821 research outputs found
Corporate Financing in Great Britain
Background: The antifungal compound ketoconazole has, in addition to its ability to interfere with fungal ergosterol synthesis, effects upon other enzymes including human CYP3A4, CYP17, lipoxygenase and thromboxane synthetase. In the present study, we have investigated whether ketoconazole affects the cellular uptake and hydrolysis of the endogenous cannabinoid receptor ligand anandamide (AEA). Methodology/Principal Findings: The effects of ketoconazole upon endocannabinoid uptake were investigated using HepG2, CaCo2, PC-3 and C6 cell lines. Fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) activity was measured in HepG2 cell lysates and in intact C6 cells. Ketoconazole inhibited the uptake of AEA by HepG2 cells and CaCo2 cells with IC50 values of 17 and 18 mu M, respectively. In contrast, it had modest effects upon AEA uptake in PC-3 cells, which have a low expression of FAAH. In cell-free HepG2 lysates, ketoconazole inhibited FAAH activity with an IC50 value (for the inhibitable component) of 34 mu M. Conclusions/Significance: The present study indicates that ketoconazole can inhibit the cellular uptake of AEA at pharmacologically relevant concentrations, primarily due to its effects upon FAAH. Ketoconazole may be useful as a template for the design of dual-action FAAH/CYP17 inhibitors as a novel strategy for the treatment of prostate cancer
Violator Spaces: Structure and Algorithms
Sharir and Welzl introduced an abstract framework for optimization problems,
called LP-type problems or also generalized linear programming problems, which
proved useful in algorithm design. We define a new, and as we believe, simpler
and more natural framework: violator spaces, which constitute a proper
generalization of LP-type problems. We show that Clarkson's randomized
algorithms for low-dimensional linear programming work in the context of
violator spaces. For example, in this way we obtain the fastest known algorithm
for the P-matrix generalized linear complementarity problem with a constant
number of blocks. We also give two new characterizations of LP-type problems:
they are equivalent to acyclic violator spaces, as well as to concrete LP-type
problems (informally, the constraints in a concrete LP-type problem are subsets
of a linearly ordered ground set, and the value of a set of constraints is the
minimum of its intersection).Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, extended abstract was presented at ESA 2006;
author spelling fixe
Spotting Trees with Few Leaves
We show two results related to the Hamiltonicity and -Path algorithms in
undirected graphs by Bj\"orklund [FOCS'10], and Bj\"orklund et al., [arXiv'10].
First, we demonstrate that the technique used can be generalized to finding
some -vertex tree with leaves in an -vertex undirected graph in
time. It can be applied as a subroutine to solve the
-Internal Spanning Tree (-IST) problem in
time using polynomial space, improving upon previous algorithms for this
problem. In particular, for the first time we break the natural barrier of
. Second, we show that the iterated random bipartition employed by
the algorithm can be improved whenever the host graph admits a vertex coloring
with few colors; it can be an ordinary proper vertex coloring, a fractional
vertex coloring, or a vector coloring. In effect, we show improved bounds for
-Path and Hamiltonicity in any graph of maximum degree
or with vector chromatic number at most 8
Population size estimation for the Warren root collar weevil, Hylobius warreni Wood (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), a pest of regenerating lodgepole pine plantations
The Warren root collar weevil, Hylobius warreni Wood (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is an endemic pest species of conifers, particularly lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) (Pinaceae), in British Columbia. Larvae feed on the roots and root collars of young trees, resulting in girdling damage and mortality or growth reductions. Population sizes of adult H. warreni have historically been difficult to assess due to a lack of operational sampling methods or chemical attractants for the species. Therefore, most previous population estimates have relied on indirect or incomplete measures of damage by immature individuals. In this study, we tested the Björklund funnel trap to assess its efficacy as a method to estimate H. warreni populations. Funnel traps were placed on all 182 trees in half of a small (~1 ha) lodgepole pine stand over four days and remained in place for 13 days after the last traps were installed. Adult weevils were captured, marked, and released on the bole of the tree on which they had been caught. It is likely that most of the adult weevils in the plot, which was isolated from any nearby lodgepole pine stands, were caught at least once and many were caught multiple times. Population sizes were estimated using both the Schnabel method and the Schumacher and Eschmeyer method, resulting in population estimates of 1.83-2.19 weevils/tree and 731-875 weevils/ha. These measures are within the range of population sizes estimated by previous studies. The results suggest the Björklund funnel trap may be an effective operational tool for population monitoring for this species and may also be an effective tactic in population reduction strategies
Crime in Maine 2014
Automata over infinite alphabets have recently come to be studied extensively
as potentially useful tools for solving problems in verification and database
theory. One popular model of automata studied is the Class Memory Automata
(CMA), for which the emptiness problem is equivalent to Petri Net Reachability.
