A Distributed Transaction and Accounting Model for Digital Ecosystem Composed Services

This paper addresses two known issues for dynamically composed services in digital ecosystems. The first issue is that of efficient distributed transaction management. The conventional view of transactions is unsuitable as the local autonomy of the participants is vital for the involvement of SMEs. The second issue is that of charging for such distributed transactions, where there will often be dynamically created services whose composition is not known in advance and might involve parts of different transactions. The paper provides solutions for both of these issues, which can be combined to provide for a unified approach to transaction management and accounting of dynamically composed services in digital ecosystems

Long-running Transactions: Semantics, schemas, implementation

In this paper we describe a formal model for the distributed coordination of long-running transactions in a Digital Ecosystem for business, involving Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The proposed non-interleaving model of interaction-based service composition allows for communication between internal activities of transactions. The formal semantics of the various modes of service composition are represented by standard xml schemas. The current implementation framework uses suitable asynchronous message passing techniques and reflects the design decisions of the proposed model for distributed transactions in digital ecosystems

Participation and satisfaction after spinal cord injury: results of a vocational and leisure outcome study

Study design: Survey. Objectives: Insight in (1) the changes in participation in vocational and leisure activities and (2) satisfaction with the current participation level of people with spinal cord injuries (SCIs) after reintegration in society. Design: Descriptive analysis of data from a questionnaire. Setting: Rehabilitation centre with special department for patients with SCIs, Groningen, The Netherlands. Subjects: A total of 57 patients with traumatic SCI living in the community, who were admitted to the rehabilitation centre two to 12 years before the current assessment. Main outcome measures: Changes in participation in activities; current life satisfaction; support and unmet needs. Results: Participation expressed in terms of hours spent on vocational and leisure activities changed to a great extent after the SCI. This was mainly determined by a large reduction of hours spent on paid work. While 60% of the respondents successfully reintegrated in work, many changes took place in the type and extent of the job. Loss of work was partially compensated with domestic and leisure activities. Sports activities were reduced substantially. The change in participation level and compensation for the lost working hours was not significantly associated with the level of SCI-specific health problems and disabilities. As was found in other studies, most respondents were satisfied with their lives. Determinants of a negative life satisfaction several years following SCI were not easily indicated. Reduced quality of life was particularly related to an unsatisfactory work and leisure situation. Conclusions: Most people with SCI in this study group were able to resume work and were satisfied with their work and leisure situation

Preserving Madagascar's Natural Heritage: The Importance of Keeping the Island's Vertebrate Fossils in the Public Domain

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Connectivity-based parcellation of the thalamus explains specific cognitive and behavioural symptoms in patients with bilateral thalamic infarct

A novel approach based on diffusion tractography was used here to characterise the cortico-thalamic connectivity in two patients, both presenting with an isolated bilateral infarct in the thalamus, but exhibiting partially different cognitive and behavioural profiles. Both patients (G.P. and R.F.) had a pervasive deficit in episodic memory, but only one of them (R.F.) suffered also from a dysexecutive syndrome. Both patients had an MRI scan at 3T, including a T1-weighted volume. Their lesions were manually segmented. T1-volumes were normalised to standard space, and the same transformations were applied to the lesion masks. Nineteen healthy controls underwent a diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI) scan. Their DTI data were normalised to standard space and averaged. An atlas of Brodmann areas was used to parcellate the prefrontal cortex. Probabilistic tractography was used to assess the probability of connection between each voxel of the thalamus and a set of prefrontal areas. The resulting map of corticothalamic connections was superimposed onto the patients' lesion masks, to assess whether the location of the thalamic lesions in R.F. (but not in G. P.) implied connections with prefrontal areas involved in dysexecutive syndromes. In G.P., the lesion fell within areas of the thalamus poorly connected with prefrontal areas, showing only a modest probability of connection with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Conversely, R.F.'s lesion fell within thalamic areas extensively connected with the ACC bilaterally, with the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and with the left supplementary motor area. Despite a similar, bilateral involvement of the thalamus, the use of connectivity-based segmentation clarified that R.F.'s lesions only were located within nuclei highly connected with the prefrontal cortical areas, thus explaining the patient's frontal syndrome. This study confirms that DTI tractography is a useful tool to examine in vivo the effect of focal lesions on interconnectivity brain patterns

D3-brane Potentials from Fluxes in AdS/CFT

We give a comprehensive treatment of the scalar potential for a D3-brane in a warped conifold region of a compactification with stabilized moduli. By studying general ultraviolet perturbations in supergravity, we systematically incorporate `compactification effects' sourced by supersymmetry breaking in the compact space. Significant contributions to the D3-brane potential, including the leading term in the infrared, arise from imaginary anti-self-dual (IASD) fluxes. For an arbitrary Calabi-Yau cone, we determine the most general IASD fluxes in terms of scalar harmonics, then compute the resulting D3-brane potential. Specializing to the conifold, we identify the operator dual to each mode of flux, and for chiral operators we confirm that the potential computed in the gauge theory matches the gravity result. The effects of four-dimensional curvature, including the leading D3-brane mass term, arise directly from the ten-dimensional equations of motion. Furthermore, we show that gaugino condensation on D7-branes provides a local source for IASD flux. This flux precisely encodes the nonperturbative contributions to the D3-brane potential, yielding a promising ten-dimensional representation of four-dimensional nonperturbative effects. Our result encompasses all significant contributions to the D3-brane potential discussed in the literature, and does so in the single coherent framework of ten-dimensional supergravity. Moreover, we identify new terms with irrational scaling dimensions that were inaccessible in prior works. By decoupling gravity in a noncompact configuration, then systematically reincorporating compactification effects as ultraviolet perturbations, we have provided an approach in which Planck-suppressed contributions to the D3-brane effective action can be computed.Comment: 70 page

