Multi-objective scheduling of Scientific Workflows in multisite clouds

Clouds appear as appropriate infrastructures for executing Scientific Workflows (SWfs). A cloud is typically made of several sites (or data centers), each with its own resources and data. Thus, it becomes important to be able to execute some SWfs at more than one cloud site because of the geographical distribution of data or available resources among different cloud sites. Therefore, a major problem is how to execute a SWf in a multisite cloud, while reducing execution time and monetary costs. In this paper, we propose a general solution based on multi-objective scheduling in order to execute SWfs in a multisite cloud. The solution consists of a multi-objective cost model including execution time and monetary costs, a Single Site Virtual Machine (VM) Provisioning approach (SSVP) and ActGreedy, a multisite scheduling approach. We present an experimental evaluation, based on the execution of the SciEvol SWf in Microsoft Azure cloud. The results reveal that our scheduling approach significantly outperforms two adapted baseline algorithms (which we propose by adapting two existing algorithms) and the scheduling time is reasonable compared with genetic and brute-force algorithms. The results also show that our cost model is accurate and that SSVP can generate better VM provisioning plans compared with an existing approach.Work partially funded by EU H2020 Programme and MCTI/RNP-Brazil (HPC4E grant agreement number 689772), CNPq, FAPERJ, and INRIA (MUSIC project), Microsoft (ZcloudFlow project) and performed in the context of the Computational Biology Institute (www.ibc-montpellier.fr). We would like to thank Kary Ocaña for her help in modeling and executing the SciEvol SWf.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Gender, Power, and the January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

In Charlotte Brontë’s 1848 Jane Eyre, Rochester’s housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax responds to Jane with certain dismay at the thought of her forty-year-old master marrying the twenty-five-year-old Blanche Ingram: “I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea of the sort” (163). Yet to Mrs. Fairfax’s great surprise,Rochester later makes an “unequal match” with an even greater disparity in age to Jane, ultimately bringing the novel to a sentimental close. Marriages with large age differences form an important narrative frame in nineteenth-century British literature, and they conveniently merge disruptive and conservative forces. Although they play with normative codes of sexual propriety and gender identity, they find legitimacy and acceptance through their allegiances to literary, social, and legal conventions. This study examines the literature of the nineteenth century that engages the theme of an older husband and a younger wife—what I call the theme of the January-May marriage. The focus of my study spans the long nineteenth century, from Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1791 A Simple Story to Bernard Shaw’s 1898 Mrs. Warren’s Profession, covering some of the most canonical works of the period such as Byron’s Don Juan, Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Eliot’s Middlemarch, as well as lesser known texts like Browning’s Pippa Passes, Geraldine Ensor Jewsbury’s Zoe, and Trollope’s An Old Man’s Love. While this project includes works from a variety of genres (novels, poetry, plays, paintings), evaluates marriages with varied age differences (the difference in Emma is sixteen years, but in Nicholas Nickleby, the difference is over fifty years), and discusses the works of authors who wrote from assorted gender, economic, sexual and historical perspectives, the dissertation offers nuanced readings of how intergenerational marriages negotiate exchanges between gender and power. January-May marriages have thus far served as pat examples of women’s victimization and oppression within a patriarchal society, though some literary critics have begun to investigate the intricate connections between age, gender and power more fully. James Kincaid’s work on the eroticized child and Catherine Robson’s study on girlhood are important precursors to my own work. However, whereas their investigations probe the image of the child and issues of pedophilia, my query moves the sexual “deviancy” of child-loving into the culturally sanctified and seemingly normative marriage union and expands notions of childhood, sometimes reading the babyish younger wife as the child and sometimes the infantilized older husband. Moreover, though this theme appears grounded in a fundamentally heterosexual rubric, my work theorizes a complex relationship between age and gender that rejects such conventional restrictions on identity. Building upon the works of gender theorists like Thomas Laqueur and Michel Foucault, my project finds that literary January-May marriages respond to peculiarly nineteenth-century anxieties regarding gender roles and, organized into thematic chapters, the dissertation analyzes the theme as parody, as incest, as aesthetics, as horror, as economics, and as love

