Behaviour Analysis of Interdependent Critical Infrastructure Components upon Failure

Urban life increasingly depends on intact critical infrastructures (CIs). For this reason, protecting critical infrastructure systems from natural disasters and man-made hazards has become an important topic in urban development research in recent years as a prerequisite for building and optimizing smart cities. To increase efficiency, the connections between CIs have been strengthened increasingly, resulting in highly interdependent large-scale infrastructure systems that are vulnerable to cascading failures. Hence, studying the cascading and feedback effects caused by the failure of a CI component in a given system can help strengthen this system. Understanding the response of the system in the event of a disaster can lead to better disaster management and better planning of critical infrastructures in the future. The population heavily depends on water, electricity, and the transportation network. These three components also depend on each other to function individually. This complex nature of interdependencies must be studied in order to understand the effects induced in one system due to the failure of another. The three systems (water, transport, and electricity) and their interdependencies can be modeled using graph theory. Water, transport, and electricity networks can be further broken down into smaller components. For example, the water network comprises water treatment plants, water storage tanks, pumping stations, sewage treatment, etc. interdependency factors into the model when, for instance, a pumping station depends on electricity. Graph theory can be used to depict the pairwise relationship between the individual components. Each node in the graph represents a critical infrastructure and the edges between these critical infrastructures represent their dependency. The modeled graph is a multigraph (inter-network dependency) and multidirectional (mutual dependence of two or more components). The idea behind building this model is to simulate the response of the interdependent systems upon failure. Building a simulation tool with an underlying interdependency graph model can not only help in understanding the failure response, but can also help in building a robust system for preserving the infrastructures. The data obtained from the simulation results will contribute to a better emergency response in the event of a disaster. The failure response of a system depends largely on the failed component. Hence, three cases are considered to simulate and identify the state of the system upon failure of a component: The failed component can be a node with maximum outward dependencies, a node with maximum inward dependencies, or a random failure of a component. If a component has the maximum number of outward edges, the simulation tool will help visualize the cascading effects, whereas a system with the maximum number of incoming edges will contribute to the understanding of the feedback response as the outward nodes are not affected immediately. Another goal of CI failure analysis is to develop an algorithm for the partial restoration of specific critical services when a CI is not working at full capacity. The selection of critical infrastructure components for restoration is based on the number of people being affected

Detours increase local knowledge-Exploring the hidden benefits of self-control failure

Self-control enables people to override momentary thoughts, emotions, or impulses in order to pursue long-term goals. Good self-control is a predictor for health, success, and subjective well-being, as bad self-control is for the opposite. Therefore, the question arises why evolution has not endowed us with perfect self-control. In this article, we draw some attention to the hidden benefits of self-control failure and present a new experimental paradigm that captures both costs and benefits of self-control failure. In an experiment, participants worked on three consecutive tasks: 1) In a transcription task, we manipulated how much effortful self-control two groups of participants had to exert. 2) In a number-comparison task, participants of both groups were asked to compare numbers and ignore distracting neutral versus reward-related pictures. 3) After a pause for recreation, participants were confronted with an unannounced recognition task measuring whether they had incidentally encoded the distracting pictures during the previous number-comparison task. The results showed that participants who exerted a high amount of effortful self-control during the first task shifted their priorities and attention toward the distractors during the second self-control demanding task: The cost of self-control failure was reflected in worse performance in the number-comparison task. Moreover, the group which had exerted a high amount of self-control during the first task and showed self-control failure during the second task was better in the unannounced third task. The benefit of self-control failure during number comparison was reflected in better performance during the recognition task. However, costs and benefits were not specific for reward-related distractors but also occurred with neutral pictures. We propose that the hidden benefit of self-control failure lies in the exploration of distractors present during goal pursuit [...

The Scalability-Efficiency/Maintainability-Portability Trade-off in Simulation Software Engineering: Examples and a Preliminary Systematic Literature Review

Large-scale simulations play a central role in science and the industry. Several challenges occur when building simulation software, because simulations require complex software developed in a dynamic construction process. That is why simulation software engineering (SSE) is emerging lately as a research focus. The dichotomous trade-off between scalability and efficiency (SE) on the one hand and maintainability and portability (MP) on the other hand is one of the core challenges. We report on the SE/MP trade-off in the context of an ongoing systematic literature review (SLR). After characterizing the issue of the SE/MP trade-off using two examples from our own research, we (1) review the 33 identified articles that assess the trade-off, (2) summarize the proposed solutions for the trade-off, and (3) discuss the findings for SSE and future work. Overall, we see evidence for the SE/MP trade-off and first solution approaches. However, a strong empirical foundation has yet to be established; general quantitative metrics and methods supporting software developers in addressing the trade-off have to be developed. We foresee considerable future work in SSE across scientific communities.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for presentation at the Fourth International Workshop on Software Engineering for High Performance Computing in Computational Science and Engineering (SEHPCCSE 2016

