European Immigration Controls Conforming to Human Rights Standards

The European continent has for some years been facing increased pressure from migration. In 2010, Europe, in comparison with the other continents, was expected to host the largest number of migrants: 69.8 million migrants representing 32.6 percent of the total flow of migrants (213.9 million international migrants). This pressure has caused the two main European organizations, the Council of Europe and the European Union, to act decisively for the protection of migrants. Although the European legal order offers a high standard of human rights protection—having adopted, over the decades, the relevant instruments and developed effective mechanisms—the two European organizations have used and continue use all legal tools, such as resolutions and recommendations, provided by their internal order

The dynamics of mitochondrial autophagy at the initiation stage.

The pathway of mitochondrial-specific autophagy (mitophagy, defined here as the specific elimination of mitochondria following distinct mitochondrial injuries or developmental/metabolic alterations) is important in health and disease. This review will be focussed on the earliest steps of the pathway concerning the mechanisms and requirements for initiating autophagosome formation on a mitochondrial target. More specifically, and in view of the fact that we understand the basic mechanism of non-selective autophagy and are beginning to reshape this knowledge towards the pathways of selective autophagy, two aspects of mitophagy will be covered: (i) How does a machinery normally working in association with the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to make an autophagosome can also do so at a site distinct from the ER such as on the surface of the targeted cargo? and (ii) how does the machinery deal with cargo of multiple sizes

Remediation by Design: New Linguistic Domains for Changing Organizational Practices

The paper examines the impact of novel linguistic vocabularies on the remediation of practices using computer-reliant media. As linguistic vocabularies we consider social Web services (with certain material agency) allowing recurrent engagement of users in designated communication acts. On the other hand, remediation is conceived as an evolving state of affairs where new practices (as defined by computer-mediated linguistic conventions) are improvised on the basis of old practices that work differently in new technological settings. In this vein, remediation of organizational routines takes place when established human activities are retooled using digital materials to convey new possibilities for action. The paper advances a proposition and a scaffold for remediating by design which is then ‘tested’ by reflecting upon an empirical case

Anticoagulation therapy and proximal femoral fracture treatment: An update

Hip fractures in the elderly population have become a ‘disease’ with increasing incidence. Most of the geriatric patients are affected by a number of comorbidities. Coagulopathies continue to be a special point of interest for the orthopaedic trauma surgeon, with the management of this high-risk group of patients a hot topic of debate among the orthopaedic community. While a universal consensus on how to manage thromboprophylaxis for this special cohort of patients has not been reached, multiple attempts to define a widely accepted protocol have been published

Ultrastructural insights into pathogen clearance by autophagy

Autophagy defends cells against proliferation of bacteria such as Salmonella in the cytosol. After escape from a damaged Salmonella-containing vacuole (SCV) exposing luminal glycans that bind to Galectin-8, the host cell ubiquitination machinery deposits a dense layer of ubiquitin around the cytosolic bacteria. The nature and spatial distribution of this ubiquitin coat in relation to other autophagy-related membranes are unknown. Using Transmission Electron Microscopy we determined the exact localisation of ubiquitin, the ruptured SCV membrane and phagophores around cytosolic Salmonella. Ubiquitin was not predominantly present on the Salmonella surface, but enriched on the fragmented SCV. Cytosolic bacteria without SCVs were less efficiently targeted by phagophores. Single bacteria were contained in single phagophores but multiple bacteria could be within large autophagic vacuoles reaching 30 m in circumference. These large phagophores followed the contour of the engulfed bacteria, they were frequently in close association with endoplasmic reticulum membranes and, within them, remnants of the SCV were seen associated with each engulfed particle. Our data suggest that the Salmonella SCV has a major role in the formation of autophagic phagophores and highlight evolutionary conserved parallel mechanisms between xenophagy and mitophagy with the fragmented SCV and the damaged outer mitochondrial membrane serving similar functions.Fellowship of the Astellas Foundation for Research on Metabolic Disorders Wellcome Trus

POV-Surgery: A Dataset for Egocentric Hand and Tool Pose Estimation During Surgical Activities

The surgical usage of Mixed Reality (MR) has received growing attention in areas such as surgical navigation systems, skill assessment, and robot-assisted surgeries. For such applications, pose estimation for hand and surgical instruments from an egocentric perspective is a fundamental task and has been studied extensively in the computer vision field in recent years. However, the development of this field has been impeded by a lack of datasets, especially in the surgical field, where bloody gloves and reflective metallic tools make it hard to obtain 3D pose annotations for hands and objects using conventional methods. To address this issue, we propose POV-Surgery, a large-scale, synthetic, egocentric dataset focusing on pose estimation for hands with different surgical gloves and three orthopedic surgical instruments, namely scalpel, friem, and diskplacer. Our dataset consists of 53 sequences and 88,329 frames, featuring high-resolution RGB-D video streams with activity annotations, accurate 3D and 2D annotations for hand-object pose, and 2D hand-object segmentation masks. We fine-tune the current SOTA methods on POV-Surgery and further show the generalizability when applying to real-life cases with surgical gloves and tools by extensive evaluations. The code and the dataset are publicly available at batfacewayne.github.io/POV_Surgery_io/

