PURPOSE Antiangiogenic therapy using bevacizumab has proven effective for a number of cancers; however, in breast cancer (BC), there is an unmet need to identify patients who benefit from such treatment. PATIENTS AND METHODS In the NeoAva phase II clinical trial, patients (N = 132) with large (= 25 mm) human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative primary tumors were randomly assigned 1

This paper assesses water quality that is used for vegetable irrigation in Tamale Metropolis, Ghana. A mixed-method of research design was employed in this study to collect and analyze the data based on survey instruments. The paper found that Escherichia coli (E. coli) that is usually used as an indicator of water contamination and heavy metals exist in all taken water samples. The mean concentra

Anti-competitive notions, it seems, are increasingly informing the critical debate on a data-driven economy organised into scalable digital platforms. Issues of market definitions, how to value personal data on multisided platforms, and how to detect and regulate misuses of dominant positions have become key nomenclature on the battlefield of addressing fairness in our contemporary digital societi

The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction is marked globally by elevated concentrations of iridium, emplaced by a hypervelocity impact event 66 million years ago. Here, we report new data from four independent laboratories that reveal a positive iridium anomaly within the peak-ring sequence of the Chicxulub impact structure, in drill core recovered by IODP-ICDP Expedition 364. The highest co

Young birds in cold environments face a range of age-specific thermal challenges. Studying the thermal biology of young birds throughout ontogeny may further our understanding of how such challenges are met. We investigated how age and environmental parameters influenced surface temperature gradients across various body regions of wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) chicks on Bird Island, South

Motivation While the pay-as-you-go model of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds is more flexible than an in-house IT infrastructure, it still has a resource-based interface towards users, who can rent virtual computing resources over relatively long time scales. There is a fundamental mismatch between this resource-based interface and what users really care about: performance.

A number of techniques have been proposed to provide runtime performance guarantees while minimizing power consumption. One drawback of existing approaches is that they work only on a fixed set of components (or actuators) that must be specified at design time. If new components become available, these management systems must be redesigned and reimplemented. In this paper, we propose PTRADE, a nov

An important challenge in the design and implementation of self-optimizing systems is that of finding a model that maps changes in a tunable parameter (or “knob”) into an effect on the performance, power, or energy, of the overall system. This paper describes ARPE (Analyzing the Relationship between Parameters and Effectors), an open source tool to analyze the effect of parameter changes on the be

A recently published paper addressed the so called "PI+p" controller (i.e., a PI augmented with an additional, stable pole) and demonstrated that said controller yields interesting results particularly if tuned with the "contextual" approach, where model-based rules are used in conjunction with a relay experiment so as to provide at the same time the tuned regulator, and the tuning model. In this

In some recent papers it was shown that preemptive process schedulers in multitasking operating systems can be viewed, and above all designed, as discrete-time feedback controls with very simple (I- or PI-type) regulators, yielding significant advantages over classical scheduling policies as for time complexity and parameter interpretability. In this work, the same problem is tackled with a predic

Self-adaptive applications are capable of changing their behavior thousands of times per second to autonomically find a way to accomplish given goals despite working in an unpredictable environment whose conditions can vary continuously. In this work we propose an evolvable system that runs self-adaptive applications on top of a heterogeneous system consisting of a general purpose processor and a

Although virtually any installed PID controller encompasses a derivative filter, and very frequently takes the standard ISA form, many tuning rules refer to the ideal controller structure, which is subsequently made realizable by introducing the so-called derivative filter a posteriori. Doing so can sometimes lead to undesired results. This paper investigates the matter and discusses two very simp

Many model-based tuning methods for PI(D) controllers, especially - but not exclusively - in the process control domain, employ models with delay. Doing so has advantages, basically in terms of tuning rules' simplicity, but also potential drawbacks, especially from the standpoint of performance (and sometimes robustness). This manuscript aims at initiating and fostering a critical discussion on th

A feedback-based approach to process scheduling in a single-processor system was recently proposed, that deeply relies on the control theory for its entire design. In this work, a literature benchmark is used to compare said approach to classical ones, with particular reference to the real-time case. Two are the main results. First, in the case of a schedulable process set, the proposed "control-t

In the production of beer, good temperature control of the starch mashing phase is very important for both the final product quality and the process efficiency. A precise tuning of the said control is, however, complicated by the highly non-linear nature of the process, and often also by the actuation scheme. Based on suitably extended literature models, this article shows how object-oriented mode

A closed-loop and an open-loop active vibration control technique are critically compared, accounting for the effects of finite precision arithmetic. The main result is that the relevance of such effects is pointed out and characterised, as rigorously as possible at the present state of the research, in a suitably idealised context, and with specifically devised indicators. Also, the differences b