Relaxing Routing Table to Alleviate Dynamism in P2P Systems

In dynamic P2P networks, nodes join and depart from the system frequently, which partially damages the predefined P2P structure, and impairs the system performance such as basic lookup functionality. Therefore stabilization process has to be done to restore the logical topology. This paper presents an approach to relax the requirement on routing tables to provide provably better stability than fixed structured P2P systems. We propose a relaxed Chord that keeps the O(logN) number of hops for greedy lookup, but it requires less stabilization overhead. It allows a tradeoff between lookup efficiency and structure flexibility without adding any overhead to the system. In the relaxed routing structure, each routing entry ("finger") of the node is allowed to vary within a set of values. Each node only needs to keep a certain number of fingers that point to nodes in its anchor set. This relaxation reduces the burden of state management of the node. The relaxed routing scheme provides an alternative structure other than randomized P2P and deterministic P2P, by relaxing on finger selection. It provides good flexibility and therefore extends the system functioning time.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Tetrakis[μ-3-(3-pyridyl)acrylato-κ2 O:O′]bis{(1,10-phenanthroline-κ2 N,N′)[3-(3-pyridyl)acrylato-κ2 O,O′]europium(III)} pentahydrate

The europiumIII ion in the title compound, [Eu2(C8H6NO2)6(C12H8N2)2]·5H2O, is coordinated by seven carboxyl­ate O atoms and two N atoms from one phenanthroline mol­ecule. The carboxyl­ate groups of 3-(3-pyrid­yl)acrylate link pairs of europium(III) ions, forming centrosymmetric dinuclear units, which further assemble into a sheet parallel to the (001) plane through hydrogen-bonding inter­actions involving the uncoordinated water mol­ecules. One water molecule is disordered

BIOMECHANICAL EFFECT OF JUMPING SPEED ON THE PYRAMIDING BOX HOPS

The purpose of this study was to compare three different jumping speeds (60 bpm, 75 bpm and 90 bpm) while performing pyramiding box hops in order to investigate the optimal rate for post-injured athletes in the return to sport phase of rehabilitation. Twelve healthy, competitive male athletes with specialty in jump were recruited from track and field team. Kinematical and kinetic data of lower extremities were collected via three-dimensional motion analysis system and two force plateforms. One-way ANOVA (SPSS) was used to determine difference among rates. Less hip adduction, knee valgus and knee valgus/varus moments were found at the rate of 90 bpm. Therefore, performing pyramiding box hops at the rate of 90 bpm may be more pertinent for post-injured athletes with ACL injury

The ultra-low-frequency shear modes of 2-4 layer graphenes observed in their scroll structures at edges

The in-plane shear modes between neighbor-layers of 2-4 layer graphenes (LGs) and the corresponding graphene scrolls rolled up by 2-4LGs were investigated by Raman scattering. In contrast to that just one shear mode was observed in 3-4LGs, all the shear modes of 3-4LGs were observed in 3-4 layer scrolls (LSs), whose frequencies agree well with the theoretical predication by both a force-constant model and a linear chain model. In comparison to the broad width (about 12cm$^{-1}$) for the G band in graphite, all the shear modes exhibit an intrinsic line width of about 1.0 cm$^{-1}$. The local electronic structures dependent on the local staking configurations enhance the intensity of the shear modes in corresponding 2-4LSs zones, which makes it possible to observe all the shear modes. It provides a direct evidence that how the band structures of FLGs can be sensitive to local staking configurations. This result can be extended to n layer graphene (n > 4) for the understanding of the basic phonon properties of multi-layer graphenes. This observation of all-scale shear modes can be foreseen in other 2D materials with similar scroll structures.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Effect of Thiazolidinedione Amide on Insulin Resistance, Creactive Protein and Endothelial Function in Young Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Purpose: To investigate the effect of thiazolidinedione amide (TZDA) treatment on high-sensitivity Creactive protein (hsCRP) levels and endothelial dysfunction in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).Methods: Twenty five women (mean age 24.7 ± 3.9 years; mean body mass index (BMI), 23.2 ± 4.0 kg/m2) with PCOS were treated with 15 μM TZDA daily for 12 months. Serum levels of testosterone, leutenizing hormone (LH), follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), insulin and hsCRP were measured. BMI, hirsutism scores and insulin sensitivity indices were also calculated prior to and after TZDA treatment. Brachial artery responses to stimuli was used to measure arterial endothelium and smooth muscle function prior to and after the treatment.Results: TZDA treatment caused a significant (p < 0.05) decrease in serum testosterone from 93.1 ± 40.3 to 54.8 ± 19.5 ng/dl and fasting insulin concentration from 11.9 ± 6.8 to 9.23 ± 5.13 U/mL. Insulin resistance index significantly (p < 0.05) improved and hirsutism score decreased significantly from 11.6 ± 2.0 to 6.8 ± 2.0. BMI, waist circumference, serum total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL)- cholesterol, FSH and LH levels remained almost unchanged. Twenty-four of the women reverted to regular menstrual cycles. SHBG levels showed a significant (p < 0.05) increase from 24.8 ± 9.5 to 49.1 ± 13.5 nmol/L after TZDA treatment. Serum hsCRP levels decreased (p < 0.05) from 0.25 ± 0.1 to 0.09 ± 0.02 mg/dL while endothelium-dependent vascular responses significantly improved (p < 0.05) following TZDA treatment (9.9 ± 3.9 vs 16.4 ± 5.1%).Conclusion: TZDA treatment improves insulin sensitivity, decreases androgen production and improves endothelial dysfunction in young women with PCOS.Keywords: Thiazolidinedione amide, Insulin sensitivity, Endothelial dysfunction, Polycystic ovary syndrom

