Generic Format Research Articles

The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life, by Stefanie Markovits

Reviewed by: The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life by Stefanie Markovits Patrick Fessenbecker (bio) The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life, by Stefanie Markovits; pp. vi + 302. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £55.00, $74.00. It is a special kind of pleasure to read a narrowly focused study like Stefanie Markovits's new book The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life. It does not aspire to political insight or transformative historical study, but limits itself to the careful analysis of a peculiar genre: the "verse-novel." Not quite epic, and certainly neither lyric nor prose novel, the verse-novel in Markovits's hands emerges as a distinctly Victorian generic formation, albeit one with Romantic ancestors and modernist descendants. Markovits argues, moreover, that its intermingling of formal features was central to its appeal. The combination of lyricism and narrative, for example, allowed Coventry Patmore in The Angel in the House (1854) to negotiate the hard problem of representing marital love: because it takes place over time, marital love refuses the kind of intensive distillation so prominent in the lyric. What is necessary instead is a form that can grasp the slow changes in love over the long stretch of a marriage. And other features of the genre evoke and correspond to other themes, including adultery, European travel, and transatlantic trade. Perhaps the most distinctive close readings in the book come in Markovits's repeated uncovering of the way a feature of the form turns up as an element of overt content in the text, and the way elements of the content seem to exist simultaneously as embodiments of the form. So, for instance, in her account of "Adulterated Verse," Markovits turns to a scene in Violet Fane's Denzil Place (1875) where the heroine meets a soon-to-be lover by accident in the library at midnight. But why did she go to the library in the first place? Because she had finished the second volume of the novel she was reading and wanted to get the third. The drive to adultery turns out to be strongly related to the "desire for narrative," and the formal combination of narrative and lyric in the genre [End Page 504] and the thematic consideration of infidelity turn out to be interrelated (50). The most theoretically ambitious chapter, Markovits's analysis of "form-things" in Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, considers a similar tension (125). On the one hand, the jewels these poets describe are literal objects relevant for narrative plots, but on the other, they also contain a "narrative potential" in themselves (131). There are thus several references to literal pearls in The Ring and The Book (1868–69), but at the same time Pompilia is herself compared to a pearl, and the lie at the center of her story—Violante's feigned pregnancy to cover up her adoption of Pompilia—is itself compared to the initial piece of grit that begins the process of pearl formation. Recalling that process reminds one that making a pearl is in some ways an extended process of torture, and in Markovits's account The Ring and The Book is saturated with torture, encasing Pompilia's monologue at the center of the poem. So the pearl is more than a pearl: it is an evocation of the pattern that structures the work as a whole. If I could press a bit on Markovits's distinction between form and content, however, it seems to me a key question gets answered in contradictory ways. One can best put it like this: does Markovits think writers who wanted to consider these topics (adultery, European travel, and so forth) found this form fitting and decided to use it, or that those writers who decided to use this form found themselves pushed toward these topics? Perhaps surprisingly, Markovits's account approaches but does not quite assert the latter: the frequency with which adultery recurs in verse-novels "is so pronounced as to make one wonder," she writes, "whether the form here 'leads to' adulterous content" (36). Generic form is thus not a tool an author might use, but a "conceptual interface" between author and institution (37). Really, though...

SEAP activity measurement in reporter cell-based assays using BCIP / NBT as substrate

SEAP (secreted embryonic alkaline phosphatase) has been suggested as versatile reporter protein inter alia for cell ligand interaction. Generic photometric assay formats for this enzyme are currently lacking. Using the interaction of recombinant hCD40 ligand with HEK-Blue sensor cells expressing the CD40 receptor as example, we show that such an assay can be developed based on BCIP/NBT (5-bromo-4-chloro-3-indolyl phosphate/nitroblue tetrazolium chloride) as substrate. Supplementation of the reaction buffer with a micelle-forming detergent (TWEEN 20) stabilizes the water-insoluble reactions products thereby allowing reproducible photometric quantification of the colloidal dispersion. After optimizing the assay in terms of incubation time, cell number and environmental conditions, a cellular response to stimulation was already visible for 0.25 ng mL−1 of rhCD40L. Moreover, the sensitivity of the assay was significantly better than reported previously for alternative assays used in combination with the commercially available reporter cells. The use of BCIP/NBT as substrate therefore provides a robust and sensitive method to monitor SEAP activity in solution, which could conceivably be extended to other cell-based and biological assays using SEAP as reporter protein.

