SCENARIO GRAPH: DISCOVERING NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES AND FAILURE MODES

ABSTRACT Companies struggle to identify new business opportunities based on their core competence be it products or services. When a company focuses on improving current offerings or is too involved in them, it has difficulty discovering new applications for them. Scenario Graph is an original design method for products or services that aids design teams to envision four types of information while in the market definition phase: potential user locations, activities associated with the location, user circumstances, and the corresponding user state. By using Scenario Graph, design teams are better able to capture new values, scenarios, and behaviors of potential customers. This knowledge captured in the fuzzy front end stage can then be translated into inputs to other Design for X (dfX) tools to improve the definition of the product or service. Another benefit of the tool is that it directs the design team to discover unidentified failure modes of the current offerings by identifying unintended user scenarios. In this paper, a detailed guide, along with case studies demonstrates the usefulness of the tool when applied in the early phase of product or service development. Scenario Graph will assist design teams and managers in discovering new product or service opportunities

Impaired neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation: a novel innate immune deficiency of human neonates

Neutrophils are highly specialized innate effector cells that have evolved for killing of pathogens. Human neonates have a common multifactorial syndrome of neutrophil dysfunction that is incompletely characterized and contributes to sepsis and other severe infectious complications. We identified a novel defect in the antibacterial defenses of neonates: inability to form neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). NETs are lattices of extracellular DNA, chromatin, and antibacterial proteins that mediate extracellular killing of microorganisms and are thought to form via a unique death pathway signaled by nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) oxidase–generated reactive oxygen species (ROS). We found that neutrophils from term and preterm infants fail to form NETs when activated by inflammatory agonists—in contrast to leukocytes from healthy adults. The deficiency in NET formation is paralleled by a previously unrecognized deficit in extracellular bacterial killing. Generation of ROSs did not complement the defect in NET formation by neonatal neutrophils, as it did in adult cells with inactivated NADPH oxidase, demonstrating that ROSs are necessary but not sufficient signaling intermediaries and identifying a deficiency in linked or downstream pathways in neonatal leukocytes. Impaired NET formation may be a critical facet of a common developmental immunodeficiency that predisposes newborn infants to infection

Expression of Interest for a Phase-II LHCb Upgrade: Opportunities in flavour physics, and beyond, in the HL-LHC era

https://cds.cern.ch/record/224431

Model-Independent Observation of Exotic Contributions to B0→J/ψK+π−B^0\to J/\psi K^+\pi^- Decays

International audienceAn angular analysis of B0→J/ψK+π- decays is performed, using proton-proton collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3  fb-1 collected with the LHCb detector. The m(K+π-) spectrum is divided into fine bins. In each m(K+π-) bin, the hypothesis that the three-dimensional angular distribution can be described by structures induced only by K* resonances is examined, making minimal assumptions about the K+π- system. The data reject the K*-only hypothesis with a large significance, implying the observation of exotic contributions in a model-independent fashion. Inspection of the m(J/ψπ-) vs m(K+π-) plane suggests structures near m(J/ψπ-)=4200 and 4600 MeV

Study of Υ\Upsilon production in ppPb collisions at sNN=8.16\sqrt{s_{NN}}=8.16 TeV

International audienceThe production of ϒ(nS) mesons (n = 1, 2, 3) in pPb and Pbp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=8.16$ TeV is measured by the LHCb experiment, using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 31.8 nb$^{−1}$. The ϒ(nS) mesons are reconstructed through their decays into two opposite-sign muons. The measurements comprise the differential production cross-sections of the ϒ(1S) and ϒ(2S) states, their forward-to-backward ratios and nuclear modification factors. The measurements are performed as a function of the transverse momentum p$_{T}$ and rapidity in the nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass frame y$^{*}$ of the ϒ(nS) states, in the kinematic range p$_{T}$ < 25 GeV/c and 1.5 < y$^{*}$ < 4.0 (−5.0 < y$^{*}$ < −2.5) for pPb (Pbp) collisions. In addition, production cross-sections for ϒ(3S) are measured integrated over phase space and the production ratios between all three ϒ(nS) states are determined. Suppression for bottomonium in proton-lead collisions is observed, which is particularly visible in the ratios. The results are compared to theoretical models

First Measurement of Charm Production in its Fixed-Target Configuration at the LHC

International audienceThe first measurement of heavy-flavor production by the LHCb experiment in its fixed-target mode is presented. The production of J/ψ and D0 mesons is studied with beams of protons of different energies colliding with gaseous targets of helium and argon with nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energies of sNN=86.6 and 110.4 GeV, respectively. The J/ψ and D0 production cross sections in pHe collisions in the rapidity range [2, 4.6] are found to be σJ/ψ=652±33(stat)±42(syst)   nb/nucleon and σD0=80.8±2.4(stat)±6.3(syst)  μb/nucleon, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. No evidence for a substantial intrinsic charm content of the nucleon is observed in the large Bjorken-x region

Measurement of the branching fraction and CPCP asymmetry in B+→J/ψρ+B^{+}\rightarrow J/\psi \rho^{+} decays

International audienceThe branching fraction and direct $C\!P$ asymmetry of the decay ${{{B} ^+}} \!\rightarrow {{J /\psi }} {{\rho } ^+}$ are measured using proton-proton collision data collected with the LHCb detector at centre-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 3 $\,\text{ fb }^{-1}$ . The following results are obtained: $\begin{aligned} \mathcal {B}({{B} ^+} \!\rightarrow {{J /\psi }} {{\rho } ^+} )&= (3.81^{+0.25-0.24} \pm 0.35) \times 10^{-5},\\ \mathcal {A}^{{C\!P}} ({{B} ^+} \!\rightarrow {{J /\psi }} {{\rho } ^+} )&= -0.045^{+0.056-0.057} \pm 0.008, \end{aligned}$ where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second systematic. Both measurements are the most precise to date