In deduplication-based backup systems, the chunks of each backup are physically scattered after deduplication, which causes a challenging fragmentation problem. The fragmentation decreases restore performance, and results in invalid chunks becoming physically scattered in different containers after users delete backups. Existing solutions attempt to rewrite duplicate but fragmented chunks to im...

The Brazilian Amazon in the past decades has been suffering severe landscape alteration, mainly due to anthropogenic activities, such as road building and land clearing for agriculture. Using a high-resolution time series of land cover maps (classified as mature forest, non-forest, secondary forest) spanning from 1984 through 2011, and four uncorrelated fragmentation metrics (edge density, clum...

The ionization energy of gas-phase deoxyribose was determined using tunable vacuum ultraviolet synchrotron radiation coupled to an effusive thermal source. Adiabatic and vertical ionization energies of the ground and first four excited states of α-pyranose, the structure that dominates in the gas phase, were calculated using high-level electronic structure methods. An appearance energy of 9.1(±...

We propose a generic framework for storage support in a distributed environment. This comprises a set of storage abstractions and storage policies: data clusters, cluster containers, and container domains, supporting sharing, caching, and replication. These abstractions and these policies are structured as fragmented objects (FOs), such that each storage system designer can ooer the appropriate...

The potential of untargeted metabolomics to answer important questions across the life sciences is hindered because of a paucity of computational tools that enable extraction of key biochemically relevant information. Available tools focus on using mass spectrometry fragmentation spectra to identify molecules whose behavior suggests they are relevant to the system under study. Unfortunately, fr...

BACKGROUND Assembly of species into communities following human disturbance (e.g., deforestation, fragmentation) may be governed by spatial (e.g., dispersal) or environmental (e.g., niche partitioning) mechanisms. Variation partitioning has been used to broadly disentangle spatial and environmental mechanisms, and approaches utilizing functional and phylogenetic characteristics of communities h...