Beryllium fastener technology

Program was conducted to develop, produce, and test optimum-configuration, beryllium prestressed and blind fasteners. The program was carried out in four phases - phase 1, feasibility study, phase 2, development, phase 3, evaluation of beryllium alloys, and phase 4, fabrication and testing

Extending the theory of Owicki and Gries with a logic of progress

This paper describes a logic of progress for concurrent programs. The logic is based on that of UNITY, molded to fit a sequential programming model. Integration of the two is achieved by using auxiliary variables in a systematic way that incorporates program counters into the program text. The rules for progress in UNITY are then modified to suit this new system. This modification is however subtle enough to allow the theory of Owicki and Gries to be used without change

The algorithmics of solitaire-like games

One-person solitaire-like games are explored with a view to using them in teaching algorithmic problem solving. The key to understanding solutions to such games is the identification of invariant properties of polynomial arithmetic. We demonstrate this via three case studies: solitaire itself, tiling problems and a novel class of one-person games. The known classification of states of the game of (peg) solitaire into 16 equivalence classes is used to introduce the relevance of polynomial arithmetic. Then we give a novel algebraic formulation of the solution to a class of tiling problems. Finally, we introduce an infinite class of challenging one-person games, which we call ``replacement-set games'', inspired by earlier work by Chen and Backhouse on the relation between cyclotomic polynomials and generalisations of the seven-trees-in-one type isomorphism. We present an algorithm to solve arbitrary instances of replacement-set games and we show various ways of constructing infinite (solvable) classes of replacement-set games

Relationship of glycaemic control and hypoglycaemic episodes to 4-year cardiovascular outcomes in people with type 2 diabetes starting insulin

AIMS: To examine the relationships between glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) and cardiovascular (CV) events in people beginning insulin in routine clinical practice in Europe, North America and Asia in a non-interventional study, the Cardiovascular Risk Evaluation in people with Type 2 Diabetes on Insulin Therapy (CREDIT) study. METHODS: Data on 2999 people were collected prospectively over 4 years from physician reports. The primary outcome was the composite of stroke or myocardial infarction (MI) or CV-specific death. Events were blindly adjudicated. The relative hazards of CV events were described from Cox proportional hazards models incorporating patient risk factors, with updated average HbA1c as a time-dependent covariate. The relationship of severe and symptomatic hypoglycaemia (collected during the 6 months before yearly ascertainment) with CV and all-cause mortality was examined. RESULTS: A total of 147 primary events were accrued during up to 54 months of follow-up. In all, 60 CV-specific deaths, 44 non-fatal MIs and 57 non-fatal strokes occurred, totalling 161 events. There was a significant positive relationship between updated mean HbA1c and primary outcome: hazard ratio (HR) 1.25 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.12-1.40; p < 0.0001]. CV death [HR 1.31 (95% CI 1.10-1.57); p = 0.0027] and stroke [HR 1.36 (95% CI 1.17-1.59); p < 0.0001] were both strongly associated with HbA1c, while MI was not [HR 1.05 (95% CI 0.83-1.32)]. One or more severe hypoglycaemic episodes affected 175 participants, while 1508 participants experienced one or more symptomatic hypoglycaemic events. We found no relationship between severe/symptomatic hypoglycaemic events and CV-specific/all-cause death. CONCLUSIONS: Ongoing poorer glucose control was associated with CV events; hypoglycaemia was not associated with CV-specific/all-cause death

Suspension-adapted Chinese hamster ovary-derived cells expressing green fluorescent protein as a screening tool for biomaterials

Synthetic biomaterials play an important role in regenerative medicine. To be effective they must support cell attachment and proliferation in addition to being non-toxic and non-immunogenic. We used a suspension-adapted Chinese hamster ovary-derived cell line expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) to assess cell attachment and growth on synthetic biomaterials by direct measurement of GFP-specific fluorescence. To simplify operations, all cell cultivation steps were performed in orbitally-shaken, disposable containers. Comparative studies between this GFP assay and previously established cell quantification assays demonstrated that this novel approach is suitable for rapid screening of a large number of samples. Furthermore the utility of our assay system was confirmed by evaluation of cell growth on three polyvinylidene fluoride polymer scaffolds that differed in pore diameter and drawing conditions. The data presented here prove the general utility of GFP-expressing cell lines and orbital shaking technology for the screening of biomaterials for tissue engineering application

Spatial proteomics finds CD155 and Endophilin-A1 as mediators of growth and invasion in medulloblastoma

