Television distribution: economic dimensions, emerging policies

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Acceptable range for structural fire resistance in performance based design

Structural fire safety engineering is increasingly moving away from prescriptive design rules to what is generally referred to as Performance Based Design (PBD) in which the structure or structural components are designed to satisfy performance requirements. By taking into account the specific characteristics of the structure, a PBD can allow for more directed investments in safety, resulting in structures which are both more economical and safer compared to designs according to traditional prescriptive rules. Although stakeholders mostly agree that the structure should have a good fire performance, determining the specific performance requirements can prove difficult, especially when the opinions of stakeholders with respect to key design parameters diverge. In this paper a decision support tool for investments in Life Safety is introduced and applied to determine an Acceptable Range for the structural fire resistance time for concrete slabs. The support tool takes into account the uncertainty related to amongst other the fire load density and the mechanical properties of the structural element, and can be used as a tool for aligning potentially diverging positions of different stakeholders.

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Analyzing the Divide between FPGA Academic and Commercial Results

The pinnacle of success for academic work is often achieved by having impact on commercial products. In order to have a successful transfer bridge, academic evaluation flows need to provide representative results of similar quality to commercial flows. A majority of publications in FPGA research use the same set of known academic CAD tools and benchmarks to evaluate new architecture and tool ideas. However, it is not clear whether the claims in academic publications based on these tools and benchmarks translate to real benefits in commercial products. In this work we compare the latest Xilinx commercial tools and products with these well-known academic tools to identify the gap in the major figures of merit. Our results show that there is a significant 2.2X gap in speed-performance for similar process technology. We have also identified the area-efficiency and runtime divide between commercial and academic tools to be 5% and 2.2X, respectively. We show that it is possible to improve portions of the academic flow such as ABC logic optimization to match the quality of commercial tools at the expense of additional runtime. Our results also show that depth reduction, which is often used as the main figure of merit for logic optimization papers does not translate to post-routing timing improvements. We finally discuss the differences between academic and commercial benchmark designs. We explain the main differences and trends that may influence the topic choice and conclusions of academic research. This work emphasizes how difficult it is to identify the relevant FPGA academic work that can provide meaningful benefits for commercial products.

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Effects of imidacloprid in combination with λ-cyhalothrin on the model pollinator Bombus terrestris at different levels of complexity

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Design, construction and testing of a COC 3D flow-over flow-through bioreactor for hepatic cell culture

In this poster, we present the joint development efforts for a 3D microfluidic bioreactor for hepatic cell cultures. Cyclic Olefin Copolymer (COC) was selected for constructing the bioreactor, since the material has good chemical resistance, low adsorption and good optical properties, including low auto-fluorescence. A downside of COC is that it is much more difficult to structure than more traditional microfluidic materials, such as PDMS, PMMA, … Two parallel approaches were developed for structuring the COC. In a first approach, mechanical micro-milling of the channels allows for extremely fast manufacturing of new design variations, at the expense of difficulties in scalability to mass-production and a channel surface that requires post-processing to achieve sufficient optical quality. In a second approach, hot embossing using epoxy molds allows for direct structuring of optical grade channels and is scalable to mass production, at the expense of longer cycle time in the development of new channel designs. To facilitate the handling of the bioreactor, a holder was designed to provide the fluidic connections to a pump,ensuring medium exchange and sampling to down-stream sensors connected to the outlets. The design of the bioreactor was intended to maintain and expose pre-formed hepatic co-culture spheroids to toxicants for more than a week. Once seeded, spheroids rest on a polycarbonate membrane with 12 µm pore size, allowing the medium to flow-through, while flow-over is maintained to avoid an excess pressure on the cells. In a single bioreactor, 9 wells are connected to a common inlet to provide the cells with fresh culture medium or test compounds. On a first cell culture trial, it was possible to visually detect the spheroids in the wells after seeding, however, after 1 week of culture there was no possibility to accurately detect the presence and viability of the cells. In the framework of HeMiBio, significant progress has been made towards producing a 3D COC-based bioreactor for hepatic cell culture, and most technological hurdles in producing prototype reactors have been overcome. Further testing is needed to see which improvements to the reactor or the flow conditions should be made to ensure cell viability.

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Legal aspects of end-of-life decisions of minors: euthanasia as case

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Flexibility and extracellular opening determine the interaction between ligands and insect sulfakinin receptors

Despite their fundamental importance for growth, the mechanisms that regulate food intake are poorly understood. Our previous work demonstrated that insect sulfakinin (SK) signaling is involved in inhibiting feeding in an important model and pest insect, the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. Because the interaction of SK peptide and SK receptors (SKR) initiates the SK signaling, we have special interest on the structural factors that influence the SK-SKR interaction. First, the three-dimensional structures of the two T. castaneum SKRs (TcSKR1 and TcSKR2) were generated from molecular modeling and they displayed significance in terms of the outer opening of the cavity and protein flexibility. TcSKR1 contained a larger outer opening of the cavity than that in TcSKR2, which allows ligands a deep access into the cavity through cell membrane. Second, normal mode analysis revealed that TcSKR1 was more flexible than TcSKR2 during receptor-ligand interaction. Third, the sulfated SK (sSK) and sSK-related peptides were more potent than the nonsulfated SK, suggesting the importance of the sulfate moiety.

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