Advanced information processing system: The Army fault tolerant architecture conceptual study. Volume 1: Army fault tolerant architecture overview

Digital computing systems needed for Army programs such as the Computer-Aided Low Altitude Helicopter Flight Program and the Armored Systems Modernization (ASM) vehicles may be characterized by high computational throughput and input/output bandwidth, hard real-time response, high reliability and availability, and maintainability, testability, and producibility requirements. In addition, such a system should be affordable to produce, procure, maintain, and upgrade. To address these needs, the Army Fault Tolerant Architecture (AFTA) is being designed and constructed under a three-year program comprised of a conceptual study, detailed design and fabrication, and demonstration and validation phases. Described here are the results of the conceptual study phase of the AFTA development. Given here is an introduction to the AFTA program, its objectives, and key elements of its technical approach. A format is designed for representing mission requirements in a manner suitable for first order AFTA sizing and analysis, followed by a discussion of the current state of mission requirements acquisition for the targeted Army missions. An overview is given of AFTA's architectural theory of operation

Advanced information processing system: The Army fault tolerant architecture conceptual study. Volume 2: Army fault tolerant architecture design and analysis

Described here is the Army Fault Tolerant Architecture (AFTA) hardware architecture and components and the operating system. The architectural and operational theory of the AFTA Fault Tolerant Data Bus is discussed. The test and maintenance strategy developed for use in fielded AFTA installations is presented. An approach to be used in reducing the probability of AFTA failure due to common mode faults is described. Analytical models for AFTA performance, reliability, availability, life cycle cost, weight, power, and volume are developed. An approach is presented for using VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) to describe and design AFTA's developmental hardware. A plan is described for verifying and validating key AFTA concepts during the Dem/Val phase. Analytical models and partial mission requirements are used to generate AFTA configurations for the TF/TA/NOE and Ground Vehicle missions

Phase transition and scaling behavior of topological charged black holes in Horava-Lifshitz gravity

Gravity can be thought as an emergent phenomenon and it has a nice "thermodynamic" structure. In this context, it is then possible to study the thermodynamics without knowing the details of the underlying microscopic degrees of freedom. Here, based on the ordinary thermodynamics, we investigate the phase transition of the static, spherically symmetric charged black hole solution with arbitrary scalar curvature $2k$ in Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity at the Lifshitz point $z=3$. The analysis is done using the canonical ensemble frame work; i.e. the charge is kept fixed. We find (a) for both $k=0$ and $k=1$, there is no phase transition, (b) while $k=-1$ case exhibits the second order phase transition within the {\it physical region} of the black hole. The critical point of second order phase transition is obtained by the divergence of the heat capacity at constant charge. Near the critical point, we find the various critical exponents. It is also observed that they satisfy the usual thermodynamic scaling laws.Comment: Minor corrections, refs. added, to appear in Class. Quant. Grav. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1111.0973 by other author

Legal and ethical requirements for developing a medical MOOC: Lessons learnt from the Paediatric Physical Examination Skills MOOC

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are increasingly being integrated into medical education. The production of a MOOC demonstrating physical examinations of children raised the issue of legal and ethical consent for the use of images and video-recordings of children. The present article shares the valuable lessons we learned around the legal and ethical consent required, and the operational issues that will be essential to comply with these legal and ethical considerations. This information may be valuable to other educators, especially those in similar resource-constrained settings,who are planning to create medical MOOCs

Extended phase space thermodynamics for charged and rotating black holes and Born-Infeld vacuum polarization

We investigate the critical behaviour of charged and rotating AdS black holes in d spacetime dimensions, including effects from non-linear electrodynamics via the Born-Infeld action, in an extended phase space in which the cosmological constant is interpreted as thermodynamic pressure. For Reissner-Nordstrom black holes we find that the analogy with the Van der Walls liquid-gas system holds in any dimension greater than three, and that the critical exponents coincide with those of the Van der Waals system. We find that neutral slowly rotating black holes in four space-time dimensions also have the same qualitative behaviour. However charged and rotating black holes in three spacetime dimensions do not exhibit critical phenomena. For Born-Infeld black holes we define a new thermodynamic quantity B conjugate to the Born-Infeld parameter b that we call Born-Infeld vacuum polarization. We demonstrate that this quantity is required for consistency of both the first law of thermodynamics and the corresponding Smarr relation.Comment: 23 pages, 32 figures, v2: minor changes, upgraded reference

A Novel Reading Scheme for Assessing the Extent of Radiographic Abnormalities and Its Association with Disease Severity in Sputum Smear-Positive Tuberculosis: An Observational Study in Hyderabad/India.