Interactive Peptide Spectral Annotator: A Versatile Web-based Tool for Proteomic Applications

Here we present IPSA, an innovative web-based spectrum annotator that visualizes and characterizes peptide tandem mass spectra. A tool for the scientific community, IPSA can visualize peptides collected using a wide variety of experimental and instrumental configurations. Annotated spectra are customizable via a selection of interactive features and can be exported as editable scalable vector graphics to aid in the production of publication-quality figures. Single spectra can be analyzed through provided web forms, whereas data for multiple peptide spectral matches can be uploaded using the Proteomics Standards Initiative file formats mzTab, mzIdentML, and mzML. Alternatively, peptide identifications and spectral data can be provided using generic file formats. IPSA provides supports for annotating spectra collecting using negative-mode ionization and facilitates the characterization of experimental MS/MS performance through the optional export of fragment ion statistics from one to many peptide spectral matches. This resource is made freely accessible at http://interactivepeptidespectralannotator.com, whereas the source code and user guides are available at https://github.com/coongroup/IPSA for private hosting or custom implementations.

Exosomal DNA Aptamer Targeting α-Synuclein Aggregates Reduced Neuropathological Deficits in a Mouse Parkinson’s Disease Model

The α-synuclein aggregates are the main component of Lewy bodies in Parkinson’s disease (PD) brain, and they showed immunotherapy could be employed to alleviate α-synuclein aggregate pathology in PD. Recently we have generated DNA aptamers that specifically recognize α-synuclein. In this study, we further investigated the in vivo effect of these aptamers on the neuropathological deficits associated with PD. For efficient delivery of the aptamers into the mouse brain, we employed modified exosomes with the neuron-specific rabies viral glycoprotein (RVG) peptide on the membrane surface. We demonstrated that the aptamers were efficiently packaged into the RVG-exosomes and delivered into neurons in vitro and in vivo. Functionally, the aptamer-loaded RVG-exosomes significantly reduced the α-synuclein preformed fibril (PFF)-induced pathological aggregates, and rescued synaptic protein loss and neuronal death. Moreover, intraperitoneal administration of these exosomes into the mice with intra-striatally injected α-synuclein PFF reduced the pathological α-synuclein aggregates and improved motor impairments. In conclusion, we demonstrated that the aptamers targeting α-synuclein aggregates could be effectively delivered into the mouse brain by the RVG-exosomes and reduce the neuropathological and behavioral deficits in the mouse PD model. This study highlights the therapeutic potential of the RVG-exosome delivery of aptamer to alleviate the brain α-synuclein pathology.

The Ambisonic Recordings of Typical Environments (ARTE) Database

Everyday listening environments are characterized by far more complex spatial, spectral and temporal sound field distributions than the acoustic stimuli that are typically employed in controlled laboratory settings. As such, the reproduction of acoustic listening environments has become important for several research avenues related to sound perception, such as hearing loss rehabilitation, soundscapes, speech communication, auditory scene analysis, automatic scene classification, and room acoustics. However, the recordings of acoustic environments that are used as test material in these research areas are usually designed specifically for one study, or are provided in custom databases that cannot be universally adapted, beyond their original application. In this work we present the Ambisonic Recordings of Typical Environments (ARTE) database, which addresses several research needs simultaneously: realistic audio recordings that can be reproduced in 3D, 2D, or binaurally, with known acoustic properties, including absolute level and room impulse response. Multichannel higher-order ambisonic recordings of 13 realistic typical environments (e.g., office, cafè, dinner party, train station) were processed, acoustically analyzed, and subjectively evaluated to determine their perceived identity. The recordings are delivered in a generic format that may be reproduced with different hardware setups, and may also be used in binaural, or single-channel setups. Room impulse responses, as well as detailed acoustic analyses, of all environments supplement the recordings. The database is made open to the research community with the explicit intention to expand it in the future and include more scenes.

