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Anion-exchange membranes (AEMs) often dehydrate and lose ionic conductivity in ferric chloride solutions used in all-iron or iron–chromium redox flow batteries (RFB). In this work, the change in ma...

A laminated thin-film composite (TFC) membrane system consisting of an ultrafiltration support, an ordered, nanoporous, polymerized lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) intermediate layer, and an ultrath...

The nanopores of an as-synthesized cross-linked, cationic, type I bicontinuous cubic (QI)-phase lyotropic liquid crystal network were modified by exchange of its Br– counteranions in the pores with...

One of the primary challenges associated with network functions virtualization (NFV) is the automated management of the service lifecycle. In this paper, we present a full software-based management and orchestration (MANO) stack which operates with OpenStack and OpenDaylight controllers and has the in-built functionality to automate the key phases of the NFV service lifecycle, namely resource discovery and matching, service mapping, service deployment, and monitoring. The MANO stack is being implemented by the EU FP7 project T-NOVA, with the components being released as open-source software. Service mapping and service deployment solutions developed in the scope of T-NOVA are presented in detail. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluate the performance of a virtualized traffic classifier network function, demonstrating the gains of virtualized hardware acceleration.

The selectivity of a bicontinuous cubic, lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) polymer nanofiltration membrane containing uniform cationic nanopores was manipulated via anion-exchange at the pore wall by soaking the fabricated membranes in aqueous salt solutions. Monovalent organosulfonate anions of various sizes were completely exchanged as the counterion at the pore walls to explore the impact of anion size on uncharged molecular solute rejection and water permeance. It was found that larger organosulfonate anions associated at the pore walls induced a higher rejection of uncharged solutes and a lower water permeance. The change in selectivity of the nanopores was described quantitatively through the calculation of the effective pore radius. The effective pore radius in these modified membranes was found to vary from 0.9±0.2 to 0.55±0.08 nm depending on the resident organosulfonate counterion, demonstrating sub-1-nm resolution in pore size manipulation. An empirical model was used to demonstrate that physicochemical properties (molecular volume and hydrophobicity) of the resident counterion correlate with the observed solute rejection, suggesting that the counterion can be chosen to target a desired membrane performance. The ability to manipulate uniform, nm-sized pores with sub-1-nm resolution via simple anion-exchange offers a new avenue to tailor nanofiltration membrane performance.

Messaging strategies for data transport play a central role in large scale IIoT/CPS systems. Research to date in these domains has focused on comparative studies of different messaging protocols and various congestion control techniques. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the latency and throughput for different message payload strategies using the same protocol combined with a novel congestion control algorithm. The results provide key insights based on experiments carried out in a real-world IOT wireless sensor network deployment. The approach presented dynamically varies the message schema and sizes in response to the utilization of edge nodes. The goal is to achieve the highest possible data throughput that fits within the available edge based compute capacity without requiring auto-scaling of back end cloud resources.

