Tidal and marine energy in the uk– identifying the future challenges for supply chain development

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current technical and operational supply chain issues surrounding the development of tidal and marine energy production in the UK. The paper outlines the market and growth potential of tidal energy production in the UK before identifying the key supply chain themes surrounding tidal energy production including an analysis of the portability and transferability of current supply chain thinking and development from other renewable energy systems such as wind turbine technology towards the development of tidal energy supply chain systems. The paper closes by identifying the major challenges that the UK supply chain must overcome in order to develop a comprehensive and robust supply chain system

Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci: beauty, politics, literature and art in early Renaissance Florence

My thesis offers the first full exploration of the literature and art associated with the Genoese noblewoman Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci (1453-1476). Simonetta has gone down in legend as a model of Sandro Botticelli, and most scholarly discussions of her significance are principally concerned with either proving or disproving this theory. My point of departure, rather, is the series of vernacular poems that were written about Simonetta just before and shortly after her early death. I use them to tell a new story, that of the transformation of the historical manna Simonetta into a cultural icon, a literary and visual construct who served the political, aesthetic and pecuniary agendas of her poets and artists. It is an account of the Florentine circles that used women to forge a collective sense of identity, of the emergence of Simonetta and her equally idealised peers as touchstones in contemporary debates regarding beauty and love, and of their corresponding lack of importance as 'real' women in the conservative republic in which they lived. In doing this, my thesis makes an important contribution to our understanding of how and why female beauty was commodified in the poetry and art of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence

Identifying the Key Attributes in an Unlabeled Event Log for Automated Process Discovery

Process mining discovers and analyzes a process model from historical event logs. The prior art methods use the key attributes of case-id, activity, and timestamp hidden in an event log as clues to discover a process model. However, a user needs to specify them manually, and this can be an exhaustive task. In this paper, we propose a two-stage key attribute identification method to avoid such a manual investigation, and thus this is a step toward fully automated process discovery. One of the challenging tasks is how to avoid exhaustive computation due to combinatorial explosion. For this, we narrow down candidates for each key attribute by using supervised machine learning in the first stage and identify the best combination of the key attributes by discovering process models and evaluating them in the second stage. Our computational complexity can be reduced from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3)$ where $N$ and $k$ are the numbers of columns and candidates we keep in the first stage, respectively, and usually $k$ is much smaller than $N$. We evaluated our method with 14 open datasets and showed that our method could identify the key attributes even with $k = 2$ for about 20 seconds for many datasets.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (Early Access version

RING-type E3 ligases: Master manipulators of E2 ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes and ubiquitination

AbstractRING finger domain and RING finger-like ubiquitin ligases (E3s), such as U-box proteins, constitute the vast majority of known E3s. RING-type E3s function together with ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes (E2s) to mediate ubiquitination and are implicated in numerous cellular processes. In part because of their importance in human physiology and disease, these proteins and their cellular functions represent an intense area of study. Here we review recent advances in RING-type E3 recognition of substrates, their cellular regulation, and their varied architecture. Additionally, recent structural insights into RING-type E3 function, with a focus on important interactions with E2s and ubiquitin, are reviewed. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Ubiquitin–Proteasome System. Guest Editors: Thomas Sommer and Dieter H. Wolf

Osteomimicry of mammary adenocarcinoma cells in vitro; increased expression of bone matrix proteins and proliferation within a 3D collagen environment.

Bone is the most common site of metastasis for breast cancer, however the reasons for this remain unclear. We hypothesise that under certain conditions mammary cells possess osteomimetic capabilities that may allow them to adapt to, and flourish within, the bone microenvironment. Mammary cells are known to calcify within breast tissue and we have recently reported a novel in vitro model of mammary mineralization using murine mammary adenocarcinoma 4T1 cells. In this study, the osteomimetic properties of the mammary adenocarcinoma cell line and the conditions required to induce mineralization were characterized extensively. It was found that exogenous organic phosphate and inorganic phosphate induce mineralization in a dose dependent manner in 4T1 cells. Ascorbic acid and dexamethasone alone have no effect. 4T1 cells also show enhanced mineralization in response to bone morphogenetic protein 2 in the presence of phosphate supplemented media. The expression of several bone matrix proteins were monitored throughout the process of mineralization and increased expression of collagen type 1 and bone sialoprotein were detected, as determined by real-time RT-PCR. In addition, we have shown for the first time that 3D collagen glycosaminoglycan scaffolds, bioengineered to represent the bone microenvironment, are capable of supporting the growth and mineralization of 4T1 adenocarcinoma cells. These 3D scaffolds represent a novel model system for the study of mammary mineralization and bone metastasis. This work demonstrates that mammary cells are capable of osteomimicry, which may ultimately contribute to their ability to preferentially metastasize to, survive within and colonize the bone microenvironment

The Democracy Cube as a Framework for Guiding Participatory Planning for Community-based IT Initiatives

Literature suggests there is a need to build more theoretically-informed understandings of the social processes implicated in participatory IT planning and implementation (Jakku & Thorburn, 2010). In this study, we explore the value of Archon Fung’s (2006) “democracy cube” as a framework for qualitatively examining the process we undertook for planning a community-based IT strategy. Our planning process involved consultations with multiple stakeholder groups across five different communities, as well as from other entities involved in disaster management, with the aim of surfacing factors that shaped local communities’ abilities to participate in disaster management activities. These factors, drawn from qualitative interviews and categorized using a SWOT framework, were subsequently translated into an IT strategy. In this paper, we revisit this process and examine it using Fung’s (2006) three dimensions of democratic participation as a lens: participant selection (our use of multiple stakeholder groups); communication and decision (our consultation process); and authority and power (how participant input drove our strategy). We use the framework to identify the specific practices that made IT planning participative, as well as those that made it nonparticipative. We also use our empirical data to explore ways that the framework can be enhanced

Supporting diverse Pacific NW marine data access needs via the NANOOS Visualization system (NVS) and data services

Serving PNW users via the ANANOOS Visualization System: Data integration and management