Effects of bone marrow-derived cells on monocrotaline- and hypoxia-induced pulmonary hypertension in mice

BACKGROUND: Bone marrow -derived cells (BMDCs) can either limit or contribute to the process of pulmonary vascular remodeling. Whether the difference in their effects depends on the mechanism of pulmonary hypertension (PH) remains unknown. OBJECTIVES: We investigated the effect of BMDCs on PH induced in mice by either monocrotaline or exposure to chronic hypoxia. METHODS: Intravenous administration of the active monocrotaline metabolite (monocrotaline pyrrole, MCTp) to C57BL/6 mice induced PH within 15 days, due to remodeling of small distal vessels. Three days after the MCTp injection, the mice were injected with BMDCs harvested from femurs and tibias of donor mice treated with 5-fluorouracil (3.5 mg IP/animal) to deplete mature cells and to allow proliferation of progenitor cells. RESULTS: BMDCs significantly attenuated PH as assessed by reductions in right ventricular systolic pressure (20 ± 1 mmHg vs. 27 ± 1 mmHg, P ≤ 0.01), right ventricle weight/left ventricle+septum weight ratio (0.29 ± 0.02 vs. 0.36 ± 0.01, P ≤ 0.03), and percentage of muscularized vessels (26.4% vs. 33.5%, P ≤ 0.05), compared to control animals treated with irradiated BMDCs. Tracking cells from constitutive GFP-expressing male donor mice with anti-GFP antibodies or chromosome Y level measurement by quantitative real-time PCR showed BMDCs in the lung. In contrast, chronically hypoxic mice subjected to the same procedure failed to show improvement in PH. CONCLUSION: These results show that BMDCs limit pulmonary vascular remodeling induced by vascular injury but not by hypoxia

Defect Characterization in SiGe/SOI Epitaxial Semiconductors by Positron Annihilation

The potential of positron annihilation spectroscopy (PAS) for defect characterization at the atomic scale in semiconductors has been demonstrated in thin multilayer structures of SiGe (50 nm) grown on UTB (ultra-thin body) SOI (silicon-on-insulator). A slow positron beam was used to probe the defect profile. The SiO2/Si interface in the UTB-SOI was well characterized, and a good estimation of its depth has been obtained. The chemical analysis indicates that the interface does not contain defects, but only strongly localized charged centers. In order to promote the relaxation, the samples have been submitted to a post-growth annealing treatment in vacuum. After this treatment, it was possible to observe the modifications of the defect structure of the relaxed film. Chemical analysis of the SiGe layers suggests a prevalent trapping site surrounded by germanium atoms, presumably Si vacancies associated with misfit dislocations and threading dislocations in the SiGe films

Male gynecomastia and risk for malignant tumours – a cohort study

BACKGROUND: Men with gynecomastia may suffer from absolute or relative estrogen excess and their risk of different malignancies may be increased. We tested whether men with gynecomastia were at greater risk of developing cancer. METHODS: A cohort was formed of all the men having a histopathological diagnosis of gynecomastia at the Department of Pathology, University of Lund, following an operation for either uni- or bilateral breast enlargement between 1970–1979. All possible causes of gynecomastia were accepted, such as endogenous or exogenous hormonal exposure as well as cases of unknown etiology. Prior to diagnosis of gynecomastia eight men had a diagnosis of prostate carcinoma, two men a diagnosis of unilateral breast cancer and one had Hodgkin's disease. These patients were included in the analyses. The final cohort of 446 men was matched to the Swedish Cancer Registry, Death Registry and General Population Registry. RESULTS: At the end of the follow up in December 1999, the cohort constituted 8375.2 person years of follow-up time. A total of 68 malignancies versus 66.07 expected were observed; SIR = 1.03 (95% CI 0.80–1.30). A significantly increased risk for testicular cancer; SIR = 5.82 (95% CI 1.20–17.00) and squamous cell carcinoma of the skin; SIR = 3.21 (95% CI 1.71–5.48) were noted. The increased risk appeared after 2 years of follow-up. A non-significantly increased risk for esophageal cancer was also seen while no new cases of male breast cancer were observed. However, in the prospective cohort, diagnostic operations for gynecomastia may substantially have reduced this risk CONCLUSIONS: There is a significant increased risk of testicular cancer and squamous cell carcinoma of the skin in men who have been operated on for gynecomastia

Complete Mitochondrial Genomes Reveal Neolithic Expansion into Europe

The Neolithic transition from hunting and gathering to farming and cattle breeding marks one of the most drastic cultural changes in European prehistory. Short stretches of ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from skeletons of pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers as well as early Neolithic farmers support the demic diffusion model where a migration of early farmers from the Near East and a replacement of pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers are largely responsible for cultural innovation and changes in subsistence strategies during the Neolithic revolution in Europe. In order to test if a signal of population expansion is still present in modern European mitochondrial DNA, we analyzed a comprehensive dataset of 1,151 complete mtDNAs from present-day Europeans. Relying upon ancient DNA data from previous investigations, we identified mtDNA haplogroups that are typical for early farmers and hunter-gatherers, namely H and U respectively. Bayesian skyline coalescence estimates were then used on subsets of complete mtDNAs from modern populations to look for signals of past population expansions. Our analyses revealed a population expansion between 15,000 and 10,000 years before present (YBP) in mtDNAs typical for hunters and gatherers, with a decline between 10,000 and 5,000 YBP. These corresponded to an analogous population increase approximately 9,000 YBP for mtDNAs typical of early farmers. The observed changes over time suggest that the spread of agriculture in Europe involved the expansion of farming populations into Europe followed by the eventual assimilation of resident hunter-gatherers. Our data show that contemporary mtDNA datasets can be used to study ancient population history if only limited ancient genetic data is available