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No abstract available.

Experimental and theoretical studies have shown the importance of stochastic processes in genetic regulatory networks and cellular processes. Cellular networks and genetic circuits often involve small numbers of key proteins such as transcriptional factors and signaling proteins. In recent years stochastic models have been used successfully for studying noise in biological pathways, and stochastic modelling of biological systems has become a very important research field in computational biology. One of the challenge problems in this field is the reduction of the huge computing time in stochastic simulations. Based on the system of the mitogen-activated protein kinase cascade that is activated by epidermal growth factor, this work give a parallel implementation by using OpenMP and parallelism across the simulation. Special attention is paid to the independence of the generated random numbers in parallel computing, that is a key criterion for the success of stochastic simulations. Numerical results indicate that parallel computers can be used as an efficient tool for simulating the dynamics of large-scale genetic regulatory networks and cellular processes.

No abstract available.

Ethicists often approach our task by thinking about the norms that apply to act types. We ask, for example, what it means to punish, to make amends, or to forgive, and what conditions govern the appropriate performance of actions that fall within these types. However, actions often do not fall neatly into only one action type. This chapter discusses two cases that can be interpreted both as acts of protest and as acts of what Linda Radzik calls “informal social punishment.” Since the norms that govern these two types diverge, the fact that a particular action can be interpreted in either of these ways poses a challenge for anyone who might be seeking moral guidance from the type to which the action belongs. The cases highlight a theoretical gap that needs to be filled not only by accounts of social punishment or protest but also by ethicists who would use this approach to think about actions of other overlapping types.

Mapping is proposed as a method to overcome universalist and Eurocentric assumptions in music historiography and arrive at more cosmopolitan conceptions. The chapter is accompanied by two maps produced with GIS (Geographic Information System) software, showing membership (by entry date) of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), the diffusion of dodecaphony (by the date of the first verified dodecaphonic composition by country) and the founding of conservatoires across the globe. The maps’ creation further involved the use of crowdsourcing. The opportunities and limitations of mapping are discussed both in relation to the concrete examples and the method in general.

No abstract available.

The concept of social imaginaries is beginning to appear in education research, especially among critical researchers. In this literature, reference is consistently made to the work of Anderson, Castoriadis, Appadurai and Taylor. Among these thinkers, imaginaries are the shared yet tacit understandings about people, society and the world that are conveyed in a variety of ways including images, stories, sayings and popular ideas. Education researchers sometimes deploy the concept in investigations of interactions between policy and practice with a particular emphasis on what is taken to be the problematic spread and implementation of ‘neoliberal’ ideas in education practices. Comparison of the theory of social imaginaries with its appropriation in education research suggests that a number of researchers use the concept in a relatively limited and unjustifiably prescriptive way. In this chapter, we take the work of Charles Taylor as a reference point to examine this development of a methodology of imaginaries in critical education research. Taylor’s account places imaginaries within the broader methodological notion of ‘the background’ which refers to a complex, layered cultural construction. A survey of Taylor’s account of ‘modernity’ raises questions about the isolated use of the concept of social imaginaries seen in some education research and about the assumption social imaginaries can be the subject of intervention to bring about preferred educational futures. We argue that before the concept of social imaginaries can effectively inform methodologies for understanding and criticising education practices, researchers need to make more systematic use of the concept, in particular taking into account origins, background and tractability.

We present an algorithm that allows two users to establish a symmetric cryptographic key by incorporating the most important features of the wireless channel in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Non-reciprocity compensation is combined with turbo codes (TCs) for error reconciliation purposes. For fair comparisons, the indexing technique is applied in conjunction with the non-reciprocity compensation technique. A series of simulations are run to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs). High entropy values are obtained throughout all rounds of simulation during the key extraction process. Furthermore, simulation results indicate a significant improvement in bit mismatch rate (BMR) and key generation rate (KGR) when TCs are used. Increasing the number of iterations in the TC can significantly improve the Bit Error Rate (BER), thus generating more symmetric keys. The key generation rate was reported high ranging from 17 to 19 for the 256-bit symmetric keys per minute with TCs, while it is ranging from 2 to 5 when compared with a sample indexing technique published in the public domain. Finally, simulations proved also improvements for different key lengths as part of the error reconciliation process when TCs are used with an almost regular permutation (ARP) instead of a random permutation.

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