Uncertainty management in real estate development: studying the potential of the SCRUM design methodology

Real estate development is all about assessing and controlling risks and uncertainties. Risk management implies making decisions based on quantified risks to execute riskresponse measures. Uncertainties, on the other hand, cannot be quantified and are therefore unpredictable. In literature, much attention is paid to risk management. The management of uncertainties is underexposed. Uncertainties appear in the programming and designing phases of projects. The main goal of our research is to develop guidelines for real estate developers to manage uncertainties in those phases

Traffic control in coherence-multiplexed networks

Coherence multiplexing (CM) is a relatively unknown form of optical CDMA, which is particulary suitable in medium bit rate, short-range optical networks like LANs. The main purpose of the technique is to allow multiple users to transmit through a common optical fiber simultaneously. When this number is too large, however, the BER will become unacceptably high. Therefore a protocol is needed to control the traffic. In this paper several protocols are presented. An adapted version of synchronous TDMA, two new protocols and a central control unit will be proposed and discussed. Finally, the protocols will be compared with respect to performance and practical implementation aspects

Exploiting coarse grained parallelism in conceptual data mining: finding a needle in a haystack as a distributed effort

A parallel implementation of Ganter’s algorithm to calculate concept lattices for Formal Concept Analysis is presented. A benchmark was executed to experimentally determine the algorithm’s performance, including an AMD Athlon64, Intel dual Xeon, and UltraSPARC T1, with respectively 1, 4, and 24 threads in parallel. Two subsets of Cranfield’s collection were chosen as document set. In addition, the theoretically maximum performance was determined. Due to scheduling problems, the performance of the UltraSPARC was disappointing. Two alternate schedulers are proposed to tackle this problem. It is shown that, given a good scheduler, the algorithm can massively exploit multi-threading architectures and so, substantially reduce the computational burden of Formal Concept Analysis

Investigating the Efficiency of ITS Cooperative Systems for a Better Use of Urban Transport Infrastructures: The iTETRIS Simulation Platform

The use of cooperative ITS communication systems, supporting driving through the dynamic exchange of Vehicle-to- Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) messages, is a potential candidate to improve the economical and societal welfare. The application of such systems for novel cooperative traffic management strategies can introduce a lot of beneficial effects not only for road safety, but also for the economy related to transportation systems and the environmental impact. Despite this apparent set of promising features, City Road Authorities, which hold a key-role in determining the final adoption of such systems, still look at cooperative systems without sharing a clear opinion. This is mainly due to the current lack of definitive and solid evidences of the effectiveness of such systems when applied in the real world. In order to fill this gap and let Road Authorities estimate the usefulness of such technologies in achieving the objectives dictated by cities’ traffic management policies, the EU consortium iTETRIS is developing a simulation platform for large scale testing of traffic management solutions making use of cooperative ITS systems. Thanks to its own distinguishing features, iTETRIS aims at becoming a good supporting tool for Road Authorities to implement preliminary tests on the effectiveness of ITS solutions prior to investing money for the physical deployment of the communication infrastructures allowing their functioning

Tetracycline-inducible gene regulation in mycobacteria

A system for the tetracycline-inducible regulation of gene expression in mycobacteria has been developed. We have sub-cloned the tetRO region from the Corynebacterium glutamicum TetZ locus into a mycobacterial shuttle plasmid, making expression of genes cloned downstream of tetRO responsive to tetracycline. Using the luxAB-encoded luciferase from Vibrio harveyi as a reporter (pMind-Lx), we observed a 40-fold increase in light output from Mycobacterium smegmatis cultures 2 h after adding 20 ng ml(−1) of tetracycline. Similarly, exposure to the drug resulted in up to 20-fold increase in relative light units from M.bovis BCG carrying the reporter construct, and a 10-fold increase for M.tuberculosis. Tetracycline induction was demonstrated in log and stationary phase cultures. To evaluate whether this system is amenable to use in vivo, J774 macrophages were infected with M.bovis BCG[pMind-Lx], treated with amikacin to kill extracellular bacteria, and then incubated with tetracycline. A 10-fold increase in light output was measured after 24 h, indicating that intracellular bacteria are accessible and responsive to exogenously added tetracycline. To test the use of the tetracycline-inducible system for conditional gene silencing, mycobacteria were transformed with a pMind construct with tetRO driving expression of antisense RNA for the ftsZ gene. Bacterial cells containing the antisense construct formed filaments after 24 h exposure to tetracycline. These results demonstrate the potential of this tetracycline-regulated system for the manipulation of mycobacterial gene expression inside and outside cells

COLOMBO Deliverable 1.1: Scenario Specifications and Required Modifications to Simulation Tools

