Evaluation of in-situ shrinkage and expansion properties of polymer composite materials for adhesive anchor systems by a novel approach based on digital image correlation

The curing reaction of thermosetting resins is associated with chemical shrinkage which is overlapped with thermal expansion as a result of the exothermal enthalpy. Final material properties of the polymer are determined by this critical process. For adhesive anchor systems the overall shrinkage behavior of the material is very important for the ultimate bond behavior between adhesive and the borehole wall. An approach for the insitu measurement of 3-dimensional shrinkage and thermal expansion with digital image correlation (DIC) is presented, overcoming the common limitation of DIC to solids. Two polymer-based anchor systems (filled epoxy, vinylester) were investigated and models were developed, showing good agreement with experimental results. Additionally, measurements with differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) provided supporting information about the curing reaction. The vinylester system showed higher shrinkage but much faster reaction compared to the investigated epoxy

Tissue Inhibitor of Metalloproteinase–3 (TIMP-3) induces FAS dependent apoptosis in human vascular smooth muscle cells

Over expression of Tissue Inhibitor of Metalloproteinases-3 (TIMP-3) in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) induces apoptosis and reduces neointima formation occurring after saphenous vein interposition grafting or coronary stenting. In studies to address the mechanism of TIMP-3-driven apoptosis in human VSMCs we find that TIMP-3 increased activation of caspase-8 and apoptosis was inhibited by expression of Cytokine response modifier A (CrmA) and dominant negative FAS-Associated protein with Death Domain (FADD). TIMP-3 induced apoptosis did not cause mitochondrial depolarisation, increase activation of caspase-9 and was not inhibited by over-expression of B-cell Lymphoma 2 (Bcl2), indicating a mitochondrial independent/type-I death receptor pathway. TIMP-3 increased levels of the First Apoptosis Signal receptor (FAS) and depletion of FAS with shRNA showed TIMP-3-induced apoptosis was FAS dependent. TIMP-3 induced formation of the Death-Inducing Signalling Complex (DISC), as detected by immunoprecipitation and by immunofluorescence. Cellular-FADD-like IL-1 converting enzyme-Like Inhibitory Protein (c-FLIP) localised with FAS at the cell periphery in the absence of TIMP-3 and this localisation was lost on TIMP-3 expression with c-FLIP adopting a perinuclear localisation. Although TIMP-3 inhibited FAS shedding, this did not increase total surface levels of FAS but instead increased FAS levels within localised regions at the cell surface. A Disintegrin And Metalloproteinase 17 (ADAM17) is inhibited by TIMP-3 and depletion of ADAM17 with shRNA significantly decreased FAS shedding. However ADAM17 depletion did not induce apoptosis or replicate the effects of TIMP-3 by increasing localised clustering of cell surface FAS. ADAM17-depleted cells could activate caspase-3 when expressing levels of TIMP-3 that were otherwise sub-apoptotic, suggesting a partial role for ADAM17 mediated ectodomain shedding in TIMP-3 mediated apoptosis. We conclude that TIMP-3 induced apoptosis in VSMCs is highly dependent on FAS and is associated with changes in FAS and c-FLIP localisation, but is not solely dependent on shedding of the FAS ectodomain

The Parkinson's disease protein LRRK2 impairs proteasome substrate clearance without affecting proteasome catalytic activity.

Leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) mutations are the most common known cause of Parkinson's disease (PD). The clinical features of LRRK2 PD are indistinguishable from idiopathic PD, with accumulation of α-synuclein and/or tau and/or ubiquitin in intraneuronal aggregates. This suggests that LRRK2 is a key to understanding the aetiology of the disorder. Although loss-of-function does not appear to be the mechanism causing PD in LRRK2 patients, it is not clear how this protein mediates toxicity. In this study, we report that LRRK2 overexpression in cells and in vivo impairs the activity of the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway, and that this accounts for the accumulation of diverse substrates with LRRK2 overexpression. We show that this is not mediated by large LRRK2 aggregates or sequestration of ubiquitin to the aggregates. Importantly, such abnormalities are not seen with overexpression of the related protein LRRK1. Our data suggest that LRRK2 inhibits the clearance of proteasome substrates upstream of proteasome catalytic activity, favouring the accumulation of proteins and aggregate formation. Thus, we provide a molecular link between LRRK2, the most common known cause of PD, and its previously described phenotype of protein accumulation

Characterization of a heat resistant beta-glucosidase as a new reporter in cells and mice.

