Role of the Calcium Plateau in the Neuronal Injury and Behavioral Morbidities Following Organophosphate Intoxication

Organophosphate (OP) chemicals include nerve agents and pesticides, and there is a growing concern of OP based chemical attacks against civilians. Current antidotes are essential in limiting immediate mortality associated with OP exposure. However, further research is needed to identify molecular mechanisms underlying long-term neurological deficits following survival of OP toxicity in order to develop effective therapeutics. We have developed rat survival models of OP induced status epilepticus (SE) that mimic chronic mortality and morbidity following OP intoxication. We have observed significant elevations in hippocampal calcium levels after OP SE that persisted for weeks following initial survival. Drugs inhibiting intracellular calcium-induced calcium release such as dantrolene, levetiracetam, and carisbamate lowered OP-SE mediated protracted calcium elevations. Given the critical role of calcium signaling in modulating behavior and cell-death mechanisms, drugs targeted at preventing the development of the calcium plateau could enhance neuroprotection, help reduce morbidity and improve outcome following survival of OP SE

Outsiders: an exploratory history of IS in corporations

This paper is an exploratory study that provides a brief history of information systems (IS) in corporations that are not part of the Information Technology sector, such as retailers, banks, government agencies and so on. It looks at the development of the IS function and the changing roles of IS practitioners in such organisations over the past 60 years, and assesses how they perceived themselves and were perceived by their peers, by business colleagues and by others. It uses the testimony of successful IS practitioners to provide a grounded perspective on the history of the IS worker over this time. The research identifies a trajectory of a gradual diminishment in the role and status of the IS worker in the corporation over the lifetime of the discipline. It observes that the IS worker has experienced changed fortunes: from a position of influence at the outset, leading to a peak of status and reward in the years up to the millennium; and to the present day where the occupation has a much lower profile. It ascribes this to the increasing commoditisation of IS, manifested by phenomena such as end-user computing, outsourcing and cloud computing. The paper is of relevance to academics who are interested in IS in the corporate organisation; to business professionals, who are sometimes bewildered by their IS colleagues; and to those who work in IS. The research is presented as an interpretative study and is intended to help future researchers frame questions and design research projects. It also aims to inform and witness, and provide a perspective on a currently neglected part of the business world

Magnetar outbursts: an observational review

Transient outbursts from magnetars have shown to be a key property of their emission, and one of the main way to discover new sources of this class. From the discovery of the first transient event around 2003, we now count about a dozen of outbursts, which increased the number of these strongly magnetic neutron stars by a third in six years. Magnetar outbursts might involve their multi-band emission resulting in an increased activity from radio to hard X-ray, usually with a soft X-ray flux increasing by a factor of 10-1000 with respect to the quiescent level. A connected X-ray spectral evolution is also often observed, with a spectral softening during the outburst decay. The flux decay times vary a lot from source to source, ranging from a few weeks to several years, as also the decay law which can be exponential-like, a power-law or even multiple power-laws can be required to model the flux decrease. We review here on the latest observational results on the multi-band emission of magnetars, and summarize one by one all the transient events which could be studied to date from these sources.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures. Chapter of the Springer Book ASSP 7395 "High-energy emission from pulsars and their systems", proceeding of the Sant Cugat Forum on Astrophysics (12-16 April 2010). Review updated to January 201

