DEM simulations of unsaturated soils interpreted in a thermodynamic framework

The behavior of granular materials (e.g. soils) strongly depends on the interactions between particles at the grain scale. In addition, in multiphase systems, the presence of water and interfaces between different phases in the soil adds complexity to the study [1,2,5]. The main purpose of this work is to introduce some concepts that are able to fill the gap between discrete element method simulations [3,4] and thermodynamics in order to develop constitutive laws able to better describe the behavior of unsaturated granular medium. The problem is studied in a thermodynamic framework where energies are calculated at low water content for a simple system of two particles of different sizes connected by a liquid bridge. The effect of gravity is considered to be negligible in this study. The energy supplied to the simple system is divided into two parts: a) the energy due to the change of the matric suction in the system and b) the energy resulting from the movement of the particles with respect to each other. Comparisions with the first law of thermodynamics show that there are some features that have significant importance in the macro formulation of energies. These features may be related to the interfacial areas in the medium

Editorial

From the Guest Editors: Strategy in Sport Management   João J. Ferreira, University of Beira Interior & NECE – Research Unit in Business Science, Portugal Dina Miragaia, University of Beira Interior & NECE – Research Unit in Business Science, Portugal Vanessa Ratten, La Trobe University, Australia    Abstract   This special issue includes six papers specific to Strategy in Sport Management (SSM) research. It offers an opportunity to advance our understanding of the specific themes of SSM. It also addresses subjects particularly critical to the SSM field, including its multidisciplinary, new theoretical perspectives, emerging methodologies and novel strategies in sport management approaches and encourages scrutinising their impact on organisational context. In this editorial we attempt to identify the main SSM research areas and outline a short description of the authors’ contributions.   Keywords: sport, sport management, sport marketing, strategy, strategic management      Theoretical Background   Research in strategy is at a critical crossroads due to the global marketplace and there is an increased emphasis on new theoretical concepts and on testing empirical relationships based on such concepts. But what do we know about strategy in sport management? The history of sport is debatably richer than any other form of human activity. Sport has generally developed across the world as a ceremony, a celebration, a physical pursuit, a leisure activity and now, increasingly, a business (CHADWICK, 2009). A business looking for stable revenues, new product development, or international expansion engages in business strategy by determining how to position itself in appropriate markets and in relation to competitors. Strategy relates to sports because a non-sport firm may use sport strategically by advertising, sponsoring (O'REILLY and HORNING, 2013), image and reputation (PARENT and FOREMAN, 2007), corporate social responsibility (HEINZE et al., 2014), partnership (BABIAK, 2007) or female (FINK, 2015) or/and a sport-related business may be associated with a variety of industries, each of which have different economic features and market forces (RATTEN, 2011; RATTEN and BABIAK, 2010). Sport has inherently competitive values in nature and is entrepreneurial as it continues to adapt based on global marketplace changes (RATTEN, 2011). In addition, stakeholders in the strategic decision making of a sport organization (MIRAGAIA et al., 2014) are other crucial elements in all processes. To be successful over a period of time organizations need to determine the nature of the environments within which the competition is taking place, ensuring that they have resources and capabilities to move successfully through those environments in order to create a sustainable strategy (BEECH and CHADWICK, 2004). In a fast moving environment, governance remains central to the effective and efficient management of sport organizations (FINK, 2013; HOYE and AULD, 2007). The strategic role and performance of the board, while central to the practice of governance, has been showed to be a weakness in many sport organizations (FERKINS et al., 2005). Changes in sport management have presented major strategic issues to those responsible for governing sport organizations (FINK, 2013; LERA-LOPEZ and RAPUN-GARATE, 2007; MILLER, 2002). The contribution of the strategic activities in sport management is a topic superficially explored by sport management scholars (RATTEN and BABIAK, 2010). Understanding the factors that both constrain and enable sport organisations to think and act strategically may provide an empirical basis for sports to build their strategic capabilities (FERKINS and SHILBURY, 2010) and efficiency (BABIAK, 2007; MIRAGAIA et al., 2016) With the worldwide downturn of the economy, there is a need to effectively measure strategy and competitiveness in sport management context (RATTEN and FERREIRA, 2016). The outcomes of this research will critically depend on the conceptualization and measurement of these concepts and their derivative constructs. Thus, in spite of numerous discussions on alternate approaches to measuring strategy, the relationship between theoretical definitions and their consequent dimensions has been generally weak in the sport management context and there is an opportunity for interdisciplinary research about sport business.  Furthermore, businesses are facing many challenges, many of which are propelled by increasing competitiveness and for lack of identification of what accurately creates a sport organization’s competitive advantage. The specific focus of this special issue was on the emerging perspectives in strategy by exploring the strategy foundations in a Sport Management context. To generate new theoretical and empirical advances in strategy, it is essential to develop an integrated, empirically-tractable account of how such phenomena influence strategy formation, resource allocation, strategy implementation, market efficiency, and sustained competitive advantage. In order to provide research themes depicted in SSM as a theoretical background, we identified the journal, authors and research topics through an intellectual structure of research on SSM. Citation data was collected from the “Current Contents Connect” included on the online databases of Thomson/Reuters-ISI. A survey was conducted by the expression: Strateg*AND “Sport Management”. As inclusion criteria’s only the references in English language were used within in “Business and Economics” research areas, and only the typologies of articles and review were selected. As a result, a total of 58 references were found highlighting the number of research published on this topic in the last ten years (Figure 1)