Existing reading schemes for chest X-ray (CXR) used to grade the extent of disease severity at diagnosis in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) are often based on numerical scores that summate specific radiographic features. However, since PTB is known to exhibit a wide heterogeneity in pathology, certain features might be differentially associated with clinical parameters of disease severity.We aimed to grade disease severity in PTB patients at diagnosis and after completion of DOTS treatment by developing a reading scheme based on five different radiographic manifestations and analyze their association with the clinical parameters of systemic involvement and infectivity.141 HIV-negative adults with newly diagnosed sputum smear-positive PTB were enrolled in a prospective observational study in Hyderabad, India. The presence and extent on CXRs of five radiographic manifestations, i.e., lung involvement, alveolar infiltration, cavitation, lymphadenopathy and pleural effusion, were classified using the new reading scheme by using a four-quadrant approach. We evaluated the inter-reader reliability of each manifestation, and its association with BMI and sputum smear positivity at diagnosis. The presence and extent of these radiographic manifestations were further compared with CXRs on completion of DOTS treatment.At diagnosis, an average lung area of 51.7% +/- 23.3% was affected by radiographic abnormalities. 94% of the patients had alveolar infiltrates, with 89.4% located in the upper quadrants, suggesting post primary PTB and in 34.8% of patients cavities were found. We further showed that the extent of affected lung area was a negative predictor of BMI (β value -0.035, p 0.019). No significant association of BMI with any of the other CXR features was found. The extent of alveolar infiltrates, along with the presence of cavitation, were strongly associated with sputum smear positivity. The microbiological cure rate in our cohort after 6 months of DOTS treatment was 95%. The extent of the affected lung area in these patients decreased from 56.0% +/- 21.5% to 31.0 +/- 20% and a decrease was also observed in the extent of alveolar infiltrates from 98.4% to 25.8% in at least one quadrant, presence of cavities from 34.8% to 1.6%, lymphadenopathy from 46.8% to 16.1%, and pleural effusion from 19.4% to 6.5%.We established a new assessment scheme for grading disease severity in PTB by specifically considering five radiographic manifestations which were differently associated with the BMI and sputum smear positivity, changed to a different extent after 6 months of treatment and exhibited an excellent agreement between radiologists. Our results suggest that this reading scheme might contribute to the estimation of disease severity with respect to differences in disease pathology. Further studies are needed to determine a correlation with short and long-term pulmonary function impairment and whether there would be any benefit in lengthening or modulating therapy based on this CXR severity assessment

Thermodynamic analysis of black hole solutions in gravitating nonlinear electrodynamics

We perform a general study of the thermodynamic properties of static electrically charged black hole solutions of nonlinear electrodynamics minimally coupled to gravitation in three space dimensions. The Lagrangian densities governing the dynamics of these models in flat space are defined as arbitrary functions of the gauge field invariants, constrained by some requirements for physical admissibility. The exhaustive classification of these theories in flat space, in terms of the behaviour of the Lagrangian densities in vacuum and on the boundary of their domain of definition, defines twelve families of admissible models. When these models are coupled to gravity, the flat space classification leads to a complete characterization of the associated sets of gravitating electrostatic spherically symmetric solutions by their central and asymptotic behaviours. We focus on nine of these families, which support asymptotically Schwarzschild-like black hole configurations, for which the thermodynamic analysis is possible and pertinent. In this way, the thermodynamic laws are extended to the sets of black hole solutions of these families, for which the generic behaviours of the relevant state variables are classified and thoroughly analyzed in terms of the aforementioned boundary properties of the Lagrangians. Moreover, we find universal scaling laws (which hold and are the same for all the black hole solutions of models belonging to any of the nine families) running the thermodynamic variables with the electric charge and the horizon radius. These scale transformations form a one-parameter multiplicative group, leading to universal "renormalization group"-like first-order differential equations. The beams of characteristics of these equations generate the full set of black hole states associated to any of these gravitating nonlinear electrodynamics...Comment: 51 single column pages, 19 postscript figures, 2 tables, GRG tex style; minor corrections added; final version appearing in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Compositional analysis and physicochemical and mechanical testing of tanned rabbit skins