We propose the innovative architecture of Superfluidity, a Horizon 2020 project, co-funded by the European Union. Superfluidity targets 5G networks, by addressing key network operator challenges with a multi-pronged approach, based on the concept of a flexible, highly adaptive, superfluid network. Superfluidity supports rapid service deployment and migration in a heterogeneous network environment, regardless of the underlying hardware. The overall proposal offers advanced capabilities in terms of service deployment and interoperability, while guaranteeing high-performance levels end-to-end. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Harley Erdman and Susan Paun de Garcia, eds. Remaking the Comedia; Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation. London: Tamesis, 2015. 303 pp.It is not uncommon to hear the following words in a comedia class: "The comedia was meant to be performed, not read." Until the second half of the twentieth century, however, a discussion of the performative aspects of the comedia required knowledge of staging and performance space, as well as a vivid imagination. The innovative research of Charles Davis, J. E. Varey, N. D. Shergold, John J. Allen, Jose Maria Diez Borque, and Jose Maria Ruano de la Haza, among other scholars, including the authors who contributed to the Tamesis series Fuentes para la historia del teatro en Espana, has elucidated our understanding of comedia performances by addressing such issues as the physical disposition of the playhouse, the autor de comedias, acting companies, and the socio-economic aspects of professional theater. Three defining moments that forever shaped the state of comedia studies, however, transpired within a ten-year period: the inauguration of Chamizal National Memorial's annual Siglo de Oro Drama Festival in 1976; the establishment of the Almagro festival in 1978; and the organization of the Compania Nacional de Teatro Clasico in 1985. Contemporary adaptations of Golden Age drama not only provided entertainment but also engendered performative studies never before possible and revealed the comedia as an entity that transcended time, space, genre, and ideology. The book Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation, edited by Harley Erdman and Susan Paun de Garcia, provides the most comprehensive study of theatrical adaptations of Golden Age drama to date. Academics, directors, translators, and actors share insightful and thought-provoking analysis throughout the twenty-six essays in this volume, which is divided into four parts: Theorizing, Surveying, Spotlighting, and Shifting.The first part of the book, "Theorizing," consists of four essays that address the theoretical and practical considerations of staging a comedia. Catherine Larson's "Terms and Concepts: The Adaptation of Classical Texts for the Stage" and Susan Fischer's "'Los senderos que se bifurcan:' Adaptation, Appropriation, and the Proliferation of Possibilities" focus, in large part, on theoretical considerations. Larson elucidates the role of translators and theatrical practitioners, the terminology associated with adaptation, including Andre Lefevere's term "refraction," fidelity discourse, and audience reception, in addition to other issues and concerns that she feels are most relevant to the field of adaptation studies and to the people who appreciate adaptations of Golden Age drama (creators, critics, audience). Fischer discusses the genre of adaptation, expounding on questions such as how to define an adaptation based on naming, or its intention, and the difference between "adaptation" and "appropriation." She weaves into her discussion the scholarship of several critics, including Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roland Barthes.Colombian director Alejandro Gonzalez-Puche, who is the author of "Interpretive Directing Games for the Golden Age Repertory," and Laurence Boswell, whose essay is titled "Re-Make, Re-Mix, Re-Model," address the practical considerations of staging an adaptation. Gonzalez-Puche believes the director's objective is to discover the multiple interpretative possibilities of an adaptation, or "rules of the game," emphasizing that this quest is not an anarchic activity. He depends on a "version" that emanates from the "games" that take place between the actors and the director during rehearsals. Boswell's approach is more introspective. He endeavors to "give the play a soul" (34), with the expectation that the spectators will re-make the production for themselves. Boswell shares his experiences as the director of Golden Age plays in Britain and the challenges of staging Spanish plays to an English-speaking audience. …

Most media streaming services are composed by different virtualized processing functions such as encoding, packaging, encryption, content stitching etc. Deployment of these functions in the cloud is attractive as it enables flexibility in deployment options and resource allocation for the different functions. Yet, most of the time overprovisioning of cloud resources is necessary in order to meet demand variability. This can be costly, especially for large scale deployments. Prior art proposes resource allocation based on analytical models that minimize the costs of cloud deployments under a quality of service (QoS) constraint. However, these models do not sufficiently capture the underlying complexity of services composed of multiple processing functions. Instead, we introduce a novel methodology based on full-stack telemetry and machine learning to profile virtualized or cloud native media processing functions individually. The basis of the approach consists of investigating 4 categories of performance metrics: throughput, anomaly, latency and entropy (TALE) in offline (stress tests) and online setups using cloud telemetry. Machine learning is then used to profile the media processing function in the targeted cloud/NFV environment and to extract the most relevant cloud level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that relate to the final perceived quality and known client side performance indicators. The results enable more efficient monitoring, as only KPI related metrics need to be collected, stored and analyzed, reducing the storage and communication footprints by over 85%. In addition a detailed overview of the functions behavior was obtained, enabling optimized initial configuration and deployment, and more fine-grained dynamic online resource allocation reducing overprovisioning and avoiding function collapse. We further highlight the next steps towards cloud native carrier grade virtualized processing functions relevant for future network architectures such as in emerging 5G architectures.

