The Time-Frequency and Time-Scale communities have recently developed a large number of overcomplete waveform dictionaries. Decomposition into overcomplete systems is not unique, and several methods for decomposition have been proposed -including the Method of Frames, Matching Pursuit, and, for special dictionaries, the Best Orthogonal Basis.Basis Pursuit is a principle for decomposing a signal into an "optimal" superposition of dictionary elements -where optimal means having the smallest 11 norm of coefficients among all such decompositions. We give examples exhibiting several advantages over the Method of Frames, Matching Pursuit and Best Ortho Basis, including better sparsity, and super-resolution.Basis Pursuit in highly overcomplete dictionaries leads to large-scale optimization problems. We obtain reasonable success with a primal-dual logarithmic barrier method and conjugate gradient solver.

Distributed storage systems for large clusters typically use replication to provide reliability. Recently, erasure codes have been used to reduce the large storage overhead of three-replicated systems. Reed-Solomon codes are the standard design choice and their high repair cost is often considered an unavoidable price to pay for high storage efficiency and high reliability. This paper shows how to overcome this limitation. We present a novel family of erasure codes that are efficiently repairable and offer higher reliability compared to Reed-Solomon codes. We show analytically that our codes are optimal on a recently identified tradeoff between locality and minimum distance. We implement our new codes in Hadoop HDFS and compare to a currently deployed HDFS module that uses Reed-Solomon codes. Our modified HDFS implementation shows a reduction of approximately 2× on the repair disk I/O and repair network traffic. The disadvantage of the new coding scheme is that it requires 14% more storage compared to Reed-Solomon codes, an overhead shown to be information theoretically optimal to obtain locality. Because the new codes repair failures faster, this provides higher reliability, which is orders of magnitude higher compared to replication.

The use of alcohol by adolescents is a growing problem and has become an important research topic in the etiology of the alcohol use disorders. A key component of this research has been the development of animal models of adolescent alcohol consumption and alcohol response. Due to their extended period of adolescence, rhesus macaques are especially well-suited for modeling alcoholrelated phenotypes that contribute to the adolescent propensity for alcohol consumption. In this review, we discuss studies from our laboratory that have investigated both the initial response to acute alcohol administration and the consumption of alcohol in voluntary self-administration paradigms in adolescent rhesus macaques. These studies confirm that adolescence is a time of dynamic change both behaviorally and physiologically, and that alcohol response and alcohol consumption are influenced by life history variables such as age, sex, and adverse early experience in the form of peer-rearing. Furthermore, genetic variants that alter functioning of the serotonin, endogenous opioid, and corticotropin releasing hormone systems are shown to influence both physiological and behavioral outcomes, in some cases interacting with early experience to indicate gene by environment interactions. These findings highlight several of the pathways involved in alcohol response and consumption, namely reward, behavioral dyscontrol, and vulnerability to stress, and demonstrate a role for these pathways during the early stages of alcohol exposure in adolescence.

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