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Many researches compare the storage performance of different virtualised systems. Some of their results are unexplained, which reduces the reliability of the storage performance comparison itself. Through experiments, this reported work identifies that the size of buffer cache significantly affects the storage performance. When the same size of buffer cache is used in experiments, very different results are obtained from the prior results because they did not take the size of buffer cache into account. The new results make more sense with the characteristics of virtualised environments. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The emergence of enterprise WLAN as a key technology has posed numerous challenges to researchers. Presented is a novel, theoretically-grounded, distributed dynamic buffering mechanism to address two of those challenges, namely, buffer stability and power consumption costs. The proposed mechanism optimally controls the buffer dynamics of system switches, thereby guaranteeing buffer queue stability, and minimising time-average expected power expenditure, thereby decreasing costs. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Klemas, V., 2014. Remote sensing of riparian and wetland buffers: an overview. Forested riparian and wetland buffers can help protect stream water quality, provide wildlife habitat, preserve floodplains and wetlands, protect against erosion, and provide recreational value. Many waterways have no buffers or buffers that have been degraded by human activities, including agriculture and urban development. To plan, evaluate, and restore riparian buffers, wetland managers need to monitor the conditions of constantly changing buffers over time. Remote sensing offers a cost-effective monitoring approach. Because riparian and wetland buffer zones exhibit extreme variations in width, length, spatial complexity, soil, and vegetation cover, mapping their hydrology and land cover requires high-spatial- and high-spectral-resolution data. The recent availability of high-spatial-resolution satellite and high-spectral-resolution aircraft imagery has significantly improved the capacity for mapping riparian buffers, wetlands, and other ecosystems. However, satellite sensors still do not have the combined spatial and spectral resolution to reliably identify buffer vegetation types and conditions. New interpretation strategies need to be developed to maximize the information obtained from high-resolution satellite sensors while minimizing the problems specific to high-resolution imagery, such as high variability within scene elements and within scene objects. The objective of this article is to review applications of remotely sensed data for modeling, designing, and evaluating riparian and wetland buffers.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: After the initial boom in the application of flow cytometry in plant sciences in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was accompanied by development of many nuclear isolation buffers, only a few efforts were made to develop new buffer formulas. In this work, recent data on the performance of nuclear isolation buffers are utilized in order to develop new buffers, general purpose buffer (GPB) and woody plant buffer (WPB), for plant DNA flow cytometry. METHODS: GPB and WPB were used to prepare samples for flow cytometric analysis of nuclear DNA content in a set of 37 plant species that included herbaceous and woody taxa with leaf tissues differing in structure and chemical composition. The following parameters of isolated nuclei were assessed: forward and side light scatter, propidium iodide fluorescence, coefficient of variation of DNA peaks, quantity of debris background, and the number of particles released from sample tissue. The nuclear genome size of 30 selected species was also estimated using the buffer that performed better for a given species. KEY RESULTS: In unproblematic species, the use of both buffers resulted in high quality samples. The analysis of samples obtained with GPB usually resulted in histograms of DNA content with higher or similar resolution than those prepared with the WPB. In more recalcitrant tissues, such as those from woody plants, WPB performed better and GPB failed to provide acceptable results in some cases. Improved resolution of DNA content histograms in comparison with previously published buffers was achieved in most of the species analysed. CONCLUSIONS: WPB is a reliable buffer which is also suitable for the analysis of problematic tissues/species. Although GPB failed with some plant species, it provided high-quality DNA histograms in species from which nuclear suspensions are easy to prepare. The results indicate that even with a broad range of species, either GPB or WPB is suitable for preparation of high-quality suspensions of intact nuclei suitable for DNA flow cytometry.

This review evaluates research in the past 20 years focusing on groundwater nitrate removal in the riparian zones of agricultural watersheds. Studies have reported a large range in the magnitude of groundwater and nitrate fluxes to buffers in different hydrogeologic settings. An earlier focus on buffers with shallow subsurface flow has expanded to include sites with deep flow paths and groundwater-fed overland flow. Nitrate removal efficiency and the width required for removal have been linked to riparian sediment texture and depth to an impervious layer. Denitrification has been identified as the dominant mechanism of nitrate removal based on evidence that this process occurs at depth in many buffers which contain buried organic-rich deposits. Several studies have assessed the cumulative effect of riparian buffers on nitrate removal at the watershed scale. Despite considerable research progress areas of uncertainty still remain. Buffers with coarse-textured sediments located in landscapes with upslope sand aquifers have received most attention. In contrast, few sites have been analysed in weathered bedrock and glacial till landscapes. Many studies have reported nitrate removal efficiency based on nitrate concentrations rather than measuring groundwater fluxes which assess the magnitude of nitrate removal. More information is needed on interactions between riparian hydrological flow paths and biogeochemical processes. Further research is recommended on the effect of riparian zone nitrate removal at the watershed scale and long-term monitoring with respect to buffer restoration, the ability to sustain nitrate removal and responses to land use and climate change.

