The regulation of metabolic coronary dilation and reactive hyperemia by nitric oxide in the isolated rat heart

grantor: University of TorontoThe aim of this study was to observe if nitric oxide couples metabolic demand to coronary flow during metabolic coronary dilation and reactive hyperemia. Isovolumically, spontaneously-beating isolated rat hearts were perfused at constant pressure (Langendorff technique) with modified Krebs-Henseleit solution. Coronary flow responses to a 10 second occlusion and to various doses of noradrenaline, adrenaline, calcium chloride and pacing-induced tachycardia were measured under control conditions, after inhibiting endothelial nitric oxide production with L-NAME and after administering L-arginine, the precursor of nitric oxide. The results show that the coronary responses for both hyperemias decreased during inhibition and increased during enhancement of nitric oxide synthesis. Although some differences exist between the two coronary responses, this is likely due to a differing mechanism of response. Thus, the data suggest that coronary flow regulation during metabolic coronary dilation and reactive hyperemia is partially mediated by nitric oxide.M.Sc

Mentality Patterns: Recurring Turns of Mind as First-Class Concerns in Software Engineering

A wide variety of sources indicate the existence of certain recurring turns of mind, usually referred to as mentality, that have significant impact in software engineering practice. Some of those turns of mind are established to the point that certain designations, for instance “not invented here” or “us and them”, have already been attributed to them. However, whereas agreement on existence is clear, there is significant ambiguity or even inconsistency in the way those are discussed and considered. In other words, there is a noticeable absence of a standardised and systematic means to define, characterize and communicate such recurring mentality elements. Consequently, existing knowledge and practices on the matter are kept on people’s minds or used in narrow contexts. Moreover, very little has been published on methods that can assist colleagues to approach the subject in their work practices in a more organized way. This thesis reports on research performed over several years, from both a researcher and practitioner perspective in the “real-life” field, and makes the following contributions: • It presents the notion of Mentality Pattern as an abstraction and representation primitive through which we can capture, make explicit, systematise and communicate such human-mentality elements. • It uses the primitive to define a Mentality Innovation Sub-process as an organized way to infuse such mentality issues as first-class concerns into software engineering practice. • It provides a support system through which a repository of mentality patterns and associated knowledge and experiences can be built and shared. Results in practice are very encouraging in what concerns the capacity of the Mentality Pattern primitive to organize different perceptions, facilitate the identification of recurring “mentalities” and act as a common communication mechanism. Moreover, there is evidence that for some mentality patterns the sub-process can drive a constructive change in the way people operate in teams. On the other hand, there exist recurring mentalities that are more persistent. Finally, based on relevant findings, this thesis calls for an intensification of research on the mentality phenomenon in software engineering and makes concrete recommendations in that respect

Mentality patterns : recurring turns of mind as first-class concerns in software engineering

A wide variety of sources indicate the existence of certain recurring turns of mind, usually referred to as mentality, that have significant impact in software engineering practice. Some of those turns of mind are established to the point that certain designations, for instance “not invented here” or “us and them”, have already been attributed to them. However, whereas agreement on existence is clear, there is significant ambiguity or even inconsistency in the way those are discussed and considered. In other words, there is a noticeable absence of a standardised and systematic means to define, characterize and communicate such recurring mentality elements. Consequently, existing knowledge and practices on the matter are kept on people’s minds or used in narrow contexts. Moreover, very little has been published on methods that can assist colleagues to approach the subject in their work practices in a more organized way. This thesis reports on research performed over several years, from both a researcher and practitioner perspective in the “real-life” field, and makes the following contributions: • It presents the notion of Mentality Pattern as an abstraction and representation primitive through which we can capture, make explicit, systematise and communicate such human-mentality elements. • It uses the primitive to define a Mentality Innovation Sub-process as an organized way to infuse such mentality issues as first-class concerns into software engineering practice. • It provides a support system through which a repository of mentality patterns and associated knowledge and experiences can be built and shared. Results in practice are very encouraging in what concerns the capacity of the Mentality Pattern primitive to organize different perceptions, facilitate the identification of recurring “mentalities” and act as a common communication mechanism. Moreover, there is evidence that for some mentality patterns the sub-process can drive a constructive change in the way people operate in teams. On the other hand, there exist recurring mentalities that are more persistent. Finally, based on relevant findings, this thesis calls for an intensification of research on the mentality phenomenon in software engineering and makes concrete recommendations in that respect.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The coordination development environment

