Evaluation of Digitally Encoded Layer‐by‐layer Coated Microparticles as Cell Carriers

To obtain more biologically relevant data there is a growing interest in the use of living cells for assaying the biological activity of unknown chemical compounds. Density ‘multiplex’ cell‐based assays, where different cell types are mixed in one well and simultaneously investigated upon exposure to a certain compound are beginning to emerge. To be able to identify the cells they should be attached to microscopic carriers that are encoded. This paper investigates how digitally encoded microparticles can be loaded with cells while keeping the digital code in the microcarriers readable. It turns out that coating the surface of the encoded microcarriers with polyelectrolytes using the layer‐by‐layer (LbL) approach provides the microcarriers with a ‘highly functional’ surface. The polyelectrolyte layer allows the growth of the cells, allows the orientation of the cell loaded microcarriers in a magnetic field, and does not hamper the reading of the code. It has further been shown that the cells growing on the polyelectrolyte layer can become transduced by adenoviral particles hosted by the polyelectrolyte layer. It is concluded that the digitally encoded microparticles are promising materials for use in biomedical and pharmaceutical in‐vitro research where cells are used as tools.     

Carbon mineralization from composts and food industry wastes added to soil

We have studied the short term C mineralization of six wastes from important food industries, one sludge from a biogas plant and three composts. All the wastes were characterized chemically and fractionated according to the Van Soest method. The fresh wastes were incubated under controlled environment conditions to determine the C mineralization rate. Based on first order mineralization kinetics, we calculated the hypothetical amount of stable C in the wastes as the amount of C that would not be mineralized within one year under field conditions. The percentage of stable organic C in the organic matter was in general much larger in the composts than in the other wastes, but when expressed on dry matter, the non-composted wastes had comparable or larger amounts of stable organic C than the composts and have a considerable potential for supplying organic matter to soils, and hence for C sequestration. The amount of stable organic C could best be predicted by the total N content of the wastes (R _a ² = 0.855), whereas the results of the fractionation had very little predictive power, probably due to problems related to the high ash content of some of the wastes. An index that combined stable organic C and N and P content in the wastes was calculated to assess possible limitations for applying these wastes in agriculture. Under current nutrient legislation in Western Europe, a number of these wastes will only be usable in small amounts, but these and other food industry wastes could still prove to be valuable soil amendments in nutrient poor situations, for increasing soil organic C content and supplying nutrients.     

A URI-based approach for addressing fragments of media resources on the Web

To make media resources a prime citizen on the Web, we have to go beyond simply replicating digital media files. The Web is based on hyperlinks between Web resources, and that includes hyperlinking out of resources (e.g., from a word or an image within a Web page) as well as hyperlinking into resources (e.g., fragment URIs into Web pages). To turn video and audio into hypervideo and hyperaudio, we need to enable hyperlinking into and out of them. The W3C Media Fragments Working Group is taking on the challenge to further embrace W3C??s mission to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing a Media Fragment protocol and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web. The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of Media Fragments as a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media resources using URIs. Moreover, we explain how the HTTP protocol can be used and extended to serve Media Fragments and what the impact is for current Web-enabled media formats.     

Analysis and synthesis of feedback control systems for the automatic balancing of rotating shaft systems

Automatic balancing is considered as a true feedback control problem, rather than as an automated sequence of separate operations. An adjustable correction mass must be positioned relative to a rectangular coordinate system rotating with the shaft such as to counterbalance the inherent system unbalance. This approach widens the scope of automatic balancing to include systems of which the unbalance conditions may change with time, for example, the rotor of a pump handling a fluid with some abrasive material.

Transfer functions with complex coefficients provide a natural basis for the analysis of this type of system, and should be useful also for the study of rotating fields in general. The root-locus technique is applied for system synthesis, using these “complex transfer functions”.

The control system is multivariable because the rotating system consists of a light flexible shaft, with more than one mass with unbalance fixed along its length. Neither the system inputs (the inherent unbalances) nor the errors (the resulting unbalances) are accessible for direct measurement, and the control tends to be quite sensitive to errors in the mathematical model. Diagonalization in terms of the orthogonal modes is proposed as a basis for synthesis in order to overcome these restrictions, and to obtain relatively simple subsystems.     

Architectures for Fast Transcoding of H.264/AVC to Quality-Scalable SVC Streams

The scalable extension of H.264/AVC (SVC) was recently standardized, and offers scalability at a minor penalty in rate-distortion efficiency when compared to single-layer H.264/AVC coding. In SVC, a scaled version of the original video sequence can easily be extracted by dropping layers from the stream. However, most of the video content nowadays is still produced in a single-layer format. While decoding and reencoding is a possible solution to introduce scalability in the existing bitstreams, this is an approach which requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. In this paper, we show that transcoding can be used to intelligently derive scalable bitstreams from existing single-layer streams. We focus on SNR scalability, and introduce techniques that are able to create multiple quality layers in the bitstreams. We also discuss bitstream rewriting from SVC to H.264/AVC, and examine how our newly proposed architectures can benefit from the changes that were introduced for bitstream rewriting. Architectures with different rate distribution flexibility and computational complexity are discussed. Rate-distortion performance of transcoding is shown to be comparable to that of reencoding at a fraction of the time needed for the latter.     

Fast computation of minimal elementary decompositions of metabolic flux vectors

The concept of elementary flux vector is valuable in a number of applications of metabolic engineering. For instance, in metabolic flux analysis, each admissible flux vector can be expressed as a non-negative linear combination of a small number of elementary flux vectors. However a critical issue concerns the total number of elementary flux vectors which may be huge because it combinatorially increases with the size of the metabolic network. In this paper we present a fast algorithm that randomly computes a decomposition of admissible flux vectors in a minimal number of elementary flux vectors without explicitly enumerating all of them.     

New driving scheme for intelligent power‐efficient high‐voltage display drivers

Abstract— A new bistable‐display driver is presented. The innovation in the developed driver is the addition of a new logical block that calculates the most energy‐efficient driving waveforms. In this paper, the algorithms being applied to the row and column waveforms in order to reduce the power consumption are discussed. Some theoretical as well as experimental results are shown, proving a reduction in the power consumption by about 50%. The proposed algorithms are especially important for battery‐powered applications.