Jazz Μουσική και Μουσική Τεχνολογία: Ιστορική Αναδρομή και Κριτική Επισκόπηση

Στο πλαίσιο του μεταπτυχιακού jazz και νέες τεχνολογίες, κλήθηκα να εξετάσω στο ερευνητικό μέρος της διπλωματικής μου εργασίας μέσω μιας βιβλιογραφικής ανασκόπησης, το ρόλο που έπαιξαν οι εξελίξεις των μέσων αναπαραγωγής και επεξεργασίας του ήχου και με ποιο τρόπο αυτές επηρέασαν την jazz μουσική.For the needs of master's degree jazz and new technologies, I was called to examine for the research part of my dissertation through a literature review, in which ways the evolution of playback media and sound editing affected jazz music

Investigation of Retrieved Cardiac Devices

Damage assessment of lead and pulse generator with various exposure times is important in the development of cardiac devices. Approximately, 92.1 million patients in the US suffer from cardiovascular diseases with an estimated healthcare cost of over $300 billion and at least one million with implantable cardiac devices. These devices are complex and composed on multiple levels and present challenges while assessing the damage. However, the study on the analysis of cardiac devices may lend insight into common damage patterns and improve future cardiac devices design. The objective of this work is to perform a thorough in vivo damage assessment of retrieved 65 cardiac devices and 136 leads from different manufacturers (Medtronic, St. Jude Medical-Abbott and Boston Scientific). The examined damage features were surface deformation, burnishing, pitting, scratching, discoloration, delamination, insulation defects, coil damage, and abrasion. Methods to collect and compile data were performed, and statistical models were used to assess the sensitivity of measured parameters with in vivo performance. The devices from Medtronic and Boston Scientific were affected by the damage modes but these damages could not have affected the functionality of the devices and the therapy. The main damage mode observed was scratching, and the anterior side was more exposed to damage than the posterior side. Medtronic leads showed significant resistant to different damage modes when compared to Boston Scientific and St. Jude Medical, and the middle part was more exposed to damage than the proximal part. Medtronic leads showed failure rates lower than other manufacturers based on the 65 devices that were examined in this paper

Targeting of Early Endosomes by Autophagy Facilitates EGFR Recycling and Signalling

Despite recently uncovered connections between autophagy and the endocytic pathway, the role of autophagy in regulating endosomal function remains incompletely understood. Here, we find that the ablation of autophagy-essential players disrupts EGFinduced endocytic trafficking of EGFR. Cells lacking ATG7 or ATG16L1 exhibit increased levels of phosphatidylinositol-3-phosphate (PI(3)P), a key determinant of early endosome maturation. Increased PI(3)P levels are associated with an accumulation of EEA1-positive endosomes where EGFR trafficking is stalled. Aberrant early endosomes are recognised by the autophagy machinery in a TBK1- and Gal8-dependent manner and are delivered to LAMP2-positive lysosomes. Preventing this homeostatic regulation of early endosomes by autophagy reduces EGFR recycling to the plasma membrane and compromises downstream signalling and cell survival. Our findings uncover a novel role for the autophagy machinery in maintaining early endosome function and growth factor sensing

Morphology of Phagophore Precursors by Correlative Light-Electron Microscopy

Autophagosome biogenesis occurs in the transient subdomains of the endoplasmic reticulum that are called omegasomes, which, in fluorescence microscopy, appear as small puncta, which then grow in diameter and finally shrink and disappear once the autophagosome is complete. Autophagosomes are formed by phagophores, which are membrane cisterns that elongate and close to form the double membrane that limits autophagosomes. Earlier electron-microscopy studies showed that, during elongation, phagophores are lined by the endoplasmic reticulum on both sides. However, the morphology of the very early phagophore precursors has not been studied at the electron-microscopy level. We used live-cell imaging of cells expressing markers of phagophore biogenesis combined with correlative light-electron microscopy, as well as electron tomography of ATG2A/B-double-deficient cells, to reveal the high-resolution morphology of phagophore precursors in three dimensions. We showed that phagophores are closed or nearly closed into autophagosomes already at the stage when the omegasome diameter is still large. We further observed that phagophore precursors emerge next to the endoplasmic reticulum as bud-like highly curved membrane cisterns with a small opening to the cytosol. The phagophore precursors then open to form more flat cisterns that elongate and curve to form the classically described crescent-shaped phagophores