Scalable data management in distributed information systems

[EN] In the era of cloud computing and huge information systems, distributed applications should manage dynamic workloads; i.e., the amount of client requests per time unit may vary frequently and servers should rapidly adapt their computing efforts to those workloads. Cloud systems provide a solid basis for this kind of applications but most of the traditional relational database systems are unprepared to scale up with this kind of distributed systems. This paper surveys different techniques being used in modern SQL, NoSQL and NewSQL systems in order to increase the scalability and adaptability in the management of persistent data. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.This work has been supported by EU FEDER and Spanish MICINN under research grants TIN2009-14460-C03-01 and TIN2010-17193Pallardó Lozoya, MR.; Esparza Peidro, J.; García Escriva, JR.; Decker, H.; Muñoz Escoí, FD. (2011). Scalable data management in distributed information systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 7046:208-217. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25126-9_31S2082177046Helland, P.: Life beyond distributed transactions: an apostate’s opinion. In: 3rd Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 132–141 (2007)Finkelstein, S., Jacobs, D., Brendle, R.: Principles for inconsistency. In: 4th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA (2009)Chang, F., Dean, J., Ghemawat, S., Hsieh, W.C., Wallach, D.A., Burrows, M., Chandra, T., Fikes, A., Gruber, R.: Bigtable: A distributed storage system for structured data. In: 7th Symp. on Operat. Syst. Design and Implem. (OSDI), pp. 205–218. USENIX Assoc., Seattle (2006)Cooper, B.F., Baldeschwieler, E., Fonseca, R., Kistler, J.J., Narayan, P.P.S., Neerdaels, C., Negrin, T., Ramakrishnan, R., Silberstein, A., Srivastava, U., Stata, R.: Building a cloud for Yahoo! IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 32, 36–43 (2009)DeCandia, G., Hastorun, D., Jampani, M., Kakulapati, G., Lakshman, A., Pilchin, A., Sivasubramanian, S., Vosshall, P., Vogels, W.: Dynamo: Amazon’s highly available key-value store. In: 21st ACM Symp. on Operat. Syst. Princ. (SOSP), Stevenson, Washington, USA, pp. 205–220 (2007)Stonebraker, M., Madden, S., Abadi, D.J., Harizopoulos, S., Hachem, N., Helland, P.: The end of an architectural era (it’s time for a complete rewrite). In: 33rd Intnl. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), pp. 1150–1160. ACM Press, Vienna (2007)Lomet, D.B., Fekete, A., Weikum, G., Zwilling, M.J.: Unbundling transaction services in the cloud. In: 4th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA (2009)Campbell, D.G., Kakivaya, G., Ellis, N.: Extreme scale with full SQL language support in Microsoft SQL Azure. In: Intnl. Conf. on Mngmnt. of Data (SIGMOD), pp. 1021–1024. ACM, New York (2010)Levandoski, J.J., Lomet, D., Mokbel, M.F., Zhao, K.K.: Deuteronomy: Transaction support for cloud data. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 123–133 (2011)Helland, P., Campbell, D.: Building on quicksand. In: 4th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA (2009)Muñoz-Escoí, F.D., García-Escrivá, J.R., Pallardó-Lozoya, M.R., Esparza-Peidro, J.: Managing scalable persistent data. Technical Report ITI-SIDI-2011/003, Instituto Tecnológico de Informática, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain (2011)Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., Antony, S., Das, S.: Data management challenges in cloud computing infrastructures. In: 6th Intnl. Wshop. on Databases in Networked Information Systems (DNIS), Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, pp. 1–10 (2010)Stonebraker, M.: The case for shared nothing. IEEE Database Eng. Bull. 9, 4–9 (1986)Alonso, G., Kossmann, D., Roscoe, T.: SwissBox: An architecture for data processing appliances. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 32–37 (2011)Baker, J., Bond, C., Corbett, J.C., Furman, J.J., Khorlin, A., Larson, J., Léon, J.M., Li, Y., Lloyd, A., Yushprakh, V.: Megastore: Providing scalable, highly available storage for interactive services. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 223–234 (2011)Curino, C., Jones, E.P.C., Popa, R.A., Malviya, N., Wu, E., Madden, S., Balakrishnan, H., Zeldovich, N.: Relational cloud: A database-as-a-service for the cloud. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 235–240 (2011)Das, S., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A.: ElasTraS: An elastic transactional data store in the cloud. CoRR abs/1008.3751 (2010)Vogels, W.: Eventually consistent. Commun. ACM 52, 40–44 (2009)Breitbart, Y., Korth, H.F.: Replication and consistency: being lazy helps sometimes. In: 16th ACM Symp. on Princ. of Database Syst., PODS 1997, pp. 173–184. ACM, New York (1997)Brantner, M., Florescu, D., Graf, D.A., Kossmann, D., Kraska, T.: Building a database on S3. In: Intnl. Conf. on Mngmnt. of Data (SIGMOD), pp. 251–264. ACM Press, Vancouver (2008)Lakshman, A., Malik, P.: Cassandra: a decentralized structured storage system. Operating Systems Review 44, 35–40 (2010)Burrows, M.: The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems. In: 7th Symp. on Operat. Syst. Design and Implem. (OSDI), pp. 335–350. USENIX Assoc., Seattle (2006)Junqueira, F.P., Reed, B.: The life and times of a ZooKeeper. In: 28th Annual ACM Symp. on Princ. of Distrib. Comp. (PODC), p. 4. ACM Press, Calgary (2009)MacCormick, J., Murphy, N., Najork, M., Thekkath, C.A., Zhou, L.: Boxwood: Abstractions as the foundation for storage infrastructure. In: 6th Simp. on Operat. Syst. Design and Impl. (OSDI), pp. 105–120. USENIX Assoc., San Francisco (2004)Stonebraker, M., Cattell, R.: Ten rules for scalable performance in ”simple operation” datastores. Commun. ACM 54, 72–80 (2011)Amazon Web Services LLC: Amazon SimpleDB (2011), http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/Lamport, L.: The part-time parliament. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 16, 133–169 (1998)Bernstein, P.A., Reid, C.W., Das, S.: Hyder - a transactional record manager for shared flash. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 9–20 (2011)Bonnet, P., Bouganim, L.: Flash device support for database management. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 1–8 (2011)Microsoft Corp.: Windows Azure: Microsoft’s cloud services platform (2011), http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/VoltDB, Inc.: VoltDB technical overview: Next generation open-source SQL database with ACID for fast-scaling OLTP applications (2010), Downloadable from: http://voltdb.com/_pdf/VoltDBTechnicalOverviewWhitePaper.pd