Multiplex Detection of Nucleic Acids Using Recombinase Polymerase Amplification and a Molecular Colorimetric 7-Segment Display.

Nucleic acid analysis has become highly relevant for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics since the advent of isothermal amplification methods that do not require thermal cycling. In particular, recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) combined with lateral flow detection offers a rapid and simple solution for field-amenable low-resource nucleic acid testing. Expanding POC nucleic acid tests for the detection of multiple analytes is vital to improve diagnostic efficiency because increased multiplexing capacity enables higher information density combined with reduced assay time and costs. Here, we investigate expanding RPA POC detection by identifying a generic multiplex RPA format that can be combined with a generic multiplex lateral flow device (LFD) to enable binary and molecular encoding for the compaction of diagnostic data. This new technology relies on the incorporation of molecular labels to differentiate nucleic acid species spatially on a lateral flow membrane. In particular, we identified additional five molecular labels that can be incorporated during the RPA reaction for subsequent coupling with LFD detection. Combined with two previously demonstrated successful labels, we demonstrate potential to enable hepta-plex detection of RPA reactions coupled to multiplex LFD detection. When this hepta-plex detection is combined with binary and molecular encoding, an intuitive 7-segment output display can be produced. We note that in all experiments, we used an identical DNA template, except for the 5′ label on the forward primer, to eliminate any effects of nucleic acid sequence amplification bias. Our proof-of-concept technology demonstration is highly relevant for developing information-compact POC diagnostics where space and time are premium commodities.

Drug utilization study in the paediatric department of a tertiary care teaching hospital

Background: Rational drug use is one of the main concerns of the health care system in India. Paediatric population being more vulnerable require additional focus to achieve this goal. Objectives of the study were to evaluate the prescription patterns according to WHO guidelines and the diseases, for which they are being prescribed, to identify the common diseases and common medications used.Methods: A cross sectional study was done in the paediatrics department for a period of 2 months. All the paediatric prescriptions were evaluated using WHO core indicators like average number of medicines per encounter, percentage of medicines from the essential drug lists and also complimentary indicators like utilization of different dosage forms and diagnostic patterns. Statistical Analysis: Data was analyzed and represented as frequency (n) and percentage (%).Results: 89 out of 302 prescriptions had 2 medicines per encounter, 100% of medicines were included from the Essential Drug List (EDL), 59.4% of the medicines were in generic format of prescription.Conclusions: This study gives a positive outlook at the utilization pattern of drugs with all the indicators specifically Essential Drugs List. Regular auditing, continuous medical education and evidence-based medicine can help in improving the health care.

Lossless compaction of model execution traces

Dynamic verification and validation (V&V) techniques are used to verify and validate the behavior of software systems early in the development process. In the context of model-driven engineering, such behaviors are usually defined using executable domain-specific modeling languages (xDSML). Many V&V techniques rely on execution traces to represent and analyze the behavior of executable models. Traces, however, tend to be overwhelmingly large, hindering effective and efficient analysis of their content. While there exist several trace metamodels to represent execution traces, most of them suffer from scalability problems. In this paper, we present a generic compact trace representation format called generic compact trace metamodel (CTM) that enables the construction and manipulation of compact execution traces of executable models. CTM is generic in the sense that it supports a wide range of xDSMLs. We evaluate CTM on traces obtained from real-world fUML models. Compared to existing trace metamodels, the results show a significant reduction in memory and disk consumption. Moreover, CTM offers a common structure with the aim to facilitate interoperability between existing trace analysis tools.

