The qnr genes are plasmid-borne fluoroquinolone-resistance determinants widespread in Enterobacteriaceae. Three families of qnr determinants (qnrA, B and S) have been described, but little is known about their expression and regulation. Two new determinants, qnrC and qnrD, have been found recently. Here, we describe the characterization of the qnrB2 promoter and the identification of a LexA-bin...

The term Systems of Systems (SoS) has recently been introduced in the systems engineering domain to describe a new class of systems exhibiting a number of attributes such as complexity, autonomy, and geographic dispersion. The (UK) Ministry of Defence Architectural Framework (MODAF) is a prominent framework used in the defence domain. MODAF is organised in views, each of which focuses on a sing...

Among the various image quality assessment (IQA) tasks, blind IQA (BIQA) is particularly challenging due to the absence of knowledge about the reference image and distortion type. Features based on natural scene statistics (NSS) have been successfully used in BIQA, while the quality relevance of the feature plays an essential role to the quality prediction performance. Motivated by the fact tha...

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL V.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the servi...

We compare and contrast the low-temperature magnetotransport properties of ultrathin, insulating Be films with and without spin-orbit scattering SOS . Beryllium films have very little intrinsic SOS, but by “dusting” them with submonolayer coverages of Au, one can introduce a well-controlled SOS rate. Pure Be films with sheet resistance R RQ exhibit a low-temperature negative magnetoresistance M...

We present SOS, a new operating system for mote-class sensor nodes that supports run-time reconfiguration of the embedded software. The architecture of SOS consists of dynamically-loaded modules and a statically compiled kernel (ref. figure 1). An application in SOS is composed of one or more modules interacting via asynchronous messages or function calls. Modules are position independent binar...

In this paper, a transmission-distribution systems flexibility market is introduced, in which system operators (SOs) jointly procure from different to meet their needs (balancing and congestion management) using common market. This is, then, formulated as cooperative game aiming at identifying stable efficient split of costs the procured among participating SOs incentivize cooperation. The non-...

ions and models help leaders and managers know what details can be “left in the design space”. However, there is a danger. Box observed that “all models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box, 1979). The architect must utilize this fact in a delicate balancing act. In one way, choosing models that managers may already know will help determine which details are unimportant to the given level of di...

ions and models help leaders and managers know what details can be “left in the design space”. However, there is a danger. Box observed that “all models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box, 1979). The architect must utilize this fact in a delicate balancing act. In one way, choosing models that managers may already know will help determine which details are unimportant to the given level of di...