Technique for anchoring fasteners to honeycomb panels

Two-piece fastener bushing provides mounting surface for components on a three-inch thick honeycomb structure. Specially constructed starter drill and sheet metal drill permit drilling without misalignment. Tapered knife-edge cutting tool removes honeycomb core material without tearing the adjacent material

Speedy Transactions in Multicore In-Memory Databases

Silo is a new in-memory database that achieves excellent performance and scalability on modern multicore machines. Silo was designed from the ground up to use system memory and caches efficiently. For instance, it avoids all centralized contention points, including that of centralized transaction ID assignment. Silo's key contribution is a commit protocol based on optimistic concurrency control that provides serializability while avoiding all shared-memory writes for records that were only read. Though this might seem to complicate the enforcement of a serial order, correct logging and recovery is provided by linking periodically-updated epochs with the commit protocol. Silo provides the same guarantees as any serializable database without unnecessary scalability bottlenecks or much additional latency. Silo achieves almost 700,000 transactions per second on a standard TPC-C workload mix on a 32-core machine, as well as near-linear scalability. Considered per core, this is several times higher than previously reported results.Engineering and Applied Science

Expressiveness of Temporal Query Languages: On the Modelling of Intervals, Interval Relationships and States

Storing and retrieving time-related information are important, or even critical, tasks on many areas of Computer Science (CS) and in particular for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The expressive power of temporal databases/query languages has been studied from different perspectives, but the kind of temporal information they are able to store and retrieve is not always conveniently addressed. Here we assess a number of temporal query languages with respect to the modelling of time intervals, interval relationships and states, which can be thought of as the building blocks to represent and reason about a large and important class of historic information. To survey the facilities and issues which are particular to certain temporal query languages not only gives an idea about how useful they can be in particular contexts, but also gives an interesting insight in how these issues are, in many cases, ultimately inherent to the database paradigm. While in the area of AI declarative languages are usually the preferred choice, other areas of CS heavily rely on the extended relational paradigm. This paper, then, will be concerned with the representation of historic information in two well known temporal query languages: it Templog in the context of temporal deductive databases, and it TSQL2 in the context of temporal relational databases. We hope the results highlighted here will increase cross-fertilisation between different communities. This article can be related to recent publications drawing the attention towards the different approaches followed by the Databases and AI communities when using time-related concepts

WindS@UP: the e-science platform for windscanner.eu

The WindScanner e-Science platform architecture and the underlying premises are discussed. It is a collaborative platform that will provide a repository for experimental data and metadata. Additional data processing capabilities will be incorporated thus enabling in-situ data processing. Every resource in the platform is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), enabling an unequivocally identification of the field(s) campaign(s) data sets and metadata associated with the data set or experience. This feature will allow the validation of field experiment results and conclusions as all managed resources will be linked. A centralised node (Hub) will aggregate the contributions of 6 to 8 local nodes from EC countries and will manage the access of 3 types of users: data-curator, data provider and researcher. This architecture was designed to ensure consistent and efficient research data access and preservation, and exploitation of new research opportunities provided by having this “Collaborative Data Infrastructure”. The prototype platform—WindS@UP—enables the usage of the platform by humans via a Web interface or by machines using an internal API (Application Programming Interface). Future work will improve the vocabulary (“application profile”) used to describe the resources managed by the platform.The WindScanner.eu|The European WindScanner Facility|is an ESFRI project (N: 312372) under the FP7-Infrastructures-2012-1. The authors are grateful to all colleagues in WP5 for the fruitful discussions, namely Dimitri Foussekis (CRES), Doron Callies (IWES Fraunhofer), Hans Verhoef (ECN), Harald Svendsen (Sintef), Jan Willem Wagenaar (ECN), Javier Sanz Rodrigo (CENER), Martin Bitter (Forwind), Mikael Sj oholm (DTU), Steen Arne S rensen (DTU) and Teresa Sim~oes (LNEG)

Glycocalyx Restricts Adenoviral Vector Access to Apical Receptors Expressed on Respiratory Epithelium In Vitro and In Vivo: Role for Tethered Mucins as Barriers to Lumenal Infection