This Deliverable describes the use case scenarios and the performance and functional assessment key indicators that will be used for the final validation and evaluation activities.

This deliverable reports the efforts of the three WP6 Tasks. It concludes all the efforts done at WP6, finalizing the control framework, the SLA-base deployment design, and completes the symbolic execution checking and anomaly detection tools implementation.

This deliverable provides the second report on communication and dissemination actions progress as well as on resulting awareness and outcome from them. In addition to it, the document summarises the standardisation and open source contributions performed until M23, the impact that these have been perceived to have, as well as the plans for further standardisation contributions until the end of the project.

This document presents use cases and requirements for a “superfluid” network, which is one that will have the ability to instantiate services on-the-fly, run them anywhere in the network (core, aggregation, edge) and shift them transparently to different locations. It is an output of the Superfluidity collaborative research project. The report includes a comprehensive set of 23 use cases, covering themes such as wireless access, mobile edge computing and on-the-fly monitoring. Each use case is described, along with its business and technical requirements. The report takes into account our on-going architecture work, which will be described in a later document. At this stage we provide some initial thoughts on how the requirements, arising from the use cases, will impact on our technical work. The intended readership for this document is quite general – other researchers into future networks, IT and their convergence; business leaders who will decide what use cases should be invested in; and engineers who will make the superfluid world a reality.

This article details a novel approach to the fine-tuning of carrier-grade virtualized network function deployments for both performance optimization and diagnostic purposes, using embedded instrumentation with an analytics framework. The work presented in this article is the output of a co-lab established between BT and Intel Labs Europe to investigate network-function-virtualization-related problems faced by traditional telecom operators. Results from comprehensive testing of virtual CDN and WAN acceleration use cases are presented. These results led to the development of a number of insights that will help network operators optimize the deployment of NFV on standard high volume servers. Significantly, it was found that the default configuration for some use cases resulted in suboptimal resource allocation and consumption. Consequently, opportunities exist for carriers to fine-tune their NFV deployments from both the technical and economic perspectives using approaches such as embedded instrumentation.

"The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal."--Cicero These words from Cicero's Philippics aptly describe the life and legacy of Tom Lathrop, who passed away on Monday, 17 February 2014 at the age of seventy-two while on vacation with his family in Anaheim, California. Tom was a man for whom the words carpe diem reflected a philosophy of life. It would not be hyperbole in the least to call Tom a Renaissance man, who will be remembered for being a loving husband, a doting father, a scholar, an athlete, a musician, a world traveler, and a sports aficionado. Academics around the world are appreciative of his many contributions; yet, Tom will be remembered for so much more than his academic achievements and scholarship. His gregarious personality, generosity, wit, and intellectual curiosity made a lasting impression on the many people in his life. I am very grateful to have this opportunity to remember him and his extraordinary life, but I write this essay as only one of many, many voices with fond and lasting memories of Tom, whose life made a difference. Tom was born and raised in Los Angeles. The best source of information on his life is, without a doubt, his "swashbuckling" (Tom's own word) web page. (1) Here you will see photos of the house he grew up in; Tom at age 9; Tom performing as a gymnast; Tom as a vaudevillian; Tom as a member of the musical trio, the Tri-Tones, which included his wife Connie (unfortunately, the Tri-Tones never performed, be cause Tom and Connie decided to take advantage of an opportunity to live in Spain); and, among others, photos of Tom and Connie's daughter Aline, who, in 1999 married Ben Glick, a cellular biologist at the University of Chicago. Tom describes Ben's work as "inconsequential nonsense such as the essence of life and the nature of disease, but he seems to know very little about major movements in Latin American poetry and the exceptions to the verb etre." Each of the photos on the website illustrates a different period of Tom's "swashbuckling" life and a brief narration explains in further detail these important moments. Following Tom's graduation from John Marshall High School (Los Angeles), where, according to his e-mail signature, he was "in the top fifty-one percent of his graduating class," Tom studied at Pepperdine University for one year, on a sports writing scholarship, before he transferred to UCLA. He completed a double major in Spanish and French and participated in UCLA's first study abroad program, which was in Bordeaux. While there, Tom was a member of the city chorus and sang in Bordeaux's opera house and cathedral. He returned to UCLA as a PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures, working as a teaching assistant in Brazilian Portuguese. He met Connie, a French graduate student at UCLA, and they married in 1969. When Tom and Connie returned to the United States after their eighteen months in Spain and Portugal, Tom accepted a teaching position at Transylvania University (Lexington, Kentucky), where he taught for three years. Their daughter Aline was born in Lexington. They then moved from Lexington to Easton, Pennsylvania, where Tom taught for four years before beginning his twenty-six year tenure at the University of Delaware in 1980. As a teaching assistant at UCLA, Tom dedicated his summers to working in different printing shops, hoping to enter into the publishing business one day. His dream became a reality when he founded LinguaText, Ltd. in 1974. Its first foreign language textbook publication was Tom and Eduardo Dias's Portugal: Lingua e Cultura. Since then, LinguaText, Ltd. has published textbooks and other pedagogical tools for students of Spanish, French, and Dutch. Tom is probably best known among Hispanists, however, for Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, which he founded in 1978. His love for Hispanic studies and the profession to which he contributed so much inside and outside of the classroom inspired him to dedicate more than thirty years of his professional life to publishing scholarship that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to publish elsewhere due to the unique and specialized focus of each publication. …