Forward pi^0 Production and Associated Transverse Energy Flow in Deep-Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Deep-inelastic positron-proton interactions at low values of Bjorken-x down to x \approx 4.10^-5 which give rise to high transverse momentum pi^0 mesons are studied with the H1 experiment at HERA. The inclusive cross section for pi^0 mesons produced at small angles with respect to the proton remnant (the forward region) is presented as a function of the transverse momentum and energy of the pi^0 and of the four-momentum transfer Q^2 and Bjorken-x. Measurements are also presented of the transverse energy flow in events containing a forward pi^0 meson. Hadronic final state calculations based on QCD models implementing different parton evolution schemes are confronted with the data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures and 3 table

Measurement of Leading Proton and Neutron Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Deep--inelastic scattering events with a leading baryon have been detected by the H1 experiment at HERA using a forward proton spectrometer and a forward neutron calorimeter. Semi--inclusive cross sections have been measured in the kinematic region 2 <= Q^2 <= 50 GeV^2, 6.10^-5 <= x <= 6.10^-3 and baryon p_T <= MeV, for events with a final state proton with energy 580 <= E' <= 740 GeV, or a neutron with energy E' >= 160 GeV. The measurements are used to test production models and factorization hypotheses. A Regge model of leading baryon production which consists of pion, pomeron and secondary reggeon exchanges gives an acceptable description of both semi-inclusive cross sections in the region 0.7 <= E'/E_p <= 0.9, where E_p is the proton beam energy. The leading neutron data are used to estimate for the first time the structure function of the pion at small Bjorken--x.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Eur. Phys.

Collisional and Radiative Processes in Optically Thin Plasmas

Most of our knowledge of the physical processes in distant plasmas is obtained through measurement of the radiation they produce. Here we provide an overview of the main collisional and radiative processes and examples of diagnostics relevant to the microphysical processes in the plasma. Many analyses assume a time-steady plasma with ion populations in equilibrium with the local temperature and Maxwellian distributions of particle velocities, but these assumptions are easily violated in many cases. We consider these departures from equilibrium and possible diagnostics in detail