80 years of electrospinning

Electrospinning is a relatively simple fibre-forming process and offers a unique method to produce nanofibers. The process exists at this moment 80 years and has seen a very turbulent history. There is a need to see what actually happened in this history. We have taken a brief look in the history of electrospinning. This paper is reporting on some of the aspects that electrospinning encountered. It is crucial to see that electrospinning has been used in different countries in different time periods. The history of electrospinning is mainly characterised by bad timing. The future of electrospinning looks however quit bright

Predicting drug penetration across the blood-brain barrier: comparison of micellar liquid chromatography and immobilized artificial membrane liquid chromatography

Several in vitro methods have been investigated for mimicking drug penetration across the blood-brain barrier (BBB) into the central nervous system (CNS). Both micellar liquid chromatography (MLC) and immobilized artificial membrane (IAM) liquid chromatography were tested in this contribution in order to construct models for BBB transfer prediction. MLC measurements were performed on a C18-column with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), polyoxyethylene (23) lauryl ether (Brij35) or sodium deoxycholate (SDC) as surfactants in the micellar mobile phase. IAM liquid chromatography measurements were performed with a Dulbecco’s phosphate-buffered saline (DPBS) and a certain percentage of methanol as organic modifier in the mobile phase. This study aimed to obtain a high correlation between in vivo and predicted log BB values (= concentration of the drug molecule in the brain to concentration in the blood)

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

Stochastic Games on a Product State Space

We examine product-games, which are n-player stochastic games satisfying: (1) the state space is a product S(1)Ãâ¦ÃS(n); (2) the action space of any player i only depends of the i-th coordinate of the state; (3) the transition probability of moving from s(i) ∈ S(i) to t(i) ∈S(i), on the i-th coordinate S(i) of the state space, only depends on the action chosen by player i. So, as far as the actions and the transitions are concerned, every player i can play on the i-th coordinate of the product-game without interference of the other players. No condition is imposed on the payoff structure of the game. We focus on product-games with an aperiodic transition structure, for which we present an approach based on so-called communicating states. For the general n-player case, we establish the existence of 0-equilibria, which makes product-games one of the first classes within n-player stochastic games with such a result. In addition, for the special case of two-player zero-sum games of this type, we show that both players have stationary 0-optimal strategies. Both proofs are constructive by nature.Economics (Jel: A)

Reformed College Confronts Poverty

This article is the first in a series of three on the concept of poverty. The product of a series of seminars sponsored by the Social Sciences Division at Dordt College, the earlier articles defined poverty, introduced related Biblical concepts, and discussed the role of the state. For reference, see: Jasper Lesage, Justice for the Poor: The Political Problem of Poverties, Pro Rege (14,2: December, 1985), p. 2-15; and Fred De Jong, The Challenge of Poverty to the Reformed Community, Pro Rege (14,4: June, 1986), pp. 2-8

Pure Subgame-Perfect Equilibria in Free Transition Games

We consider a class of stochastic games, where each state is identified with a player. At any moment during play, one of the players is called active. The active player can terminate the game, or he can announce any player, who then becomes the active player. There is a non-negative payoff for each player upon termination of the game, which depends only on the player who decided to terminate. We give a combinatorial proof of the existence of subgame-perfect equilibria in pure strategies for the games in our class.mathematical economics;

Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism is an “old school” reliable technique for swift microbial community screening in anaerobic digestion

The microbial community in anaerobic digestion has been analysed through microbial fingerprinting techniques, such as terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (TRFLP), for decades. In the last decade, high-throughput 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing has replaced these techniques, but the time-consuming and complex nature of high-throughput techniques is a potential bottleneck for full-scale anaerobic digestion application, when monitoring community dynamics. Here, the bacterial and archaeal TRFLP profiles were compared with 16S rRNA gene amplicon profiles (Illumina platform) of 25 full-scale anaerobic digestion plants. The α-diversity analysis revealed a higher richness based on Illumina data, compared with the TRFLP data. This coincided with a clear difference in community organisation, Pareto distribution, and co-occurrence network statistics, i.e., betweenness centrality and normalised degree. The β-diversity analysis showed a similar clustering profile for the Illumina, bacterial TRFLP and archaeal TRFLP data, based on different distance measures and independent of phylogenetic identification, with pH and temperature as the two key operational parameters determining microbial community composition. The combined knowledge of temporal dynamics and projected clustering in the β-diversity profile, based on the TRFLP data, distinctly showed that TRFLP is a reliable technique for swift microbial community dynamics screening in full-scale anaerobic digestion plants