The professionalization of public theatre in late sixteenth-century Spain transformed the public street drama of playwrights and actors such as Lope de Rueda into an activity whose survival and success depended on ticket sales and attendance. It is within this context that the aside became one of the most popular dramatic techniques of Spain's Golden Age theater. This article seeks to answer two questions about the aside: (1) Do Golden Age playwrights utilize the aside in the same manner? and (2) Does the subgenre of a comedia dictate the use of a particular category of aside? I propose to answer these questions, focusing in particular on the different ways that the following comedias utilize the aside to transform the audience from mere spectators to active accomplices of what they witness on stage: Calderon de la Barca's El alcalde de Zalamea (comedia de honor), Antonio Mira de Amescua's El esclavo del demonio (comedia hagiografica), and Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla (comedia moral).

Mass transport and electrochemical parameters affecting pitting stability and repassivation in neutral chloride media were measured using the artificial pit electrode technique and the effect of different variables was studied. Sensitivity analysis showed that accurate estimation of the critical pit stability product, (i*x)crit is necessary for correctly estimating the maximum pit size that can be attained on a stainless steel surface under a thin electrolyte film. The value of (i*x)crit is directly related to the surface concentration and is some fraction of the value when a salt film is present (i*x)sf. A graphical method to determine the surface concentration at the edge of pit stability was developed in terms of diffusive transport by relating repassivation potential (Erp) to pit stability. It was seen that the value of 60-80% commonly accepted in the literature as the minimum degree of saturation for pitting stability may in fact overestimate the actual value. Further, it was noted that redox reactions involving dissolved minor alloying elements may significantly affect the measurement of Erp in some systems.

Wildlife ecologists frequently make use of limited information on locations of a species of interest in combination with readily available GIS data to build models to predict space use. In addition to a wide range of statistical data models that are more commonly used, machine learning approaches provide another means to develop predictive spatial models. However, comparison of output from these two families of models for the same data set is not often carried out. It is important that wildlife managers understand the pitfalls and limitations when a single set of models is used with limited GIS data to try to predict and understand species distribution. To illustrate this, we carried out two sets of models generalized linear mixed models GLMMs and boosted regression trees BRTs to predict geographic occupancy of the eastern coyote Canis latrans on the island of Newfoundland, Canada. This exercise is illustrative of common spatial questions in wildlife research and management. Our results show that models vary depending on the approach GLMM vs. BRT and that, overall, BRT had higher predictive ability. Although machine learning has been criticized because it is not explicitly hypothesis-driven, it has been used in other areas of spatial modelling with success. Here, we demonstrate that it may be a useful approach for predicting wildlife space use and to generate hypotheses when data are limited. The results of this comparison can help to improve other models for species distributions and also guide future sampling and modelling initiatives.