Weyl points created by a three-dimensional flat band

Following the discovery of topological insulators (TIs), topological Dirac/Weyl semimetal has attracted much recent interest. A prevailing mechanism for the formation of Weyl points is by breaking time-reversal symmetry (TRS) or spatial inversion symmetry of a Dirac point. Here we demonstrate a generic formation mechanism for Weyl points by breaking TRS of a three-dimensional (3D) TI featured with highly degenerate 3D flat bands (FBs). It is in direct contrast to the conventional view that breaking TRS of a 2D/3D TI leads to a Chern insulator exhibiting quantum anomalous Hall effect. Based on a tight-binding model of pyrochlore lattice, we show that this unusual 3D-FB-enabled Weyl state may contain only a minimum of two Weyl points. Furthermore, using first-principles calculations, we identify this Weyl state in a real material Sn$_2$Nb$_2$O$_7$. The main features of the resulting Weyl points are analyzed with respect to symmetry, topological invariant and surface state. Our finding sheds new light on our fundamental understanding of topological physics and significantly extends the scope of Weyl semimetals to attract immediate experimental interest.

Spontaneous ring formation in wind-emitting accretion discs

Rings and gaps have been observed in a wide range of proto-planetary discs, from young systems like HLTau to older discs like TW Hydra. Recent disc simulations have shown that magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence (in both the ideal or non-ideal regime) can lead to the formation of rings and be an alternative to the embedded planets scenario. In this paper, we have investigated the way in which these ring form in this context and seek a generic formation process, taking into account the various dissipative regimes and magnetisations probed by the past simulations. We identify the existence of a linear and secular instability, driven by MHD winds, and giving birth to rings of gas that have a width larger than the disc scale height. We show that the linear theory is able to make reliable predictions regarding the growth rates, the contrast and spacing between ring and gap, by comparing these predictions to a series of 2D (axisymmetric) and 3D MHD numerical simulations. In addition, we demonstrate that these rings can act as dust traps provided that the disc is sufficiently magnetised, with plasma beta lower than 104. Given its robustness, the process identified in this paper could have important implications, not only for proto-planetary discs but also for a wide range of accreting systems threaded by large-scale magnetic fields.

Guidelines for reporting and archiving 210Pb sediment chronologies to improve fidelity and extend data lifecycle

Abstract Radiometric dating methods are essential for developing geochronologies to study Late Quaternary environmental change and 210Pb dating is commonly used to produce age-depth models from recent (within 150 years) sediments and other geoarchives. The past two centuries are marked by rapid environmental socio-ecological changes frequently attributed to anthropogenic land-use activities, modified biogeochemical cycles, and climate change. Consequently, historical reconstructions over this recent time interval have high societal value because analyses of these datasets provide understanding of the consequences of environmental modifications, critical ecosystem thresholds, and to define desirable ranges of variation for management, restoration, and conservation. For this information to be used more broadly, for example to support land management decisions or to contribute data to regional analyses of ecosystem change, authors must report all of the useful age-depth model information. However, at present there are no guidelines for researchers on what information should be reported to ensure 210Pb data are fully disclosed, reproducible, and reusable; leading to a plethora of reporting styles, including inadequate reporting that reduces potential reusability and shortening the data lifecycle. For example, 64% of the publications in a literature review of 210Pb dated geoarchives did not include any presentation of age uncertainty estimates in modeled calendar ages used in age-depth models. Insufficient reporting of methods and results used in 210Pb dating geoarchives severely hampers reproducibility and data reusability, especially in analyses that make use of databased palaeoenvironmental data. Reproducibility of data is fundamental to further analyses of the number of palaeoenvironmental data and the spatial coverage of published geoarchives sites. We suggest, and justify, a set of minimum reporting guidelines for metadata and data reporting for 210Pb dates, including an IEDA (Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance), LiPD (Linked Paleo Data) and generic format data presentation templates, to contribute to improvements in data archiving standards and to facilitate the data requirements of researchers analyzing datasets of several palaeoenvironmental study sites. We analyse practices of methods, results and first order interpretation of 210Pb data and make recommendations to authors on effective data reporting and archiving to maximize the value of datasets. We provide empirical evidence from publications and practitioners to support our suggested reporting guidelines. These guidelines increase the scientific value of 210Pb by expanding its relevance in the data lifecycle. Improving quality and fidelity of environmental datasets broadens interdisciplinary use, lengthens the potential lifecycle of data products, and achieves requirements applicable for evidenced-based policy support.