A comparative study of covert nursing problems as perceived by a certain group of orthopedic patients and the professional nurses on the same unit

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Defending Constitutional Rights in Imbalanced Courtrooms

Safeguarding Fourth Amendment protections is critical to preserving individual privacy rights and fostering positive perceptions of police legitimacy within communities. Maintaining an effective accountability structure for police stops, searches, and seizures is a necessary step toward achieving these objectives. In this article, we use qualitative interviews and survey data with defense attorneys to explore—from a court community perspective— their use of discretion to uphold the Exclusionary Rule through bringing suppression motions. Data demonstrate that power dynamics within the court community lead defense attorneys to conclude that litigating rights violations is often a futile effort that interferes with favorable case outcomes and important professional relationships. As a result, they sometimes opt to refrain from filing suppression motions in exchange for favorable plea offers and career aspirations. While understandable, these decisions frustrate the ability of the judicial system to hold the police accountable for Fourth Amendment violations

The Influence of Prior Legal Background on Judicial Sentencing Considerations

State court judges are influenced by a myriad of factors during criminal case processing. To study the influence of prior legal background on judicial decision-making at sentencing, we performed in-depth qualitative interviews of 39 trial court judges presiding over criminal cases in a Northeastern U.S. state. We find that judges are influenced by their former legal experiences and most judges are cognizant of this influence. While certain sentencing considerations are prioritized for almost all judges (e.g., criminal history, seriousness of the offense), prioritization and processing of many other sentencing criteria are correlated with prior legal background. Former defense attorneys tend to focus on defendants’ mental health, social upbringing, and family support, while prosecutors focus on victim impact and violence, among other considerations. Our results highlight the need for diversity on the bench in criminal courts coupled with increased training and inter-courtroom communications

Effect of Low-magnitude, High-frequency Vibration on Osteocytes in the Regulation of Osteoclasts

Osteocytes are well evidenced to be the major mechanosensor in bone, responsible for sending signals to the effector cells (osteoblasts and osteoclasts) that carry out bone formation and resorption. Consistent with this hypothesis, it has been shown that osteocytes release various soluble factors (e.g. transforming growth factor-β, nitric oxide, and prostaglandins) that influence osteoblastic and osteoclastic activities when subjected to a variety of mechanical stimuli, including fluid flow, hydrostatic pressure, and mechanical stretching. Recently, low-magnitude, high-frequency (LMHF) vibration (e.g., acceleration less than \u3c 1 × g, where g = 9.81 m/s2, at 20–90 Hz) has gained much interest as studies have shown that such mechanical stimulation can positively influence skeletal homeostasis in animals and humans. Although the anabolic and anti-resorptive potential of LMHF vibration is becoming apparent, the signaling pathways that mediate bone adaptation to LMHF vibration are unknown. We hypothesize that osteocytes are the mechanosensor responsible for detecting the vibration stimulation and producing soluble factors that modulate the activity of effector cells. Hence, we applied low-magnitude (0.3 × g) vibrations to osteocyte-like MLO-Y4 cells at various frequencies (30, 60, 90 Hz) for 1 h. We found that osteocytes were sensitive to this vibration stimulus at the transcriptional level: COX-2 maximally increased by 344% at 90 Hz, while RANKL decreased most significantly (−55%, p \u3c 0.01) at 60 Hz. Conditioned medium collected from the vibrated MLO-Y4 cells attenuated the formation of large osteoclasts (≥ 10 nuclei) by 36% (p \u3c 0.05) and the amount of osteoclastic resorption by 20% (p = 0.07). The amount of soluble RANKL (sRANKL) in the conditioned medium was found to be 53% lower in the vibrated group (p \u3c 0.01), while PGE2 release was also significantly decreased (−61%, p \u3c 0.01). We conclude that osteocytes are able to sense LMHF vibration and respond by producing soluble factors that inhibit osteoclast formation