While targeting on supporting descriptions of scenarios and extensions to the simulation suite, the document additionally delivers a complete overview of the evaluation procedures to use in COLOMBO. Starting with an overview of the evaluation process, based on work done in the FESTA project, the document includes definitions of the performance indicators to use. These were originally produced by the iTETRIS project (by consortium partners of COLOMBO, mainly) and was extended within COLOMBO by performance indicators that describe the behaviour of inter-vehicle communication. To put the work on a scientific ground, a performed comparison of 40 scientific simulation studies is given, that shows that no standard scenarios and metrics exist. Additionally the document lists feature extensions which shall be implemented into the simulation tools within the COLOMBO project. Applicable software and data yielding to the scenarios were provided to the COLOMBO partners. As targeted, the document lists the scenarios made available within COLOMBO, distinguishing synthetic and real-world scenarios. Overall, seven scenarios based on real-world data were made available. Additionally, a tool that allows generating a large variety of synthetic scenarios is presented. The document ends with an extension (against the one given in D5.1) of requirements put on the simulations suite

Patient-ventilator interaction in mechanically ventilated children

Mechanical ventilation is a life-saving intervention in severe medical situations and a cornerstone in the management of critically ill children. To ensure efficiency of mechanical ventilation, ventilator performance should meticulously match the patients demands. This requires an optimal synchronization between the patient and the ventilator. Patient-ventilator asynchrony develops if patient and ventilator are out-of-sync. The studies reported in this thesis were performed for a better understanding of the occurrence and clinical implications of patient-ventilator asynchrony in critically ill children as unique developmental aspects between children and adults making it difficult to translate findings from studies performed in adults to children and so far adult-based definitions are used to characterize patient-ventilator asynchrony in children. For example, whereas in adults, patient-ventilator asynchrony is associated with prolonged duration of mechanical ventilation, increased intensive care unit stay and increased mortality, we could not confirm this in children. In contrast, mechanically ventilated children with a high level of patient-ventilator asynchrony had a shorter duration of mechanical ventilation. Although we could not ascertain an effect on the duration of mechanical ventilation, patient-ventilator asynchrony in mechanically ventilated children cannot be ignored. We found that patient-ventilator asynchrony can increase the work-of-breathing by 30-40%. To further study the effects of patient-ventilator asynchrony continuous monitoring systems are needed. In this thesis we designed and validated such a tool. The first step to truly understand the ramifications of patient-ventilator asynchrony on clinical outcome

Control of Ring-Billed Gulls and Herring Gulls Nesting at Urban and Industrial Sites in Ontario, 1987-1990

Large numbers of ring-billed gulls (Larus delawarensis) and much smaller numbers of herring gulls (L. argentatus) have begun to nest at several industrial and urban sites in the Canadian Great Lakes causing a flight safety problem (nesting at end of a runway), disrupting commercial operations (nesting on roads and storage yards), and creating nuisances (noise and smell of the colony and defecations on equipment). Gulls were prevented from nesting by scaring (using tethered birds of prey, moving vehicles, and foot patrols equipped with cracker shells) or by physically excluding them (by installing monofilament lines). At some sites nest building was thwarted by frequently disturbing the nesting substrate through grading, disking, or dragging a boom. Where nesting could not be prevented, reproduction was stopped by collecting eggs repeatedly, or by spraying oil on eggs. Operations at gull colonies were carried out by affected landowners under special permits issued by the Canadian Wildlife Service. Advantages and disadvantages of the different control methods are briefly discussed. Control operations reduced or eliminated local problems but did not reduce the population of adult, urbanized gulls. We predict more problems associated with the expected colonization of other industrial sites by gulls

Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigen 85B and ESAT-6 expressed as a recombinant fusion protein in Mycobacterium smegmatis elicits cell-mediated immune response in a murine vaccination model

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Molecular Immunology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.In this study, we investigated the potential molecular and immunological differences of a recombinant fusion protein (Hybrid-1), comprising of the immunodominant antigens Ag85B and ESAT-6 from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, derived from two different expression systems, namely Mycobacterium smegmatis and Escherichia coli. The fusion protein was successfully expressed and purified from both bacterial hosts and analyzed for any host-dependent post-translational modifications that might affect the immunogenicity of the protein. We investigated the immunogenicity of Hybrid-1 expressed in the two host species in a murine vaccination model, together with a reference standard Hybrid-1 (expressed in E. coli) from the Statens Serum Institut. No evidence of any post-translation modification was found in the M. smegmatis-derived Hybrid-1 fusion protein, nor were there any significant differences in the T-cell responses obtained to the three antigens analyzed. In conclusion, the Hybrid-1 fusion protein was successfully expressed in a homologous expression system using M. smegmatis and this system is worth considering as a primary source for vaccination trials, as it provided protein of excellent yield, stability and free from lipopolysaccharide.European TB-VAC consortium and Brunel University

Mycobacterium tuberculosis ClpP Proteases Are Co-transcribed but Exhibit Different Substrate Specificities

PMCID: PMC3613350This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited