Bellaso’s 1552 cipher recovered in Venice

Abstract

In his 1553 paper Giovan Battista Bellaso presented his first polyalphabetic cipher, writing that this was an improved reprint of a previous cipher of 1552 that had been printed in Venice on a loose leaflet without instructions. There was much speculation about this early cipher, since no print of that cipher was reported to have been found. Now a printed copy of that leaflet has been found in Venice by the author, and this paper is a report of that finding.     

Authoring vs. Configuring Affective Agents for Interactive Storytelling

Autonomous characters in interactive storytelling can be supported by using affective agent architectures. The configuration of most current tools for controlling agents is, however, implementation specific and not tailored to the needs of authors. Based on literature review, a questionnaire evaluation of authors’ preferences for character creation, and a case study of an author’s conceptualization of this process, we investigate the different methods of configuration available in current agent architectures, reviewing discrepancies and matches. Given these relations, promising approaches to configuration are identified, based on initial inner states, “global” parameters of characters, libraries of stock characters, and selections of backstory experiences.     

QoS management middleware solutions for Bluetooth audio distribution

A primary challenge in the mobile Internet scenario is the dynamic differentiation of provided levels of Quality of Service (QoS) depending on client characteristics and current resource availability. In this context, the paper presents how the application-level ubiQoS middleware supports the provisioning of audio applications with different QoS levels over the last Bluetooth segment to wireless devices. To this purpose, ubiQoS dynamically deploys mobile proxies, acting as masters in Bluetooth piconets, to properly configure and manage Bluetooth connections at runtime. Audio applications working on top of ubiQoS can easily exploit differentiated QoS by simply specifying different user classes and terminal profiles. ubiQoS proxies exploit JSR82ext, a newly developed Java library that extends the JSR82 specification for Java-based Bluetooth communication facilities with richer QoS management functions for all types of Bluetooth connections. The reported experimental results show that our Java-based implementation can dynamically support differentiated QoS levels for audio traffic, with an efficient usage of the available Bluetooth bandwidth.     

Abnormal cytoskeletal protein expression in cultured skin fibroblasts from type 1 diabetes mellitus patients with nephropathy: A proteomic approach

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) develops in about 40% of insulin-dependent type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) patients, and is associated not only with diabetes duration and metabolic control, but also with a genetic predisposition. Constitutive alterations of cytoskeletal proteins may play a role in the development of DN. We investigated the expression of these proteins in cultured skin fibroblasts, obtained from long-term T1DM patients with and without DN but comparable metabolic control, and from matched healthy subjects, by means of 2-DE electrophoresis and MS-MALDI analyses. In T1DM with DN, compared to the other two groups, quantitative analyses revealed an altered expression of 17 spots (p<0.05-p<0.01), corresponding to 12 unique proteins. In T1DM with DN, beta-actin and three isoforms of tubulin beta-2 chain, tropomodulin-3, and LASP-1 were decreased, whereas two tubulin beta-4 chain isoforms, one alpha actinin-4 isoform, membrane-organizing extension spike protein (MOESIN), FLJ00279 (corresponding to a fragment of myosin heavy chain, non-muscle type A), vinculin, a tropomyosin isoform, and the macrophage capping protein were increased. A shift in caldesmon isoforms was also detected. These results demonstrate an association between DN and the constitutive expression of cytoskeleton proteins in cultured skin fibroblasts from T1DM with DN, which may retain pathophysiologycal implications.     

A new high performance battery-operated electrometer

Design and analysis of a new low-noise, fast-response, high-sensitivity, compact electrometer are described. This electrometer are battery operated and capable of measuring currents down to the femtoampere level. The portable, high performance nature of the electrometer renders it applicable for deployment in compact instruments for applications such as aerosol particle counters. A parametric experimental study is conducted to determine the role of different components on the performance of the electrometer. Under an ideal configuration, the electrometer has a step-up response time of approximately 3 s. Experiments with the electrometer used for particle counting measurements suggest that the new electrometer has high accuracy and sensitivity in comparison to the Keithley 6514 electrometer. The response of the electrometer used in particle counting studies is consistent with that of an optical single particle counter used in comparison experiments. A damping component introduced to reduce possible spike currents in the electrometer is also seen to reduce noise and almost have no effect on response time. The electrometer response characteristics are presented in detail.     

