In remote storage services, delays in the time to retrieve data can cause economic losses to the data owners. In this paper, we address the problem of properly establishing specific clauses in the service level agreement (SLA), intended to guarantee a short and predictable retrieval time. Based on the rationale that the retrieval time mainly depends on the storage media used at the server side, we introduce the concept of Provable Storage Medium (PSM), to denote the ability of a user to efficiently verify that the provider is complying to this aspect of the SLA.

ZBTB2 is a protein belonging to the BTB/POZ zinc-finger family whose members typically contain a BTB/POZ domain at the N-terminus and several zinc-finger domains at the C-terminus. Studies have been carried out to disclose the role of ZBTB2 in cell proliferation, in human cancers and in regulating DNA methylation. Moreover, ZBTB2 has been also described as an ARF, p53 and p21 gene repressor as well as an activator of genes modulating pluripotency. In this scenario, ZBTB2 seems to play many functions likely associated with other proteins.

Derivations of the Jarzynski equality (JE) appear to be quite general, and applicable to any particle system, whether deterministic or stochastic, under equally general perturbations of an initial equilibrium state at given temperatureT. At the same time, the definitions of the quantities appearing in the JE, in particular the work, have been questioned. Answers have been given, but a deeper understanding of the range of phenomena to which the JE applies is necessary, both conceptually and in order to interpret the experiments in which it is used.

The use of Euler polynomials and Euler numbers allows us to construct a quadrature rule similar to the well-known Euler--MacLaurin quadrature formula, using Euler (instead of Bernoulli) numbers, and even (instead of odd) order derivatives of a given function evaluated at the extrema of the considered interval. An expression of the remainder term and numerical examples are also given. © 2001, Heldermann Verlag. All rights reserved.

Background A subset of individuals affected by imprinting disorders displays multi-locus imprinting disturbances (MLID). MLID has been associated with maternal-effect variants that alter the maintenance of methylation at germline-derived differentially methylated regions (gDMRs) in early embryogenesis. Pedigrees of individuals with MLID also include siblings with healthy phenotype.

In a typical secure communication system, messages undergo two different encodings: an error-correcting code is applied at the physical layer to ensure correct reception by the addressee (integrity), while at an upper protocol layer cryptography is leveraged to enforce secrecy with respect to eavesdroppers (confidentiality).

Recently, structural monitoring by radar remote sensing has become more necessary for both economic and security reasons. Infrastructure monitoring with no incorporated deformation sensors (e.g., old generation water dams for which regulations did not impose monitoring capabilities) is usually performed by regular in situ topographic surveys. However, these surveys cannot be performed very often, and alternative methods are desirable.

Motivated by the upcoming Internet of Things, designing light-weight authentication protocols for resource constrained devices is among the main research directions of the last decade. Current solutions in the literature attempt either to improve the computational efficiency of cryptographic authentication schemes, or to build a provably-secure scheme relying on the hardness of a specific mathematical problem.

In Mobile Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (MUWSNs), nodes sense the environment and store the acquired data until the arrival of a trusted data sink. MUWSNs, other than being a reference model for an increasing number of military and civilian applications, also capture a few important characteristics of emerging computing paradigms like Participatory Sensing (PS). In this paper, we start by identifying the main features and issues of MUWSNs, revising the related work in the area and highlighting their shortcomings.

This article presents a methodology for the monitoring of tall structures based on the joint use of a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS), configured in line scanner mode, and a ground-based real aperture radar (GB-RAR) interferometer. The methodology provides both natural frequencies and oscillation amplitudes of tall structures. Acquisitions of the surface of the tall structure are performed by the TLS with a high sampling rate: each line scan provides an instantaneous longitudinal section.