ITS-90 Density of Water Formulation for Volumetric Standards Calibration

A new formulation of the density of air-saturated water as a function of temperature on the 1990 International Temperature Scale (ITS-90) is presented. Also, a new equation for calculating isothermal compressibility as a function of temperature on ITS-90 was developed. The equations are to be used to calculate the density of water, in the temperature range 5 to 40 °C on ITS-90, used in the gravimetric determination of the volume of volumetric standards.     

Risky and aggressive driving in young adults: Personality matters

Young, novice drivers constitute a disproportionate percentage of fatalities and injuries in road traffic accidents around the world. This study, attempts to identify motivational factors behind risky driving behavior, and examines the role of personality, especially sensation seeking, impulsivity and sensitivity to punishment/reward in predicting negative driving outcomes (accident involvement and traffic offences) among young drivers. Gender and driver's age are additional factors examined in relation to driving outcomes and personality. Adopting the contextual mediated model of traffic accident involvement (Sümer, 2003), the study is based on the theory that personality, age and gender represent distal factors that predict accident involvement indirectly through their relationship with stable tendencies towards aberrant driving behavior. Results from correlations and Structural Equation Modeling using AMOS 6 indicated that direct personality effects on driving outcomes were few, whereas personality had significant correlations with aberrant driving behavior, showing that personality is a distal but important predictor of negative driving outcomes. These high risk traits appear to be at a peak among young male drivers. Thus, personality is important in understanding aggressive and risky driving by young adults and needs to be taken into consideration in designing targeted accident prevention policies.     

Model-driven development of composite context-aware web applications

Context-awareness constitutes an essential aspect of services, especially when interaction with end-users is involved. In this paper a solution for the context-aware development of web applications consisting of web services is presented. The methodology proposes a model based approach and advocates in favour of a complete separation of the web application functionality from the context adaptation at all development phases (analysis, design, implementation). In essence, context adaptation takes place on top of and is transparent to the web application business functionality. Starting from UML diagrams of independent web services and respective UML context models, our approach can produce a functional composite context-aware application. At execution level this independence is maintained through an adaptation framework based on message interception.     

On the stabilization of feedforward systems with bounded control

For the global asymptotic stabilization of nonlinear—controllable in the first approximation—cascades consisting of a globally asymptotically—locally exponentially stable system driving a stable system, a Lyapunov-like design is proposed. This yields (bounded) control laws, where the control magnitude can be chosen arbitrarily large. This result provides an alternative to classical forwarding.     

WI – Call for Papers,Heft 5/2010, Konstruktionsforschung in der Wirtschaftsinformatik

Ohne Zusammenfassung This article is also available in English via and : Winter R, Baskerville R (2009) BISE – Call for Papers, Issue 5/2010, Science of Business and Information Systems Engineering. Bus Inf Syst Eng. doi: 10.1007/s12599-009-0047-2.     

Selection of formal verification heuristics for parallel execution

Functional verification is “the” major design-phase bottleneck for silicon productivity. Since functional verification is an NP-complete problem, it relies on a large number of heuristics with associated parameters (engines). With the advent of parallel processing, formal verification can be optimized by selecting the best n engines to run in parallel, increasing the chance of reaching successful termination of the verification task. In this paper, we will present a methodology to build engine estimators based on structural metrics and to select n engines to run in parallel. The methodology considers both engines’ estimated performance and engines’ correlation. Results confirmed that the methodology can be a very quick selection mechanism for parallelization of engines in order to increase the chance of running the best engines to solve the problem.     

Air-Liquid-Interface Differentiated Human Nose Epithelium: A Robust Primary Tissue Culture Model of SARS-CoV-2 Infection

The global urgency to uncover medical countermeasures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has revealed an unmet need for robust tissue culture models that faithfully recapitulate key features of human tissues and disease. Infection of the nose is considered the dominant initial site for SARS-CoV-2 infection and models that replicate this entry portal offer the greatest potential for examining and demonstrating the effectiveness of countermeasures designed to prevent or manage this highly communicable disease. Here, we test an air–liquid-interface (ALI) differentiated human nasal epithelium (HNE) culture system as a model of authentic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Progenitor cells (basal cells) were isolated from nasal turbinate brushings, expanded under conditionally reprogrammed cell (CRC) culture conditions and differentiated at ALI. Differentiated cells were inoculated with different SARS-CoV-2 clinical isolates. Infectious virus release into apical washes was determined by TCID₅₀, while infected cells were visualized by immunofluorescence and confocal microscopy. We demonstrate robust, reproducible SARS-CoV-2 infection of ALI-HNE established from different donors. Viral entry and release occurred from the apical surface, and infection was primarily observed in ciliated cells. In contrast to the ancestral clinical isolate, the Delta variant caused considerable cell damage. Successful establishment of ALI-HNE is donor dependent. ALI-HNE recapitulate key features of human SARS-CoV-2 infection of the nose and can serve as a pre-clinical model without the need for invasive collection of human respiratory tissue samples.     

The Role of Interleukins in Recurrent Implantation Failure: A Comprehensive Review of the Literature

Recurrent implantation failure (RIF) is a multifactorial condition affecting 10–15% of in vitro fertilization (IVF) couples. Data suggest that functional dysregulation of the endometrial immune system constitutes one of the main pathophysiological mechanisms leading to RIF. The aim of this article is to provide a thorough presentation and evaluation of the role of interleukins (ILs) in the pathogenesis of RIF. A comprehensive literature screening was performed summarizing current evidence. During implantation, several classes of ILs are secreted by epithelial and stromal endometrial cells, including IL-6, IL-10, IL-12, IL-15, IL-18, and the leukemia inhibitory factor. These ILs create a perplexing network that orchestrates both proliferation and maturation of uterine natural killer cells, controls the function of regulatory T and B cells inhibiting the secretion of antifetal antibodies, and supports trophoblast invasion and decidua formation. The existing data indicate associations between ILs and RIF. The extensive analysis performed herein concludes that the dysregulation of the ILs network indeed jeopardizes implantation leading to RIF. This review further proposes a mapping of future research on how to move forward from mere associations to robust molecular data that will allow an accurate profiling of ILs in turn enabling evidence-based consultancy and decision making when addressing RIF patients.     

A concentric morphology model for the detection of masses in mammography

We propose a technique for the automated detection of malignant masses in screening mammography. The technique is based on the presence of concentric layers surrounding a focal area with suspicious morphological characteristics and low relative incidence in the breast region. Mammographic locations with high concentration of concentric layers with progressively lower average intensity are considered suspicious deviations from normal parenchyma. The multiple concentric layers (MCLs) technique was trained and tested using the craniocaudal views of 270 mammographic cases with biopsy proven malignant masses from the digital database of screening mammography. One-half of the available cases were used for optimizing the parameters of the detection algorithm. The remaining cases were used for testing. During testing, malignant masses were detected with 92%, 88%, and 81% sensitivity at 5.4, 2.4, and 0.6 false positive marks per image. Testing on 82 normal screening mammograms showed a false positive rate of 5.0, 1.7, and 0.2 marks per image at the previously reported operating points. Furthermore, additional evaluation on 135 benign cases produced a significantly lower detection rate for benign masses (61.6%, 58.3%, and 43.7% at 5.1, 2.8, and 1.2 false positives per image, respectively). Overall, MCL is a promising computer-assisted detection strategy for screening mammograms to identify malignant masses while maintaining the detection rate of benign masses considerably lower.