Information and anti-terrorist security of Poland. A critical analysis exemplified with the tasks and activity of the Internal Security Agency

The subject matter of the analysis conducted in the text is information and anti-terrorist security of Poland, which has been presented within the context of a clash between two spheres – the state and the private sphere. Furthermore, the issues of security have been supplemented with a description of the tasks and activity of the Internal Security Agency, as well as a synthetic appraisal of a terrorist threat to Poland. The main parts of this work are concerned with: (1) the state and the private sphere, (2) " terrorism " and terrorist offences, (3) the tasks and activity of the Internal Security Agency, (4) an appraisal of a terrorist threat to Poland. Given the necessity to elaborate the research problem, the text features the following research questions: (1) To what extent does referring to a threat to security influence a limitation on rights and freedoms in Poland (with regard to the clash between the state and the private sphere)?, (2) To what extent do the tasks and activity of the Internal Security Agency influence the effectiveness of anti-terrorist security in Poland?

Controlling steering and judging heading: retinal flow, visual direction, and extraretinal information

The contribution of retinal flow (RF), extraretinal (ER), and egocentric visual direction (VD) information in locomotor control was explored. First, the recovery of heading from RF was examined when ER information was manipulated; results confirmed that ER signals affect heading judgments. Then the task was translated to steering curved paths, and the availability and veracity of VD were manipulated with either degraded or systematically biased RE Large steering errors resulted from selective manipulation of RF and VD, providing strong evidence for the combination of RF, ER, and VD. The relative weighting applied to RF and VD was estimated. A point-attractor model is proposed that combines redundant sources of information for robust locomotor control with flexible trajectory planning through active gaze.

Internal wave drag in stratified flow over mountains on a beta plane

The impact of the variation of the Coriolis parameter f on the drag exerted by internal Rossby-gravity waves on elliptical mountains is evaluated using linear theory, assuming constant wind and static stability and a beta-plane approximation. Previous calculations of inertia-gravity wave drag are thus extended in an attempt to establish a connection with existing studies on planetary wave drag, developed primarily for fluids topped by a rigid lid. It is found that the internal wave drag for zonal westerly flow strongly increases relative to that given by the calculation where f is assumed to be a constant, particularly at high latitudes and for mountains aligned meridionally. Drag increases with mountain width for sufficiently wide mountains, reaching values much larger than those valid in the non-rotating limit. This occurs because the drag receives contributions from a low wavenumber range, controlled by the beta effect, which accounts for the drag amplification found here. This drag amplification is shown to be considerable for idealized analogues of real mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas and the Rocky mountains, and comparable to the barotropic Rossby wave drag addressed in previous studies.

Boundary and internal conditions for adjoint fluid-flow problems

The ever-increasing robustness and reliability of flow-simulation methods have consolidated CFD as a major tool in virtually all branches of fluid mechanics. Traditionally, those methods have played a crucial role in the analysis of flow physics. In more recent years, though, the subject has broadened considerably, with the development of optimization and inverse design applications. Since then, the search for efficient ways to evaluate flow-sensitivity gradients has received the attention of numerous researchers. In this scenario, the adjoint method has emerged as, quite possibly, the most powerful tool for the job, which heightens the need for a clear understanding of its conceptual basis. Yet, some of its underlying aspects are still subject to debate in the literature, despite all the research that has been carried out on the method. Such is the case with the adjoint boundary and internal conditions, in particular. The present work aims to shed more light on that topic, with emphasis on the need for an internal shock condition. By following the path of previous authors, the quasi-1D Euler problem is used as a vehicle to explore those concepts. The results clearly indicate that the behavior of the adjoint solution through a shock wave ultimately depends upon the nature of the objective functional.

Optical flow using color information: preliminary results

AIRES, Kelson R. T.; SANTANA, André M.; MEDEIROS, Adelardo A. D. Optical flow using color information: preliminary results. In: ANNUAL ACM SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTING, 23., 2008, Fortaleza. Proceedings... Fortaleza: SAC, 2008.