Objective assessment of total laparoscopic hysterectomy: Development and validation of a feasible rating scale for formative and summative feedback

ObjectivesThe aims of the study were to develop and gather validity evidence for a feasible rating scale for formative and summative assessment of total laparoscopic hysterectomy in the operating theatre. Study designThe study was a prospective observer-blinded cohort study. The rating scale was developed according to the generic format of Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills. We applied the contemporary framework of validity to examine validity evidence of the content, response process, internal structure, relationship to other variables, and consequences. Two experienced gynecologists constructed a preliminary version of the rating scale, which was reviewed by a multicentre team of experienced gynecologists in a modified Delphi process. The surgeons (beginners and experienced surgeons) were video recorded during live performance of total laparoscopic hysterectomies. Two blinded raters evaluated the performances independently using the rating scale. Internal consistency reliability and interrater reliability were calculated as measures of internal structure. The performances of the two groups were compared and a pass/fail score was set to show the consequences of the rating scale. ResultsThe content of the rating scale was defined during three Delphi rounds and upon agreement comprised of 12 items. Sixteen participants including 8 beginners and 8 experienced surgeons performed total laparoscopic hysterectomies. The internal consistency reliability of the items was 0.95 (Cronbach’s alpha), and the interrater reliabilities (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, absolute agreement) were 0.996 for one rater and 0.998 for two raters (P < 0.001 for all correlations). The beginners’ mean performance score was 19.2 (SD 7.1) and the experienced surgeons’ score was 36.4 (SD 3.9); the groups performed statistically significantly different (P < 0.001). The pass/fail score was 29.3 with no false positives and no false negatives. ConclusionWith this study, a feasible rating scale for the objective assessment of total laparoscopic hysterectomy was developed with sound validity evidence. The rating scale is suitable for both formative and summative feedback in the commencement of surgical training in gynecology.

Introducing the New COPD Pocket Consultant Guide App: Can A Digital Approach Improve Care? A Statement of the COPD Foundation.

The COPD Foundation has tried to address gaps in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) care by providing COPD Pocket Consultant Guide cards to U.S. health care providers. Since launching the card in 2007, there have been numerous updates and more than 800,000 of these cards have been distributed at no charge to health care professionals. The most recent versions have concentrated on presenting an algorithm for COPD management based on 7 severity domains: spirometry, symptoms, exacerbations, oxygen requirements, the presence of chronic bronchitis or emphysema and comorbidities. To increase the usability and reach of this tool, the COPD Pocket Consultant Guide is now available as an app for iOS and Android. This updated version of the app includes new COPD and asthma/COPD overlap flow charts; an interactive therapy chart that takes into account modified Medical Research Council (mMRC), COPD Assessment Test (CAT), and spirometry scores; anxiety and depression screeners; up-to-date medication charts in both brand and generic formats; a checklist to aid in determining when a patient should be referred to a pulmonologist and more. Potential use of the COPD Pocket Consultant Guide app in clinical care is discussed.

Representing spatial objects in data warehouses: a logical solution

Spatial data warehouse logical design involves mainly extending the techniques used in relational logical data warehouse design for the support of spatial objects, i.e., geometric objects in space. Spatial objects can have different geometric granularities and can be found at different hierarchical levels of a dimension in the logical model of a data warehouse. This paper addresses data warehouse logical design considerations for a consolidated representation of spatial and non-spatial data. The novelty of the model presented in this paper is the representation of spatial objects in a logical and semantically effective manner. With this approach, complex spatial objects can be modelled in a generic and user-friendly format. The model also includes ROLAP operations supporting the navigation across different dimensions' levels and the execution of queries. The functionality of the model is also provided by a number of example queries.