The composition of the plasma membrane (PM)-associated proteome of tumor cells determines cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions and the response to environmental cues. Whether the PM-associated proteome impacts the phenotype of Medulloblastoma (MB) tumor cells and how it adapts in response to growth factor cues is poorly understood. Using a spatial proteomics approach, we observed that hepatocyte growth factor (HGF)-induced activation of the receptor tyrosine kinase c-MET in MB cells changes the abundance of transmembrane and membrane-associated proteins. The depletion of MAP4K4, a pro-migratory effector kinase downstream of c-MET, leads to a specific decrease of the adhesion and immunomodulatory receptor CD155 and of components of the fast-endophilin-mediated endocytosis (FEME) machinery in the PM-associated proteome of HGF-activated MB cells. The decreased surface expression of CD155 or of the fast-endophilin-mediated endocytosis effector endophilin-A1 reduces growth and invasiveness of MB tumor cells in the tissue context. These data thus describe a novel function of MAP4K4 in the control of the PM-associated proteome of tumor cells and identified two downstream effector mechanisms controlling proliferation and invasiveness of MB cells

Divergence in Dialogue

Copyright: 2014 Healey et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC; http://www.esrc.ac.uk/) through the DynDial project (Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue, RES-062-23-0962) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/) through the RISER project (Robust Incremental Semantic Resources for Dialogue, EP/J010383/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Diet management, lifestyle factors and education needs by target attainment in Italian youth with type 1 diabetes from the Global TEENs study

Background and aims: TEENs is an international, cross-sectional observational study, conducted in 20 countries in order to assess T1D management and psychosocial parameters in 8-25-year-olds (y/o). Data on diet management, lifestyle factors and education needs by target HbA1c attainment from the Italian cohort are reported. Materials and methods: Data were collected at 23 centres by participant interview, medical record review and participant/parent survey from 1,009 Italian youth (46% female) in three age groups: 8-12 y/o (n=330), 13-18 y/o (n=490), and 19-25 y/o (n=189). HbA1c was measured uniformly using A1cNow™ with target HbA1c defined as &lt;7.5% (58 mmol/mol) for ≤18 y/o (ISPAD) and &lt;7% (53 mmol/mol) for &gt;18 y/o (ADA). Results: Overall, 40% of participants met HbA1c targets. Measuring food intake based on experience was the most common method used by all age groups, followed by carbohydrate counting (Table). Of the participants who used carbohydrate counting, a higher percentage met target HbA1c than did not in all age groups, with a significant effect on target attainment due to carbohydrate counting compared with other methods observed in 13-18 y/o (p=0.035). Avoiding sugars was the least common method used in all age groups. Across all age groups, participants who did not undertake any exercise were numerically less likely to reach HbA1c target; on the contrary, participants who exercised 1-2 days/week were numerically more likely to reach HbA1c target. Performing exercise had a significant effect on target HbA1c attainment in 8-12 y/o (p=0.012). The majority of participants were in the underweight/normal body mass index (BMI) category in all age groups, with no clear pattern between BMI class and the proportion of patients reaching HbA1c target. Participants of all ages commonly requested education on diet, carbohydrate counting, how to manage T1D during illness, and how to manage blood glucose levels with exercise. Conclusion: Carbohydrate counting and exercising at least twice per week help to attain HbA1c target across all age groups. Assessment of lifestyle factors suggests that efforts targeting carbohydrate counting and exercise could promote successful health outcomes and help more patients with T1D to reach the recommended HbA1c target. Supported by: Sanof

Hiring expert consultants in e-healthcare: an analytics-based two sided matching approach

Very often in some censorious healthcare scenario, there may be a need to have some expert consultancies (especially by doctors) that are not available in-house to the hospitals. Earlier, this interesting healthcare scenario of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) from outside of the hospitals had been studied with the robust concepts of mechanism design with money and mechanism design without money. In this paper, we explore the more realistic two sided matching market in our healthcare set-up. In this, the members of the two participating communities, namely the patients and the doctors are revealing the strict preference ordering over the members of the opposite community for a stipulated amount of time. We assume that the patients and doctors are strategic in nature. With the theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that the TOMHECs, that results in the stable allocation of doctors to the patients, satisfies the several economic properties such as strategy-proof-ness (or truthfulness) and optimality. Further, the analytically based analysis of our proposed mechanisms i.e. RAMHECs and TOMHECs are carried out on the ground of the expected distance of the allocation done by the mechanisms from the top most preference. The proposed mechanisms are also validated with the help of exhaustive experiments.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft