Energizing the Nexus of Corporate Knowledge: A Portal Toward the Virtual Organization

In the age of virtual organizations, managers and experts cease to be lone custodians of the corporate knowl- edge base. Knowledge must be shared across cultural and time-space boundaries to create strategic frontiers in global and virtual enterprises. However, we believe that organizations have barely scratched the surface of the “knowledge sharing game” played across virtual environments. In technology-based organizations, for example, technical knowledge must be meticulously captured and conveyed in a highly cognitive manner to have substantive benefits in raising the competence and productivity of globally-dispersed workers. In this light, we contend that richer forms of knowledge/media representations, such as virtual reality (VR) and 3D imagery, could be creatively utilized to enable improvements in knowledge management, especially within virtual workspace. We further argue that organizational learning evolves to a higher level only when knowl- edge management is radically improved and effectively exploits “organizational memory” with the aid of IT (Stein and Zwass 1995). This paper explores how a technology-based firm, APV Anhydro, has extracted technical knowledge from its experts and creatively presented such knowledge in rich media representations using VR/3D technologies. This enabled APV to share rich technical knowledge across its global marketing operations, and as a consequence, accelerated its organizational learning process

The Effects of Nanoparticles on the Specific Heat Capacity of Molten Salts

The desire to increase the efficiency of existing renewable energy sources has been thoroughly researched over the past years. This meta study aimed to investigate existing methods used by previous researchers to increase the Specific Heat Capacity of Molten Salt used for Concentrated Solar Power Plants. Investigations into nanoparticles were explored because of the effect of particle size and concentration can potentially increase the specific heat capacity of the molten salt. Numerous nanoparticles have shown to improve the thermal properties such as Silica (SiO2), Alumina (Al2O3), Titania (TiO2). Our summation was that the addition of nanoparticles into Molten Salts shows an increase in desired thermal properties of the Molten Salts. An efficiency increase of up to 28% was noted in the SHC (Cp) of the Molten Salts when Nanoparticles of 60nm were introduced

Microchamber Cultures of Bladder Cancer: A Platform for Characterizing Drug Responsiveness and Resistance in PDX and Primary Cancer Cells.

Precision cancer medicine seeks to target the underlying genetic alterations of cancer; however, it has been challenging to use genetic profiles of individual patients in identifying the most appropriate anti-cancer drugs. This spurred the development of patient avatars; for example, patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) established in mice and used for drug exposure studies. However, PDXs are associated with high cost, long development time and low efficiency of engraftment. Herein we explored the use of microfluidic devices or microchambers as simple and low-cost means of maintaining bladder cancer cells over extended periods of times in order to study patterns of drug responsiveness and resistance. When placed into 75 µm tall microfluidic chambers, cancer cells grew as ellipsoids reaching millimeter-scale dimeters over the course of 30 days in culture. We cultured three PDX and three clinical patient specimens with 100% success rate. The turn-around time for a typical efficacy study using microchambers was less than 10 days. Importantly, PDX-derived ellipsoids in microchambers retained patterns of drug responsiveness and resistance observed in PDX mice and also exhibited in vivo-like heterogeneity of tumor responses. Overall, this study establishes microfluidic cultures of difficult-to-maintain primary cancer cells as a useful tool for precision cancer medicine

The Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) Graft for Portacaval Interposition: An Experimental Observation

In an attempt to determine the efficacy of the polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) graft as a portacaval interposition shunt, 26 mongrel dogs were randomly selected to receive a side-to-side shunt with a 6 mm, 8 mm, or 10 mm PTFE graft after portal hypertension had been created by hepatic vein ligation. The dogs were clinically observed, and if they showed signs of graft occlusion, they were reexplored surgically. The 6 mm graft had a 0% patency rate; the 8 mm graft had a 28.6% patency rate; and the 10 mm graft had an 87.5% patency rate. Histological examinations revealed adequate incorporation of the graft, formation of an endothelial layer, and absence of a thick intimal layer. In this experimental model, the PTFE graft served as a satisfactory portacaval interposition shunt when the 10 mm graft was used

FingerSlide: Investigating Passive Haptic Sliding As A Tacton Channel

The haptic sensation of sliding a surface under a probing finger can be used to convey surface information or coded data to the user. In this paper, we investigate users' ability to discern different sliding profiles based on the velocity and direction of sliding for use as haptic-tactons. We built FingerSlide, a novel haptic device which can position and control moving surfaces under a user's finger and used this to run two independent studies. The first study investigates if users can identify the direction of sliding at different velocities. The second study investigates if the users can distinguish a difference between two velocities. Our results show a faster response for higher velocities in the direction study and high error rates in identifying differences in the direction study. We discuss these results and infer design considerations for haptic devices that use the sliding effect to convey information

Flip Distance Between Triangulations of a Planar Point Set is APX-Hard

In this work we consider triangulations of point sets in the Euclidean plane, i.e., maximal straight-line crossing-free graphs on a finite set of points. Given a triangulation of a point set, an edge flip is the operation of removing one edge and adding another one, such that the resulting graph is again a triangulation. Flips are a major way of locally transforming triangular meshes. We show that, given a point set $S$ in the Euclidean plane and two triangulations $T_1$ and $T_2$ of $S$, it is an APX-hard problem to minimize the number of edge flips to transform $T_1$ to $T_2$.Comment: A previous version only showed NP-completeness of the corresponding decision problem. The current version is the one of the accepted manuscrip

Clinical brca1/2 reversion analysis identifies hotspot mutations and predicted neoantigens associated with therapy resistance

Reversion mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 are associated with resistance to PARP inhibitors and platinum. To better understand the nature of these mutations, we collated, codified, and analyzed more than 300 reversions. This identified reversion “hotspots” and “deserts” in regions encoding the N and C terminus, respectively, of BRCA2, suggesting that pathogenic mutations in these regions may be at higher or lower risk of reversion. Missense and splice-site pathogenic mutations in BRCA1/2 also appeared less likely to revert than truncating mutations. Most rever-sions were <100 bp deletions. Although many deletions exhibited microhomology, this was not universal, suggesting that multiple DNA-repair processes cause reversion. Finally, we found that many reversions were predicted to encode immunogenic neopeptides, suggesting a route to the treatment of reverted disease. As well as providing a freely available database for the collation of future reversion cases, these observations have implications for how drug resistance might be managed in BRCA-mutant cancers. SIGNIFICANCE: Reversion mutations in BRCA genes are a major cause of clinical platinum and PARP inhibitor resistance. This analysis of all reported clinical reversions suggests that the position of BRCA2 mutations affects the risk of reversion. Many reversions are also predicted to encode tumor neoantigens, providing a potential route to targeting resistance