Formalization of the partnering structure for networked businesses

Rapidly changing market demands and increasing competitive pressure cause many businesses implement changes to the way they conduct business. One of these changes is the decision to collaborate with other businesses, forming what we call a 'networked business'. Networked businesses are formed by different organizations working together to reach a common goal. For the participating organizations in a networked business to be able to promptly react to their customers' needs, they must set up as cornerstone a well-defined collaborative partnering structure. In this report we discuss the partnering structure of networked businesses and present a framework for its formalization. Using a case study, we illustrate that existing approaches for value modeling, roles specification, and responsibilities definition can be used successfully if employed in a unifying way to address this structure concept

Differential antifungal activity of human and cryptococcal melanins with structural discrepancies

Indexación: Scopus.Melanin is a pigment found in all biological kingdoms, and plays a key role in protection against ultraviolet radiation, oxidizing agents, and ionizing radiation damage. Melanin exerts an antimicrobial activity against bacteria, fungi, and parasites. We demonstrated an antifungal activity of synthetic and human melanin against Candida sp. The members of the Cryptococcus neoformans and C. gattii species complexes are capsulated yeasts, which cause cryptococcosis. For both species melanin is an important virulence factor. To evaluate if cryptococcal and human melanins have antifungal activity against Cryptococcus species they both were assayed for their antifungal properties and physico-chemical characters. Melanin extracts from human hair and different strains of C. neoformans (n = 4) and C. gattii (n = 4) were investigated. The following minimum inhibitory concentrations were found for different melanins against C. neoformans and C. gattii were (average/range): 13.7/(7.8-15.6) and 19.5/(15.6-31.2) μg/mL, respectively, for human melanin; 273.4/(125- > 500) and 367.2/(125.5- > 500) μg/mL for C. neoformans melanin and 125/(62.5-250) and 156.2/(62-250) μg/mL for C. gattii melanin. Using Scanning Electron Microscopy we observed that human melanin showed a compact conformation and cryptococcal melanins exposed an amorphous conformation. Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) showed some differences in the signals related to C-C bonds of the aromatic ring of the melanin monomers. High Performance Liquid Chromatography established differences in the chromatograms of fungal melanins extracts in comparison with human and synthetic melanin, particularly in the retention time of the main compound of fungal melanin extracts and also in the presence of minor unknown compounds. On the other hand, MALDI-TOF-MS analysis showed slight differences in the spectra, specifically the presence of a minor intensity ion in synthetic and human melanin, as well as in some fungal melanin extracts. We conclude that human melanin is more active than the two fungal melanins against Cryptococcus. Although some physico-chemical differences were found, they do not explain the differences in the antifungal activity against Cryptococcus of human and cryptococcal melanins. More detailed studies on the structure should be considered to associate structure and antifungal activity.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2017.01292/ful

Evaluation of CNN architectures for gait recognition based on optical flow maps

This work targets people identification in video based on the way they walk (\ie gait) by using deep learning architectures. We explore the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for learning high-level descriptors from low-level motion features (\ie optical flow components). The low number of training samples for each subject and the use of a test set containing subjects different from the training ones makes the search of a good CNN architecture a challenging task.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Standardization of molecular monitoring for chronic myeloid leukemia in Latin America using locally produced secondary cellular calibrators

Residual disease in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patients undergoing therapy with tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) is measured by assessing the quantity of transcripts of the BCR-ABL1 fusion gene in peripheral white blood cells. This analysis is based on reverse-transcription quantitative PCR (RT–qPCR) technology; however, the wide array of methods used worldwide has led to large variation in quantitative BCR-ABL1 measurements, which hamper inter-laboratory comparative studiesFil: Ruiz, María Sol. Fundación Cáncer. Centro de Investigaciones Oncológicas; ArgentinaFil: Medina, M.. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Medicina Experimental. Academia Nacional de Medicina de Buenos Aires. Instituto de Medicina Experimental; ArgentinaFil: Tapia, I.. Fundación Cáncer. Centro de Investigaciones Oncológicas; ArgentinaFil: Mordoh, Jose. Fundación Cáncer. Centro de Investigaciones Oncológicas; ArgentinaFil: Cross, N. C. P.. Universidad de Southampton Uk; Reino UnidoFil: Larripa, Irene Beatriz. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Medicina Experimental. Academia Nacional de Medicina de Buenos Aires. Instituto de Medicina Experimental; ArgentinaFil: Bianchini, Michele. Fundación Cáncer. Centro de Investigaciones Oncológicas; Argentin

Cooper pairs as bosons

Although BCS pairs of fermions are known not to obey Bose-Einstein (BE) commutation relations nor BE statistics, we show how Cooper pairs (CPs), whether the simple original ones or the CPs recently generalized in a many-body Bethe-Salpeter approach, being clearly distinct from BCS pairs at least obey BE statistics. Hence, contrary to widespread popular belief, CPs can undergo BE condensation to account for superconductivity if charged, as well as for neutral-atom fermion superfluidity where CPs, but uncharged, are also expected to form.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, full biblio info adde

Secrecy content of two-qubit states

We analyze the set of two-qubit states from which a secret key can be extracted by single-copy measurements plus classical processing of the outcomes. We introduce a key distillation protocol and give the corresponding necessary and sufficient condition for positive key extraction. Our results imply that the critical error rate derived by Chau, Phys. Rev. A {\bf 66}, 060302 (2002), for a secure key distribution using the six-state scheme is tight. Remarkably, an optimal eavesdropping attack against this protocol does not require any coherent quantum operation.Comment: 5 pages, RevTe