Conflict Consulting Clinic as a Method of Practical Training of Humanities Students

Conflictology as an educational program aimed at training specialists in the field of conflict resolution includes not only theoretical aspects, it is focused on modern practice. This stems both from the interdisciplinary subject field of conflict management, which combines the fundamental and applied components, as well as the needs of the labor market and the students themselves. At the same time, being in the circle of social sciences and humanities, conflict management faces the traditional challenges for this industry, associated with the most relevant forms of organizing students’ practical work. The article analyzes the unique experience of the clinical form of organizing the practice of students majoring in conflictology, which has been implemented at St. Petersburg State University for 10 years. The practice of students, organized in the form of a conflict consulting clinic, first of all solves the problem of adapting students to the conditions and requirements of the practical activity of a conflictologist. The authors focus on the issues of correlating the clinical form to the requirements of the newest educational standard. The main forms and stages of students’ work in the clinic are presented. The article describes the opportunities of students in acquiring the skills and abilities in conflict resolution, organizing and conducting the negotiation process, mastering conflict management strategies. The authors conclude that the conflict consulting clinic is a complex pedagogical methodology that includes both in-class and out-of-class forms of student practical activity in working with real cases based on client requests and promoting mediation, as well as teacher supervision with rhythmically organized discussion and correction of students’ actions, which ensures due professionalism and quality services provided by students to external consumers

Realising a species-selective double well with multiple-radiofrequency-dressed potentials

Techniques to manipulate the individual constituents of an ultracold mixture are key to investigating impurity physics. In this work, we confine a mixture of the hyperfine ground states of Rb-87 in a double-well potential. The potential is produced by dressing the atoms with multiple radiofrequencies. The amplitude and phase of each frequency component of the dressing field are individually controlled to independently manipulate each species. Furthermore, we verify that our mixture of hyperfine states is collisionally stable, with no observable inelastic loss.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Loss of the mammal-specific tectorial membrane component CEA cell adhesion molecule 16 (CEACAM16) leads to hearing impairment at low and high frequencies

The vertebrate-restricted carcinoembryonic antigen gene family evolves extremely rapidly. Among their widely expressed members, the mammal-specific, secreted CEACAM16 is exceptionally well conserved and specifically expressed in the inner ear. To elucidate a potential auditory function we inactivated murine Ceacam16 by homologous recombination. In young Ceacam16-/- mice the hearing threshold for frequencies below 10 kHz and above 22 kHz was raised. This hearing impairment progressed with age. A similar phenotype is observed in hearing-impaired members of Family 1070 with non-syndromic autosomal dominant hearing loss (DFNA4) who carry a missense mutation in CEACAM16. CEACAM16 was found in interdental and Deiters cells and was deposited in the tectorial membrane of the cochlea between postnatal day 12 and 15, when hearing starts in mice. In cochlear sections of Ceacam16-/- mice tectorial membranes were significantly more often stretched out as compared to wild-type mice where they were mostly contracted and detached from the outer hair cells. Homotypic cell sorting observed after ectopic cell surface expression of the carboxy-terminal immunoglobulin variable-like N2 domain of CEACAM16 indicated that CEACAM16 can interact in trans. Furthermore, Western blot analyses of membrane-bound CEACAM16 under reducing and non-reducing conditions demonstrated oligomerization via unpaired cysteines. Taken together, CEACAM16 probably can form higher order structures with other tectorial membrane proteins such as α-tectorin and β-tectorin and influences the physical properties of the tectorial membrane. Evolution of CEACAM16 might have been an important step for the specialization of the mammalian cochlea allowing hearing over an extended frequency range

Conflict Potential on Account of Media Extraterritoriality

In the context of the media sphere, people seemed to be simple consumers of a discourse overflowing with symbols. The need to consume those types of products is imposed by the media industry itself, which totally confirms itself by offering satisfaction. The authors of this article set themselves the task of describing the conflict potential of modern media, which have an extraterritorial character and act as tools for constructing a conflict of values and conflict management. The authors highlighted the vitality of the fact that the conflict of values and identity is one of the most severe forms of actualization of contradictions between the subjects of conflict interaction.В контексте медиасферы люди рассматриваются, как потребители дискурса, переполненного символами. Потребность потребления такого рода продуктов накладывается самой медиаиндустрией, тотально себя самоутверждающей путем предложения удовлетворения. Авторы данной статьи ставили перед собой задачу описания конфликтного потенциала современных медиа, имеющих экстерриториальный характер и выступающих в качестве инструментов конструирования конфликта ценностей, управления конфликтом. Авторы отмечают, что конфликт ценностей и идентичности является одной из самых жестких форм актуализации противоречий между субъектами конфликтного взаимодействия

Streamlined vessels for speedboats: Macro modifications of shark skin design applications

