A multiscale phenomenological constitutive model for strain rate dependent tensile ductility in nanocrystalline metals

Acknowledgments No external funding was received for this project.Peer reviewedPostprin

New Horizons In The Treatment Of Metastatic Castrate Resistant Prostate Cancer

“The nature of the body is the beginning of medical science”-Hippocrates. From the chosen Dhanvantri of ancient India to Imhotep of Egypt, to Huangdi of China, the disease was seen as a combination of the supernatural and the natural and medicine focused on healing the soul and the body. While practices have changed drastically since the establishment of the first organized medieval medical school Schola Medica Salernitana in Italy, what remains unchanged is the importance of the basics. If anything, modern knowledge and analysis have increased the emphasis laid on basic sciences and anatomy can be regarded as the backbone, the core of basic medical sciences. Just as a mechanic cannot repair a car without a thorough knowledge of its form, external and internal, a doctor cannot heal the human body without a deep understanding of its structure. A fact that has been understood and utilized by the likes of Herophilus and Vesalius, fathers of anatomy. The subject deals with the learning of the structure of the human body from the gross external features down to the microscopic level, at all stages of development, from the embryo to the elderly. This knowledge is essential for a physician to understand the functioning of the body, disease pathophysiology, and treatment modalities.  The speciality that benefits the most from this subject in clinical practice is surgery while the rest of the specialities rely on anatomy during physical exams, symptom interpretation, patient education, and interpretation of radiological images.   If we talk specifically about the undergraduate medical curriculum, anatomy is a vital component of the basic sciences taught during the first one or two years of medical or dental school. The role these subjects play in the curriculum can be discussed in two categories: the ideal, theoretical role and the less-than-perfect, practical reality. Despite having adopted an integrated modular system, most medical schools in Pakistan, UK, and USA still teach anatomy in the first two years at the most.  During these two years, a specific number of hours (from around 150 hours of total teaching time for anatomy) is allocated to gross anatomy, neuroanatomy, histology, etc. Anatomy should be taught in all 4-5 years of medical school for deeper understanding and integration, assimilated with clinical subjects. While the systems approach of teaching medical curriculum sounds fine on paper, the lack of a standardized practical application of this approach has its pitfalls, especially for complex subjects like anatomy. Study shows that students who learned anatomy via the old curriculum scored higher in the subject as compared to students taught through the modular approach.   Instead of taking anatomy to a higher pedestal, newer recommendations have decreased the time and resources spent teaching anatomy, raising concerns among students, faculty, and clinicians.   A sound, comprehensive anatomy curriculum needs to be created, one aligned with clinical practice, with input from anatomists, clinicians, and educationists.  Added to this is the issue of the anatomy faculty. In Utopia, medical schools would have a highly trained team of anatomists, proficient in the traditional and modern methods of teaching the subject. The reality, however, is bleak: anatomists have been rapidly dwindling in number with the passing years and the funds allocated to anatomists and their relevant research have been declining leading to lesser people choosing the subject as a profession. The medical world has become enchanted with fields like molecular genetics and cellular biology, diverting staff, resources, and graduate requirements to newer fields. Medical students rarely choose to teach the subject after their medical school years.  Anatomists now form a very small community, and their training level has deteriorated.  Pakistan has not been spared by this pedagogical plague and Ph.D.-trained anatomists are now an almost extinct species in the country adding to the multitude of challenges already faced in anatomy teaching.   The problem of the ‘disappearing anatomists’ and its impact on medical education has been widely studied but no concrete steps have been taken to address this issue that threatens to disrupt the fabric of medical education. If anatomy is to be seen as the backbone of the basic sciences, the subject that sets the stage and scenery for all other basic sciences subjects, then dissection can be called the building block of that backbone. A lot has changed since the seventh century when the first dissections were practised and consequently outlawed for the next few centuries. Dissections can now be performed legally, within ethical parameters, and yield a treasure trove of knowledge regarding the human body.   Dissection provides solid, tangible scientific knowledge and teaches important skills like teamwork, professional development, empathy, and coming to terms with the prosaic reality of death.    However, due to the question of ethics and resources, dissection has been removed from many medical curricula. But has this been a wise decision? Surveys show that most medical students feel that more hours and detail should be invested in dissections and prosections.   Medical schools that previously removed cadaveric dissection from the curricula realized their folly and started reintroducing this age-old practice, most of them taking steps to inculcate it along the lines of vertical integration.  ‘Obsolete’ is a slur frequently directed at the didactics of anatomy. While paying homage to tradition and all that can learn from it, it is imperative that the subject gains maximum benefit from the fruits of technology and development.  Computer-assisted learning utilizing 2-D and 3-D imaging, virtual dissection, radiological aids, live surgical streaming, and modern educational tools like Problem-Based learning needs to be integrated especially in a country like Pakistan where most students still learn anatomy swotting over bland textbooks with the occasional once-in-a-lifetime trip to a poorly equipped dissection hall. Modern educational tools can be manna in our country where medical education is already suffering due to a lack of allocated resources and trained staff. The most avant-garde medical colleges in Pakistan are still using hopelessly outdated multimedia options, resulting in increased student dissatisfaction.  In conclusion, an exhaustive amount of research has been carried out to define and appreciate the role of anatomy in the undergraduate curriculum, with most clinicians agreeing to anatomy is the cornerstone of medical education.  Is this subject being taught in a manner fitting its vast implications in the life of doctors and patients? The answer is no. Do most students possess an adequate knowledge of anatomy? No. If anything, the conditions of anatomy learning, despite the incorporation of novel technologies, are worsening in medical institutions, leading to potentially grave consequences for the future of healthcare. The stakeholders need to take urgent and applicable steps in the right direction