Three genes, Mc1r, Agouti, and CBD103, interact in a type-switching process that controls much of the pigmentation variation observed in mammals. A deletion in the CBD103 gene is responsible for dominant black color in dogs, while the white-phased black bear ("spirit bear") of British Columbia, Canada, is the lightest documented color variant caused by a mutation in Mc1r. Rare all-white animals have recently been discovered in a new northeastern population of the coyote in insular Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. To investigate the causative gene and mutation of white coat in coyotes, we sequenced the three type-switching genes in white and dark-phased animals from Newfoundland. The only sequence variants unambiguously associated with white color were in Mc1r, and one of these variants causes the amino acid variant R306Ter, a premature stop codon also linked to coat color in Golden Retrievers and other dogs with yellow/red coats. The allele carrying R306Ter in coyotes matches that in the Golden Retriever at other variable amino acid sites and hence may have originated in these dogs. Coyotes experienced introgression with wolves and dogs as they colonized northeastern North America, and coyote/Golden Retriever interactions have been observed in Newfoundland. We speculate that natural selection, with or without a founder effect, may contribute to the observed frequency of white coyotes in Newfoundland, as it has contributed to the high frequency of white bears, and of a domestic dog-derived CBD allele in gray wolves.

As the rollout of NFV in the Telecommunications domain gains momentum, methods that enable the automated and performant deployment of VNFs are required to support large scale deployments. This paper presents a framework that enables the automated characterization of VNFs and modelling of the relationships between resource types, quantities and achieved performance. A workload characterization approach is proposed to identify the most appropriate types of resources to be allocated to a VNF at deployment time. Machine learning modelling was used to identify the appropriate deployment configuration which meets required performance targets, such as network throughput. The proposed framework has been experimentally validated based on the optimization of a Traffic Classifier VNF deployment in an OpenStack cloud environment.

As clouds increase in size and as machines of different types are added to the infrastructure in order to maximize performance and power efficiency, heterogeneous clouds are being created. However, exploiting different architectures poses significant challenges. To efficiently access heterogeneous resources and, at the same time, to exploit these resources to reduce application development effort, to make optimisations easier and to simplify service deployment, requires a re-evaluation of our approach to service delivery. We propose a novel cloud management and delivery architecture based on the principles of self-organisation and self-management that shifts the deployment and optimisation effort from the consumer to the software stack running on the cloud infrastructure. Our goal is to address inefficient use of resources and consequently to deliver savings to the cloud provider and consumer in terms of reduced power consumption and improved service delivery, with hyperscale systems particularly in mind. The framework is general but also endeavours to enable cloud services for high performance computing. Infrastructure-as-a-Service provision is the primary use case, however, we posit that genomics, oil and gas exploration, and ray tracing are three downstream use cases that will benefit from the proposed architecture.

Network Functions Visualization is focused on migrating traditional hardware-based network functions to software-based appliances running on standard high volume severs. There are a variety of challenges facing early adopters of Network Function Virtualizations; key among them are resource and service mapping, to support virtual network function orchestration. Service providers need efficient and effective mapping capabilities to optimally deploy network services. This paper describes TeNOR, a micro-service based network function virtualisation orchestrator capable of effectively addressing resource and network service mapping. The functional architecture and data models of TeNOR are described, as well as two proposed approaches to address the resource mapping problem. Key evaluation results are discussed and an assessment of the mapping approaches is performed in terms of the service acceptance ratio and scalability of the proposed approaches.

Applying new sensing technology to healthcare maybe part of a solution to the financial and demographic crisis facing global healthcare systems. Researchers applying new approaches to noninvasive patient monitoring and diagnostics are assisted by the features of Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility and Experimental Reusability (SHIMMER™), a flexible sensing platform. Integrated peripherals, open software, modular expansion, specific power management hardware, and a library of applications supported with platform validation provide SHIMMER with advantages over many other medical research platforms.