Anti-tumor effect of polysaccharides from rhizome of Curculigo orchioides Gaertn on cervical cancer

Purpose: To investigate the anti-tumor effects of polysaccharides from Curculigo orchioides (PDC) on cervical cancer and the possible mechanisms involved.Methods: A Box–Behnken design (BBD) was employed to optimize extraction conditions for PDC. The anti-tumor effect of PDC on cervical cancer was investigated in vivo in mice injected with Hela cells. The parameters measured were tumor volume and weight. In vitro anti-tumor effects of PDC were assessed by measuring expressions of caspase-3, caspase-9 and P53 proteins in Hela cells via ELISA assay. Thymus and spleen indices were calculated for assessment of PDC effect on immune function.Results: The optimum extraction conditions predicted by the response surface methodology (RSM) were: extraction time = 1.58 h, ratio-of-water-to-sample = 30.05 mL/g and extraction number = 1.95. PDC showed significant anti-tumor effect on cervical cancer in mice. It significantly increased thymus and spleen indices in mice; and significantly up-regulated expressions of caspase-3, caspase-9 and P53 proteins in HeLa cells.Conclusion: PDC has significant anti-tumor effect on cervical cancer in vivo and in vitro, most probably through mechanisms involving enhancement on immune function and induction of apoptosis.Keyword: Curculigo orchioides, Polysaccharides, Cervical cancer, HeLa cells, Apoptosi

Objcache: An Elastic Filesystem over External Persistent Storage for Container Clusters

Container virtualization enables emerging AI workloads such as model serving, highly parallelized training, machine learning pipelines, and so on, to be easily scaled on demand on the elastic cloud infrastructure. Particularly, AI workloads require persistent storage to store data such as training inputs, models, and checkpoints. An external storage system like cloud object storage is a common choice because of its elasticity and scalability. To mitigate access latency to external storage, caching at a local filesystem is an essential technique. However, building local caches on scaling clusters must cope with explosive disk usage, redundant networking, and unexpected failures. We propose objcache, an elastic filesystem over external storage. Objcache introduces an internal transaction protocol over Raft logging to enable atomic updates of distributed persistent states with consistent hashing. The proposed transaction protocol can also manage inode dirtiness by maintaining the consistency between the local cache and external storage. Objcache supports scaling down to zero by automatically evicting dirty files to external storage. Our evaluation reports that objcache speeded up model serving startup by 98.9% compared to direct copies via S3 interfaces. Scaling up with dirty files completed from 2 to 14 seconds with 1024 dirty files.Comment: 13 page

Retro-FPN: Retrospective Feature Pyramid Network for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Learning per-point semantic features from the hierarchical feature pyramid is essential for point cloud semantic segmentation. However, most previous methods suffered from ambiguous region features or failed to refine per-point features effectively, which leads to information loss and ambiguous semantic identification. To resolve this, we propose Retro-FPN to model the per-point feature prediction as an explicit and retrospective refining process, which goes through all the pyramid layers to extract semantic features explicitly for each point. Its key novelty is a retro-transformer for summarizing semantic contexts from the previous layer and accordingly refining the features in the current stage. In this way, the categorization of each point is conditioned on its local semantic pattern. Specifically, the retro-transformer consists of a local cross-attention block and a semantic gate unit. The cross-attention serves to summarize the semantic pattern retrospectively from the previous layer. And the gate unit carefully incorporates the summarized contexts and refines the current semantic features. Retro-FPN is a pluggable neural network that applies to hierarchical decoders. By integrating Retro-FPN with three representative backbones, including both point-based and voxel-based methods, we show that Retro-FPN can significantly improve performance over state-of-the-art backbones. Comprehensive experiments on widely used benchmarks can justify the effectiveness of our design. The source is available at https://github.com/AllenXiangX/Retro-FPNComment: Accepted by ICCV 202