[EN] Chemical composition and physicochemical and mechanical parameters of New Zealand White rabbit tanned skin were evaluated. Skin samples from 70-d-old males, in natura and semi-finished, were collected for evaluation. The in natura treatment comprise skins without any processing, while semi-finished treatment comprise skins after soaking, fleshing, liming, de-liming, purging, degreasing, pickling, tanning, neutralising, re-tanning and dyeing, followed by oiling, drying, stretching and softening. After tanning, samples from the dorsal and flank regions were removed for tensile and physicochemical testing in the longitudinal and transverse directions. A split plot design was used with plot treatments (leather regions: R1=dorsal and R2=flank) and subplots directions (S1=longitudinal and S2=transversal), using 10 examples per treatment. At the end of processing, the leather analysis revealed low moisture (31.76%), protein (46.48%) and fat content (24.95%), and a high ash content (8.58%). Leather presented a pH of 4.9 and contained 2.0% chromium oxide, 25.5% extractable substances in dichloromethane, and these characteristics were coupled with a higher tensile strength (10.84 N/mm2) in the dorsal region. However, samples in the same region proved to have higher elasticity (64.57%) in the longitudinal direction, although there was no difference in the progressive tearing analysis (21.07-23.50 N/mm). Overall, our analyses suggest that, in this case, the tanned leather product does not have sufficient resistance for application in clothing production.Souza, MR.; Hoch, AL.; Gasparino, E.; Scapinello, C.; Mesquita Dourado, D.; Claudino Da Silva, SC.; Lala, B. (2016). Compositional analysis and physicochemical and mechanical testing of tanned rabbit skins. World Rabbit Science. 24(3):233-238. doi:10.4995/wrs.2016.4037SWORD233238243ABNT. Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2014. ABNT NBR ISO 3376: 2014 - Couro - Ensaios físicos e mecânicos – Determinação de resistência à tração e alongamento percentual. Rio de Janeiro, 1-5.ABNT. Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2014. NBR - 2589: Couro - Ensaios físicos e mecânicos - Determinação da espessura. Rio de Janeiro, 1.ABNT. Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2013. NBR - 11030: couro - Determinação de substâncias extraíveis com diclorometano (CH2Cl2). Rio de Janeiro, 1-3.ABNT. Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2013. ABNT NBR 11032: 2013 - Pele e couro - Amostragem na amostra de teste - Procedimento. Rio de Janeiro, 1-4.ABNT. ABNT Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2014. NBR – 5398-1: Couro – determinação química do teor de óxido de cromo Parte 1: Quantificação por titulação. Rio de Janeiro, 1-5.ABNT. Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2014. NBR - 3377-2: Couro – Ensaios físicos e mecânicos — Determinação da força de rasgamento Parte 2: Rasgamento de extremidade dupla. Rio de Janeiro, 1-3.ABNT. Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2014. ABNT NBR 10455: 2014 - Clima de materiais utilizados em calçados e artigos relacionados fabricar. Rio de Janeiro, 1-2.ABNT. Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas. 2006. NBR – 11057: Couro –determinação do pH e da cifra diferencial. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro, 1-3.Cunniff P.A. 1998. Official Methods of Analysis of AOAC International. 16th ed. Arlington: Association of Official Analytical Chemists.Franco, M.L.R.S. 2007. Curtimento de pele de tilápia. In: Boscolo, W.r., Feiden, A. (Orgs.) Industrialização de tilápias. Toledo: GFM Gráfica e editora, 185-223.Freire M.C., Canl R.M. 2000. A pele bovina como matéria-prima. Revista Nacional da Carne, 24: 100-110.Gerhard J. 1998. Posibles fallas e el cuero y e su producción – conceptos, causas, consecuencias, remedios y tipos de cueros. Partner Rübelmann GmbH: Lampertheim (Alemania).Gutterres M. 2001. Distribuição, deposição e interação química de substâncias de engraxe no couro. In: Congresso da federação latino-americana das associações dos químicos e técnicos da indústria do couro, 15, Salvador. Anais... v.1, 108-119.Gutterres M. 2003. Efeito do Curtimento sobre a Microestrutura Dérmica. Revista do Couro Abqtic, Estância Velha, 26: 56-59.Oliveira A.C., Souza M.L.R., Hoch A.L.V., Gasparino E., Scapinello C., Kffuri V.R. Domingues M.C. 2007. Resistência dos couros de coelhos em função do sexo e da idade de abate. Tecnicouro, 28: 52-56.Prado M., Franco M.L.R.S., Uchimura C.M., Souza E.D., Bordignon A.C., Justen A.P., Silva S.C.C., Del Vesco A.P. 2013. Efeito da etapa de engraxe no processo de curtimento das peles de coelhos. Acta Tecnológica, 8: 8-11. http://portaldeperiodicos.ifma.edu.br/index.php/actatecnologica/article/view/131SAEG. 2000. Sistemas de Análises Estatísticas e Genéticas. Versão 8.0. Universidade Federal de Viçosa. Viçosa.Souza M.L.R. 2004. Tecnologia para processamento das peles de peixe. Maringá, PR. Coleção Fundamentum, 11: 14-55.Souza M.L.R. 2006. Tecnologia para processamento de peles de coelhos: peleteria e couro. In Proc: 3rd Rabbit Congress of the Americas, 2006, Maringá –Pr, Brasil. v. 1.Souza M.L.R. 2008. Tecnologia para processamento das peles de peixe. Maringá: Eduem. 3° Ed

