From Cold War to War on Terror: NATO, Russia and the Balkans 1991–2002

The end of the Cold War brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union and caused the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to think hard about its changed role in the world. Coincident with these momentous events was the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the attendant civil wars in the Balkans. At a given point in history, therefore, NATO and its former Cold War protagonist Russia found themselves undergoing fundamental changes while being forced to deal with the immediacy of the crisis in the Balkans. This thesis examines, from a NATO perspective, how the Alliance and Russia came to terms with their changing status after the Cold War, and how their relationship developed throughout the 1990s and beyond. In particular, it focuses on the course of the relationship during the bloody civil war in Bosnia, and in the NATO campaign against Serbia in Kosovo, known as Operation Allied Force. The thesis considers the disparate nature of the twenty-six-member Alliance and, ultimately, its dependence upon US political leadership and military power to act effectively. It considers also the relative weakness of the post-Soviet Russian Federation, and its attempts to maintain its great power status despite its greatly reduced circumstances. The conduct of the unequal relationship between a powerful NATO and a weakened Russia is traced through the course of their interaction in Bosnia from 1991 to 1995, and their subsequent cooperation in peacekeeping there. It is examined further in the case of the war over Kosovo, and the deep rift which it caused between the Alliance and Moscow, only partially bridged by their peacekeeping activities in the province. In conclusion the thesis attempts an evaluation of the significance of the Balkans in the overall context of NATO–Russia relations, and offers some thoughts for the future of the relationship

Agility demands of Gaelic football match-play: a time-motion analysis

Research into the physical demands of Gaelic football is limited with no research into the agility or change of direction (CoD) demands of the sport. This study examined the CoD demands of Gaelic football via a time-motion analysis of senior inter-county match play. The Bloomfield movement classification (BMC) was adapted for application to Gaelic football. A new “descriptor” was used in an effort to account for the decision-making component of agility by isolating actions that occurred during active engagement with play. Of 1,899 changes of direction (CoDs) identified, 1,035 occurred during active engagement in play. The left/right split for CoDs during active engagement in play was 47.1/49.9%, indicating no preference for completing actions to one side over the other. Whilst the most common CoDs were ≤90° (74.9%), 80% of CoDs greater than 270° took place during active engagement in play. CoD actions are very common in Gaelic football and may be more common than in other field and court sports. It is important that athletes are physically prepared to cope with the demands of very acute CoDs during meaningful periods of match play

The Hyperion system: Compiling multithreaded Java bytecode for distributed execution

A preliminary version of this work has been presented as a Distinguished Paper at the Euro-Par 2000 Conference, Munich, Germany, August 2000.International audienceOur work combines Java compilation to native code with a runtime library that executes Java threads in a distributed memory environment. This allows a Java programmer to view a cluster of processors as executing a single JAVA virtual machine. The separate processors are simply resources for executing Java threads with true parallelism, and the run-time system provides the illusion of a shared memory on top of the private memories of the processors. The environment we present is available on top of several UNIX systems and can use a large variety of communication interfaces thanks to the high portability of its run time system. To evaluate our approach, we compare serial C, serial Java, and multithreaded Java implementations of a branch and-bound solution to the minimal-cost map-coloring problem. All measurements have been carried out on two platforms using two different communication interfaces: SISCI/SCI and MPI BIP/Myrinet

Facilitators and barriers associated with youth player transition to professional first team football:a key stakeholder perspective

The transition of elite youth footballers through academy systems towards the first team is highly complex, competitive, and often unsuccessful. A myriad of factors including technical competence, physical prowess, and the development environment combine to determine youth player progression. Current research has focused on broad investigations of multiple clubs and stakeholders, providing a valuable overview of the key aspects associated with elite youth player transition. This study aimed to provide an in-depth, context-specific investigation of key stakeholders within an elite level club in the United Kingdom (UK). Seven key stakeholders including the head of the academy (n = 1), the head of sports science (n = 1), coaches (n = 3), and lead sports scientists (n = 2) were recruited. Framework analysis led to the development of a practical framework outlining the key facilitators and barriers of youth-to-first-team transition. Facilitators of transition included overcoming adversity, high-level physical prowess, exceptional technical competence, and possessing at least one elite-level attribute. Barriers to transition included a lack of opportunity, lucrative youth player contracts and a lack of development-specific coaching. In addition, the developmental environment and developing individuals within a team environment were key influences on youth-to-first-team transition. This study complements recent broad investigations of the UK and global stakeholders by corroborating many of their findings while providing transferable, context-specific accounts of applied issues related to successful transition to first-team football

The phenome-wide distribution of genetic variance

A general observation emerging from estimates of additive genetic variance in sets of functionally or developmentally related traits is that much of the genetic variance is restricted to few trait combinations as a consequence of genetic covariance among traits. While this biased distribution of genetic variance among functionally related traits is now well documented, how it translates to the broader phenome and therefore any trait combination under selection in a given environment is unknown. We show that 8,750 gene expression traits measured in adult male Drosophila serrata exhibit widespread genetic covariance among random sets of five traits, implying that pleiotropy is common. Ultimately, to understand the phenome-wide distribution of genetic variance, very large additive genetic variance-covariance matrices (G) are required to be estimated. We draw upon recent advances in matrix theory for completing high-dimensional matrices to estimate the 8,750-trait G and show that large numbers of gene expression traits genetically covary as a consequence of a single genetic factor. Using gene ontology term enrichment analysis, we show that the major axis of genetic variance among expression traits successfully identified genetic covariance among genes involved in multiple modes of transcriptional regulation. Our approach provides a practical empirical framework for the genetic analysis of high-dimensional phenome-wide trait sets and for the investigation of the extent of high-dimensional genetic constraint

