On the Behaviour of General-Purpose Applications on Cloud Storages

Managing data over cloud infrastructures raises novel challenges with respect to existing and well studied approaches such as ACID and long running transactions. One of the main requirements is to provide availability and partition tolerance in a scenario with replicas and distributed control. This comes at the price of a weaker consistency, usually called eventual consistency. These weak memory models have proved to be suitable in a number of scenarios, such as the analysis of large data with Map-Reduce. However, due to the widespread availability of cloud infrastructures, weak storages are used not only by specialised applications but also by general purpose applications. We provide a formal approach, based on process calculi, to reason about the behaviour of programs that rely on cloud stores. For instance, one can check that the composition of a process with a cloud store ensures `strong' properties through a wise usage of asynchronous message-passing

Metabolic and hormonal control of energy utilization and partitioning from early to mid lactation in Sarda ewes and Saanen goats

In a recent study, we observed that starch-rich diets used in mid lactation induced lower milk production persistency and higher body fat accumulation in dairy ewes compared with dairy goats. Because these species differences could be linked to hormonal mechanisms that drive energy partitioning, in the same experiment, we explored the evolution of metabolic and hormonal status during lactation to test this hypothesis. Twenty mature Sarda dairy ewes and 20 mature Saanen goats [15\u2013134 \ub1 11 d in milk (DIM), mean \ub1 SD] were compared simultaneously. In early lactation, each species was allocated to one dietary treatment: high-starch diet [HS: 20.4% starch, on dry matter (DM) basis], whereas from 92 \ub1 11 DIM, each species was allocated to 1 of 2 dietary treatments: HS (20.0% starch, on DM basis) and low-starch (LS: 7.8% starch, on DM basis) diets. Blood samples were collected in the morning to analyze glucose, nonesterified fatty acids (NEFA), growth hormone (GH), insulin, and insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I). Data were analyzed using the PROC MIXED procedure of SAS with repeated measurements (SAS Version 9.0). The HS and LS diets applied in mid lactation did not affect metabolic status of the animal within species; thus, only a comparison between species was carried out. From early to mid lactation, plasma glucose concentration was higher in ewes than in goats (54.57 vs. 48.35 \ub1 1.18 mg/dL), whereas plasma NEFA concentration was greater in goats than in ewes (0.31 vs. 0.25 \ub1 0.03 mmol/L). Goats had higher plasma GH concentration and lower plasma insulin content than ewes (4.78 vs. 1.31 ng/mL \ub1 0.47; 0.11 vs. 0.26 \u3bcg/L \ub1 0.02). Plasma IGF-I concentration did not vary between species. The comparison of metabolic and hormonal status of lactating Sarda dairy ewes and Saanen goats, carried out by studying simultaneously the 2 species in the same stage of lactation and experimental conditions, suggests that the higher insulin and glucose concentration observed in Sarda ewes explains why they partitioned more energy toward body reserves than to the mammary gland, especially in mid lactation. This can justify the negative effect of high-starch diets in mid-lactating Sarda ewes. Conversely, the highest GH and NEFA concentration observed in Saanen goats explain why they partitioned more energy of starch diets toward the mammary gland than to body reserves and justify the positive effect of high-starch diet in mid lactation. Together, these different responses contribute to explain why specialized dairy goats, such as the Saanen breed, have a higher milk production persistency than specialized dairy sheep breeds, such as the Sarda