COX-2-mediated stimulation of the lymphangiogenic factor VEGF-C in human breast cancer

Increased expression of COX-2 or VEGF-C has been correlated with progressive disease in certain cancers. Present study utilized several human breast cancer cell lines (MCF-7, T-47D, Hs578T and MDA-MB-231, varying in COX-2 expression) as well as 10 human breast cancer specimens to examine the roles of COX-2 and prostaglandin E (EP) receptors in VEGF-C expression or secretion, and the relationship of COX-2 or VEGF-C expression to lymphangiogenesis. We found a strong correlation between COX-2 mRNA expression and VEGF-C expression or secretion levels in breast cancer cell lines and VEGF-C expression in breast cancer tissues. Expression of LYVE-1, a selective marker for lymphatic endothelium, was also positively correlated with COX-2 or VEGF-C expression in breast cancer tissues. Inhibition of VEGF-C expression and secretion in the presence of COX-1/2 or COX-2 inhibitors or following downregulation of COX-2 with COX-2 siRNA established a stimulatory role COX-2 in VEGF-C synthesis by breast cancer cells. EP1 as well as EP4 receptor antagonists inhibited VEGF-C production indicating the roles of EP1 and EP4 in VEGF-C upregulation by endogenous PGE2. Finally, VEGF-C secretion by MDA-MB-231 cells was inhibited in the presence of kinase inhibitors for Her-2/neu, Src and p38 MAPK, indicating a requirement of these kinases for VEGF-C synthesis. These results, for the first time, demonstrate a regulatory role of COX-2 in VEGF-C synthesis (and thereby lymphangiogenesis) in human breast cancer, which is mediated at least in part by EP1/EP4 receptors

Phenotypic characterisation of regulatory T cells in dogs reveals signature transcripts conserved in humans and mice

Regulatory T cells (Tregs) are a double-edged regulator of the immune system. Aberrations of Tregs correlate with pathogenesis of inflammatory, autoimmune and neoplastic disorders. Phenotypically and functionally distinct subsets of Tregs have been identified in humans and mice on the basis of their extensive portfolios of monoclonal antibodies (mAb) against Treg surface antigens. As an important veterinary species, dogs are increasingly recognised as an excellent model for many human diseases. However, insightful study of canine Tregs has been restrained by the limited availability of mAb. We therefore set out to characterise CD4+CD25high T cells isolated ex vivo from healthy dogs and showed that they possess a regulatory phenotype, function, and transcriptomic signature that resembles those of human and murine Tregs. By launching a cross-species comparison, we unveiled a conserved transcriptomic signature of Tregs and identified that transcript hip1 may have implications in Treg function