Search results for "VIP"

Relation of fruit color, elongation, hardness, and volume to the infestation of olive cultivars by the olive fruit fly, Bactrocera oleae

2012

The susceptibility of olive cultivars to the olive fruit fly, Bactrocera oleae (Rossi) (Diptera: Tephritidae), has seldom been studied. This article examines factors associated with olive fruit fly infestation of 16 commonly planted Sicilian olive cultivars. Total infestation data were simultaneously correlated with categorical and quantitative factors using ordinal logistic regression. When all factors were included in the analysis, year, sampling date, cultivar, and fruit color were highly significant, but the quantitative factors fruit volume, fruit elongation, and fruit hardness were not. When the analysis was repeated excluding cultivar, all quantitative factors were significant, and e…

The Fevipiprant Phase IIIb Systemic Corticosteroid Avoidance Study: SHIELD

2019

Amino acid sequence and homology modeling of obtustatin, a novel non-RGD-containing short disintegrin isolated from the venom of Vipera lebetina obtu…

2003

Disintegrins represent a group of cysteine-rich peptides occurring in Crotalidae and Viperidae snake venoms, and are potent antagonists of several integrin receptors. A novel disintegrin, obtustatin, was isolated from the venom of the Vipera lebetina obtusa viper, and represents the first potent and selective inhibitor of the binding of integrin alpha(1)beta(1) to collagen IV. The primary structure of obtustatin contains 41 amino acids and is the shortest disintegrin described to date. Obtustatin shares the pattern of cysteines of other short disintegrins. However, in contrast to known short disintegrins, the integrin-binding loop of obtustatin is two residues shorter and does not express t…

Dynamic aspects of industrial middleware architectures

2011

Financial aspects of business models : reducing costs and increasing revenues in a cloud context

2018

The emergence of cloud computing induces opportunities for software vendors and for organizations with great storage needs. Indeed, software companies have begun to adopt cloud technologies and offer their software as a service to customers instead of selling software products. As a result, their revenue models have changed, and the diversity and complexity of the resulting pricing models have created both opportunities and impediments to competition in the market. On the other hand, due to the exponentially growing volume of digital content, organizations have an increasing demand for storage and need to choose between private, public, and hybrid storage solutions. This decision requires c…

Adopting encryption to protect confidential data in public clouds: A review of solutions, implementation challenges and alternatives

2015

A shift towards use of public cloud services is ongoing and more and more enterprises will start to use them in the near future. As public cloud services certainly promise to deliver many benefits, this new way of delivering services also introduces new types of risks. Due to the NSA’s surveillance programs, non-US enterprises need to reassess the risks of public cloud services provided by US companies and look for available solutions to protect their confidential data transferred and stored in the cloud. Encryption is seen as a solution to help enterprises full fill the requirements related to security and privacy, but is often challenging to implement. Encryption has its own security prob…

Protective coloration of European vipers throughout the predation sequence

2020

Antipredator adaptations in the form of animal coloration are common and often multifunctional. European vipers (genus Vipera) have a characteristic dorsal zigzag pattern, which has been shown to serve as a warning signal to potential predators. At the same time, it has been suggested to decrease detection risk, and to cause a motion dazzle or flicker-fusion effect during movement. We tested these hypotheses by asking whether (1) the zigzag pattern decreases detection risk and (2) the detection is dependent on the base coloration (grey or brown) or the snake's posture (coiled, basking form or S-shaped, active form). Additionally, (3) we measured the fleeing speed of adders, Vipera berus, an…

Adversarial Attack’s Impact on Machine Learning Model in Cyber-Physical Systems

2020

Deficiency of correctly implemented and robust defence leaves Internet of Things devices vulnerable to cyber threats, such as adversarial attacks. A perpetrator can utilize adversarial examples when attacking Machine Learning models used in a cloud data platform service. Adversarial examples are malicious inputs to ML-models that provide erroneous model outputs while appearing to be unmodified. This kind of attack can fool the classifier and can prevent ML-models from generalizing well and from learning high-level representation; instead, the ML-model learns superficial dataset regularity. This study focuses on investigating, detecting, and preventing adversarial attacks towards a cloud dat…

Consistency of Targeted Metatranscriptomics and Morphological Characterization of Phytoplankton Communities

2020

The composition of phytoplankton community is the basis for environmental monitoring and assessment of the ecological status of aquatic ecosystems. Community composition studies of phytoplankton have been based on time-consuming and expertise-demanding light microscopy analyses. Molecular methods have the potential to replace microscopy, but the high copy number variation of ribosomal genes and the lack of universal primers for simultaneous amplification of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genes complicate data interpretation. In this study, we used our previously developed directional primer-independent high-throughput sequencing (HTS) approach to analyze 16S and 18S rRNA community structures. C…

Resembling a Viper: Implications of Mimicry for Conservation of the Endangered Smooth Snake

2014

The phenomenon of Batesian mimicry, where a palatable animal gains protection against predation by resembling an unpalatable model, has been a core interest of evolutionary biologists for 150 years. An extensive range of studies has focused on revealing mechanistic aspects of mimicry (shared education and generalization of predators) and the evolutionary dynamics of mimicry systems (co-operation vs. conflict) and revealed that protective mimicry is widespread and is important for individual fitness. However, according to our knowledge, there are no case studies where mimicry theories have been applied to conservation of mimetic species. Theoretically, mimicry affects, for example, frequency…