Fasceíte necrotizante na gravidez: relato de dois casos.

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Ciências da Saúde, Departamento de Tocoginecologia, Curso de Medicina, Florianópolis, 199

viSNE and Wanderlust, two algorithms for the visualization and analysis of high-dimensional single-cell data

The immune system presents a unique opportunity for studying development in mammals. White blood cells undergo differentiation and proliferation, a never-ending process throughout the life of the organism. Hematopoiesis, the development of cells in the immune system, depends upon the interaction between many different cell types (some of which comprise less than a tenth of a percent of the population), transient regulatory decisions, genomic rearrangement events, cell proliferation, and death. To capture these events we employ mass cytometry, a novel technology that measures fifty proteins simultaneously in single cells. Mass cytometry results in large quantities of high-dimensional data which challenges existing computational techniques. To address these challenges, we developed two dimensionality reduction algorithms for analyzing mass cytometry and other single-cell data. The first, viSNE, transforms high-dimensional data into an intuitive two-dimensional map, making it accessible to visual exploration. The second algorithm, Wanderlust, receives as input a static snapshot (where cells occupy different stages of their development) and constructs their developmental ordering: the developmental trajectory. viSNE maps healthy bone marrow into a canonical shape that separates cell subtypes. In leukemia, however, the shape is malformed: the maps of cancer samples are distinct from the healthy map and from each other. The algorithm highlights structure in the heterogeneity of surface phenotype expression in cancer, traverses the progression from diagnosis to relapse, and identifies a rare leukemia population in minimal residual disease settings. Wanderlust was applied to healthy B lineage cells, where the trajectory follows known marker expression trends and genetic recombination events. Using the Wanderlust trajectory we identified CD24 as an early marker of B cell development. The trajectory captures the coordination between several regulatory mechanisms (surface marker expression, signaling, proliferation and apoptosis) during crucial development checkpoints. As new technologies raise the number of simultaneously measured parameters in each cell to the hundreds, viSNE and Wanderlust will become a mainstay in analyzing and interpreting such experiments

A robot swarm assisting a human fire-fighter

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings

Modeling in Branding: a critical ethnography approach

Purpose- The paper aims to shed light on the potential of ethnography to provide a dialectical approach to modeling the process of branding as its focus widens from managerial to social. Design/methodology/approach- A critical approach to ethnography is adopted and implemented in light of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnographic modeling technique of ‘Participant Objectification’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Findings-The paper demonstrates from the customer standpoint- of a case of a grocery retailer- the ability of critical ethnography to dialectically model the branding process as an organic cultural whole, which envelops an intricate set of different, yet interdependent, social and managerial systems, functioning in a coherent and complementary manner. Research limitations- The empirical evidence is limited to the area of grocery retailing. Thus, widening the application of the technique in other areas would be desirable. Practical implications– The dialectical nature of the critical approach to modeling yields a rich multi-faceted view of the branding process that could help remedy the problem of detachment from complex reality, which has often been a criticism of traditional approaches to modeling in marketing. Originality/Value- The suggested dialectical approach to modeling expands the potential use of ethnography within the critical orientation to theory building in marketing generally, and branding in particular through elaborating the process of cultural construction from textual via participant observation to dialectical via participant objectification

The impact of precise inter-satellite ranges on relative precise orbit determination in a smart CubeSats constellation

The use of CubeSats is expanding in space and earth science applications due to the low costs of building and the possibility of launching them in a large low-earth orbits (LEO) constellation. Such constellation can serve as an augmentation system for positioning, navigation and timing. However, real-time precise orbit determination (POD) is still one of the challenges for this application. Real-time reduced-dynamic POD requires more processing capability than what is available in current CubeSats, and the kinematic POD highly depends on the number and the quality of the signals from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). In this study, an approach is proposed to increase the orbital accuracy by implementing the precise inter-satellite ranges in the Kinematic POD. The precise orbits of a set of CubeSats from the Spire Global constellation that are determined using the reduced-dynamic POD is to be used to generate the precise inter-satellite ranges. These ranges vary from hundreds to thousands of kilometres and are constrained in the relative kinematic POD between the tested CubeSats. The results, which depend on the length of the inter-satellite ranges, show the improvement of the orbital accuracy in all directions. An initial architecture for implementing such a method in a smart CubeSats constellation is proposed and the limitations and remedies are discussed