Understanding of protein structure and stability gained to date has been acquired through investigations made under dilute conditions where total macromolecular concentration never surpasses 10 g l-1. However, biological macromolecules are known to evolve and function under crowded intracellular environments that comprises of proteins, nucleic acids, ribosomes and carbohydrates etc. Crowded environment is known to result in altered biological properties including thermodynamic, structural and functional aspect of macromolecules as compared to the macromolecules present in our commonly used experimental dilute buffers (for example, Tris HCl or phosphate buffer). In this study, we have investigated the thermodynamic and structural consequences of synthetic crowding agent (Ficoll 70) on three different proteins (Ribonuclease-A, lysozyme and holo alpha -lactalbumin) at different pH values. We report here that the effect of crowding is protein dependent in terms of protein thermal stability and structure. We also observed that the structural characteristics of the denatured state determines if crowding will have an effect or not on the protein stability.

With the advancement in CMOS technology and multiple processors on the chip, communication across these cores is managed by a network-on-chip (NoC). Power and performance of these NoC interconnects have become a significant factor.The authors aim to reduce the leakage power consumption of NoC buffers by the use of non-volatile spin transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM)-based buffers. STT-RAM technology has the advantages of high density and low leakage but suffers from low endurance. This low endurance has an impact on the lifetime of the router on the whole due to unwanted write-variations governed by virtual channel (VC) allocation policies. Here various VC allocation policies that help the uniform distribution of the writes across the buffers are proposed. Iso-capacity and iso-area-based alternatives to replace SRAM buffers with STT-RAM buffers are also presented. Pure STT-RAM buffers, however, impact the network latency. To mitigate this, a hybrid variant of the proposed policies which uses alternative VCs made of SRAM technology in the case of heavy network traffic is proposed. Experimental evaluation of full system simulation shows that proposed policies reduce the write variation by 99% and improve lifetime by 3.2 times and 1093 times, respectively. Also a 55.5% gain in the energy delay product is obtained.

At present, the National Metrology Institute of Japan provides six national primary pH buffers under the Japan Calibration Service System. Each batch of these buffers is certified by the primary pH method using a Harned cell. On the basis of these primary buffers, the designated laboratories supply the secondary and working pH standards using a high-precision pH meter. This paper provides an estimate of the batch-to-batch reproducibility of the primary pH standard production based on the history of the certification of primary carbonate buffers in NMIJ. This buffer, which was chosen as the subject of the study because of the relative difficulty of its measurements (and thus a greater dispersion of results), is nominally the 0.025 mol kg−1 equimolal solution of disodium carbonate and sodium hydrogen carbonate. As its pH value is significantly affected by the purity of the reagents used, the evaluation of their source materials is made by both pH measurements and acidimetric gravimetric back titrations. Considering the experimentally determined pH reproducibility of ca. 0.010, potential risks to the pH accuracy are discussed when using recipe-based carbonate pH standards.

We report a fiber loop quantum buffer based on a low-loss 2 × 2 switch and a unit delay made of a fiber delay line. We characterize the device by using a two-photon polarization entangled state in which one photon of the entangled photon pair is stored and retrieved at a repetition rate up to 78 kHz. The device, which enables integer multiples of a unit delay, can store the qubit state in a unit of fiber delay line up to 5.4 km and the number of loop round-trips up to 3. Furthermore, we configure the device with other active elements to realize integer multiplier and divider of a unit delay of a qubit. The quantum state tomography is performed on the retrieved photon and its entangled photon. We obtain a state fidelity > 94 % with a maximum storage time of 52 μ s with an insertion loss of 5.56 dB. To further characterize the storing and retrieving processes of the device, we perform entanglement-assisted quantum process tomography on the buffered qubit state. The process fidelity of the device is > 0.98. Our result implies that the device preserves the superposition and entanglement of a qubit state from a two-photon polarization-entangled state. This is a significant step towards facilitating applications in optical asynchronous transfer mode based quantum networks.

Super-resolution imaging methods have revolutionized fluorescence microscopy by revealing the nanoscale organization of labeled proteins. In particular, single-molecule methods such as Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) provide resolutions down to a few tens of nanometers by exploiting the cycling of dyes between fluorescent and non-fluorescent states to obtain a sparse population of emitters and precisely localizing them individually. This cycling of dyes is commonly induced by adding different chemicals, which are combined to create a STORM buffer. Despite their importance, the composition of these buffers has scarcely evolved since they were first introduced, fundamentally limiting what can be resolved with STORM. By identifying a new chemical suitable for STORM and optimizing the buffer composition for Alexa-647, we significantly increased the number of photons emitted per cycle by each dye, providing a simple means to enhance the resolution of STORM independently of the optical setup used. Using this buffer to perform 3D-STORM on biological samples, we obtained images with better than 10 nanometer lateral and 30 nanometer axial resolution.