Database Tuning and its Role in Information Technology Education

Course curriculum in database management systems encompasses many topics, from data modeling to implementation and testing. These topics establish a strong foundation for Information Technology students to analyze, design, and implement a database system. Beyond these basic skills, Information Technology students must be equipped with the necessary capabilities to address database performance issues, such as when end-user expectations are not met. The topic of database tuning includes various techniques associated with enhancing database performance, and is important in providing a well-rounded database curriculum, but this skill is not generally covered in most database management systems courses. Our study focuses on testing the researcher’s assumption that database tuning is not part of current Information Technology curriculums. In addition, its significance and importance in the curriculums is researched. We surveyed academics and professionals to quantify the importance of database tuning and establish an understanding of its role within the education of students taking database related courses

Handling Unstructured Data Type in DB2 and Oracle

The objective of our work is to determine which mainstream object-relational database management systems (ORDMS) provide convenient facilities for the storage and manipulation of unstructured data objects. These objects, which consist of video, audio, photographs, and even executable code such as Java applets, are becoming readily employed by desktop, network, and Internet applications. Typically, these ORDMSs must store the objects in a manner by which they can be easily accessed, but more importantly, easily processed during either storage or retrieval. Our focus is on two of the ORDMS market leaders: IBM’s DB2 and Oracle. The salient facilities of DB2 and Oracle in handling object types are analyzed, considering their advantages and disadvantages

MIS Research Involving Human Subjects: Processes and IRB Requirements

This paper discusses major issues and institutional requirements for human subjects\u27 research. In particular, it considers the responsibilities of principal investigators or individual researchers conducting human subjects research in management information systems. The paper introduces the issues related to human subjects\u27 research and presents the background and responsibilities of institutional review boards. An overview is presented of institutional review boards as they relate to management information systems within the broader context of social and behavioral science research. The data collection instruments commonly used in management information systems studies are considered in relation to human subject involvement. New developments such as the Internet as a mechanism for data collection are also considered

Farseer-NMR: automatic treatment, analysis and plotting of large, multi-variable NMR data

We present Farseer-NMR (https ://git.io/vAueU), a software package to treat, evaluate and combine NMR spectroscopic data from sets of protein-derived peaklists covering a range of experimental conditions. The combined advances in NMR and molecular biology enable the study of complex biomolecular systems such as flexible proteins or large multibody complexes, which display a strong and functionally relevant response to their environmental conditions, e.g. the presence of ligands, site-directed mutations, post translational modifications, molecular crowders or the chemical composition of the solution. These advances have created a growing need to analyse those systems' responses to multiple variables. The combined analysis of NMR peaklists from large and multivariable datasets has become a new bottleneck in the NMR analysis pipeline, whereby information-rich NMR-derived parameters have to be manually generated, which can be tedious, repetitive and prone to human error, or even unfeasible for very large datasets. There is a persistent gap in the development and distribution of software focused on peaklist treatment, analysis and representation, and specifically able to handle large multivariable datasets, which are becoming more commonplace. In this regard, Farseer-NMR aims to close this longstanding gap in the automated NMR user pipeline and, altogether, reduce the time burden of analysis of large sets of peaklists from days/weeks to seconds/minutes. We have implemented some of the most common, as well as new, routines for calculation of NMR parameters and several publication-quality plotting templates to improve NMR data representation. Farseer-NMR has been written entirely in Python and its modular code base enables facile extension

Antibiotic resistance genes in treated wastewater and in the receiving water bodies: a pan-European survey of urban settings

There is increasing public concern regarding the fate of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) during wastewater treatment, their persistence during the treatment process and their potential impacts on the receiving water bodies. In this study, we used quantitative PCR (qPCR) to determine the abundance of nine ARGs and a class 1 integron associated integrase gene in 16 wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluents from ten different European countries. In order to assess the impact on the receiving water bodies, gene abundances in the latter were also analysed. Six out of the nine ARGs analysed were detected in all effluent and river water samples. Among the quantified genes, intI1 and sul1 were the most abundant. Our results demonstrate that European WWTP contribute to the enrichment of the resistome in the receiving water bodies with the particular impact being dependent on the effluent load and local hydrological conditions. The ARGs concentrations in WWTP effluents were found to be inversely correlated to the number of implemented biological treatment steps, indicating a possible option for WWTP management. Furthermore, this study has identified bla as a possible resistance gene for future studies investigating the impact of WWTPs on their receiving water. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Pulsar kicks from a dark-matter sterile neutrino

We show that a sterile neutrino with mass in the 1-20 keV range and a small mixing with the electron neutrino can simultaneously explain the origin of the pulsar motions and the dark matter in the universe. An asymmetric neutrino emission from a hot nascent neutron star can be the explanation of the observed pulsar velocities. In addition to the pulsar kick mechanism based on resonant neutrino transitions, we point out a new possibility: an asymmetric off-resonant emission of sterile neutrinos. The two cases correspond to different values of the masses and mixing angles. In both cases we identify the ranges of parameters consistent with the pulsar kick, as well as cosmological constraints.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; final version; discussion and references adde

A superconvergent representation of the Gersten-Nitzan and Ford-Webber nonradiative rates