BACKGROUND: Reporter genes are widely used in biology and only a limited number are available. We present a new reporter gene for the localization of mammalian cells and transgenic tissues based on detection of the bglA (SYNbglA) gene of Caldocellum saccharolyticum that encodes a thermophilic beta-glucosidase. RESULTS: SYNbglA was generated by introducing codon substitutions to remove CpG motifs as these are associated with gene silencing in mammalian cells. SYNbglA expression can be localized in situ or detected quantitatively in colorimetric assays and can be co-localized with E. coli beta-galactosidase. Further, we have generated a Cre-reporter mouse in which SYNbglA is expressed following recombination to demonstrate the general utility of SYNbglA for in vivo analyses. SYNbglA can be detected in tissue wholemounts and in frozen and wax embedded sections. CONCLUSIONS: SYNbglA will have general applicability to developmental and molecular studies in vitro and in vivo.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Task-Driven Big Data Integration

Data integration aims at combining data acquired from different autonomous sources to provide the user with a unified view of this data. One of the main challenges in data integration processes is entity resolution, whose goal is to detect the different representations of the same real-world entity across the sources, in order to produce a unique and consistent representation for it. The advent of big data has challenged traditional data integration paradigms, making the offline batch approach to entity resolution no longer suitable for several scenarios (e.g., when performing data exploration or dealing with datasets that change with a high frequency). Therefore, it becomes of primary importance to produce new solutions capable of operating effectively in such situations. In this paper, I present some contributions made during the first half of my PhD program, mainly focusing on the design of a framework to perform entity resolution in an on-demand fashion, building on the results achieved by the progressive and query-driven approaches to this task. Moreover, I also briefly describe two projects in which I took part as a member of my research group, touching on some real-world applications of big data integration techniques, to conclude with some ideas on the future directions of my research

