Cine are nevoie de intelligence competitiv?

Competitive intelligence (CI) represents the action of defining, collecting, analyzing, distributing information about products, customers, competitors, as well as any aspect related to the environment necessary to support managers in making strategic decisions for an organization. In essence, competitive intelligence means understanding what is happening in the world outside a business, about the competition in the market

The costs of cyberterrorism for the national economy: United States of America vs Egypt

In recent years cyber terrorism has become increasingly used with the globalization of technology and people’s access to high-speed internet. It takes place exclusively in the online environment, the advantage being that it offers an increased level of anonymity to users. Terrorist groups are targeting the misappropriation of social media accounts, focused on Distributed Denial of Service activities, exploiting communications services and banking services for fraudulent misappropriation of financial accounts. Cyberterrorism generates very high costs for the national economy, such as the involvement of specialists for detecting and correcting intrusion, declining productivity and income, costs of information theft, regaining the reputation of an institution or company, the costs relating to the resumption of production and the provision of services, the loss of information concerning intellectual property, financial manipulation using stolen information, the cost of securing computer networks and assuring them in the event of intrusion, costs generated by the time spent on recovering stolen data. In 2018 both the US and Egypt took action on these activities, the US modified its national cyber strategy and Egypt adopted the new law project to combat cybercrime. The main cyber threats they face are: threats of intrusion and sabotage of IT infrastructures, cyberterrorism and cyberwar, threats to digital identity and theft of private data, malware programs. The targets of the attacks were public sector entities, financial organizations, health care organizations, retail and accommodation. The reasons for why hackers attack these organizations are money-related, malware infected by emails, commercial and industrial espionage

Experimental models of acute pancreatitis -closed duodenal loop mode

Randomized controlled studies of severe human acute pancreatitis can be performed only with restriction, especially in children. Some pathophysiological or therapeutic aspects should be first verified through animal experiments. Animal test results can be transferred to clinical practice if the results are based on trials with established models, standardized methods and a study design imitating the clinical situation. This study aims to review the different experimental models proposed for acute pancreatitis, focusing on the experience of the researchers team with the closed duodenal loop model. A closed duodenal loop model was prepared in male Wistar rats. The duodenum was ligated 2cm distal and proximal to the junction of the hepatopancreatic duct. All rats developed severe acute pancreatitis. The histopathological alterations of the pancreas consisted in edema, parenchymal necrosis, thrombosis and hemorrhage. All animals died within 2-5 days from generalized sepsis. Animal experiments are of great value, especially in acute necrotizing pancreatitis because randomized controlled studies are problematic. The most common experimental models of acute pancreatitis are secretagogue hyperstimulation (cerulein pancreatitis), choline-deficient, ethionine-supplemented diet (CDE), duct obstruction/ligation, closed duodenal loop, duct perfusion. Closed duodenal loop model is easy enough from the technical point of view and presents histological characteristics that resemble those of human pancreatitis, but it has the drawback of early mortality

Adenovirus-Mediated FasL Minigene Transfer Endows Transduced Cells with Killer Potential

Fas ligand (First apoptosis signal ligand, FasL, also known as CD95L) is the common executioner of apoptosis within the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) superfamily. We aimed to induce functional FasL expression in transduced cells using an adenovirus vector, which has the advantage of strong and transient induction of the gene included in the adenoviral genome. Here, we report that the adenovirus carrying a truncated FasL gene, named FasL minigene, encoding the full-length FasL protein (Ad-gFasL) is more efficient than the adenovirus carrying FasL cDNA (Ad-cFasL) in the induction of FasL expression in transduced cells. FasL minigene (2887 bp) lacking the second intron and a part of the 3′-UTR was created to reduce the gene length due to the size limitation of the adenoviral genome. The results show that, in transduced hepatocytes, strong expression of mRNA FasL appeared after 10 h for Ad-gFasL, while for Ad-cFasL, a faint expression appeared after 16 h. For Ad-gFasL, the protein expression was noticed starting with 0.5 transfection units (TU)/cell, while for Ad-cFasL, it could not be revealed. FasL-expressing endothelial cells induced apoptosis of A20 cells in co-culture experiments. FasL-expressing cells may be exploitable in various autoimmune diseases such as graft-versus-host disease, chronic colitis, and type I diabetes