Functional properties of shark denticles have caught the attention of engineers and scientist today due to the hydrodynamic effects of its skin surface roughness. The skin of a fast swimming shark reveals riblet structures that help to reduce skin friction drag, shear stresses, making its movement to be more efficient and faster. Inspired by the structure of the shark skin denticles, our team has conducted a study on alternative on improving the hydrodynamic design of marine vessels by applying the simplified version of shark skin skin denticles on the surface hull of the vessels. Models used for this study are constructed and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations are then carried out to predict the effectiveness of the hydrodynamic effects of the biomimetic shark skins on those models. Interestingly, the numerical calculated results obtained shows that the presence of biomimetic shark skin implemented on the vessels give improvements in the maximum speed as well as reducing the drag force experience by the vessels. The pattern of the wave generated post cruising area behind the vessels can also be observed to reduce the wakes and eddies. Theoretically, reduction of drag force provides a more efficient vessel with a better cruising speed. To further improve on this study, the authors are now actively arranging an experimental procedure in order to verify the numerical results obtained by CFD. The experimental test will be carried out using an 8 metre flow channel provided by University Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia. © 2018 Author(s)

Micro-Needle with Polygonal Structure of Micro-Channel for Stress and Blood or Drug Flow Optimization

This paper presents micro-needle with different tip and inner structure of the needle for optimizations of pain stresses and drug or blood deliveries. The micro-needle comes with several design's parameters of length ranging from 5 mm to 50 mm and diameter ranging from 100 µm to 200 µm. A hollow micro-needle with four different tip designs which are 10°, D3-2, D6 and Quadruple are also designed to optimize the pain stresses parameters. In order to improve the flow deliveries, the inner structure of the channel is modified into various polygonal shape which is square, hexagon and dodecagon. It shows that, having less contact surface area between the skin and micro-needle's tip and polygonal shape of inner channel has better performance for both of the objectives. These feasible region of average velocity and stress of the micro-needle have satisfied in determining the best design for tip and inner channel of the micro-needle under certain conditions and constraints. The three-dimensional geometry study had improved the insertions performance and efficiencies in painless drug or blood deliveries

Biomarkers in Liquid Biopsies for Prediction of Early Liver Metastases in Pancreatic Cancer

Individualized diagnostics approaches in modern cancer therapy require predictive and prognostic biomarkers that are easily accessible and stratify patients for optimal and individualized treatment. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is still a life-threatening disease mainly because of its late diagnosis in advanced stages or rapid progress even in patients with curative resection of the primary tumor. Moreover, patients with liver metastases exhibit an even worse prognosis. Hence, this retrospective multi-center study aims to identify biomarkers in perioperative serum of PDAC patients predicting early liver metastasis. A highly sensitive biomarker analysis was performed using two different methodological approaches. Olink® analysis, which was also used to validate LEGENDplexTM results, identified significant differences in proteins involved in chemotaxis and migration of immune cells as well as cell growth in serum of patients with early versus late onset of liver metastasis. Further studies with larger cohorts are required to validate these findings for clinical translation

Small diameter helical vascular scaffolds support endothelial cell survival

There is an acute clinical need for small-diameter vascular grafts as a treatment option for cardiovascular disease. Here, we used an intelligent design system to recreate the natural structure and hemodynamics of small arteries. Nano-fibrous tubular scaffolds were fabricated from blends of polyvinyl alcohol and gelatin with inner helices to allow a near physiological spiral flow profile, using the electrospinning technique. Human coronary artery endothelial cells (ECs) were seeded on the inner surface and their viability, distribution, gene expression of mechanosensitive and adhesion molecules compared to that in conventional scaffolds, under static and flow conditions. We show significant improvement in cell distribution in helical vs conventional scaffolds (94% ± 9% vs 82% ± 7.2%; p<0.05) with improved responsiveness to shear stress and better ability to withhold physiological pressures. Our helical vascular scaffold provides an improved niche for EC growth and may be attractive as a potential small diameter vascular graft

Cell-Sized confinement in microspheres accelerates the reaction of gene expression

Cell-sized water-in-oil droplet covered by a lipid layer was used to understand how lipid membranes affect biochemical systems in living cells. Here, we report a remarkable acceleration of gene expression in a cell-sized water-in-oil droplet entrapping a cell-free translation system to synthesize GFP (green fluorescent protein). The production rate of GFP (VGFP) in each droplet remained almost constant at least for on the order of a day, which implies 0th-order reaction kinetics. Interestingly, VGFP was inversely proportional to radius of droplets (R) when R is under 50 μm, and VGFP in droplets with R ∼ 10 μm was more than 10 times higher than that in the bulk. The acceleration rates of GFP production in cell-sized droplets strongly depended on the lipid types. These results demonstrate that the membrane surface has the significant effect to facilitate protein production, especially when the scale of confinement is on the order of cell-size