Multivariate Analysis of Finnish Dialect Data An Overview of Lexical Variation

During the process of writing a comprehensive dictionary ofFinnish dialects, a large set of maps describing the regionaldistribution of the dialect words have been compiled in electronicform. In this article, we set out to analyse this corpus ofdata in order to gain new insight on the variation of Finnishdialects. We use a wide range of multivariate data analysismethods, including principal components analysis, independentcomponents analysis, clustering, and multidimensional scaling.We explain how to preprocess the data to overcome the problemof uneven sampling caused by the way the data has been collected.We discuss the results obtained by these methods and comparethem to the traditional view of Finnish dialect groups.     

Einsatz von alternativen Reaktionsmedien für eine umweltverträglichere chemische Produktion

Use of alternative reaction media for an environmentally safer chemical production. The way in which a chemical reaction is carried out and the composition of the reaction mixture diotate the degree of difficulty of downstream processing operations, not only in terms of energy consumption but also with respect to environmental pollution. A specific environmental protection that is an integral part of the production process must therefore begin with the examination of the chemical rection step. Restructuring a process from a reaction engineering point of view includes two important aspects of which the technical implementation has not yet been systematically examined and which therefore should promise a significant potential for innovation. These are the integration of modern separation operations in the chemical reactor with the aim of shifting the chemical equilibrium and the choice of an alternative reaction medium; although the latter also serves the same purpose, it can bring about a significant reduction in environmental pollution. This aspect is the focus of this paper, in which the advantages of molten salts, supercritical fluids and microemulsions as alternative reaction media are discussed.     

Parallelizable split-operator propagator for treating Coriolis-coupled quantum dynamics

We show that the split-operator propagator of Feit and Fleck can be converted into a form that is easy to parallelize for a quantum system with Coriolis-coupled quantum dynamics. The angular kinetic energy part of the propagator is replaced by the Crank-Nicholson approximation, which makes the entire propagator tridiagonal in the quantum number Ω (the projection of the total angular momentum quantum number J onto the intermolecular axis). We demonstrate that the modified propagator is numerically stable and accurate, provided that the Crank-Nicholson approximation is applied to the entire angular kinetic energy operator.     

Effect of iridoid glycoside content on oviposition host plant choice and parasitism in a specialist herbivore

The Glanville fritillary butterfly Melitaea cinxia feeds upon two host plant species in Å land, Finland, Plantago lanceolataand Veronica spicata, both of which produce iridoid glycosides. Iridoids are known to deter feeding or decrease the growth rate of many generalist insect herbivores, but they often act as oviposition cues to specialist butterflies and are feeding stimulants to their larvae. In this study, two iridoid glycosides (aucubin and catalpol) were analyzed by micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography. We measured the spatial and temporal variation of iridoid glycosides in natural populations of the host plants of M. cinxia. We also analyzed the aucubin and catalpol content in plants in relation to their use by ovipositing females, and in relation to the incidence of parasitism of M. cinxia larvae in natural populations. The mean concentrations of aucubin and catalpol were higher in P. lanceolata than in V. spicata, and catalpol concentrations were higher than aucubin concentrations in both host species. Plantago lanceolata individuals that were used for oviposition by M. cinxia had higher aucubin concentrations than random plants and neighboring plants. Additionally, oviposition and random plants had higher catalpol concentrations than neighboring plants, indicating that ovipositing females select for high iridoid glycoside plants or that oviposition induces iridoid glycoside production in P. lanceolata. Parasitism by the specialist parasitoid wasp Cotesia melitaearum occurred most frequently in larval groups that were feeding on plants with low concentrations of catalpol, irrespective of year, population, and host plant species. Therefore, parasitoids appear to avoid or perform poorly in host larvae with high catalpol content.     

Problematic Instant Messaging Use

This study is an empirical investigation of problematic instant messaging (IM) use among university students in Singapore. It adapts Caplan's (2005) theoretical framework of problematic Internet use (PIU) to the context of problematic IM use by linking pre-existing human dispositions to cognitive-behavioral symptoms and negative outcomes of improper IM use. Four new factors—oral communication apprehension, polychronicity, perceived inconvenience of using offline communication means, and trait procrastination—were tested as predictors of problematic IM use. The results provided strong support for Caplan's theoretical framework of PIU and indicated that oral communication apprehension and perceived inconvenience of using offline means were significant predictors of problematic IM use, whereas polychronicity and trait procrastination were not. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Knowledge based quality-driven architecture design and evaluation

Modelling and evaluating quality properties of software is of high importance, especially when our every day life depends on the quality of services produced by systems and devices embedded into our surroundings. This paper contributes to the body of research in quality and model driven software engineering. It does so by introducing; (1) a quality aware software architecting approach and (2) a supporting tool chain. The novel approach with supporting tools enables the systematic development of high quality software by merging benefits of knowledge modelling and management, and model driven architecture design enhanced with domain-specific quality attributes. The whole design flow of software engineering is semi-automatic; specifying quality requirements, transforming quality requirements to architecture design, representing quality properties in architectural models, predicting quality fulfilment from architectural models, and finally, measuring quality aspects from implemented source code. The semi-automatic design flow is exemplified by the ongoing development of a secure middleware for peer-to-peer embedded systems.     

Reliable Distributed Storage

A distributed storage service lets clients abstract a single reliable shared storage device using a collection of possibly unreliable computing units. Algorithms that implement this abstraction offer certain tradeoffs and vary according to dimensions such as complexity, the consistency semantics provided, and the types of failures tolerated.     

Fragile base-class problem,problem?

The fragile base-class problem (FBCP) has been described in the literature as a consequence of “misusing” inheritance and composition in object-oriented programming when (re)using frameworks. Many research works have focused on preventing the FBCP by proposing alternative mechanisms for reuse, but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous research work studying the prevalence and impact of the FBCP in real-world software systems. The goal of our work is thus twofold: (1) assess, in different systems, the prevalence of micro-architectures, called FBCS, that could lead to two aspects of the FBCP, (2) investigate the relation between the detected occurrences and the quality of the systems in terms of change and fault proneness, and (3) assess whether there exist bugs in these systems that are related to the FBCP. We therefore perform a quantitative and a qualitative study. Quantitatively, we analyse multiple versions of seven different open-source systems that use 58 different frameworks, resulting in 301 configurations. We detect in these systems 112,263 FBCS occurrences and we analyse whether classes playing the role of sub-classes in FBCS occurrences are more change and–or fault prone than other classes. Results show that classes participating in the analysed FBCS are neither more likely to change nor more likely to have faults. Qualitatively, we conduct a survey to confirm/infirm that some bugs are related to the FBCP. The survey involves 41 participants that analyse a total of 104 bugs of three open-source systems. Results indicate that none of the analysed bugs is related to the FBCP. Thus, despite large, rigorous quantitative and qualitative studies, we must conclude that the two aspects of the FBCP that we analyse may not be as problematic in terms of change and fault-proneness as previously thought in the literature. We propose reasons why the FBCP may not be so prevalent in the analysed systems and in other systems in general.