Formal Specification and Testing of a Management Architecture

The importance of network and distributed systems management to supply and maintain services required by users has led to a demand for management facilities. Open network management is assisted by representing the system resources to be managed as objects, and providing standard services and protocols for interrogating and manipulating these objects. This paper examines the application of formal description techniques to the specification of managed objects by presenting a case study in the specification and testing of a management architecture. We describe a formal specification of a management architecture suitable for scheduling and distributing services across nodes in a distributed system. In addition, we show how formal specifications can be used to generate conformance tests for the management architecture

The ACIGA Data Analysis programme

The Data Analysis programme of the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy (ACIGA) was set up in 1998 by the first author to complement the then existing ACIGA programmes working on suspension systems, lasers and optics, and detector configurations. The ACIGA Data Analysis programme continues to contribute significantly in the field; we present an overview of our activities.Comment: 10 pages, 0 figures, accepted, Classical and Quantum Gravity, (Proceedings of the 5th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves, Tirrenia, Pisa, Italy, 6-11 July 2003

An information theoretic characterisation of auditory encoding.

The entropy metric derived from information theory provides a means to quantify the amount of information transmitted in acoustic streams like speech or music. By systematically varying the entropy of pitch sequences, we sought brain areas where neural activity and energetic demands increase as a function of entropy. Such a relationship is predicted to occur in an efficient encoding mechanism that uses less computational resource when less information is present in the signal: we specifically tested the hypothesis that such a relationship is present in the planum temporale (PT). In two convergent functional MRI studies, we demonstrated this relationship in PT for encoding, while furthermore showing that a distributed fronto-parietal network for retrieval of acoustic information is independent of entropy. The results establish PT as an efficient neural engine that demands less computational resource to encode redundant signals than those with high information content

Electronic structure of strained InP/GaInP quantum dots

We calculate the electronic structure of nm scale InP islands embedded in $Ga_{0.51}In_{0.49}P$. The calculations are done in the envelope approximation and include the effects of strain, piezoelectric polarization, and mixing among 6 valence bands. The electrons are confined within the entire island, while the holes are confined to strain induced pockets. One pocket forms a ring at the bottom of the island near the substrate interface, while the other is above the island in the GaInP. The two sets of hole states are decoupled. Polarization dependent dipole matrix elements are calculated for both types of hole states.Comment: Typographical error corrected in strain Hamiltonia

Distinct contributions of DNA methylation and histone acetylation to the genomic occupancy of transcription factors

Epigenetic modifications on chromatin play important roles in regulating gene expression. Although chromatin states are often governed by multilayered structure, how individual pathways contribute to gene expression remains poorly understood. For example, DNA methylation is known to regulate transcription factor binding but also to recruit methyl-CpG binding proteins that affect chromatin structure through the activity of histone deacetylase complexes (HDACs). Both of these mechanisms can potentially affect gene expression, but the importance of each, and whether these activities are integrated to achieve appropriate gene regulation, remains largely unknown. To address this important question, we measured gene expression, chromatin accessibility, and transcription factor occupancy in wild-type or DNA methylation-deficient mouse embryonic stem cells following HDAC inhibition. We observe widespread increases in chromatin accessibility at retrotransposons when HDACs are inhibited, and this is magnified when cells also lack DNA methylation. A subset of these elements has elevated binding of the YY1 and GABPA transcription factors and increased expression. The pronounced additive effect of HDAC inhibition in DNA methylation-deficient cells demonstrates that DNA methylation and histone deacetylation act largely independently to suppress transcription factor binding and gene expression

Anomalous magnetophotoluminescence as a result of level repulsion in arrays of quantum dots

Selectively excited photoluminescence (SPL) of an array of self-organized In$_{0.5}$Ga$_{0.5}$As quantum dots has been measured in a magnetic field up to 11T. Anomalous magnetic field sensitivity of the SPL spectra has been observed under conditions for which the regular photoluminescence spectra is insensitive to the magnetic field due to large inhomogeneous broadening. The anomalous sensitivity is interpreted in terms of the repulsion of excited levels of the dots in a random potential. A theory presented to describe this phenomena is in excellent agreement with the experimental data. The data estimated the correlation in the positions of excited levels of the dots to be 94%. The magnetic field dependence allows the determination of the reduced cyclotron effective mass in a dot. For our sample we have obtained $m_em_h/(m_e+m_h)=0.034m_0$.Comment: 12 revtex preprint pages + 4 ps figures, uuencode