Cardiac and vascular hypertrophy in Fabry disease: evidence for a new mechanism independent of blood pressure and glycosphingolipid deposition.

OBJECTIVE: Fabry disease is an X-linked disorder resulting from alpha-galactosidase A deficiency. The cardiovascular findings include left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and increased intima-media thickness of the common carotid artery (CCA IMT). The current study examined the possible correlation between these parameters. To corroborate these clinical findings in vitro, plasma from Fabry patients was tested for possible proliferative effect on rat vascular smooth muscle cells (vascular smooth muscle cell [VSMC]) and mouse neonatal cardiomyocytes. METHODS AND RESULTS: Thirty male and 38 female patients were enrolled. LVH was found in 60% of men and 39% of women. Increased CCA IMT was equally present in males and females. There was a strong positive correlation between LV mass and CCA IMT (r2=0.27; P<0.0001). VSMC and neonatal cardiomyocyte proliferative response in vitro correlated with CCA IMT (r2=0.39; P<0.0004) and LV mass index (r2=0.19; P=0.028), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: LVH and CCA IMT occur concomitantly in Fabry suggesting common pathogenesis. The underlying cause may be a circulating growth-promoting factor whose presence has been confirmed in vitro.

New Iowa materials : a supplement to the third edition of Iowa and some Iowans, 1990

This bibliography is an update to the publication Iowa and Some Iowans, 1988. It includes literature and history with elementary and secondary interests.

Detection of metabolite induction in fungal co-cultures on solid media by high-throughput differential ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography-time-of-flight mass spectrometry fingerprinting.

Access to new biological sources is a key element of natural product research. A particularly large number of biologically active molecules have been found to originate from microorganisms. Very recently, the use of fungal co-culture to activate the silent genes involved in metabolite biosynthesis was found to be a successful method for the induction of new compounds. However, the detection and identification of the induced metabolites in the confrontation zone where fungi interact remain very challenging. To tackle this issue, a high-throughput UHPLC-TOF-MS-based metabolomic approach has been developed for the screening of fungal co-cultures in solid media at the petri dish level. The metabolites that were overexpressed because of fungal interactions were highlighted by comparing the LC-MS data obtained from the co-cultures and their corresponding mono-cultures. This comparison was achieved by subjecting automatically generated peak lists to statistical treatments. This strategy has been applied to more than 600 co-culture experiments that mainly involved fungal strains from the Fusarium genera, although experiments were also completed with a selection of several other filamentous fungi. This strategy was found to provide satisfactory repeatability and was used to detect the biomarkers of fungal induction in a large panel of filamentous fungi. This study demonstrates that co-culture results in consistent induction of potentially new metabolites.

Entropic transport in confined media: a challenge for computational studies in biological and soft-matter systems

Transport in small-scale biological and soft-matter systems typically occurs under confinement conditions in which particles proceed through obstacles and irregularities of the boundaries that may significantly alter their trajectories. A transport model that assimilates the confinement to the presence of entropic barriers provides an efficient approach to quantify its effect on the particle current and the diffusion coefficient. We review the main peculiarities of entropic transport and treat two cases in which confinement effects play a crucial role, with the appearance of emergent properties. The presence of entropic barriers modifies the mean first-passage time distribution and therefore plays a very important role in ion transport through micro- and nano-channels. The functionality of molecular motors, modeled as Brownian ratchets, is strongly affected when the motor proceeds in a confined medium that may constitute another source of rectification. The interplay between ratchet and entropic rectification gives rise to a wide variety of dynamical behaviors, not observed when the Brownian motor proceeds in an unbounded medium. Entropic transport offers new venues of transport control and particle manipulation and new ways to engineer more efficient devices for transport at the nanoscale.