Maintenance of quantitative genetic variance in complex, multitrait phenotypes:the contribution of rare, large effect variants in 2 Drosophila species

The interaction of evolutionary processes to determine quantitative genetic variation has implications for contemporary and future phenotypic evolution, as well as for our ability to detect causal genetic variants. While theoretical studies have provided robust predictions to discriminate among competing models, empirical assessment of these has been limited. In particular, theory highlights the importance of pleiotropy in resolving observations of selection and mutation, but empirical investigations have typically been limited to few traits. Here, we applied high-dimensional Bayesian Sparse Factor Genetic modeling to gene expression datasets in 2 species, Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila serrata, to explore the distributions of genetic variance across high-dimensional phenotypic space. Surprisingly, most of the heritable trait covariation was due to few lines (genotypes) with extreme [>3 interquartile ranges (IQR) from the median] values. Intriguingly, while genotypes extreme for a multivariate factor also tended to have a higher proportion of individual traits that were extreme, we also observed genotypes that were extreme for multivariate factors but not for any individual trait. We observed other consistent differences between heritable multivariate factors with outlier lines vs those factors without extreme values, including differences in gene functions. We use these observations to identify further data required to advance our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics and nature of standing genetic variation for quantitative traits

ISBS 2018 AUCKLAND CONFERENCE ACADEMIC CLOSING PROGRAMME

ISBS 2018 Auckland Conference Chair Professor Patria Hume will welcome the Vice Chancellor, ISBS 2018 conference volunteers, and ISBS awardees to the stage. AUT Vice Chancellor Derek McCormack will thank the contributors to the conference (organising, logistics, assistants) and provide words of reflection on the conference. The ISBS research, internship and mobility grant awards will be provided by ISBS Board member Tim Exell. ISBS President Young-Hoo Kwon will award the certificates to the ISBS Fellows, Life Member and announce the Geoffrey Dyson. Dr Neil Bezodis will read the citation for the Life Member. Professor Mike McGuigan will award the “Samsung best ISBS digital poster use of video or other interactive technology” that the judges rated for: Visual appeal, Innovation, Use of biomechanics technology, Applied biomechanics. The prize is the Samsung Note9 and the Samsung Multi-media DeX dock. Thanks to Diamond Industry Partner Samsung and AUT for these amazing prizes. The finalists in the oral podium and the oral posters will be awarded medals by ISBS President Young-Hoo Kwon, certificates by ISBS Board member Dr Neil Bezodis and cash awards by VC Derek McCormack. Dr Gerda Strutzenberger will introduce Dr Mark Walsh who will present the up-coming highlights of the ISBS 2019 conference at the University of Miami Ohio, USA. The conference will be officially closed by President Young-Hoo Kwon with the furling of the ISBS banner and presentation to ISBS 2019 Conference Chair Dr Mark Walsh. To finish there will be a performance of haka and song by delegates, led by Dr Valance Smith

Uneven distribution of mutational variance across the transcriptome of Drosophila serrata revealed by high-dimensional analysis of gene expression

There are essentially an infinite number of traits that could be measured on any organism, and almost all individual traits display genetic variation, yet substantial genetic variance in a large number of independent traits is not plausible under basic models of selection and mutation. One mechanism that may be invoked to explain the observed levels of genetic variance in individual traits is that pleiotropy results in fewer dimensions of phenotypic space with substantial genetic variance. Multivariate genetic analyses of small sets of functionally-related traits have shown that standing genetic variance is often concentrated in relatively few dimensions. It is unknown if a similar concentration of genetic variance occurs at a phenome-wide scale when many traits of disparate function are considered, or if the genetic variance generated by new mutations is also unevenly distributed across phenotypic space. Here, we used a Bayesian sparse factor model to characterize the distribution of mutational variance of 3385 gene expression traits of after 27 generations of mutation accumulation, and found that 46% of the estimated mutational variance was concentrated in just 21 dimensions with significant mutational heritability. We show that the extent of concentration of mutational variance into such a small subspace has the potential to substantially bias the response to selection of these traits

Implementing Java consistency using a generic multithreaded DSM runtime system

International audienceThis paper describes the implementation of Hyperion, an environment for executing Java programs on clusters of computers. To provide high performance, the environment compiles Java bytecode to native code and supports the concurrent execution of Java threads on multiple nodes of a cluster. The implementation uses the PM2 distributed, multithreaded runtime system. PM2 provides light weight threads and efficient inter-node communication. It also includes a generic, distributed shared memory layer (DSM-PM2) which allows the efficient and flexible implementation of the Java memory consistency model. This paper includes preliminary performance figures for our implementation of Hyperion/PM2 on clusters of Linux machines connected by SCI and Myrinet