Integrazione di dati on-demand

Sempre più spesso aziende e organizzazioni basano le proprie decisioni sui dati di cui dispongono. Garantire la qualità di tali dati è fondamentale per poter effettuare analisi accurate e affidabili. L'integrazione dei dati consiste nel combinare dati acquisiti da molteplici sorgenti eterogenee per fornire all'utente finale una vista unitaria e coerente su tali dati. Si tratta perciò di un processo fondamentale per incrementare il valore dei dati disponibili. In passato, operando su numeri limitati di sorgenti, il paradigma di riferimento, noto come ETL, richiedeva di estrarre i dati grezzi, pulirli e immagazzinarli in un data warehouse per poterli poi analizzare. Al giorno d'oggi, operando su milioni di sorgenti, è sempre più diffuso il paradigma noto invece come ELT, per il quale i dati grezzi vengono raccolti in grandi quantità e immagazzinati così come sono, ad esempio in un data lake. Gli utenti possono poi pulire le porzioni di dati utili per le loro applicazioni. È pertanto necessario studiare soluzioni innovative per l'integrazione dei dati, maggiormente adatte alle nuove sfide che tale modello comporta. Uno dei processi fondamentali per l'integrazione dei dati è la riconciliazione di entità, che consiste nell'individuare i profili che descrivono la stessa entità reale (duplicati) per consolidarli in un unico profilo coerente. Tradizionalmente, questo processo viene effettuato sull'intero dataset prima di poter operare su di esso, risultando perciò spesso molto costoso. In molti casi, solo una porzione delle entità pulite si rivela utile per l'applicazione dell'utente finale. Ad esempio, operando su dati raccolti dal Web, è fondamentale poter filtrare le entità d'interesse senza dover pulire l'intera mole di dati, in continua crescita. Allo stesso modo, quando si effettuano interrogazioni su un data lake, si vuole pulire su richiesta solo la porzione di interesse, ottenendo i relativi risultati nel minor tempo possibile. Per rispondere a tali esigenze presentiamo BrewER, un framework per eseguire interrogazioni SQL su dati sporchi emettendo progressivamente i risultati come se fossero stati ottenuti sui dati puliti. BrewER focalizza il processo di pulizia su un'entità alla volta, in base a una priorità definita dall'utente nella clausola ORDER BY. Per molte applicazioni, come l'esplorazione dei dati, BrewER consente di risparmiare una grande quantità di tempo e risorse. I duplicati non esistono però solo a livello di singoli profili, ma anche a livello di dataset. È infatti comune ad esempio che un data scientist per le proprie analisi effettui trasformazioni su un dataset presente nel data lake aziendale, immagazzinando poi anche la nuova versione ottenuta all'interno del data lake stesso. Situazioni simili si verificano nel Web, ad esempio su Wikipedia, dove le tabelle vengono spesso duplicate e le copie ottenute hanno uno sviluppo indipendente, con la possibile insorgenza di inconsistenze. Individuare automaticamente queste tabelle duplicate consente di renderle coerenti con operazione di pulizia dei dati o propagazione delle modifiche, oppure di rimuovere le copie ridondanti per liberare spazio di archiviazione o risparmiare futuro lavoro agli editori. La ricerca di tabelle duplicate è stata perlopiù ignorata dalla letteratura esistente. Per colmare questa mancanza presentiamo Sloth, un framework che, date due tabelle, consente di determinarne la più grande sottotabella in comune, consentendo di quantificarne la similarità e di rilevare le possibili inconsistenze. BrewER e Sloth rappresentano soluzioni innovative per l'integrazione dei dati nello scenario ELT, utilizzando le risorse a disposizione su richiesta e indirizzando il processo di integrazione dei dati verso un approccio orientato alle applicazioni.Companies and organizations depend heavily on their data to make informed business decisions. Therefore, guaranteeing high data quality is critical to ensure the reliability of data analysis. Data integration, which aims to combine data acquired from several heterogeneous sources to provide users with a unified consistent view, plays a fundamental role to enhance the value of the data at hand. In the past, when data integration involved a limited number of sources, ETL (extract, transform, load) established as the most popular paradigm: once collected, raw data is cleaned, then stored in a data warehouse to perform analysis on it. Nowadays, big data integration needs to deal with millions of sources; thus, the paradigm is more and more moving towards ELT (extract, load, transform). A huge amount of raw data is collected and directly stored (e.g., in a data lake), then different users can transform portions of it according to the task at hand. Hence, novel approaches to data integration need to be explored to address the challenges raised by this paradigm. One of the fundamental building blocks for data integration is entity resolution (ER), which aims at detecting profiles that describe the same real-world entity, to consolidate them into a single consistent representation. ER is typically employed as an expensive offline cleaning step on the entire data before consuming it. Yet, determining which entities are useful once cleaned depends solely on the user's application, which may need only a fraction of them. For instance, when dealing with Web data, we would like to be able to filter the entities of interest gathered from multiple sources without cleaning the entire continuously growing data. Similarly, when querying data lakes, we want to transform data on-demand and return results in a timely manner. Hence, we propose BrewER, a framework to evaluate SQL SP queries on dirty data while progressively returning results as if they were issued on cleaned data. BrewER tries to focus the cleaning effort on one entity at a time, according to the priority defined by the user through the ORDER BY clause. For a wide range of applications (e.g., data exploration), a significant amount of resources can therefore be saved. Further, duplicates not only exist at profile level, as in the case for ER, but also at dataset level. In the ELT scenario, it is common for data scientists to retrieve datasets from the enterprise’s data lake, perform transformations for their analysis, then store back the new datasets into the data lake. Similarly, in Web contexts such as Wikipedia, a table can be duplicated at a given time, with the different copies having independent development, possibly leading to the insurgence of inconsistencies. Automatically detecting duplicate tables would allow to guarantee their consistency through data cleaning or change propagation, but also to eliminate redundancy to free up storage space or to save additional work for the editors. While dataset discovery research developed efficient tools to retrieve unionable or joinable tables, the problem of detecting duplicate tables has been mostly overlooked in the existing literature. To fill this gap, we therefore present Sloth, a framework to efficiently determine the largest overlap (i.e., the largest common subtable) between two tables. The detection of the largest overlap allows to quantify the similarity between the two tables and spot their inconsistencies. BrewER and Sloth represent novel solutions to perform big data integration in the ELT scenario, fostering on-demand use of available resources and shifting this fundamental task towards a task-driven paradigm

