How to become a “Kwa” noun

An important problem of comparative Niger-Congo morphology is understanding the processes that relate word structures in languages of the isolating ??Kwa?? type to those of the agglutinating ??Bantu?? type. A salient sub-problem of this larger morphological puzzle is charting the connection between the noun class systems of the Kwa-type languages which, at one extreme, can lack such classes entirely, against those of the Bantu type which, at the other extreme, are famously elaborated. This issue is examined by looking at a range of ways that Niger-Congo noun class systems have been observed to diverge from the canonical Bantu type. The main conclusion of this study is that Niger-Congo noun class systems are quite robust, in the sense that loss of one part of the system need not be correlated with loss of the other parts. This suggests that the level of noun class attrition found in Kwa languages was not a historically ??natural?? event and also has implications for models of agreement and inflectional morphology.     

Protein unfolding in crowded milieu: what crowding can do to a protein undergoing unfolding?

The natural environment of a protein inside a cell is characterized by the almost complete lack of unoccupied space, limited amount of free water, and the tightly packed crowd of various biological macromolecules, such as proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and complexes thereof. This extremely crowded natural milieu is poorly mimicked by slightly salted aqueous solutions containing low concentrations of a protein of interest. The accepted practice is to model crowded environments by adding high concentrations of various polymers that serve as model “crowding agents” to the solution of a protein of interest. Although studies performed under these model conditions revealed that macromolecular crowding might have noticeable influence on various aspects related to the protein structure, function, folding, conformational stability, and aggregation propensity, the complete picture describing conformational behavior of a protein under these conditions is missing as of yet. Furthermore, there is an accepted belief that the conformational stability of globular proteins increases in the presence crowding agents due to the excluded volume effects. The goal of this study was to conduct a systematic analysis of the effect of high concentrations of PEG-8000 and Dextran-70 on the unfolding behavior of eleven globular proteins belonging to different structural classes.     

Towards a new politics of migration?

This paper reconsiders Stephen Castle’s classic paper Why Migration Policies Fail. Beginning with the so-called migration crisis of 2015 it considers the role of numbers is assessing success or failure. It argues that in the UK public debates about immigration changed with European Union (EU) Enlargement in 2004, when the emphasis shifted from concerns about asylum to concerns about EU mobility. Concerns were exacerbated by the government’s failure to meet its promise to reduce net migration. This policy is hampered by the general problem of definition of “migrant” and the gap between statistical measures and popular usage in which “migration” signifies problematic mobility. In fact, concern about migration has become a placeholder for concerns about globalization and democratic accountability. A new politics of migration must make connections between migrants and citizens, but also between migration and other global processes, particularly outsourcing and the exploitation of labour and resources in the global south.     

Overtaking on migration: does longer distance migration always incur a penalty?

For many migratory bird species, the latitudinal range of the winter distribution spans thousands of kilometres, thus encompassing considerable variation in individual migration distances. Pressure to winter near breeding areas is thought to be a strong driver of the evolution of migration patterns, as individuals undertaking a shorter migration are generally considered to benefit from earlier arrival on the breeding grounds. However, the influence of migration distance on timing of arrival is difficult to quantify because of the large scales over which individuals must be tracked. Using a unique dataset of individually‐marked Icelandic black‐tailed godwits Limosa limosa islandica tracked throughout the migratory range by a network of hundreds of volunteer observers, we quantify the consequences of migrating different distances for the use of stop‐over sites and timing of arrival in Iceland. Modelling of potential flight distances and tracking of individuals from across the winter range shows that individuals wintering further from the breeding grounds must undertake a stop‐over during spring migration. However, despite travelling twice the distance and undertaking a stop‐over, individuals wintering furthest from the breeding grounds are able to overtake their conspecifics on spring migration and arrive earlier in Iceland. Wintering further from the breeding grounds can therefore be advantageous in migratory species, even when this requires the use of stop‐over sites which lengthen the migratory journey. As early arrival on breeding sites confers advantages for breeding success, the capacity of longer distance migrants to overtake conspecifics is likely to influence the fitness consequences of individual migration strategies. Variation in the quality of wintering and stopover sites throughout the range can therefore outweigh the benefits of wintering close to the breeding grounds, and may be a primary driver of the evolution of specific migration routes and patterns.     

From high-availability to collapse: quantitative analysis of “Cloud-Droplet-Freezing” attack threats to virtual machine migration in cloud computing

Virtual machines (VM) migration can improve availability, manageability, performance and fault tolerance of systems. Current migration researches mainly focus on the promotion of the efficiency by using shared storage, priority-based policy etc.. But the effect of migration is not well concerned. In fact, once physical servers are overloaded from denial-of-service attack (DDoS) attack, a hasty migration operation not only unable to alleviate the harm of the attack, but also increases the harmfulness. In this paper, a novel DDoS attack, Cloud-Droplet-Freezing (CDF) attack, is described according to the characteristics of cloud computing cluster. Our experiments show that such attack is able to congest internal network communication of cloud server cluster, whilst consume resources of physical server. Base on the analysis of CDF attack, we highlight the method of evaluating potential threats hidden behind the normal VM migration and analyze the flaws of existing intrusion detection systems/prevention system for defensing the CDF attack.     