Identification of differentially expressed proteins in papillary thyroid carcinomas with V600E mutation of BRAF

BRAF, a serine/threonine kinase of the RAF family, is a downstream transducer of the RAS-regulated MAPK pathway. V600E mutation of BRAF protein is the most common genetic alteration occurring in papillary thyroid carcinomas and is prognostic of poor clinicopathological outcomes. Protein expression in the subclass of PTC bearing the BRAF(V600E) mutation was investigated by using 2-DE and MS/MS techniques and compared to that of matched normal thyroid tissues from seven patients. 2-D gel image analysis revealed that the expression of eight polypeptide spots, corresponding to five proteins, were significantly underexpressed in PTC bearing BRAF(V600E) mutation whereas 25 polypeptides, representing 19 distinct proteins, were significantly upregulated in tumour tissue, as compared to normal thyroid. Among the differentially expressed polypeptides, mitochondrial proteins, ROS-scavenger enzymes, apoptosis-related proteins as well as proteins involved in tumour cell proliferation were identified. Although dissimilarities between the present results and those previously reported can be ascribed to the use of different 2-DE techniques, the possibility that BRAF(V600E) mutation is responsible for changes in protein expression distinct from those induced by other oncogenes cannot be ruled out.     

Combining supervised and unsupervised learning for data clustering

Clustering aims to partition a data set into homogenous groups which gather similar objects. Object similarity, or more often object dissimilarity, is usually expressed in terms of some distance function. This approach, however, is not viable when dissimilarity is conceptual rather than metric. In this paper, we propose to extract the dissimilarity relation directly from the available data. To this aim, we train a feedforward neural network with some pairs of points with known dissimilarity. Then, we use the dissimilarity measure generated by the network to guide a new unsupervised fuzzy relational clustering algorithm. An artificial data set and a real data set are used to show how the clustering algorithm based on the neural dissimilarity outperforms some widely used (possibly partially supervised) clustering algorithms based on spatial dissimilarity.     

Enhancing grid security by fine-grained behavioral control and negotiation-based authorization

Nowadays, Grid has become a leading technology in distributed computing. Grid poses a seamless sharing of heterogeneous computational resources belonging to different domains and conducts efficient collaborations between Grid users. The core Grid functionality defines computational services which allocate computational resources and execute applications submitted by Grid users. The vast models of collaborations and openness of Grid system require a secure, scalable, flexible and expressive authorization model to protect these computational services and Grid resources. Most of the existing authorization models for Grid have granularity to manage access to service invocations while behavioral monitoring of applications executed by these services remains a responsibility of a resource provider. The resource provider executes an application under a local account, and acknowledges all permissions granted to this account to the application. Such approach poses serious security threats to breach system functionality since applications submitted by users could be malicious. We propose a flexible and expressive policy-driven credential-based authorization system to protect Grid computational services against a malicious behavior of applications submitted for the execution. We split an authorization process into two levels: a coarse-grained level that manages access to a computational service; and a fine-grained level that monitors the behavior of applications executed by the computational service. Our framework guarantees that users authorized on a coarse-grained level behave as expected on the fine-grained level. Credentials obtained on the coarse-grained level reflect on fine-grained access decisions. The framework defines trust negotiations on coarse-grained level to overcome scalability problem, and preserves privacy of credentials and security policies of, both, Grid users and providers. Our authorization system was implemented to control access to the Globus Computational GRAM service. A comprehensive performance evaluation shows the practical scope of the proposed system.

Optimization of a passive vibration control scheme acting on a bladed rotor using an homogenized model

This paper deals with the optimization of a passive vibration damping system of innovative type. A bladed rotor composed of equally spaced flexible blades mounted on a flexible ring is considered. The blades are equipped with piezoelectric devices that convert vibrational energy into electrical energy, which is in turn dissipated by suitable electric shunts comprising resistive components. The optimization of these shunts, aimed at maximizing the vibration damping, is achieved by employing a simple and accurate dynamical model, derived via a homogenization procedure.