Considerations on Resource Usage in Exceptions and Failures in Workflows

The paper presents a description of some point of view of different authors related to the failures and exceptions that appear in workflows, as a direct consequence of unavailability of resources involved in the workflow.\ud Each of these interpretations is typical for a certain situation, depending on the authors' interpretation of failures and exceptions in workflows modeling real dynamical systems.\u

The impact of emotional distraction on cognition: from basic brain responses to large-scale network interactions

The goal of the current dissertation was to clarify the behavioral and neural mechanisms associated with the impact and control of emotional distraction by investigating the influences of the nature (positive vs. negative) and source (external vs. internal) of emotional distraction, the types of emotion regulation (spontaneous vs. instructed) engaged to cope with it, and the role of sex differences. The present dissertation comprises three studies, with the first two focusing on external emotional distraction, and the third focusing on internal emotional distraction. Study one investigated the roles of arousal and valence in the impact of external emotional distraction on working memory (WM) performance, and yielded four main findings. First, positive distraction had reduced impact on WM performance, compared with negative distraction. Second, fMRI results identified valence-specific effects in a dorsal executive system (DES) and overlapping arousal and valence effects in a ventral affective system (VAS), suggesting both increased impact of negative distraction and enhanced engagement of coping mechanisms for positive distraction. Third, a valence-related rostro-caudal dissociation was identified in medial frontal regions associated with the default-mode network (DMN). Finally, these DMN regions showed increased functional connectivity with DES regions for negative compared with positive distraction. Study two investigated sex differences in the response to external emotional distraction and yielded three main findings. First, an increased impact of emotional distraction among women was detected, in trials associated with high-confidence responses, in the context of overall similar WM performance in women and men. Second, regarding the fMRI results, women showed increased sensitivity to emotional distraction in VAS regions, whereas men showed increased sensitivity in DES regions, in the context of overall similar patterns of response to emotional distraction in women and men. Third, a sex-related dorsal-ventral hemispheric dissociation emerged in the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) related to coping with emotional distraction, with women showing a positive correlation with WM performance in left ventral PFC, and men showing similar effects in the right dorsal PFC. Study three investigated the impact and regulation of internal emotional distraction, and yielded four main findings. First, the instructed engagement of emotion regulation (ER) diminished both the subjective negative experience and the objective WM interference. Second, the overall response to internal emotional distraction was linked to deactivation in DES and increased activity in VAS regions, similar to the response to external emotional distraction, as well as with specific increased activity in DMN regions. Third, ER engagement was associated with both diminished activity in VAS regions part of the salience network, and increased activity in executive and memory-related regions. Finally, ER was also associated with increased functional connectivity between fronto-parietal regions. Supplementary, a behavioral pilot study investigated the role of valence and showed that negative but not positive internal distraction interfered with concurrent WM performance. Also, an exploratory analysis tested for sex differences and showed increased impact of internal emotional distraction in women for high-confidence WM performance, linked to increased sensitivity in a medial frontal region associated with the salience network. These findings contribute to a better understanding of healthy functioning under transient emotional distraction. In addition, they have implications for understanding factors linked to increased susceptibility to mood and anxiety disorders, which are afflictions characterized by increased distractibility and altered processing of negative and positive stimuli originating from the external and internal environments, and are more prevalent in women compared to men

L-CYSTEINE INFLUENCE ON THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF BREAD FROM HIGH EXTRACTION FLOURS WITH NORMAL GLUTEN

Reducing agents like L-cysteine are used in bread baking of strong flours, with short gluten to reduce mixing andfermentation time. The aim of this study is to determine if L-cysteine may be an improving agent for the quality of breadobtained from high extraction flours with normal gluten.The tested high extraction flour was analyzed by determination of several quality indicators such as wet gluten content,gluten deformation index, moisture, ash, Falling Number index and alveogram parameters of dough. The resultsindicate that flour has a normal gluten network, is “good” for bread making and has a normal α-amylase activity.After its addition to dough, L-cysteine improves the physical properties of bread made with high extraction flour. Theobserved increase for bread volume was maximum 10%, for porosity maximum 5,75% and for elasticity maximum2,58%, comparing with reference bread.The proposed solution can be assimilated into pan bread making technology

