The sociology of entrenchment: a cystic fibrosis test for everyone?

In this article we introduce the notion of entrenchment to conceptualize the processes in which new technological options, through the interactions between a variety of actors, become viable and established practices in society, both satisfying and modifying needs and interests. The notion of entrenchment we use as a framework for an analysis of developments and debates in the field of cystic fibrosis testing and screening in Denmark. On the one hand, it appears that the development and introduction of cystic fibrosis (CF) screening to some extent is predetermined both by existing networks of human genome researchers, clinical geneticist, patients (organizations),funding organizations, and regulatory agencies, and by existing practices like that of prenatal diagnosis. On the other hand, in Denmark, the content and future of CF screening is shaped in ongoing processes or articulation of demand for screening and of its cultural and political acceptability, processes which also involve political decision-making and which (may) result in new networks and regimes. Yet, what appears to be an inherent and undecided part of the process of entrenchment of CF screening in Denmark, is how to allocate responsibilities and authority to decide what is acceptable and what not

Bounded policy learning? : EU efforts to anticipate unintended consequences in conflict minerals legislation

Inspired by the emerging literature on unintended consequences of EU external action, this article studies how the anticipation of negative unintended consequences factors into EU policy-making. Using policy learning analytical lens, case study research strategy and process-tracing method, this article examines EU policy-making on conflict minerals: when respective EU policy was drafted, the negative unintended consequences of the earlier US conflict minerals legislation figured prominently in the debate. The analysis shows why and how major differences between US and EU conflict minerals legislation have resulted from bounded lessons-drawing driven by two opposing transatlantic advocacy coalitions. Eventually, the EU designed its conflict minerals policy so as to mitigate perceived negative unintended consequences of the earlier US law. The article contributes to literatures on unintended consequences of EU external action, policy learning and specifically bounded lessons-drawing in EU context, and conflict minerals legislation

Creation of strange-quark-matter droplets as a unique signature for quark-gluon plasma formation in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

We demonstrate that strangeness separates in the Gibbs-phase coexistence between a baryon-rich quark-gluon plasma and hadron matter, even at T=0. For finite temperatures this is due to the associated production of kaons (containing s¯ quarks) in the hadron phase while s quarks remain in the deconfined phase. The s-s¯ separation results in a strong enhancement of the s-quark abundance in the quark phase. This mechanism is further supported by cooling and net strangeness enrichment due to the prefreezeout evaporation of pions and K+, K0, which carry away entropy and anti- strangeness from the system. Metastable droplets (i.e., stable as far as weak interactions are not regarded) of strange-quark matter (‘‘strangelets’’) can thus be formed during the phase transition. Such cool, compact, long-lived clusters could be experimentally observed by their unusually small Z/A ratio (≤0.1–0.3). Even if the strange-quark-matter phase is not stable under strong interactions, it should be observable by the delayed correlated emission of several hyperons. This would serve as a unique signature for the transient formation of a quark-gluon plasma

Augmenting Biogas Process Modeling by Resolving Intracellular Metabolic Activity

The process of anaerobic digestion in which waste biomass is transformed to methane by complex microbial communities has been modeled for more than 16 years by parametric gray box approaches that simplify process biology and do not resolve intracellular microbial activity. Information on such activity, however, has become available in unprecedented detail by recent experimental advances in metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics. The inclusion of such data could lead to more powerful process models of anaerobic digestion that more faithfully represent the activity of microbial communities. We augmented the Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 (ADM1) as the standard kinetic model of anaerobic digestion by coupling it to Flux-Balance-Analysis (FBA) models of methanogenic species. Steady-state results of coupled models are comparable to standard ADM1 simulations if the energy demand for non-growth associated maintenance (NGAM) is chosen adequately. When changing a constant feed of maize silage from continuous to pulsed feeding, the final average methane production remains very similar for both standard and coupled models, while both the initial response of the methanogenic population at the onset of pulsed feeding as well as its dynamics between pulses deviates considerably. In contrast to ADM1, the coupled models deliver predictions of up to 1,000s of intracellular metabolic fluxes per species, describing intracellular metabolic pathway activity in much higher detail. Furthermore, yield coefficients which need to be specified in ADM1 are no longer required as they are implicitly encoded in the topology of the species’ metabolic network. We show the feasibility of augmenting ADM1, an ordinary differential equation-based model for simulating biogas production, by FBA models implementing individual steps of anaerobic digestion. While cellular maintenance is introduced as a new parameter, the total number of parameters is reduced as yield coefficients no longer need to be specified. The coupled models provide detailed predictions on intracellular activity of microbial species which are compatible with experimental data on enzyme synthesis activity or abundance as obtained by metatranscriptomics or metaproteomics. By providing predictions of intracellular fluxes of individual community members, the presented approach advances the simulation of microbial community driven processes and provides a direct link to validation by state-of-the-art experimental techniques

A new project to address run-time reconfigurable hardware systems

Last autumn, we started a new project named Context Switching Reconfigurable Hardware for Communication Systems (COSRECOS). In this talk, I would like to present how we plan to address the challenge of changing hardware configurations while a system is in operation. The overall goal of the project is to contribute in making run-time reconfigurable systems more feasible in general. This includes introducing architectures for reducing reconfiguration time as well as undertaking tool development. Case studies by applications in network and communication systems will be a part of the project. Comments to the planned outline are much welcome