Banking brains: a pre-mortem “how to” guide to successful donation

A review of the brain banking literature reveals a primary focus either on the factors that influence the decision to become a future donor or on the brain tissue processing that takes place after the individual has died (i.e., the front-end or back-end processes). What has not been sufficiently detailed, however, is the complex and involved process that takes place after this decision to become a future donor is made yet before post-mortem processing occurs (i.e., the large middle-ground). This generally represents a period of many years during which the brain bank is actively engaged with donors to ensure that valuable clinical information is prospectively collected and that their donation is eventually completed. For the past 15 years, the Essential Tremor Centralized Brain Repository has been actively involved in brain banking, and our experience has provided us valuable insights that may be useful for researchers interested in establishing their own brain banking efforts. In this piece, we fill a gap in the literature by detailing the processes of enrolling participants, creating individualized brain donation plans, collecting clinical information and regularly following-up with donors to update that information, and efficiently coordinating the brain harvest when death finally arrives.     

Toward a “Risk Index” to Assess Work Schedules

This article describes our preliminary attempt to develop a Risk Index to estimate the risk of human error on different work schedules based on trends in the relative risk of accidents and injuries, rather than on hypothetical intervening variables such as alertness, fatigue, or performance on interpolated tasks. We briefly review trends in risk from the published epidemiological studies that have ensured that the a priori risk was constant. A simple Risk Index based on an additive model is developed on the basis of these trends, and we illustrate how it may be used to assess work schedules. Finally, we compare the results from this Risk Index with those from the UK HSE's Fatigue Index and point out the discrepancies that emerge. We conclude that our risk-based modeling approach may assist in developing safer work schedules and also increase our understanding of this complex, multifaceted area.     

Health migration from Norway to Spain – ambiguous belonging

Abstract

In line with Gustafson (2008), most studies of transnationalism have investigated migration from south to north. This article examines health-, welfare- and lifestyle-related migration from Norway to Spain. The phenomenon is increasing, with consequences for national and municipal policies. The focus is on how Norwegian health migrants cope. Based on anthropological fieldwork and life story interviews we ask: Who are these migrants? How did the migration step come into being? How do they cope when the decision is effectuated? What kind of identity-related challenges do they face? The article also discusses implications for future comparative research on the phenomenon.     

Stress hormone dynamics: an adaptation to migration?

The hormone corticosterone (CORT) is an important component of a bird’s response to environmental stress, but it can also have negative effects. Therefore, birds on migration are hypothesized to have repressed stress responses (migration-modulation hypothesis). In contrast to earlier studies on long-distance migrants, we evaluate this hypothesis in a population containing both migratory and resident individuals. We use a population of partially migratory blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) in southern Sweden as a model species. Migrants had higher CORT levels at the time of capture than residents, indicating migratory preparations, adaptation to stressors, higher allostatic load or possibly low social status. Migrants and residents had the same stress response, thus contradicting the migration-modulation hypothesis. We suggest that migrants travelling short distances are more benefited than harmed by retaining the ability to respond to stress.     

mtDNA analysis of Nile River Valley populations: A genetic corridor or a barrier to migration?

To assess the extent to which the Nile River Valley has been a corridor for human migrations between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa, we analyzed mtDNA variation in 224 individuals from various locations along the river. Sequences of the first hypervariable segment (HV1) of the mtDNA control region and a polymorphic HpaI site at position 3592 allowed us to designate each mtDNA as being of "northern" or "southern" affiliation. Proportions of northern and southern mtDNA differed significantly between Egypt, Nubia, and the southern Sudan. At slowly evolving sites within HV1, northern-mtDNA diversity was highest in Egypt and lowest in the southern Sudan, and southern-mtDNA diversity was highest in the southern Sudan and lowest in Egypt, indicating that migrations had occurred bidirectionally along the Nile River Valley. Egypt and Nubia have low and similar amounts of divergence for both mtDNA types, which is consistent with historical evidence for long-term interactions between Egypt and Nubia. Spatial autocorrelation analysis demonstrates a smooth gradient of decreasing genetic similarity of mtDNA types as geographic distance between sampling localities increases, strongly suggesting gene flow along the Nile, with no evident barriers. We conclude that these migrations probably occurred within the past few hundred to few thousand years and that the migration from north to south was either earlier or lesser in the extent of gene flow than the migration from south to north.