Novel Peptide‐Heterocycle Hybrids: Synthesis and Preliminary Studies on Calpain Inhibition

New peptidic compounds, having peptide chains linked to bi‐ and tricyclic heterocycles (peptide‐heterocycle hybrids), have been synthesized. The heterocyclic components are derivatives of partially reduced isoquinoline and pyrido[1,2‐b]isoquinoline bearing α,β‐unsaturated carbonyl functionalities. The heterocyclic compounds have been used as acylating agents in coupling reactions with short N‐unprotected peptides. Based on our interest on potential calpain inhibitors, we have used short (2–4 amino acids) peptides with hydrophobic amino acids of the two enantiomeric series. We report preliminary studies on the inhibition of calpain, with some compounds having IC₅₀ values in the nanomolar range.     

Topological hierarchy-contour tracing algorithm for nests of interconnected contours

As a simple meaningful external illustration, a group of boundary contours is commonly used for representing the physical appearance of an object of interest on a 2D plane (e.g., a part drawing, CT scan image, a sliced layer, tile pattern). The illustration is understood from the composition of the contours and their attributes that include their shapes, sizes, locations and relationships. Therefore, not only is geometrical information important for contours to be useful in subsequent operations but their topological hierarchy relationships also are essential. Presented in this paper is a topological hierarchy-contour tracing algorithm that is capable of tracing nests of interconnected contours often found in practice and of identifying their topological hierarchy relationships automatically during contour tracing. The algorithm organizes contours by family rather than by group or as individual. However, contours are traced across families generation by generation instead of going deep with one family branch at a time. The outputs of the algorithm are ordered sequences of boundary pixels representing all closed contours and their topological hierarchy relationships. The algorithm has been implemented on LabVIEW, and tested with several samples to illustrate its applications.     

Universal design (UD) principles for flexible packaging and corresponding minimal customer requirement set

Other research has established seven UD principles and performance measures for the design and assessment of generic products. The objective of this research is to improve the suitability of UD for flexible packaging. The methodology used here begins by creating customer requirements from UD performance measures and packaging functions from JIS S 0022‐4. The authors propose a correlation matrix to discard uncorrelated, duplicated and irrelevant requirements from the list of requirements. The remaining customer requirements are screened by using the Index of Consistency. Then, experts check and add essential customer requirements. A factor analysis is conducted on the survey data to find the important requirements and eliminate uncorrelated requirements. The number of customer requirements is reduced from 261 to 39 with five principles corresponding to UD. The five principles relevant to UD are (a) convenient, intuitive and simple use; (b) perceptible information; (c) structure and graphic design; (d) easy opening; and (e) equitable use. The benefit of the new five principles is not only the reduction from seven principles to five principles, but also the grouped customer requirements that are easy to use for packaging manufacturers and packaging designers. Customer requirements can be used as performance measures to evaluate the compliance of flexible packaging to UD. Finally, the application of the five principles and 39 customer requirements are demonstrated with case studies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stimulus control of copulatory behavior in sexually naive male Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica): Effects of test context and stimulus movement.

Sexually experienced male quail (Coturnix japonica) are more likely to engage in copulatory behavior than sexually naive ones. These experiments suggest that sexual experience in a particular place may facilitate later copulatory responding because of increased familiarity with the contextual cues of the environment. Male quail in Exp 1 did not copulate reliably with taxidermic models of females in a novel context, even though some of the subjects were allowed to copulate with female quail in their home cages. In contrast, sexually naive males in Exps 2 and 3 copulated vigorously with taxidermic models of females in a familiar context. In Exp 4, sexually naive males tested in an unfamiliar context were more likely to copulate with a moving than with a static model. The stimulus control of copulatory behavior in sexually naive male quail was similar to that in sexually experienced ones but only in familiar contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imitative learning in male Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) using the two-action method.

The study of imitative learning in animals has suffered from the presence of a number of confounding motivational and attentional factors (e.g., social facilitation and stimulus enhancement). The two-action method avoids these problems by exposing observers to demonstrators performing a response (e.g., operating a treadle) using 1 of 2 distinctive topographies (e.g., pecking or by stepping). Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) observers exposed to conspecific demonstrators showed a high correlation between the topography of the response they observed and the response they performed. These data provide strong evidence for the existence of true imitative learning in an active, precocious bird under conditions that control for alternative accounts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Data deduplication techniques for efficient cloud storage management: a systematic review

The exponential growth of digital data in cloud storage systems is a critical issue presently as a large amount of duplicate data in the storage systems exerts an extra load on it. Deduplication is an efficient technique that has gained attention in large-scale storage systems. Deduplication eliminates redundant data, improves storage utilization and reduces storage cost. This paper presents a broad methodical literature review of existing data deduplication techniques along with various existing taxonomies of deduplication techniques that have been based on cloud data storage. Furthermore, the paper investigates deduplication techniques based on text and multimedia data along with their corresponding taxonomies as these techniques have different challenges for duplicate data detection. This research work is useful to identify deduplication techniques based on text, image and video data. It also discusses existing challenges and significant research directions in deduplication for future researchers, and article concludes with a summary of valuable suggestions for future enhancements in deduplication.     

Energy-aware Virtual Machine Migration for Cloud Computing - A Firefly Optimization Approach

Energy efficiency has grown into a latest exploration area of virtualized cloud computing paradigm. The increase in the number and the size of the cloud data centers has propagated the need for energy efficiency. An extensively practiced technology in cloud computing is live virtual machine migration and is thus focused in this work to save energy. This paper proposes an energy-aware virtual machine migration technique for cloud computing, which is based on the Firefly algorithm. The proposed technique migrates the maximally loaded virtual machine to the least loaded active node while maintaining the performance and energy efficiency of the data centers. The efficacy of the proposed technique is exhibited by comparing it with other techniques using the CloudSim simulator. An enhancement in the average energy consumption of about 44.39 % has been attained by reducing an average of 72.34 % of migrations and saving 34.36 % of hosts, thereby, making the data center more energy-aware.     

整合生态与景观的绿色高速公路上海崇启通道生态景观规划

传统的工程师主导的高速公路建设往往造成对城市肌理及自然环境的巨大割裂,易道在中国第一次综合调动风景园林师、生态环境师及城市设计师的团队,以多学科合作的工作模式,针对绿色生态高速路进行创新性探索。项目的重点在于如何减少高速公路对崇明岛独特景观元素的破坏,同时,发掘并整合其生态、景观、旅游、文化等多元价值的机遇。