Athenaeus the Navigator

Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2008. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.This study concerns navigation in a geographical sense and in the sense of the reader finding a way through a complex text with the help of points of reference. Recent studies in Athenaeus have suggested that he was a more sophisticated writer than the second-hand compiler of Hellenistic comment on classical Greek authors, which has been a dominant view. Building on these studies, this article argues that Athenaeus' approach to his history of ancient dining draws on traditional poetic links between the symposium and the sea, and expands such metaphors with a major interest in place and provenance, which also belongs to the literature of the symposium. Provenance at the same time evokes a theme of imperial thought, that Rome can attract to herself all the good things of the earth that are now under her sway. Good things include foods and the literary heritage of Greece now housed in imperial libraries. Athenaeus deploys themes of navigation ambiguously, to celebrate diversity and to warn against the dangers of luxury. Notorious examples of luxury are presented – the Sybarites and Capuans, for example – but there seem to be oblique warnings to Rome as well. Much clearer censure is reserved for the gastronomic poem of Archestratus of Gela, which surveys the best cities in which to eat certain fish. The Deipnosophists deplore the immorality of the poet and his radical rewriting of their key authors Homer and Plato, while at the same time quoting him extensively for the range of his reference to geography and fish. This commentary on Archestratus is a good example of the Deipnosophists' guidance to the reader, Roman or otherwise, who wishes to ‘navigate’ the complicated history of the Greek deipnon and symposium

Inequality, Fiscal Capacity and the Political Regime: Lessons from the Post-Communist Transition

Using panel data for twenty-seven post-communist economies between 1987-2003, we examine the nexus of relationships between inequality, fiscal capacity (defined as the ability to raise taxes efficiently) and the political regime. Investigating the impact of political reform we find that full political freedom is associated with lower levels of income inequality. Under more oligarchic (authoritarian) regimes, the level of inequality is conditioned by the state’s fiscal capacity. Specifically, oligarchic regimes with more developed fiscal systems are able to defend the prevailing vested interests at a lower cost in terms of social injustice. This empirical finding is consistent with the model developed by Acemoglu (2006). We also find that transition countries undertaking early macroeconomic stabilisation now enjoy lower levels of inequality; we confirm that education fosters equality and the suggestion of Commander et al (1999) that larger countries are prone to higher levels of inequality.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57211/1/wp831 .pd

India’s Season of Dissent: An Interview with Poet Karthika Naïr

Ghazal: India’s Season of Dissent This year, this night, this hour, rise to salute the season of dissent.Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims—Indians, all—seek their nation of dissent. We the people of…they chant: the mantra that birthed a republic.Even my distant eyes echo flares from this beacon of dissent. Kolkata, Kasargod, Kanpur, Nagpur, Tripura… watch it spread,tip to tricoloured tip, then soar: the winged horizon of dissent. Dibrugarh: five hundred students face the CAA and lathiwieldingcops with T..