Total internal reflection fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy: theory and application for studying boundary slip phenomenon

I present a new experimental method called Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Cross-Correlation Spectroscopy (TIR-FCCS). It is a method that can probe hydrodynamic flows near solid surfaces, on length scales of tens of nanometres. Fluorescent tracers flowing with the liquid are excited by evanescent light, produced by epi-illumination through the periphery of a high NA oil-immersion objective. Due to the fast decay of the evanescent wave, fluorescence only occurs for tracers in the ~100 nm proximity of the surface, thus resulting in very high normal resolution. The time-resolved fluorescence intensity signals from two laterally shifted (in flow direction) observation volumes, created by two confocal pinholes are independently measured and recorded. The cross-correlation of these signals provides important information for the tracers’ motion and thus their flow velocity. Due to the high sensitivity of the method, fluorescent species with different size, down to single dye molecules can be used as tracers. The aim of my work was to build an experimental setup for TIR-FCCS and use it to experimentally measure the shear rate and slip length of water flowing on hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. However, in order to extract these parameters from the measured correlation curves a quantitative data analysis is needed. This is not straightforward task due to the complexity of the problem, which makes the derivation of analytical expressions for the correlation functions needed to fit the experimental data, impossible. Therefore in order to process and interpret the experimental results I also describe a new numerical method of data analysis of the acquired auto- and cross-correlation curves – Brownian Dynamics techniques are used to produce simulated auto- and cross-correlation functions and to fit the corresponding experimental data. I show how to combine detailed and fairly realistic theoretical modelling of the phenomena with accurate measurements of the correlation functions, in order to establish a fully quantitative method to retrieve the flow properties from the experiments. An importance-sampling Monte Carlo procedure is employed in order to fit the experiments. This provides the optimum parameter values together with their statistical error bars. The approach is well suited for both modern desktop PC machines and massively parallel computers. The latter allows making the data analysis within short computing times. I applied this method to study flow of aqueous electrolyte solution near smooth hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. Generally on hydrophilic surface slip is not expected, while on hydrophobic surface some slippage may exists. Our results show that on both hydrophilic and moderately hydrophobic (contact angle ~85°) surfaces the slip length is ~10-15nm or lower, and within the limitations of the experiments and the model, indistinguishable from zero.

Flow cytometry and FISH to measure the average length of telomeres (flow FISH)

Telomeres have emerged as crucial cellular elements in aging and various diseases including cancer. To measure the average length of telomere repeats in cells, we describe our protocols that use fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) with labeled peptide nucleic acid (PNA) probes specific for telomere repeats in combination with fluorescence measurements by flow cytometry (flow FISH). Flow FISH analysis can be performed using commercially available flow cytometers, and has the unique advantage over other methods for measuring telomere length of providing multi-parameter information on the length of telomere repeats in thousands of individual cells. The accuracy and reproducibility of the measurements is augmented by the automation of most pipetting (aspiration and dispensing) steps, and by including an internal standard (control cells) with a known telomere length in every tube. The basic protocol for the analysis of nucleated blood cells from 22 different individuals takes about 12 h spread over 2-3 days.

Taking an Object-Centric View on Dynamic Information with Object Flow Analysis

A large body of research analyzes the runtime execution of a system to extract abstract behavioral views. Those approaches primarily analyze control flow by tracing method execution events or they analyze object graphs of heap snapshots. However, they do not capture how objects are passed through the system at runtime. We refer to the exchange of objects as the object flow, and we claim that object flow is necessary to analyze if we are to understand the runtime of an object-oriented application. We propose and detail Object Flow Analysis, a novel dynamic analysis technique that takes this new information into account. To evaluate its usefulness, we present a visual approach that allows a developer to study classes and components in terms of how they exchange objects at runtime. We illustrate our approach on three case studies.