An alternative representation of the quasistatic nonradiative rates of Gersten and Nitzan [J. Chem. Phys. 1981, 75, 1139] and Ford and Weber [Phys. Rep. 1984, 113, 195] is derived for the respective parallel and perpendicular dipole orientations. Given the distance d of a dipole from a sphere surface of radius a, the representations comprise four elementary analytic functions and a modified multipole series taking into account residual multipole contributions. The analytic functions could be arranged hierarchically according to decreasing singularity at the short distance limit d ---> 0, ranging from d^{-3} over d^{-1} to ln (d/a). The alternative representations exhibit drastically improved convergence properties. On keeping mere residual dipole contribution of the modified multipole series, the representations agree with the converged rates on at least 99.9% for all distances, arbitrary particle sizes and emission wavelengths, and for a broad range of dielectric constants. The analytic terms of the representations reveal a complex distance dependence and could be used to interpolate between the familiar d^{-3} short-distance and d^{-6} long-distance behaviors with an unprecedented accuracy. Therefore, the representations could be especially useful for the qualitative and quantitative understanding of the distance behavior of nonradiative rates of fluorophores and semiconductor quantum dots involving nanometal surface energy transfer in the presence of metallic nanoparticles or nanoantennas. As a byproduct, a complete short-distance asymptotic of the quasistatic nonradiative rates is derived. The above results for the nonradiative rates translate straightforwardly to the so-called image enhancement factors Delta, which are of relevance for the surface-enhanced Raman scattering.Comment: 30 pages including 6 figure

Reaction rates and transport in neutron stars

Understanding signals from neutron stars requires knowledge about the transport inside the star. We review the transport properties and the underlying reaction rates of dense hadronic and quark matter in the crust and the core of neutron stars and point out open problems and future directions.Comment: 74 pages; commissioned for the book "Physics and Astrophysics of Neutron Stars", NewCompStar COST Action MP1304; version 3: minor changes, references updated, overview graphic added in the introduction, improvements in Sec IV.A.

Sex and puberty-related differences in metabolomic profiles associated with adiposity measures in youth with obesity

BackgroundSpecific patterns of metabolomic profiles relating to cardiometabolic disease are associated with increased weight in adults. In youth with obesity, metabolomic data are sparse and associations with adiposity measures unknown.ObjectivesPrimary, to determine associations between adiposity measures and metabolomic profiles with increased cardiometabolic risks in youth with obesity. Secondary, to stratify associations by sex and puberty.MethodsParticipants were from COBRA (Childhood Overweight BioRepository of Australia; a paediatric cohort with obesity). Adiposity measures (BMI, BMI z-score, %truncal and %whole body fat, waist circumference and waist/height ratio), puberty staging and NMR metabolomic profiles from serum were assessed. Statistics included multivariate analysis (principal component analysis, PCA) and multiple linear regression models with false discovery rate adjustment.Results214 participants had metabolomic profiles analyzed, mean age 11.9years (SD3.1), mean BMI z-score 2.49 (SD +/- 0.24), 53% females. Unsupervised PCA identified no separable clusters of individuals. Positive associations included BMI z-score and phenylalanine, total body fat % and lipids in medium HDL, and waist circumference and tyrosine; negative associations included total body fat % and the ratio of docosahexaenoic acid/total fatty acids and histidine. Stratifying by sex and puberty, patterns of associations with BMI z-score in post-pubertal males included positive associations with lipid-, cholesterol- and triglyceride-content in VLDL lipoproteins; total fatty acids; total triglycerides; isoleucine, leucine and glycoprotein acetyls.Conclusion In a paediatric cohort with obesity, increased adiposity measures, especially in post-pubertal males, were associated with distinct patterns in metabolomic profiles.</p

Farseer-NMR: automatic treatment, analysis and plotting of large, multi-variable NMR data

We present Farseer-NMR (https://git.io/vAueU), a software package to treat, evaluate and combine NMR spectroscopic data from sets of protein-derived peaklists covering a range of experimental conditions. The combined advances in NMR and molecular biology enable the study of complex biomolecular systems such as flexible proteins or large multibody complexes, which display a strong and functionally relevant response to their environmental conditions, e.g. the presence of ligands, site-directed mutations, post translational modifications, molecular crowders or the chemical composition of the solution. These advances have created a growing need to analyse those systems’ responses to multiple variables. The combined analysis of NMR peaklists from large and multivariable datasets has become a new bottleneck in the NMR analysis pipeline, whereby information-rich NMR-derived parameters have to be manually generated, which can be tedious, repetitive and prone to human error, or even unfeasible for very large datasets. There is a persistent gap in the development and distribution of software focused on peaklist treatment, analysis and representation, and specifically able to handle large multivariable datasets, which are becoming more commonplace. In this regard, Farseer-NMR aims to close this longstanding gap in the automated NMR user pipeline and, altogether, reduce the time burden of analysis of large sets of peaklists from days/weeks to seconds/minutes. We have implemented some of the most common, as well as new, routines for calculation of NMR parameters and several publication-quality plotting templates to improve NMR data representation. Farseer-NMR has been written entirely in Python and its modular code base enables facile extension