The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq by Daniel Binns (review)

Reviewed by: The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq by Daniel Binns Pearl James Daniel Binns, The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq. Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-78320-754-1. 180 pages. $43. Daniel Binns is a lecturer in media studies at Melbourne’s RMIT University. He also works as a writer, producer, and consultant for film productions. His monograph on the Hollywood war film is not the first book on this subject or even the first with this title, but he brings a more theoretically-informed and less historicist approach to bear on the topic than previous scholars. He draws thoughtfully on the best and best-known works on the topic, including those by Paul Virilio, Jeanine Basinger, and Robert Eberwein. Over the course of an introduction and four chapters, he works to elicit a new understanding of the war film genre and, in the process, of generic formation more generally. Yet the book is organized historically and ultimately makes an argument about how the Hollywood war film genre has evolved over time. Each of the first three chapters focuses on a broad cultural moment: World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, and ‘Conflict in the Middle East.’ The final chapter traces the working of the war film genre across media, specifically into video games and comic books. That final chapter contains the book’s most original and interesting insights. Binns describes an overarching trajectory of the war film genre and its relation to what he calls, drawing upon Jean-Francois Lyotard and Hans-Ake Persson, a “grand narrative,” specifically, a myth of American national supremacy. Simply put, in the Hollywood war film, the “grand narrative can be both a representation of former glory, and a powerful inspiration for or justification of future engagements” (15). In Binns’s account, films about the World Wars instantiate this grand narrative in cinema and are typically epic in scale. They portray war as glorious and necessary. But different wars beget generic shifts, and this period of the genre ends with Patton (1970). Hollywood’s depictions of the wars in Korea and Vietnam still belong to the genre, but strain it; they tend to express “fear and frustration” through portrayals of “loneliness, quietness, and introspection” (56). While films of the World Wars tend to be organized (as Jeanine Basinger has demonstrated) around a platoon of representative Americans, films about Korea and Vietnam instead typically focus on a single individual. After the Gulf War, Hollywood war films return to the grand narrative and again portray war(s) in the Middle East and Afghanistan as necessary and sometimes heroic. While this overarching chronology makes sense at a macro-level, it leads Binns to make his least convincing points. Particularly problematic for me as a scholar of World War I film is his conflation of films about World War I and II. Those are two entirely different wars and cultural moments in the United States, and as such they receive dramatically different treatment in film. But perhaps because he’s primarily interested in laying a groundwork for his final claims about where the genre has gone most recently, he paints this section with rather large brush-strokes. He uses Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) as a primary example of what he describes as “the cinematic message of World War I” that “combat is glorious [End Page 53] and victory is sweet” (25). That claim is pretty hard to accept. The film was famously banned in Germany precisely because it was seen to portray war as an obscene waste of life by the nationalist state. Perhaps aware of the stretch he’s making, Binns vacillates; in some places he softens his overarching claim and admits that All Quiet “portrays war for what it is: violent, hard, and futile” (30) only to reiterate a page later that it and other films about World War I suggest that war, for all its brutality, “is ultimately necessary for the greater good” (31). Binns’s local observations about Milestone’s film are interesting, particularly as he points out its tendency to...

Management of local multi-sensors applied to SHM and long-term infrared monitoring: Cloud2IR implementation

ABSTRACTCloud2IR is an autonomous software architecture, allowing multi-sensor connection, dedicated to the long-term thermal monitoring of infrastructures. It has benefited of past experimental knowledge acquired in various research projects to redefine a lighter architecture using generic standards, more appropriated to autonomous operations in the field, and that can be later included in a wide distributed architecture. The system has been developed in order to cut down software integration time facilitating the system adaptation to each experiment specificities. After a detailed presentation of data standards, our bi-headed architecture is presented. First, a generic unit, a data management side able to aggregate any sensor data, type or size, automatically encapsulating them in various generic data format such as hierarchical data format or cloud data such as opengis standard. This whole part is also in charge of the acquisition scenario, the local storage management and the network management. Second, a specialised unit where the sensor specific development fitted to experimental requirements are addressed. The system has been deployed on two test sites for more than one year. It aggregates various sensor data issued from infrared thermal cameras, GPS units, pyranometers, weather stations, etc. The software and some results in outdoor conditions are discussed.

