An Agent Based Architecture ForComponent-Based Software Development

Today\u27s companies are facing major changes in their organizations due to the changing environment in which they operate. They have to decrease the costs, decrease time to market, and improve quality. These imperatives have led to changes in the placement and role of IS department in the organization (Fried, 1995). Together with the recent advances in communication technology and powerful workstations, end-users have become more involved with the application development. Besides, the business processes change so fast that the traditional SDLC is too slow to keep up with these fluctuating requirements in the application domain. The need for rapid application development to respond to users\u27 changing needs, among the other mentioned trends, encourages the use of reusable software components. In (ATP, 1995), it is stated that at the level of vertical-market products, software design costs are generally $1 million to$10 million with near zero cost of reproducing additional units, and the typical production quantity is one. Reusable software components help organizations recover costs, improve quality through specialization, and develop rapidly from existing components

Determination Of The Features Of Instructional Computer Games

The ultimate goal of computer based education is to design an education-application which interactively presents all the relevant information in the best possible way. Imagine an expert systemwith all the advanced capabilities presents the information by using all sorts of different media, including virtual reality, accesses a rich knowledgebase, and interacts with students as an expert in the field. This kind of a system would provide the knowledge and experience of the best teacher to a large group of people. Today, the use of computers in education is generally an effort to imitate the conventional education by using the computer. But it may be necessary to adapt a totally different approach in order to fully utilize the capabilities of a computer. One of the best ways to utilize the power of the computers in education may be to present the instructional material in the form of an instructional computer game. Computer games can enhance learning while affecting the motivation and retention of knowledge and skills positively. In the context of this paper, learning is defined as enhancing the learning outcomes proposed by Gagné (1985). A game becomes an intentional education tool when the rules which govern the play of the game demand the development and use of educationally valuable skills, the acquisition of important knowledge, or exploration of a worthwhile world of experience

Publication and Citation Analysis of Medical Doctors' Residency Master's Theses Involving Animal Experiments on Rats in Turkey

The number of non-human animals used in research has increased in line with advances in medical technology, although it has previously been shown that these experiments demonstrate poor human utility. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of animal studies on rats that were performed as part of medical doctors' residency master's theses prepared in Turkey between January 2006 and December 2015. The number of thesis-derived published papers from each year, as well as the subsequent citation rate of these papers, was determined. Results from 34% of the 656 analysed studies (226/656) were published as papers in PubMed-indexed journals. These 226 studies got 1803 subsequent citations in total. Citation counts were statistically significantly different in 2009 and 2010, as compared to 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Previous studies showed that the usual main objective for carrying out animal studies in Turkey was the preparation of a thesis or the furthering of an academic career (i.e. personal self-interest). In the current study, the publication rate and the number of subsequent citations of these thesis-derived papers were both low, and thus, the contribution of these animal studies to scientific progress is doubtful. It is recommended that institutional research ethics committees should be much more highly selective in approving the use of animals for the purposes of student thesis preparation

RECONSTRUCTION OF A FULL-THICKNESS COLLAGEN-BASED HUMAN ORAL MUCOSAL EQUIVALENT

Tissue engineered human oral mucosa has the potential to be applied to the closure of surgical wounds after tissue deficits due to facial trauma, malignant lesion surgery or preposthetic procedure. It can also be used to elucidate the biology and pathology of oral mucosa and as a model alternative to animals for safety testing of oral care products. Using the technology previously developed in our laboratory for the production of a skin equivalent, we were able to reconstruct a nonkeratinized full-thickness human oral mucosal equivalent closely mimicking human native oral mucosa. The successive coculture of human lamina propria fibroblasts and human oral epithelial cells isolated from the nonkeratinized region of oral cavity in a porous collagen–glycosaminoglycan (GAG)–chitosan scaffold gave rise to a lamina propria equivalent (LPE) and then to an oral mucosa equivalent (OME). The results of the histology, immunohistology and transmission electron microscopy of this OME demonstrated the presence of a nonkeratinized pluristratified and differentiated epithelium as in native nonkeratinized human oral mucosa expressing both K13 and K3/76. This epithelium was firmly anchored to the LPE by a continuous and ultrastructurally well-organized basement membrane. In the LPE, fibroblasts synthesized new extracellular matrix where the average collagen fibre diameter was 28.4 nm, close to that of native oral mucosa. The proliferative capacity of the basal cells was demonstrated by the expression of Ki6

In Vivo and In Vitro Quantitative Analysis of Neural Crest Cell Migration

The neural crest is an embryonic cell population induced at the border of the neural plate from where it delaminates and migrates long distances across the embryo. Due to its extraordinary migratory capabilities, the neural crest has become a powerful system to study cellular and molecular aspects of collective and single cell migration both in vivo and in vitro. Here we provide detailed protocols used to perform quantitative analysis of molecular and cellular aspects of Xenopus laevis neural crest cell migration, both in vivo and in vitro