Abbildung von Lernsystemen zur Gestaltung von Lernkultur

In Zeiten der Unsicherheit durch Wirtschaftskrise, politische Umbrüche, Globalisierung u. v. a. m. werden Bildungsdiskussionen zunehmend lauter. Dabei setzt man vor allem auf die Ausbildung an Hochschulen, die dazu angehalten werden, Studierende mit der Fähigkeit zum selbstorganisierten Handeln auszustatten, um den Herausforderungen des 21. Jahrhunderts entgegenzutreten. Dafür sind jedoch spezielle didaktische Methoden sowie ein Umdenken in der Gestaltung von Lernsystemen unabdingbar. Der Beitrag beschreibt die Ergebnisse des innovativen Forschungsprojektes für die Bearbeitung zur Frage, wie die Einführung der Lernmethode "Problem Based Learning" die Wahrnehmung und Haltung zum Lernen bei Studierenden verändert und welche Erkenntnisse für die Gestaltung des Lernens daraus abgeleitet werden können. 02.11.2011 | Dirk Unterschemmann & Pia Lindner (Wien

(Acetato-κO)(2,2′-bipyridine-κ2 N,N′)trimethyl­platinum(IV) monohydrate

In the title hydrate, [Pt(CH3)3(CH3COO)(C10H8N2)]·H2O, the PtIV atom exhibits a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry built up by three methyl ligands in a facial arrangement, a bipyridine ligand and a monodentately bound acetate ligand. In the crystal structure, inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds are observed between the water mol­ecule and the platinum complex, which link the mol­ecules into chains along the c axis

Cell Specific Coxsackievirus B3 Replication

Myocarditis is an inflammatory disease caused by viral infection. Different subpopulations of leukocytes enter the cardiac tissue and lead to severe cardiac inflammation associated with myocyte loss and remodeling. Here, we study possible cell sources for viral replication using three compartments of the heart: fibroblasts, cardiomyocytes, and macrophages. We infected C57BL/6j mice with Coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3) and detected increased gene expression of anti-inflammatory and antiviral cytokines in the heart. Subsequently, we infected cardiac fibroblasts, cardiomyocytes, and macrophages with CVB3. Due to viral infection, the expression of TNF-α, IL-6, MCP-1, and IFN-β was significantly increased in cardiac fibroblasts compared to cardiomyocytes or macrophages. We found that in addition to cardiomyocytes cardiac fibroblasts were infected by CVB3 and displayed a higher virus replication (132-fold increase) compared to cardiomyocytes (14-fold increase) between 6 and 24 hours after infection. At higher virus concentrations, macrophages are able to reduce the viral copy number. At low virus concentration a persistent virus infection was determined. Therefore, we suggest that cardiac fibroblasts play an important role in the pathology of CVB3-induced myocarditis and are another important contributor of virus replication aggravating myocarditis

(OC-6-33)-(2,2′-Bipyridine-κ2 N,N′)trimeth­yl(2-methyl­sulfanyl-2-thia­zoline-κN)platinum(IV) tetra­fluoridoborate

The asymmetric unit of the title complex, [Pt(CH3)3(C10H8N2)(C4H7NS2)]BF4, contains two crystallographically independent mol­ecules. The PtIV atom in each complex cation exhibits a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry, built up by three methyl ligands in a facial binding fashion, a bipyridine ligand and a monodentately N-bound 2-methyl­sulfanyl-2-thia­zoline ligand (configuration index: OC-6–33). In the crystal structure, weak inter­molecular C—H⋯F hydrogen bonds are found between the complex cations and BF4 − anions

Sensing Social Media Signals for Cryptocurrency News

The ability to track and monitor relevant and important news in real-time is of crucial interest in multiple industrial sectors. In this work, we focus on the set of cryptocurrency news, which recently became of emerging interest to the general and financial audience. In order to track relevant news in real-time, we (i) match news from the web with tweets from social media, (ii) track their intraday tweet activity and (iii) explore different machine learning models for predicting the number of the article mentions on Twitter within the first 24 hours after its publication. We compare several machine learning models, such as linear extrapolation, linear and random forest autoregressive models, and a sequence-to-sequence neural network. We find that the random forest autoregressive model behaves comparably to more complex models in the majority of tasks.Comment: full version of the paper, that is accepted at ACM WWW '19 Conference, MSM'19 Worksho

Differential Expression of Matrix Metalloproteases in Human Fibroblasts with Different Origins

Fibroblasts are widely distributed cells and are responsible for the deposition of extracellular matrix (ECM) components but also secrete ECM-degrading matrix metalloproteases. A finely balanced equilibrium between deposition and degradation of ECM is essential for structural integrity of tissues. In the past, fibroblasts have typically been understood as a uniform cell population with comparable functions regardless of their origin. Here, we determined growth curves of fibroblasts derived from heart, skin, and lung and clearly show the lowest proliferation rate for cardiac fibroblasts. Furthermore, we examined basal expression levels of collagen and different MMPs in these three types of fibroblasts and compared these concerning their site of origin. Interestingly, we found major differences in basal mRNA expression especially for MMP1 and MMP3. Moreover, we treated fibroblasts with TNF-α and observed different alterations under these proinflammatory conditions. In conclusion, fibroblasts show different properties in proliferation and MMP expression regarding their originated tissue