Development of filter media treatments for liquid filtration

Woven monofilament, multifilament, and spun yarn filter media have long been the standard media in liquid filtration equipment. While the energy for a solid-liquid separation process is determined by the engineering work, it is the interface between the slurry and the equipment - the filter media - that greatly affects the performance characteristics of the unit operation. Those skilled in the art are well aware that a poorly designed filter medium may endanger the whole operation, whereas well-performing filter media can make the operation smooth and economical. As the mineral and pulp producers seek to produce ever finer and more refined fractions of their products, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to dewater slurries with average particle sizes around 1 ¿m using conventional, high-capacity filtration equipment. Furthermore, the surface properties of the media must not allow sticky and adhesive particles to adhere to the media. The aim of this thesis was to test how the dirt-repellency, electrical resistance and highpressure filtration performance of selected woven filter media can be improved by modifying the fabric or yarn with coating, chemical treatment and calendering. The results achieved by chemical surface treatments clearly show that the woven media surface properties can be modified to achieve lower electrical resistance and improved dirt-repellency. The main challenge with the chemical treatments is the abrasion resistance and, while the experimental results indicate that the treatment is sufficiently permanent to resist standard weathering conditions, they may still prove to be inadequately strong in terms of actual use.From the pressure filtration studies in this work, it seems obvious that the conventional woven multifilament fabrics still perform surprisingly well against the coated media in terms of filtrate clarity and cake build-up. Especially in cases where the feed slurry concentration was low and the pressures moderate, the conventional media seemed to outperform the coated media. In the cases where thefeed slurry concentration was high, the tightly woven media performed well against the monofilament reference fabrics, but seemed to do worse than some of the coated media. This result is somewhat surprising in that the high initial specific resistance of the coated media would suggest that the media will blind more easily than the plain woven media. The results indicate, however, that it is actually the woven media that gradually clogs during the coarse of filtration. In conclusion, it seems obvious that there is a pressure limit above which the woven media looses its capacity to keep the solid particles from penetrating the structure. This finding suggests that for extreme pressures the only foreseeable solution is the coated fabrics supported by a strong enough woven fabric to hold thestructure together. Having said that, the high pressure filtration process seems to follow somewhat different laws than the more conventional processes. Based on the results, it may well be that the role of the cloth is most of all to support the cake, and the main performance-determining factor is a long life time. Measuring the pore size distribution with a commercially available porometer gives a fairly accurate picture of the pore size distribution of a fabric, but failsto give insight into which of the pore sizes is the most important in determining the flow through the fabric. Historically air, and sometimes water, permeability measures have been the standard in evaluating media filtration performance including particle retention. Permeability, however, is a function of a multitudeof variables and does not directly allow the estimation of the effective pore size. In this study a new method for estimating the effective pore size and open pore area in a densely woven multifilament fabric was developed. The method combines a simplified equation of the electrical resistance of fabric with the Hagen-Poiseuille flow equation to estimate the effective pore size of a fabric and the total open area of pores. The results are validated by comparison to the measured values of the largest pore size (Bubble point) and the average pore size. The results show good correlation with measured values. However, the measured and estimated values tend to diverge in high weft density fabrics. This phenomenon is thought to be a result of a more tortuous flow path of denser fabrics, and could most probably be cured by using another value for the tortuosity factor.

La "Materia de Bretaña" en las culturas hispánicas de la Edad Media y el Renacimiento : textos, ediciones y estudios

La publicación en 1977 de "A critical bibliography of Hispanic Arthurial material", de Harvey L. Sharrer (Londres, Grant & Cutler) contribuyó a un mejor conocimiento de los textos conservados, ediciones y estudios de la literatura artúrica y tristaniana medieval en España y Portugal. Treinta años después, este artículo amplía los contenidos de aquel volumen, al recoger los resultados del descubrimiento de nuevos testimonios y de las últimas investigaciones sobre este ámbito, en lengua catalana, gallego-portuguesa y castellana de la Edad Media.

