Temporal vertical profiling

Modern systems are enormously complex; many applications today comprise millions of lines of code, make extensive use of software frameworks, and run on complex, multi‐tiered, run‐time systems. Understanding the performance of these applications is challenging because it depends on the interactions between the many software and the hardware components. This paper describes and evaluates an interactive and iterative methodology, temporal vertical profiling, for understanding the performance of applications. There are two key insights behind temporal vertical profiling. First, we need to collect and reason across information from multiple layers of the system before we can understand an application's performance. Second, application performance changes over time and thus we must consider the time‐varying behavior of the application instead of aggregate statistics. We have developed temporal vertical profiling from our own experience of analyzing performance anomalies and have found it very helpful for methodically exploring the space of hardware and software components. By representing an application's behavior as a set of metrics, where each metric is represented as a time series, temporal vertical profiling provides a way to reason about performance across system layers, regardless of their level of abstraction, and independent of their semantics. Temporal vertical profiling provides a methodology to explore a large space of metrics, hundreds of metrics even for small benchmarks, in a systematic way. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

BrC-MCDLM: breast Cancer detection using Multi-Channel deep learning model

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Breast cancer (BrC) is a lethal form of cancer which causes numerous deaths in women across the world. Generally, mammograms and histopathology biopsy images are...     

Which sort orders are interesting?

Sort orders play an important role in query evaluation. Algorithms that rely on sorting are widely used to implement joins, grouping, duplicate elimination and other set operations. The notion of interesting orders has allowed query optimizers to consider plans that could be locally sub-optimal, but produce ordered output beneficial for other operators, and thus be part of a globally optimal plan. However, the number of interesting orders for most operators is factorial in the number of attributes involved. Optimizer implementations use heuristics to prune the number of interesting orders, but the quality of the heuristics is unclear. Increasingly complex decision support queries and increasing use of query-covering indices, which provide multiple alternative sort orders for relations, motivate us to better address the problem of choosing interesting orders. We show that even a simplified version of the problem is NP-hard and provide a 1/2-benefit approximation algorithm for a special case of the problem. We then present principled heuristics for the general case of choosing interesting orders. We have implemented the proposed techniques in a Volcano-style cost-based optimizer, and our performance study shows significant improvements in estimated cost. We also executed our plans on a widely used commercial database system, and on PostgreSQL, and found that actual execution times for our plans were significantly better than for plans generated by those systems in several cases.     

von Hippel-Lindau gene mutations in N-nitrosodimethylamine-induced rat renal epithelial tumors

BACKGROUND: Mutations in the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) gene are common in human clear cell kidney cancers. Carcinogens in cigarette smoke, especially nitrosamines, are known to induce kidney tumors of a variety of histologic types in rodents--but with no evidence of VHL mutations; however, none of these tumors resembled human clear cell carcinomas. We examined N-nitrosodimethylamine-induced kidney tumors of the clear or mixed clear/granular cell type in Wistar rats to assess the presence of VHL mutations. METHODS: Sections of eight clear or mixed clear/granular cell kidney tumors that had been formalin fixed and paraffin embedded were microdissected. DNA was extracted from the microdissected tissue, and exons 1-3 of the rat VHL gene were examined by use of polymerase chain reaction and cycle sequencing techniques. RESULTS: Four VHL gene mutations (three G:C to A:T and one A:T to G:C) were detected in three of the tumors in contrast to no mutations in 40 previously reported rat kidney tumors of other histologic types (three of eight tumors versus none of 40; two-sided Fisher's exact test; P=.003). Only tumors showing prominent swollen clear cell cytology with a signet-ring appearance had VHL mutations. CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge, this is the first report of VHL mutations in kidney tumors after direct chemical exposure and provides a possible molecular pathway linking tobacco smoking to kidney cancer.     

