Network and device-level impacts: performance and reliability of active I/O storage systems

Distributed active storage architectures are designed to offload user-level processing to the peripheral from the host servers. In this paper, we report preliminary investigation on performance and fault recovery designs, as impacted by emerging storage interconnect protocols and state-of-the-art storage devices. Empirical results obtained using validated device-level and interconnect data demonstrate the significance of the said parameters on the overall system performance and reliability.     

Cross-Border Migration of Hong Kong Residents Under the 'One Country, Two Systems' Policy

Hong Kong is known as a migrant city because its population was sourced from mainland China, and because there has always been outflows of people to overseas countries, especially from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. Emigration to mainland China has become a significant recent trend. This article discusses this phenomenon in the theoretical contexts of migration and trans-border residential development. It contends that the trend will intensify more quickly than other cross-border movements because the two systems are separated by a political border within one country, and because there are common cultural ties and rapid economic integration.     

A Study of The Moisture-Uptake Kinetics of a Hygroscopic Pharmaceutical Powder

The moisture-uptake kinetics of a hygroscopic powder, sodium heparin contained in a cylindrical container, was determined using a novel moisture-uptake measuring device under a constant convective air flow. The amount of moisture uptake increased with the increase in the relative humidity of the air. The effect of powder-bed height on the total amount of moisture uptake was found to be significant only at the highest relative humidity (75%) evaluated in this study. However, the percent of weight increase of the powder as a result of moisture uptake decreases as the height of the powder bed increases. The results of this study are explained by the dynamic nature of the moisture-uptake process associated with the instrument.     

Aspects of three-dimensional constrained Delaunay meshing

Presented in this paper are the theoretical aspects of node addition to a non-convex, multiboundary mesh of tetrahedral elements as used in finite element modelling. The method used is derived from Watson¹ and Shenton and Cendes² and is extended to deal with node addition on inter-material boundaries. Several situations are identified that result in an illegal insertion polyhedron (IP), these could be caused by the ‘constrained’ nature of the mesh, adjacent objects with different material properties, or degenerate node configurations. A new Delaunay algorithm is described that checks for illegal cases of the IP and then corrects them, this checking relies on the consistent ordering of the element nodes. It is shown that a particular type of illegal IP can easily be identified and corrected using this technique. The Delaunay algorithm is then applied to automatic mesh generation, and modification to the basic Delaunay algorithm is described so that previously meshed edges and faces of the current object being meshed are not deleted during the addition of subsequent nodes. This ‘protection’ method only becomes viable by recognizing the node ordering sense of the IP faces.     

Bound for Minkowski metric or quadratic metric applied to VQcodeword search

A bound for a Minkowski metric based on L_p distortion measure is proposed and evaluated as a means to reduce the computation in vector quantisation. This bound provides a better criterion than the absolute error inequality (AEI) elimination rule on the Euclidean distortion measure. For the Minkowski metric of order n, this bound contributes the elimination criterion from the L₁ metric to L _n metric. This bound can also be an extended quadratic metric which can be a hidden Markov model (HMM) with a Gaussian mixture probability density function (PDF). In speech recognition, the HMM with the Gaussian mixture VQ codebook PDF has been shown to be a promising method     

FORUM for International Cooperation on Fire Research

The FORUM for International Cooperation on Fire Research is an informal group of people committed to fire research and the application of fire-research results. Since it was formed in 1988, the FORUM has brought together organizational leaders who direct resources for fire research throughout the world. This article is reprinted from the Nordic Fire Safety Engineering Symposium, Development and Verification of Tools for Performance Codes, August 30–September 1, 1993, in Espoo, Finland.     

Glucokinase gene variants in the common form of NIDDM

To determine whether a structural defect in glucokinase could be a primary cause of glucose intolerance in the common form of NIDDM, the prevalence of mutations in the gene in 60 American black NIDDM patients was investigated. First, by Southern blot analysis of DNA from a subset of randomly selected subjects (n = 20), no gross deletions, insertions, or rearrangements of the gene were detected. Next, the 5'-untranslated and coding regions of the gene were amplified directly from genomic DNA by the polymerase chain reaction. PCR products were screened for mutations by using single-strand conformational polymorphism analysis. A total of nine variants were identified, with two in the 5'-UT regions of islet exon 1, two in the 5'-UT region of liver exon 1, and five in the coding regions. For islet exon 1, 5 of 60 NIDDM patients had both variants in the 5'-UT region; and for liver exon 1, two variants each occurred in 1 of 60 NIDDM patients. The coding region variants included a missense mutation in islet exon 1, substitution of Ala11 (GCC) with Thr11 (ACC), found in 2 patients. The biological consequences of this mutation and the mutations in the 5'-UT portion of the gene have yet to be determined. The rest of the variants were third base pair changes of codons, i.e., silent. A common polymorphism, which was in linkage equilibrium with microsatellite repeats GCK1 and GCK2, was found in intron 9, and a variant in intron 2 in both alleles of 1 patient.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Impairments of movement kinematics in patients with Huntington's disease: a comparison with and without a concurrent task

This study aimed to quantify the efficiency and smoothness of voluntary movement in Huntington's disease (HD) by the use of a graphics tablet that permits analysis of movements profiles. In particular, we aimed to ascertain whether a concurrent task (digit span) would affect the kinematics of goal-directed movements. Twelve patients with HD and their matched controls performed 12 vertical zig-zag movements, with both left and right hands (with and without the concurrent task), to large or small circular targets over long or short extents. The concurrent task was associated with shorter movement times and reduced right-hand superiority. Patients with HD were overall slower, especially, with long strokes, and had similar peak velocities for both small and large targets, so that controls could better accommodate differences in target size. Patients with HD spent more time decelerating, especially with small targets, whereas controls allocated more nearly equal proportions of time to the acceleration and deceleration phases of movement, especially with large targets. Short strokes were generally less force inefficient than were long strokes, especially so for either hand in either group in the absence of the concurrent task, and for the right hand is its presence. With the concurrent task, however, the left hand's behavior changed differentially for the two groups; for patients with HD, it became more force efficient with short strokes and even less efficient with long strokes, whereas for controls, it became more efficient with long strokes. Controls may be able to divert attention away from the inferior left hand, increasing its automaticity, whereas patients with HD, because of disease, may be forced to engage even further online visual control under the demands of a concurrent task. Patients with HD may perhaps become increasingly reliant on terminal visual guidance, which indicates an impairment in constructing and refining an internal representation of the movement necessary for its effective execution. Basal ganglia dysfunction may impair the ability to use internally generated cues to guide movement.