Handling of TDM Connections with Cello Media Gateway

UMTS is a 3rd generation telecommunication system, which introduces new network architecture. The change in the network architecture introduces new logical network nodes and changes the role of existing nodes in the network. This architecture changes the current vertically specialized network into a horizontally layered structure. In practice, the layering means that different levels in network hierarchy are separated, and they communicate over well-specified interfaces. The Connectivity Layer, at the bottom of the UMTS network architecture, contains Media Gateways (MGW). The GSM radio access network and UMTS access network are connected to the connectivity network via a MGW. External networks, e.g. ISDN networks, are accessed via other MGWs. The user plane is transported across the connectivity network between/via MGWs. ATM network is used as the backbone in Ericsson’s UMTS core network release 2.0. The main goal of this thesis is to study how the MGW is used to bridge ATM and TDM networks. The Circuit Emulation Service (CES) for ATM is studied, as the conversion from TDM to ATM is made according it. The transportation is made using AAL2 and the issues that it has with voice traffic are studied. The implementation and usage of TDM switching service in MGW are described in detail.

Java Mobile Media API porting in Symbian Operating System

Työssä tutkitaan, kuinka Symbian käyttöjärjestelmälle voidaan tehdä siirrettäviä ohjelmia. Työssä käydään läpi menetelmiä, jotka helpottavat ohjelmistojen siirrettävyyttä uudelle alustalle. Uuteen älypuhelimeen voi tulla monia uusia komponentteja. Laite voi muuttua piiritasolla, käyttöjärjestelmästä voi tulla uusi versio sekä siirrettävästä ohjelmasta voi tulla uusi versio. Kaikki nämä vaikuttavat ohjelman siirrettävyyteen. Työssä tehtiin Java-rajapinnan siirto uudelle alustalle. Prosessin aikana löydettiin tärkeitä tekijöitä, jotka vaikuttavat ohjelmiston siirrettävyyteen. Siirrettävyys sinänsä pitäisi ottaa huomioon ohjelmistoprosessin jokaisessa vaiheessa. Älypuhelimista tulee jatkuvasti uusia versioita. Tämä tekee ohjelmien siirrettävyydestä hyvin tärkeän tekijän ohjelmistojen suunnittelussa. Hyvin suunniteltu ohjelma on helpompi ylläpitää, päivättää ja siirtää myöhemmin.

Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production

Many concepts have been developed to describe the convergence of media, languages, and formats in contemporary media systems. This article is a theoretical reflection on “transmedia storytelling” from a perspective that integrates semiotics and narratology in the context of media studies. After dealing with the conceptual chaos around transmedia storytelling, the article analyzes how these new multimodal narrative structures create different implicit consumers and construct a narrative world. The analysis includes a description of the multimedia textual structure created around the Fox television series 24. Finally, the article analyzes transmedia storytelling from the perspective of a semiotics of branding.

Challenges for the New Century Schools for All and Narrowing Gaps through Transformation Pedagogies

La pedagogia ha tractat la qüestió de gènere i d’educació? I si és el cas, de quina manera? Quins han estat els resultats? Tant el valor de l’educació com el de gènere foren qüestionats i revisats al començament del segle XX. Els resultats d’aquelles reflexions i les batalles lluitades per millorar les condicions, comencen a sentir-se cent anys més tard. Aquest article inclourà primerament una visió general de la situació de la dona en l’educació en l’àmbit mundial. En segon lloc, se centrarà en els enfocaments pedagògics transformacionals que de manera gradual comencen a introduir-se en els sistemes educatius convencionals —també en algunes universitats i programes de traducció—, secundats d’una banda pels principis de democràcia, diàleg, carnaval, experimentació i (socio) constructivisme, i per la neurociència i la psicologia de l’altra. És evident que aquests enfocaments desafien la discriminació i afavoreixen la creació de ponts, no tan sols entre gèneres, sinó també entre etnicitats i classes social

Localisation of B2C Marketing Communications on the Internet. Case: New Product Launch

