The need for style systems in ODA

Many advanced document systems provide a formatting mechanism called ‘style sheets’ Style sheets provide a great deal of flexibility in describing a document's format, and allow easy maintenance of different house styles for a collection of documents. In this paper, we describe the basics of general style sheet systems, argue that successful document interchange must include the exchange of style sheet information, and evaluate ODA's style mechanism against this requirement.     

Composing RESTful Services and Collaborative Workflows: A Lightweight Approach

The use of RESTful Web services has gained momentum in the development of distributed applications based on traditional Web standards such as HTTP. In particular, these services can integrate easily into various applications, such as mashups. Composing RESTful services into Web-scale workflows requires a lightweight composition language that's capable of describing both the control and data flow that constitute a workflow. The authors address these issues with Bite, a lightweight and extensible composition language that enables the creation of Web-scale workflows and uses RESTful services as its main composable entities.     

Object-oriented H.263 compatible video coding platform forconferencing applications

This paper describes a prototype video coding platform meant for the conception and testing of multimedia products such as next-generation videophones. The platform is largely based on ITU-T Recommendation H.263, with a number of additional object-oriented quality enhancement features which make it especially well suited for very low bit-rate coding of “head-and-shoulders” video material typical of real-time multimedia applications, video teleconferencing, and video telephony. These features consist of: (1) segmentation into objects of interest, (2) segmentation-based prefiltering, (3) model-assisted rate control, (4) adaptive vector quantization, and finally (5) segmentation-based postfiltering. In the spirit of Recommendation H.263, these enhancements are modular and can be selectively turned on or off, thereby enabling a wide variety of coding modes     

Dynamic contributions to the DNA binding entropy of the EcoRI and EcoRV restriction endonucleases

Molecular Dynamics simulations on DNA-EcoRI and DNA-EcoRV complexes suggest that the DNA within these complexes is significantly more ordered than free DNA. Similarly, both the protein and the DNA are more ordered in the specific (cognate) DNA-EcoRV complex than they are in the non-cognate DNA-protein complex, consistent with recently proposed analogies between protein folding and sequence-specific DNA-protein recognition. Analysis of the trajectories shows that the net entropy gain upon specific binding to be the result of opposing contributions. Solvent release, which increases entropy versus configurational terms (as measured by the magnitude of the atomic fluctuations), and collective terms from tight coupling between the motions of the protein and the DNA.     

Constraint programming and graph algorithms

Aconstraint system includes a set of variables and a set of relations among these variables, calledconstraints. The solution of a constraint system is an assignment of values to variables so that all, or many, of the relations are made true. A simple and efficient method for constraint resolution has been proposed in the work of B.N. Freeman-Benson, J. Maloney, and A. Borning. We show how their method is related to the classical problem of graph matching, and from this connection we derive new resolution algorithms.     

Chicken oviductal ecto-ATP-diphosphohydrolase. Purification and characterization

An ecto-ATP diphosphohydrolase (ATPDase) was purified to homogeneity from vesiculosomes shed from chicken oviduct. First, the ecto-ATPDase-enriched vesiculosomes were concentrated by filtration, differential centrifugation, and exclusion chromatography. Next, the nonionic detergent, Nonidet P-40, was used to extract the ecto-ATPDase from vesiculosomal membranes, and the solubilized enzyme was further purified by ion exchange (DEAE-Bio-Gel) and lentil-lectin-Sepharose 4B chromatography. In the final stage, immunoaffinity chromatography was utilized to obtain purified ecto-ATPDase. More than 25,000-fold purification was achieved. Specific activity of the purified enzyme was greater than 800 micronol/min/mg of protein with MgATP as the substrate, the highest ever reported for an ATPDase. The enzyme also hydrolyzed other nucleoside triphosphates in the presence of magnesium at similar rates and CaATP and MgADP at lower rates. The molecular mass of the purified glycoprotein was 80 kDa as determined by SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and Western blot analysis. Based on its enzymatic properties, the relationship of the chicken oviduct ecto-ATPDase with other reported ATPDases and ecto-ATPases is discussed.     

On the sensitivity of coupled resonator filters without some direct couplings

This paper presents an analysis of the sensitivity of coupled resonator filters in which some direct couplings are missing. The effect of changes in the coupling coefficients and resonant frequencies of the resonators is investigated by directly computing the gradient of the scattering parameters. It is shown that structures that are modular in the input-to-output direction are much less sensitive than those with modularity in the orthogonal direction for the same frequency response.