We identify a restriction - which we call weakness - of CMA, and show that
their emptiness problem is equivalent to Petri Net Coverability. Further, we
show that in the deterministic case they are closed under all Boolean
operations. We clarify the connections between weak CMA and existing automata
over data languages. We also extend CMA to operate over multiple levels of
nested data values, and show that while these have undecidable emptiness in
general, adding the weakness constraint recovers decidability of emptiness, via
reduction to coverability in well-structured transition systems. We also
examine connections with existing automata over nested data.Comment: Preprint of LATA'15 pape
Fragments of ML Decidable by Nested Data Class Memory Automata
The call-by-value language RML may be viewed as a canonical restriction of
Standard ML to ground-type references, augmented by a "bad variable" construct
in the sense of Reynolds. We consider the fragment of (finitary) RML terms of
order at most 1 with free variables of order at most 2, and identify two
subfragments of this for which we show observational equivalence to be
decidable. The first subfragment consists of those terms in which the
P-pointers in the game semantic representation are determined by the underlying
sequence of moves. The second subfragment consists of terms in which the
O-pointers of moves corresponding to free variables in the game semantic
representation are determined by the underlying moves. These results are shown
using a reduction to a form of automata over data words in which the data
values have a tree-structure, reflecting the tree-structure of the threads in
the game semantic plays. In addition we show that observational equivalence is
undecidable at every third- or higher-order type, every second-order type which
takes at least two first-order arguments, and every second-order type (of arity
greater than one) that has a first-order argument which is not the final
argument
An automaton over data words that captures EMSO logic
We develop a general framework for the specification and implementation of
systems whose executions are words, or partial orders, over an infinite
alphabet. As a model of an implementation, we introduce class register
automata, a one-way automata model over words with multiple data values. Our
model combines register automata and class memory automata. It has natural
interpretations. In particular, it captures communicating automata with an
unbounded number of processes, whose semantics can be described as a set of
(dynamic) message sequence charts. On the specification side, we provide a
local existential monadic second-order logic that does not impose any
restriction on the number of variables. We study the realizability problem and
show that every formula from that logic can be effectively, and in elementary
time, translated into an equivalent class register automaton
Tree Buffers
In runtime verification, the central problem is to decide if a given program execution violates a given property. In online runtime verification, a monitor observes a program’s execution as it happens. If the program being observed has hard real-time constraints, then the monitor inherits them. In the presence of hard real-time constraints it becomes a challenge to maintain enough information to produce error traces, should a property violation be observed. In this paper we introduce a data structure, called tree buffer, that solves this problem in the context of automata-based monitors: If the monitor itself respects hard real-time constraints, then enriching it by tree buffers makes it possible to provide error traces, which are essential for diagnosing defects. We show that tree buffers are also useful in other application domains. For example, they can be used to implement functionality of capturing groups in regular expressions. We prove optimal asymptotic bounds for our data structure, and validate them using empirical data from two sources: regular expression searching through Wikipedia, and runtime verification of execution traces obtained from the DaCapo test suite
Dynamic Set Intersection
Consider the problem of maintaining a family of dynamic sets subject to
insertions, deletions, and set-intersection reporting queries: given , report every member of in any order. We show that in the word
RAM model, where is the word size, given a cap on the maximum size of
any set, we can support set intersection queries in
expected time, and updates in expected time. Using this algorithm
we can list all triangles of a graph in
expected time, where and
is the arboricity of . This improves a 30-year old triangle enumeration
algorithm of Chiba and Nishizeki running in time.
We provide an incremental data structure on that supports intersection
{\em witness} queries, where we only need to find {\em one} .
Both queries and insertions take O\paren{\sqrt \frac{N}{w/\log^2 w}} expected
time, where . Finally, we provide time/space tradeoffs for
the fully dynamic set intersection reporting problem. Using words of space,
each update costs expected time, each reporting query
costs expected time where
is the size of the output, and each witness query costs expected time.Comment: Accepted to WADS 201
On -Simple -Path
An -simple -path is a {path} in the graph of length that passes
through each vertex at most times. The -SIMPLE -PATH problem, given a
graph as input, asks whether there exists an -simple -path in . We
first show that this problem is NP-Complete. We then show that there is a graph
that contains an -simple -path and no simple path of length greater
than . So this, in a sense, motivates this problem especially
when one's goal is to find a short path that visits many vertices in the graph
while bounding the number of visits at each vertex.
We then give a randomized algorithm that runs in time that solves the -SIMPLE -PATH on a graph with
vertices with one-sided error. We also show that a randomized algorithm
with running time with gives a
randomized algorithm with running time \poly(n)\cdot 2^{cn} for the
Hamiltonian path problem in a directed graph - an outstanding open problem. So
in a sense our algorithm is optimal up to an factor
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