Tavoitteena on tutkia kuluttajille suunnatun markkinointiviestinnän lokalisointia Internetissä uuden tuotteen lanseerauksen yhteydessä. Vaikka Internet on globaali media, sen haasteena on tarjota paikallisesti kuluttajille merkityksellistä sisältöä, sekä ylläpitää yhtenäistä brandia. Tutkimus on toteutettu deskriptiivisenä tapaustutkimuksena globaalissa tietoliikenneyrityksessä, ja se perustuu haastatteluihin sekä valmiiseen aineistoon. Lyhentyneet kulutuselektroniikan elinkaaret, nopeat tuotelanseeraukset, kasvava yhteistyö ulkopuolisten kumppanien kanssa sekä markkinointiviestinnän integraation tarve aiheuttavat ajoitusongelmia lokalisointiin. Yhtenäinen web infrastruktuuri, työkalut ja globaalit prosessit mahdollistavat kustannustehokkaan lokalisoinnin business-tilanteen muuttuessa ja kultturieroista johtuen. Tässä tutkimuksessa on selvitetty neljän tekijän (ympäristö, tuote, kuluttaja, organisaatiostrategia) vaikutusta lokalisointiin. Jotta maiden parhaita menettelytapoja voidaan hyödyntää nykyistä paremmin ja välttää kultturierojen sivuuttaminen, tarvitaan sekä ’virallista’ että vapaamuotoista seurantaa. Globaalin Internet-sivuston ja lukuisten kansallisten sivustojen ylläpitäminen vaatii Internet-sivustojen fokuksen tarkkaa noudattamista, globaalia segmentointia, ja sen mukaista sisällön tarjontaa kuluttajille.

Modeling the transport phenomena within arterial wall: porous media approach

The transport of macromolecules, such as low-density lipoprotein (LDL), and their accumulation in the layers of the arterial wall play a critical role in the creation and development of atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is a disease of large arteries e.g., the aorta, coronary, carotid, and other proximal arteries that involves a distinctive accumulation of LDL and other lipid-bearing materials in the arterial wall. Over time, plaque hardens and narrows the arteries. The flow of oxygen-rich blood to organs and other parts of the body is reduced. This can lead to serious problems, including heart attack, stroke, or even death. It has been proven that the accumulation of macromolecules in the arterial wall depends not only on the ease with which materials enter the wall, but also on the hindrance to the passage of materials out of the wall posed by underlying layers. Therefore, attention was drawn to the fact that the wall structure of large arteries is different than other vessels which are disease-resistant. Atherosclerosis tends to be localized in regions of curvature and branching in arteries where fluid shear stress (shear rate) and other fluid mechanical characteristics deviate from their normal spatial and temporal distribution patterns in straight vessels. On the other hand, the smooth muscle cells (SMCs) residing in the media layer of the arterial wall respond to mechanical stimuli, such as shear stress. Shear stress may affect SMC proliferation and migration from the media layer to intima. This occurs in atherosclerosis and intimal hyperplasia. The study of blood flow and other body fluids and of heat transport through the arterial wall is one of the advanced applications of porous media in recent years. The arterial wall may be modeled in both macroscopic (as a continuous porous medium) and microscopic scales (as a heterogeneous porous medium). In the present study, the governing equations of mass, heat and momentum transport have been solved for different species and interstitial fluid within the arterial wall by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Simulation models are based on the finite element (FE) and finite volume (FV) methods. The wall structure has been modeled by assuming the wall layers as porous media with different properties. In order to study the heat transport through human tissues, the simulations have been carried out for a non-homogeneous model of porous media. The tissue is composed of blood vessels, cells, and an interstitium. The interstitium consists of interstitial fluid and extracellular fibers. Numerical simulations are performed in a two-dimensional (2D) model to realize the effect of the shape and configuration of the discrete phase on the convective and conductive features of heat transfer, e.g. the interstitium of biological tissues. On the other hand, the governing equations of momentum and mass transport have been solved in the heterogeneous porous media model of the media layer, which has a major role in the transport and accumulation of solutes across the arterial wall. The transport of Adenosine 5´-triphosphate (ATP) is simulated across the media layer as a benchmark to observe how SMCs affect on the species mass transport. In addition, the transport of interstitial fluid has been simulated while the deformation of the media layer (due to high blood pressure) and its constituents such as SMCs are also involved in the model. In this context, the effect of pressure variation on shear stress is investigated over SMCs induced by the interstitial flow both in 2D and three-dimensional (3D) geometries for the media layer. The influence of hypertension (high pressure) on the transport of lowdensity lipoprotein (LDL) through deformable arterial wall layers is also studied. This is due to the pressure-driven convective flow across the arterial wall. The intima and media layers are assumed as homogeneous porous media. The results of the present study reveal that ATP concentration over the surface of SMCs and within the bulk of the media layer is significantly dependent on the distribution of cells. Moreover, the shear stress magnitude and distribution over the SMC surface are affected by transmural pressure and the deformation of the media layer of the aorta wall. This work reflects the fact that the second or even subsequent layers of SMCs may bear shear stresses of the same order of magnitude as the first layer does if cells are arranged in an arbitrary manner. This study has brought new insights into the simulation of the arterial wall, as the previous simplifications have been ignored. The configurations of SMCs used here with elliptic cross sections of SMCs closely resemble the physiological conditions of cells. Moreover, the deformation of SMCs with high transmural pressure which follows the media layer compaction has been studied for the first time. On the other hand, results demonstrate that LDL concentration through the intima and media layers changes significantly as wall layers compress with transmural pressure. It was also noticed that the fraction of leaky junctions across the endothelial cells and the area fraction of fenestral pores over the internal elastic lamina affect the LDL distribution dramatically through the thoracic aorta wall. The simulation techniques introduced in this work can also trigger new ideas for simulating porous media involved in any biomedical, biomechanical, chemical, and environmental engineering applications.