Vector Space Decomposition for Solving Large-Scale Linear Programs

We develop an algorithmic framework for linear programming guided by dual optimality considerations. The solution process moves from one feasible solution to the next according to an exchange mechanism that is defined by a direction and a resulting step size. Part of the direction is obtained via a pricing problem devised in primal and dual forms. From the dual perspective, one maximizes the minimum reduced cost that can be achieved from splitting the set of dual variables in two subsets: one being fixed while the other is optimized. From the primal perspective, this amounts to selecting a nonnegative combination of variables entering the basis. The direction is uniquely complemented by identifying the affected basic variables, if any. The framework is presented in a generic format motivated by and alluding to concepts from network flow problems. It specializes to a variety of algorithms, several of which are well known. The most prominent is the primal simplex algorithm where all dual variables are fixed: this results in the choice of a single entering variable commonly leading to degenerate pivots. At the other extreme, we find an algorithm for which all dual variables are optimized at every iteration. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies the improved primal simplex algorithm for which one fixes the dual variables associated with the nondegenerate basic variables and optimizes the remaining ones. The two last variants both bestow a pricing problem providing necessary and sufficient optimality conditions. As a result, directions yielding strictly positive step sizes at every iteration are also issued from these pricing steps. These directions move on the edges of the polyhedron for the latter while the former can also identify interior directions.

RDF Data Storage and Query Processing Schemes

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) represents a main ingredient and data representation format for Linked Data and the Semantic Web. It supports a generic graph-based data model and data representation format for describing things, including their relationships with other things. As the size of RDF datasets is growing fast, RDF data management systems must be able to cope with growing amounts of data. Even though physically handling RDF data using a relational table is possible, querying a giant triple table becomes very expensive because of the multiple nested joins required for answering graph queries. In addition, the heterogeneity of RDF Data poses entirely new challenges to database systems. This article provides a comprehensive study of the state of the art in handling and querying RDF data. In particular, we focus on data storage techniques, indexing strategies, and query execution mechanisms. Moreover, we provide a classification of existing systems and approaches. We also provide an overview of the various benchmarking efforts in this context and discuss some of the open problems in this domain.

Production of patient-specific electron beam aperture cut-outs using a low-cost, multi-purpose 3D printer.

Electron beam collimators for non‐standard field sizes and shapes are typically fabricated using Styrofoam molds to cast the aperture cut‐out. These molds are often produced using a dedicated foam cutter, which may be expensive and only serves a single purpose. An increasing number of radiotherapy departments, however, has a 3D printer on‐site, to create a wide range of custom‐made treatment auxiliaries, such as bolus and dosimetry phantoms. The 3D printer can also be used to produce patient‐specific aperture cut‐outs, as elaborated in this note. Open‐source programming language was used to automatically generate the mold's shape in a generic digital file format readable by 3D printer software. The geometric mold model has the patient's identification number integrated and is to be mounted on a uniquely fitting, reusable positioning device, which can be 3D printed as well. This assembly likewise fits uniquely onto the applicator tray, ensuring correct and error‐free alignment of the mold during casting of the aperture. For dosimetric verification, two aperture cut‐outs were cast, one using a conventionally cut Styrofoam mold and one using a 3D printed mold. Using these cut‐outs, the clinical plan was delivered onto a phantom, for which the transversal dose distributions were measured at 2 cm depth using radiochromic film and compared using gamma‐index analysis. An agreement score of 99.9% between the measured 2D dose distributions was found in the (10%–80%) dose region, using 1% (local) dose‐difference and 1.0 mm distance‐to‐agreement acceptance criteria. The workflow using 3D printing has been clinically implemented and is in routine use at the author's institute for all patient‐specific electron beam aperture cut‐outs. It allows for a standardized, cost‐effective, and operator‐friendly workflow without the need for dedicated equipment. In addition, it offers possibilities to increase safety and quality of the process including patient identification and methods for accurate mold alignment.

Formalisation in Constructive Type Theory of Barendregt's Variable Convention for Generic Structures with Binders

We introduce a universe of regular datatypes with variable binding information, for which we define generic formation and elimination (i.e. induction /recursion) operators. We then define a generic alpha-equivalence relation over the types of the universe based on name-swapping, and derive iteration and induction principles which work modulo alpha-conversion capturing Barendregt's Variable Convention. We instantiate the resulting framework so as to obtain the Lambda Calculus and System F, for which we derive substitution operations and substitution lemmas for alpha-conversion and substitution composition. The whole work is carried out in Constructive Type Theory and machine-checked by the system Agda.