On the expressiveness and trade-offs of large scale tuple stores

Proceedings of On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems (OTM)Massive-scale distributed computing is a challenge at our doorstep. The current exponential growth of data calls for massive-scale capabilities of storage and processing. This is being acknowledged by several major Internet players embracing the cloud computing model and offering first generation distributed tuple stores. Having all started from similar requirements, these systems ended up providing a similar service: A simple tuple store interface, that allows applications to insert, query, and remove individual elements. Further- more, while availability is commonly assumed to be sustained by the massive scale itself, data consistency and freshness is usually severely hindered. By doing so, these services focus on a specific narrow trade-off between consistency, availability, performance, scale, and migration cost, that is much less attractive to common business needs. In this paper we introduce DataDroplets, a novel tuple store that shifts the current trade-off towards the needs of common business users, pro- viding additional consistency guarantees and higher level data process- ing primitives smoothing the migration path for existing applications. We present a detailed comparison between DataDroplets and existing systems regarding their data model, architecture and trade-offs. Prelim- inary results of the system's performance under a realistic workload are also presented

A Survey on the milk fatty acid composition of forty dairy sheep flocks in Sardinia

A survey was carried out to monitor milk fatty acid (FA) composition during two years (2003 and 2004) on forty dairy sheep flocks, fed pasture based rations, in 5 macro pedoclimatic areas of Sardinia, featured by different i) soil type, (granitic, G; basaltic, B and alluvial, A) ii) average annual rainfall (low, L, 500-600 mm/year; high, H, 600-800 mm/year). Milk FA profile was strongly influenced by year. In particular milk linolenic acid (LN), CLA (conjugated linoeic acid) and PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acids) levels increased (by 25, 30 and 14%, respectively, P<0.01) whereas the atherogenicity index (AI) decreased (by 8%, P<0.01) in all areas in 2004 as compared with 2003. Pedoclimatic area affected milk fatty acid composition (P<0.01). In both years milk from AL farms showed the highest levels of LN, CLA and PUFA. AI was lower in BH and GH in year 2003 and in BH, AH and GL in 2004

Cetaceans in the Mediterranean Sea. Encounter rate, dominant species, and diversity hotspots

We investigated the presence and diversity of cetaceans in the Mediterranean Sea, analysing the data collected by 32 different research units, over a period of 15 years (2004–2018), and shared on the common web-GIS platform named Intercet. We used the encounter rate, the species prevalence, and the Shannon diversity index as parameters for data analysis. The results show that cetacean diversity, in the context of the Mediterranean basin, is generally quite low when compared with the eastern Atlantic, as few species, namely the striped dolphin, the bottlenose dolphin, the fin whale, and the sperm whale, dominate over all the others. However, some areas, such as the Alboran Sea or the north-western Mediterranean Sea, which includes the Pelagos Sanctuary (the Specially Protected Area of Mediterranean Interest located in the northern portion of the western basin), show higher levels of diversity and should be considered hotspots to be preserved. Primary production and seabed profile seem to be the two main drivers influencing the presence and distribution of cetaceans, with the highest levels of diversity observed in areas characterized by high levels of primary production and high bathymetric variability and gradient. This collective work underlines the importance of data sharing to deepen our knowledge on marine fauna at the scale of the whole Mediterranean Sea and encourages greater efforts in the networking process, also to accomplish the requirements of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, with particular reference to Descriptor 1: biological diversity is maintained

Changes in the pause in muscle spindle discharge during a sequence of twitches. Expl. Neurol. 60: 201-212.

A study was made of the change in duration of the pauses in discharge from spindle afferents occurring during a series of isometric twitches of the cat's triceps surae muscle. These were induced by stimulation of the muscle nerve at frequencies of 0.1 to 1.0 Hz. At frequencies of 0.2 Hz and higher, the duration of the pause exhibited by group II and tonic and phasic group Ia afferents decreased progressively until stabilizing within 5 to 15 s. The time course of this change was largely independent of the frequency of stimulation, but the eventual duration in the steady state was strongly dependent on the frequency, being shorter at higher rates. At a given frequency, the pause was shorter at longer muscle lengths. The decrease in pause duration was not accompanied by a parallel change in duration or amplitude of the muscle tension responses, indicating that it arose from some alteration intrinsic to the spindle organ. We suggest that the progressive change in sensory discharge could serve the initial reinforcement of repetitive movements