Tracking the Flow of Information through the Hippocampal Formation in the Rat

The hippocampus receives input from upper levels of the association cortex and is implicated in many mnemonic processes, but the exact mechanisms by which it codes and stores information is an unresolved topic. This work examines the flow of information through the hippocampal formation while attempting to determine the computations that each of the hippocampal subfields performs in learning and memory. The formation, storage, and recall of hippocampal-dependent memories theoretically utilize an autoassociative attractor network that functions by implementing two competitive, yet complementary, processes. Pattern separation, hypothesized to occur in the dentate gyrus (DG), refers to the ability to decrease the similarity among incoming information by producing output patterns that overlap less than the inputs. In contrast, pattern completion, hypothesized to occur in the CA3 region, refers to the ability to reproduce a previously stored output pattern from a partial or degraded input pattern. Prior to addressing the functional role of the DG and CA3 subfields, the spatial firing properties of neurons in the dentate gyrus were examined. The principal cell of the dentate gyrus, the granule cell, has spatially selective place fields; however, the behavioral correlates of another excitatory cell, the mossy cell of the dentate polymorphic layer, are unknown. This report shows that putative mossy cells have spatially selective firing that consists of multiple fields similar to previously reported properties of granule cells. Other cells recorded from the DG had single place fields. Compared to cells with multiple fields, cells with single fields fired at a lower rate during sleep, were less likely to burst, and were more likely to be recorded simultaneously with a large population of neurons that were active during sleep and silent during behavior. These data suggest that single-field and multiple-field cells constitute at least two distinct cell classes in the DG. Based on these characteristics, we propose that putative mossy cells tend to fire in multiple, distinct locations in an environment, whereas putative granule cells tend to fire in single locations, similar to place fields of the CA1 and CA3 regions. Experimental evidence supporting the theories of pattern separation and pattern completion comes from both behavioral and electrophysiological tests. These studies specifically focused on the function of each subregion and made implicit assumptions about how environmental manipulations changed the representations encoded by the hippocampal inputs. However, the cell populations that provided these inputs were in most cases not directly examined. We conducted a series of studies to investigate the neural activity in the entorhinal cortex, dentate gyrus, and CA3 in the same experimental conditions, which allowed a direct comparison between the input and output representations. The results show that the dentate gyrus representation changes between the familiar and cue altered environments more than its input representations, whereas the CA3 representation changes less than its input representations. These findings are consistent with longstanding computational models proposing that (1) CA3 is an associative memory system performing pattern completion in order to recall previous memories from partial inputs, and (2) the dentate gyrus performs pattern separation to help store different memories in ways that reduce interference when the memories are subsequently recalled.

Ribonucleoprotein infrastructure regulating the flow of genetic information between the genome and the proteome

Following transcription and splicing, each mRNA of a mammalian cell passes into the cytoplasm where its fate is in the hands of a complex network of ribonucleoproteins (mRNPs). The success or failure of a gene to be expressed depends on the performance of this mRNP infrastructure. The entry, gating, processing, and transit of each mRNA through an mRNP network helps determine the composition of a cell's proteome. The machinery that regulates storage, turnover, and translational activation of mRNAs is not well understood, in part, because of the heterogeneous nature of mRNPs. Recently, subsets of cellular mRNAs clustered as members of mRNP complexes have been identified by using antibodies reactive with RNA-binding proteins, including ELAV/Hu, eIF-4E, and poly(A)-binding proteins. Cytoplasmic ELAV/Hu proteins are involved in the stability and translation of early response gene (ERG) transcripts and are expressed predominately in neurons. mRNAs recovered from ELAV/Hu mRNP complexes were found to have similar sequence elements, suggesting a common structural linkage among them. This approach opens the possibility of identifying transcripts physically clustered in vivo that may have similar fates or functions. Moreover, the proteins encoded by physically organized mRNAs may participate in the same biological process or structural outcome, not unlike operons and their polycistronic mRNAs do in prokaryotic organisms. Our goal is to understand the organization and flow of genetic information on an integrative systems level by analyzing the collective properties of proteins and mRNAs associated with mRNPs in vivo.