Dancing in the Streets - a design case study

How do you transform a city center at night to enhance the experience of residents and visitors and to combat the public’s fears over safety and security after dark? This challenge was set by the York City Council’s “Renaissance Project: Illuminating York,” and we took them up on it. We made it our goal to get pedestrians to engage with our interactive light installation—and to get them dancing without even realizing it. People out shopping or on their way to restaurants and nightclubs found themselves followed by ghostly footprints, chased by brightly colored butterflies, playing football with balls of light, or linked together by a “cat’s cradle” of colored lines. As they moved within the light projections, participants found that they were literally dancing in the street

The influence of tobacco smoking on adhesion molecule profiles

Sequential interactions between several adhesion molecules and their ligands regulate lymphocyte circulation and leukocyte recruitment to inflammatory foci. Adhesion molecules are, therefore, central and critical components of the immune and inflammatory system. We review the evidence that tobacco smoking dysregulates specific components of the adhesion cascade, which may be a common factor in several smoking-induced diseases. Smoking causes inappropriate leukocyte activation, leukocyte-endothelial adhesion, and neutrophil entrapment in the microvasculature, which may help initiate local tissue destruction. Appropriate inflammatory reactions may thus be compromised. In addition to smoke-induced alterations to membrane bound endothelial and leukocyte adhesion molecule expression, which may help explain the above phenomena, smoking has a profound influence on circulating adhesion molecule profiles, most notably sICAM-1 and specific sCD44 variants. Elevated concentrations of soluble adhesion molecules may simply reflect ongoing inflammatory processes. However, increasing evidence suggests that specific soluble adhesion molecules are immunomodulatory, and that alterations to soluble adhesion molecule profiles may represent a significant risk factor for several diverse diseases. This evidence is discussed herein

Higher-Order Demand-Driven Program Analysis

We explore a novel approach to higher-order program analysis that brings ideas of on-demand lookup from first-order CFL-reachability program analyses to higher-order programs. The analysis needs to produce only a control-flow graph; it can derive all other information including values of variables directly from the graph. Several challenges had to be overcome, including how to build the control-flow graph on-the-fly and how to deal with non-local variables in functions. The resulting analysis is flow- and context-sensitive with a provable polynomial-time bound. The analysis is formalized and proved correct and terminating, and an initial implementation is described

The action mechanism of daptomycin

The final publication is available at Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bmc.2016.05.052 © 2016.Daptomycin is a lipopeptide antibiotic produced by the soil bacterium Streptomyces roseosporus that is clinically used to treat severe infections with Gram-positive bacteria. In this review, we discuss the mode of action of this important antibiotic. Although daptomycin is structurally related to amphomycin and similar lipopeptides that inhibit peptidoglycan biosynthesis, experimental studies have not produced clear evidence that daptomycin shares their action mechanism. Instead, the best characterized effect of daptomycin is the permeabilization and depolarization of the bacterial cell membrane. This activity, which can account for daptomycin's bactericidal effect, correlates with the level of phosphatidylglycerol (PG) in the membrane. Accordingly, reduced synthesis of PG or its increased conversion to lysyl-PG promotes bacterial resistance to daptomycin. While other resistance mechanisms suggest that daptomycin may indeed directly interfere with cell wall synthesis or cell division, such effects still await direct experimental confirmation. Daptomycin's complex structure and biosynthesis have hampered the analysis of its structure activity relationships. Novel methods of total synthesis, including a recent one that is carried out entirely on a solid phase, will enable a more thorough and systematic exploration of the sequence space

Capacity limitations of visual memory in two-interval comparison of Gabor arrays

The capacity of short-term visual memory (VSTM) was assessed in a two-interval spatial frequency (SF) discrimination task. The cued Gabor target in a multi-element array either increased or decreased in SF across a 2s interstimulus interval (ISI). Distracters as well as target were made to change across ISI so that memory of the individual SF of Gabor elements was required to solve the discrimination. The dynamics of the information loss from visual memory were analysed by manipulating the timing of spatial cues and masks. Cueing the target position before the first display gave thresholds comparable with those for a single Gabor patch. Cues placed after the first display gave higher thresholds indicating some loss of information. Within the ISI there was little increase in threshold or set size effect with cue delay. However there was a sharp rise in thresholds for cue positions after the second display. Gabor masks placed before a mid-ISI cue were more effective than noise masks or Gabor masks placed after the cue. With a cue placed late in the ISI, preceded by a Gabor mask, the masking effect decreased with increasing delay of the mask after the first display. This suggests a selective, dynamic but increasingly durable representation of the initial stimulus is built up in memory, and there is a graded form of “overwriting” of this representation by new stimuli

The FX/90: A proposal in response to a low Reynolds Number station keeping mission

The FX/90 is a remotely piloted vehicle designed to fly at Reynolds numbers below 2 x 10 to the 5th power. Several applications exist for this type of flight, such as low altitude flight of very small aircraft. The design presented here allows investigation into the unique problems involved in low Reynolds number flight, which will, in turn, further understanding of this flight regime. The aircraft will operate in a steady flight environment, free from significant atmospheric turbulence and weather effects. The F-90 has a 39 in. fuselage which is constructed of balsa and plywood. The landing gear for the aircraft is a detachable carriage on which the aircraft rests. The aerodynamic planform is a rectangular wing (no taper or sweep) with a chord of 9 in., a wingspan of 72 in., and is constructed entirely out of styrofoam. The propulsion system is a puller configuration mounted on the front of the fuselage. It consists of an Astro 05 engine and a 10-6 two bladed propeller. Control of the aircraft is accomplished through the use of two movable control surfaces: elevators for pitch control, and a rudder for yaw control. The aircraft is soundly constructed, highly maneuverable, and adequately powered. Furthermore, the investigation into alternative technologies, most notably the styrofoam wing and the detachable landing gear, holds promise to improve the performance of the aircraft