Considerations on Construction Ontologies

The paper proposes an analysis on some existent ontologies, in order to point out ways to resolve semantic heterogeneity in information systems. Authors are highlighting the tasks in a Knowledge Acquisiton System and identifying aspects related to the addition of new information to an intelligent system. A solution is proposed, as a combination of ontology reasoning services and natural languages generation. A multi-agent system will be conceived with an extractor agent, a reasoner agent and a competence management agent.Comment: 10 pages, exposed on 5th International Conference "Actualities and Perspectives on Hardware and Software" - APHS2009, Timisoara, Romani

METABOLIC AND BIOCHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PROBIOTIC CULTURE IN MILK SUPPLEMENTED WITH RYE FLAKES AND MALT EXTRACT

Rye flakes and malt extract were added to milk in order to stimulate growth and fermentative activity of probioticbacteria and to obtain a probiotic product with pleasant sensory attributes. Probiotic culture used in this study containsbifidobacteria, Lb. acidophilus, Lactobacilus lactis and Streptococcus thermophilus.Rye flakes have a stimulating effect more pronounced than malt extract on acidification capacity of the probioticculture, and to achieve an increase of the milk acidity of 7g lactic acid /dm3 (in 6h at 39oC) the two ingredients must beadded in concentration of 2% and, respectively, 0.2%..The probiotic culture reach the greatest proteolytic activity when rye flakes are added in the proportion of 3% andmalt extract in the proportion of 0.1% and the amino acids released rate was 764.6 μg%. The lactose bioconversionrate was greater in the milk supplemented with rye flakes 3% and malt extract 0.1% and residual lactose was 3.84%

Improving the Energy-Efficiency of Task Based Programming on Chip Multiprocessors

In the early 2000s, the superscalar CPU paradigm reached the point of diminishing returns mainly due to power requirements and overheating concerns. Faced with a constant demand for performance, hardware developers were in need of new ways to efficiently use the ever increasing transistor count predicted by Moore’s law. The Chip MultiProcessors (CMPs) came as a natural solution to the power wall: several less complex and significantly less "power hungry" cores integrated on a single chip. In almost all ICT segments today, from High Performance Computing (HPC) to embedded devices, CMPs have become the architecture of choice. With this wide adoption of CMPs, software developers need to use parallel programming to fully exploit this architecture. Although parallelization can maximize the performance and energy efficiency of applications running on CMPs, it also comes with its own set of challenges. Among these, inherent management overheads that can account for sub-linear speedups and can increase the energy consumption of executions. Because of rising concerns for energy cost and battery life, much research and development today focuses on reducing power requirements and saving energy. In this thesis, we investigate how parallel programming can be used to improve the energy efficiency of applications running on CMP systems. We focus on a programming paradigm called Task Based Programming (TBP). The base concept of the TBP model is that the programmer focuses on identifying and annotating pieces of code (tasks) which can be executed concurrently with other tasks. An important result of our work is an increased understanding of how computations, parallelization and energy consumption relate when executing on CMP systems. Working in this direction, we use a simulation framework to allow for increased flexibility in design space exploration and noninvasive measurements. Unfortunately, the performance overhead of simulation is significant: simulating a parallel application can be 10000x slower than executing it on real hardware. In the first part of our research, we took it upon ourselves to try to solve this issue. We investigate the challenges of employing a sampling based technique to take advantage of the periodic behavior in TBP parallel applications. Our proposal is a simple 3-phase methodology that identifies only a small number of representative execution samples to simulate thus reducing the overall simulation time. In the second part of our work, we look at parallelization as a mean to save energy on CMP platforms. We test and compare two TBP libraries, Wool and Intel TBB, focusing on the behavior of some basic TBP parallelization operations like task spawning, task synchronization and task stealing. We investigate the energy footprint of these parallelization overheads and the effect it has on the energy-efficiency of the executing system. We have identified that failed task steals amount for the largest overhead. To reduce their impact and improve our system’s energy efficiency, we devised a new occupancy-aware policy for victim selection. This policy allows for a more informed decision when selecting the victim for task stealing and reduces the number of failed steals

Dictionary of Romanian Language (Letter N) - DLR (ELEXIS)

Dicționarul Limbii Române, abbreviated DLR, also called Thesaurus Dictionary of the Romanian Language, is the most important lexicographical work of the Romanian language, developed under the aegis of the Romanian Academy during more than a century. It was compiled and edited in two stages (known under the brand DA series during 1906–1944 and new series, DLR, from 1965 to 2010), in 37 volumes and contains about 175,000 words and variations, with more than 1,300,000 quotes. The development of electronic version was made in 2007–2010