Functional Identification of Arabidopsis ATSIP2 (At3g57520) as an Alkaline α-Galactosidase with a Substrate Specificity for Raffinose and an Apparent Sink-Specific Expression Pattern

Arabidopsis ATSIP2 has recently been suggested to be a raffinose synthase gene. However, it has high amino acid identity to functionally characterized alkaline α-galactosidases from Cucumis melo and Zea mays. Using the Sf9 insect cell expression system, we demonstrate that recombinant ATSIP2 is a genuine alkaline α-galactosidase with a distinct substrate specificity for raffinose, and not a raffinose synthase. A β-glucuronidase reporter construct using the ATSIP2 promoter shows that ATSIP2 is strongly expressed in sink tissues of Arabidopsis, i.e. sink leaves and non-xylem parts of the root stele, suggesting a physiological function in raffinose phloem unloadin

General anesthesia reduces complexity and temporal asymmetry of the informational structures derived from neural recordings in Drosophila

We apply techniques from the field of computational mechanics to evaluate the statistical complexity of neural recording data from fruit flies. First, we connect statistical complexity to the flies' level of conscious arousal, which is manipulated by general anesthesia (isoflurane). We show that the complexity of even single channel time series data decreases under anesthesia. The observed difference in complexity between the two states of conscious arousal increases as higher orders of temporal correlations are taken into account. We then go on to show that, in addition to reducing complexity, anesthesia also modulates the informational structure between the forward- and reverse-time neural signals. Specifically, using three distinct notions of temporal asymmetry we show that anesthesia reduces temporal asymmetry on information-theoretic and information-geometric grounds. In contrast to prior work, our results show that: (1) Complexity differences can emerge at very short timescales and across broad regions of the fly brain, thus heralding the macroscopic state of anesthesia in a previously unforeseen manner, and (2) that general anesthesia also modulates the temporal asymmetry of neural signals. Together, our results demonstrate that anesthetized brains become both less structured and more reversible.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. Comments welcome; Added time-reversal analysis, updated discussion, new figures (Fig. 5 & Fig. 6) and Tables (Tab. 1