tion (e.g., a call to a method of one participant), and a rule body stating what to do in that case. Contracts are also unaware of the existence of other contracts. This facilitates enormously incremental system evolution, because explicit dependencies between the di#erent parts of the system are kept to a minimum, and new contracts can be defined and added to the system at any time (even run-time), thus coping with changes that were not predicted at system design time. Consider the banking domain, in which ATX Software has several years of experience. Usually, there is an object class account with an attribute balance and a method withdrawal with parameter amount. In a typical implementation one can assign the guard balance#amount restricting this method to occur in states in which the amount to be withdrawn can be covered by the balance. However, as explained in [2], assigning this guard to withdrawal can be seen as part of the specification of a business requirement and not necess

Breakthroughs in the treatment of advanced squamous-cell NSCLC: not the neglected sibling anymore?

During the last years, translational research has contributed in many advances in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) discovering genetic alternations or recognizing the immunoescape and neo-angiogenesis of lung cancer. Although the majority of these advances took place in the non-squamous histological subtype, therapeutic options for patients diagnosed with advanced squamous cell lung cancer (SqCLC) have been also enriched significantly with the addition of nab-paclitaxel in the conventional chemotherapy; the introduction of necitumumab, afatinib and erlotinib in the inhibition of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) axis and of ramucirumab in the inhibition of VEGF-induced angiogenesis and last with the approvals of nivolumab, pembrolizumab atezolizumab and durvalumab soon in the promising field of immunotherapies. Agents targeted various other pathways including FGFR, IGF-1, PI3K, CDK4/6, MET and PARP inhibitors are under investigation in order to open new prospects in the treatment of SqCLC. In this review, we present all published data that led to recent approvals for the treatment of advanced SqCLC and all ongoing clinical trials that keep searching for new molecular targets following a more-personalized approach

Breakthroughs in the treatment of advanced squamous-cell NSCLC: not the neglected sibling anymore?

During the last years, translational research has contributed in many advances in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) discovering genetic alternations or recognizing the immunoescape and neo-angiogenesis of lung cancer. Although the majority of these advances took place in the non-squamous histological subtype, therapeutic options for patients diagnosed with advanced squamous cell lung cancer (SqCLC) have been also enriched significantly with the addition of nab-paclitaxel in the conventional chemotherapy; the introduction of necitumumab, afatinib and erlotinib in the inhibition of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) axis and of ramucirumab in the inhibition of VEGF-induced angiogenesis and last with the approvals of nivolumab, pembrolizumab atezolizumab and durvalumab soon in the promising field of immunotherapies. Agents targeted various other pathways including FGFR, IGF-1, PI3K, CDK4/6, MET and PARP inhibitors are under investigation in order to open new prospects in the treatment of SqCLC. In this review, we present all published data that led to recent approvals for the treatment of advanced SqCLC and all ongoing clinical trials that keep searching for new molecular targets following a more-personalized approach

Using Coordination Contracts for Evolving Business Rules

This experience paper reports on the use of coordination contracts in a project for a credit recovery company. We have designed and implemented a framework that allows users to define several business rules according to pre-defined parameters. However, some rules require changes to the services provided by the system. For these, we use coordination contracts to intercept the calls to the underlying services and superpose whatever behaviour is imposed by the business rules applicable to that service. Such contracts can be added and deleted at run-time. Hence, our framework includes a configurator that, whenever a service is called, checks the applicable rules and configures the service with the given parameters and contracts, before proceeding with the call. Using this framework we have also devised a way to generate rule-dependent SQL code for batch-oriented services