that this bias can come in a different form, depending on the language and the cultural context. In this work we extend our previous work and further investigate how bias varies in different languages. We examine Italian and Swedish word embeddings for gender and origin bias, and demonstrate how an origin bias concerning local migration groups in Switzerland is included in German word embeddings. We propose BiasWords, a method to automatically detect new forms of bias. Finally, we discuss how cultural and language aspects are relevant to the impact of bias on the application, and to potential mitigation measures

The resurrection of Antoni Gaudí in post-war media : a critical chronology: 1945–1965

The Post-war time coincides with the rehabilitation of Antoni Gaudí, a process closely linked to the spread of his architecture on a global scale. Although Gaudí’s historiography has paid specific attention to some outstanding episodes of this rehabilitation, these have not been shared from the outlook of the media apparatus that sustains them, following a temporal cadence that favours their relational reading from a critical perspective. The Post-war “resurrection” of Gaudí cannot be separated from the large number of publications, exhibitions, photographic series and even films that shaped his figure according to the interests of time: a media operation, not neutral at all, which explains, to a great extent, the treatment that the architect and his work still receive today.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The Anchor, Volume 51.14: April 13, 1938

The Anchor began in 1887 and was first issued weekly in 1914. Covering national and campus news alike, Hope College’s student-run newspaper has grown over the years to encompass over two-dozen editors, reporters, and staff. For much of The Anchor\u27s history, the latest issue was distributed across campus each Wednesday throughout the academic school year (with few exceptions). As of Fall 2019 The Anchor has moved to monthly print issues and a more frequently updated website. Occasionally, the volume and/or issue numbering is irregular