Novel Measurement Technique of the Tibial Slope on Conventional MRI

The posterior inclination of the tibial plateau, which is referred to as posterior tibial slope, is determined routinely on lateral radiographs. However, radiographically, it is not always possible to reliably recognize the lateral plateau, making a separate assessment of the medial and lateral plateaus difficult. We propose a technique to measure the plateaus separately by defining a tibial longitudinal axis on a conventional MRI. The medial plateau posterior tibial slope obtained from radiographs was compared with MR images in 100 consecutive patients with knee pain when ligament or meniscal injury was assumed. The posterior tibial slope on MRI correlated with those on radiographs. The mean posterior tibial slope was 3.4° smaller on MRI compared with radiographs (4.8°±2.4° versus 8.2°±2.8°, respectively). The reproducibility was slightly better on radiographs than MRI (±0.9° versus±1.4°). Twenty-one of the 100 cases had more than a 5° difference (range, −8.7° to 8.9°) between the medial and lateral plateaus. The proposed technique allows measurement of the posterior tibial slope of the medial and lateral plateaus on a standard knee MRI. By using this novel measurement technique, a reliable assessment of the medial and lateral tibial plateaus is possible. Level of Evidence: Level III, diagnostic study. See the Guidelines for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidenc

An Arabidopsis T-DNA Insertion Mutant for Galactokinase (AtGALK, At3g06580) Hyperaccumulates Free Galactose and is Insensitive to Exogenous Galactose

Galactokinase (GALK, EC 2.7.1.6) is a cytosolic enzyme with a wide occurrence across the taxonomic kingdoms. It catalyzes the phosphorylation of α-d-galactose (Gal) to α-d-Gal-1-P. The cytotoxicity of free (unphosphorylated) Gal is well documented in plants and causes marked defects. An Arabidopsis GALK (AtGALK, At3g06580) was previously identified, cloned and functionally characterized in Escherichia coli and was suggested to occur as a single copy gene in Arabidopsis. We identified an AtGALK T-DNA insertion mutant (atgalk) that (i) is AtGALK transcript deficient; (ii) displays no GALK activity in vegetative tissues; and (iii) accumulates Gal up to 6.8 mg g−1 FW in vegetative tissues, in contrast to wild-type plants. By constitutively overexpressing the AtGALK cDNA, atgalk was functionally rescued. Three independent transformed lines showed restored AtGALK transcripts and GALK activity and had low leaf Gal concentrations comparable with those observed in wild-type plants. Surprisingly, in vitro grown atgalk plants were largely insensitive to the exogenous application of up to 100 mM free Gal, while wild-type plants exhibited sensitivity to low Gal concentrations (10 mM). Furthermore, atgalk seedlings retained the capacity for uptake of exogenously supplied Gal (100 mM), accumulating up to 57 mg g−1 FW in leaves. Leaves from soil-grown atgalk plants that exhibited no growth or morphological defects were used to demonstrate that the accumulating Gal occurred exclusively in the vacuoles of mesophyll protoplasts. Collectively, these findings suggest a novel Gal detoxification pathway that targets free Gal to the vacuole and is active in the atgalk mutant backgroun

Off-the-shelf barrier for emergency intubation in the cardiac catheterization laboratory during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic

With the spread of SARS-CoV-2, it is expected that cases of acute coronary syndrome in the setting of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) develop. As expensive and sophisticated protection devices are not widely available, we have been working on a simple, off-the-shelf protection device for endotracheal intubation of potentially infected patients. For this purpose, we used a large transparent plastic bag (such as the sterile protective cover of the lead glass shield) for protection from airborne infections. The cover is moved over the patient's head from cranial to caudal, covering the catheter table including the torso with no need for patient mobilization. The intubation is done conventionally under direct visual control

Citizen Deliberation in Germany: Lessons from the 'Bürgerrat Demokratie'

This article explores the capacity of randomly-selected, citizen deliberation procedures to deliver on their promise to generate inclusive and considered citizen judgements, connecting these to political authority and the broader public sphere. These 'mini-publics' are increasingly adopted in representative democratic systems. Germany is no exception and has been at the forefront of this trend. The article begins with a historical overview of citizen deliberation in Germany, followed by in-depth analysis of the pioneering case of the Bürgerrat Demokratie. This analysis shows mini-publics can produce more inclusive and considered citizen input into policy-making than self-selected participation, but highlights the need for attitudinal stratification in participation selection if mini-publics are to represent politically alienated citizens. Furthermore, it details how the Bürgerrat Demokratie's combination of an innovative, four-phase process design with civil society campaign expertise holds lessons for connecting citizen deliberation to both political authority and the public sphere without institutionalising the process