Propagation through fractal media: The Sierpinski gasket and the Koch curve

We present new analytical tools able to predict the averaged behavior of fronts spreading through self-similar spatial systems starting from reaction-diffusion equations. The averaged speed for these fronts is predicted and compared with the predictions from a more general equation (proposed in a previous work of ours) and simulations. We focus here on two fractals, the Sierpinski gasket (SG) and the Koch curve (KC), for two reasons, i.e. i) they are widely known structures and ii) they are deterministic fractals, so the analytical study of them turns out to be more intuitive. These structures, despite their simplicity, let us observe several characteristics of fractal fronts. Finally, we discuss the usefulness and limitations of our approa

Learning in Digital Media: the legacy of McLuhan and his Impact on Formal Education

This paper describes a bibliographic analysis of the vision of Marshal McLuhan and the vision adopted by diverse current authors regarding the use of new interactive learning technologies. The paper also analyzes the transformation that will have to take place in the formal surroundings of education in order to improve their social function. The main points of view and contributions made by diverse authors are discussed. It is important that all actors involved in the educational process take in consideration these contributions in order to be ready for future changes.

Utilizing social media in software documentation and knowledge management

This Master’s thesis studies the possibilities that social media tools can bring to help knowledge management in software development companies. It will introduce the most popular tools of social media and their usage possibilities in companies, not forgetting the possible downsides. One relevant aspect in this study is to investigate the possibilities of social media to help converting existing tacit knowledge into explicit. The purpose of the work is to create a proposal of social media utilization for a mid-sized software company, which has not utilized social media tools before. To be able to create the proposal, employees of the company are interviewed and a survey is executed to analyze the current situation. In addition a pilot project for trying out new social media tools is executed. The final result of this thesis introduces a tailored solution for the target company to start utilizing social media in its documentation and knowledge sharing processes. This new solution consists of multiple individual suggestions that are categorized and prioritized based on the significance and benefit that they bring to the company.