Inefficient adenoviral vector (AdV)-mediated gene transfer to the ciliated respiratory epithelium has hindered gene transfer strategies for the treatment of cystic fibrosis lung disease. In part, the inefficiency is due to an absence of the coxsackie B and adenovirus type 2 and 5 receptor (CAR) from the apical membranes of polarized epithelia. In this study, using an in vitro model of human ciliated airway epithelium, we show that providing a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-linked AdV receptor (GPI-CAR) at the apical surface did not significantly improve AdV gene transfer efficiency because the lumenal surface glycocalyx limited the access of AdV to apical GPI-CAR. The highly glycosylated tethered mucins were considered to be significant glycocalyx components that restricted AdV access because proteolytic digestion and inhibitors of O-linked glycosylation enhanced AdV gene transfer. To determine whether these in vitro observations are relevant to the in vivo situation, we generated transgenic mice expressing GPI-CAR at the surface of the airway epithelium, crossbred these mice with mice that were genetically devoid of tethered mucin type 1 (Muc1), and tested the efficiency of gene transfer to murine airways expressing apical GPI-human CAR (GPI-hCAR) in the presence and absence of Muc1. We determined that AdV gene transfer to the murine airway epithelium was inefficient even in GPI-hCAR transgenic mice but that the gene transfer efficiency improved in the absence of Muc1. However, the inability to achieve a high gene transfer efficiency, even in mice with a deletion of Muc1, suggested that other glycocalyx components, possibly other tethered mucin types, also provide a significant barrier to AdV interacting with the airway lumenal surface

Membrane Mucin Muc4 promotes blood cell association with tumor cells and mediates efficient metastasis in a mouse model of breast cancer

Mucin-4 (Muc4) is a large cell surface glycoprotein implicated in the protection and lubrication of epithelial structures. Previous studies suggest that aberrantly expressed Muc4 can influence the adhesiveness, proliferation, viability and invasiveness of cultured tumor cells, as well as the growth rate and metastatic efficiency of xenografted tumors. Although it has been suggested that one of the major mechanisms by which Muc4 potentiates tumor progression is via its engagement of the ErbB2/HER2 receptor tyrosine kinase, other mechanisms exist and remain to be delineated. Moreover, the requirement for endogenous Muc4 for tumor growth progression has not been previously explored in the context of gene ablation. To assess the contribution of endogenous Muc4 to mammary tumor growth properties, we first created a genetically engineered mouse line lacking functional Muc4 (Muc4 ko), and then crossed these animals with the NDL (Neu DeLetion mutant) model of ErbB2-induced mammary tumorigenesis. We observed that Muc4 ko animals are fertile and develop normally, and adult mice exhibit no overt tissue abnormalities. In tumor studies, we observed that although some markers of tumor growth such as vascularity and cyclin D1 expression are suppressed, primary mammary tumors from Muc4 ko /NDL female mice exhibit similar latencies and growth rates as Muc4 wt /NDL animals. However, the presence of lung metastases is markedly suppressed in Muc4 ko /NDL mice. Interestingly, histological analysis of lung lesions from Muc4 ko /NDL mice revealed a reduced association of disseminated cells with platelets and white blood cells. Moreover, isolated cells derived from Muc4 ko /NDL tumors interact with fewer blood cells when injected directly into the vasculature or diluted into blood from wild type mice. We further observed that blood cells more efficiently promote the viability of non-adherent Muc4 wt /NDL cells than Muc4 ko /NDL cells. Together, our observations suggest that Muc4 may facilitate metastasis by promoting the association of circulating tumor cells with blood cells to augment tumor cell survival in circulation

Contextual and Granular Policy Enforcement in Database-backed Applications

Database-backed applications rely on inlined policy checks to process users' private and confidential data in a policy-compliant manner as traditional database access control mechanisms cannot enforce complex policies. However, application bugs due to missed checks are common in such applications, which result in data breaches. While separating policy from code is a natural solution, many data protection policies specify restrictions based on the context in which data is accessed and how the data is used. Enforcing these restrictions automatically presents significant challenges, as the information needed to determine context requires a tight coupling between policy enforcement and an application's implementation. We present Estrela, a framework for enforcing contextual and granular data access policies. Working from the observation that API endpoints can be associated with salient contextual information in most database-backed applications, Estrela allows developers to specify API-specific restrictions on data access and use. Estrela provides a clean separation between policy specification and the application's implementation, which facilitates easier auditing and maintenance of policies. Policies in Estrela consist of pre-evaluation and post-evaluation conditions, which provide the means to modulate database access before a query is issued, and to impose finer-grained constraints on information release after the evaluation of query, respectively. We build a prototype of Estrela and apply it to retrofit several real world applications (from 1000-80k LOC) to enforce different contextual policies. Our evaluation shows that Estrela can enforce policies with minimal overheads

Data science

Even though it has only entered public perception relatively recently, the term "data science" already means many things to many people. This chapter explores both top-down and bottom-up views on the field, on the basis of which we define data science as "a unique blend of principles and methods from analytics, engineering, entrepreneurship and communication that aim at generating value from the data itself". The chapter then discusses the disciplines that contribute to this "blend", briefly outlining their contributions and giving pointers for readers interested in exploring their backgrounds further