Noncatalytic hydrothermolysis of ammonia borane

Hydrolysis of ammonia borane (AB) is attractive as a chemical method for hydrogen storage. The use of catalysts is, however, usually required. In the present paper, two new methods for releasing hydrogen from AB and water are investigated which do not involve any catalyst. One method is based on combustion of AB mixtures with nanoscale aluminum powder and gelled water. It is shown experimentally that these mixtures, upon ignition, exhibit self-sustained combustion with hydrogen release from both AB and water. The other method involves external heating of aqueous AB solutions to temperatures 120 °C or higher, under argon pressure to avoid water boiling. To clarify the reaction mechanism, isotopic experiments using D₂O instead of H₂O were conducted. It is shown that heating AB/D₂O solution to temperatures 117–170 °C releases 3 equiv. of hydrogen per mole AB, where 2–2.1 equiv. originate from AB and 0.9–1 equiv. from water. The prospects of both methods for hydrogen storage are discussed.     

Stopping force of 0.5-3.5 MeV/u Cl ions in polymers

The stopping force of Cl ions in LR-115 and Kapton polymers, at energies 0.5-3.5 MeV/u, has been measured. These measurements have been performed using 15UD Pelletron accelerator facility at Inter University Accelerator Centre, New Delhi, India. The measured stopping force values have been compared with the corresponding computed values based on the semi-empirical formulations viz. Ziegler et al., Paul and Schinner, Hubert et al., Diwan et al., and standard data tables viz. Northcliffe and Schilling, ICRU-73 report. The aim of the present study is to measure stopping force around Bragg’s peak and to check the compatibility of the widely used semi-empirical formulations and standard data tables through comparison with the experimentally measured values.     

A new water-based liquid scintillator and potential applications

In this paper we describe a new type of scintillating liquid based on water. We describe the concept, preparation, and properties of this liquid, and how it could be used for a very large, but economical detector. The applications of such a detector range from fundamental physics such as nucleon decay and neutrino physics to physics with broader application such as neutron detection. We briefly describe the scientific requirements of these applications, and how they can be satisfied by the new material.     

Modification in Surface Chemistry of the Polyetrafluoroethylene Through Chemical Graft Copolymerization for Potential Oil Contamination Control

In the present study, an attempt has been made to design an oleophobic surface through chemical graft copolymerization of methyl methacrylate (MMA) onto polytetrafluroethylene (PTFE) film. The PTFE films were grafted with MMA resulting in PTFE-g-MMA grafts using benzoyl peroxide (BPO) as initiator in aqueous media. Optimum conditions pertaining to maximum percentage of grafting were evaluated by varying time, temperature, initiator, and monomer concentration. The maximum graft yield 9.47% was obtained at [BPO] = 0.03 M, [MMA] = 10%V/V, [reaction temperature] = 50°C and [reaction time] = 120 min. Methyl iodide was used to measure the contact angle, which revealed the oleophobic nature of grafted PTFE-g-MMA film. Maximum contact angle 95.5° of PTFE-g-MMA film was observed at optimum grafting conditions. The surface morphology of PTFE-g-MMA films was studied by Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and x-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis confirmed the change in structure of PTFE after MMA grafting.     

A comparison of techniques for overcoming non‐uniqueness of boundary integral equations for the collocation partition of unity method in two‐dimensional acoustic scattering

The Partition of Unity Method has become an attractive approach for extending the allowable frequency range for wave simulations beyond that available using piecewise polynomial elements. The non‐uniqueness of solution obtained from the conventional boundary integral equation (CBIE) is well known. The CBIE derived through Green's identities suffers from a problem of non‐uniqueness at certain characteristic frequencies. Two of the standard methods of overcoming this problem are the so‐called Combined Helmholtz Integral Equation Formulation (CHIEF) method and that of Burton and Miller. The latter method introduces a hypersingular integral, which may be treated in various ways. In this paper, we present the collocation partition of unity boundary element method (PUBEM) for the Helmholtz problem and compare the performance of CHIEF against a Burton–Miller formulation regularised using the approach of Li and Huang. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.