Overview Map Research Articles

Mapping the Complex Morphology of Cell Interactions with Nanowire Substrates Using FIB-SEM

Using high resolution focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) we study the details of cell-nanostructure interactions using serial block face imaging. 3T3 Fibroblast cellular monolayers are cultured on flat glass as a control surface and on two types of nanostructured scaffold substrates made from silicon black (Nanograss) with low- and high nanowire density. After culturing for 72 hours the cells were fixed, heavy metal stained, embedded in resin, and processed with FIB-SEM block face imaging without removing the substrate. The sample preparation procedure, image acquisition and image post-processing were specifically optimised for cellular monolayers cultured on nanostructured substrates. Cells display a wide range of interactions with the nanostructures depending on the surface morphology, but also greatly varying from one cell to another on the same substrate, illustrating a wide phenotypic variability. Depending on the substrate and cell, we observe that cells could for instance: break the nanowires and engulf them, flatten the nanowires or simply reside on top of them. Given the complexity of interactions, we have categorised our observations and created an overview map. The results demonstrate that detailed nanoscale resolution images are required to begin understanding the wide variety of individual cells’ interactions with a structured substrate. The map will provide a framework for light microscopy studies of such interactions indicating what modes of interactions must be considered.

Historijsko-geografski kontekst nastanka Lučićeve karte Illyricum hodiernum

U radu se razmatra prva integralna karta hrvatskih povijesnih regija koja je izrađena u drugoj polovici 17. st. Rukopisnu inačicu te karte za potrebe Papinskoga ilirskoga (hrvatskog) zavoda svetog Jeronima u Rimu nacrtao je Pietro Andrea Buffalini 1663. Ta karta je zatim, uz odgovarajuće izmjene, otisnuta pod naslovom Illyricum hodiernum u Lučićevu historiografskom djelu De Regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae te u Blaeuovu atlasu Atlas Maior sive Geographia Blaviana 1668. Sudeći prema sadržaju tih karata i političkim okolnostima u kojima su nastale, oblikovanju njihova sadržaja najviše je pridonio hrvatski polihistor i kartograf Ivan Lučić. On je kao vrsni poznavatelj povijesti i geografije Hrvatske vlastiti kartografski imaginarij pretočio u kartografsku sintezu u obliku pregledne karte koja je nastala na temelju kompilacije sadržaja starijih karata i na temelju osobnih istraživanja. Kartom je ponajprije htio jasno pokazati koji se prostor u duhu reformnokatoličkog ilirizma podrazumijeva tadašnjim Ilirikom, odnosno Hrvatskom, a ujedno iskoristiti mogućnost koju karta kao kodirana slika geografske stvarnosti ima kada je potrebno predočiti prostorne odnose u kontekstu historijsko-geografskog pregleda razvoja Hrvatske.

REINTERPRETATION OF ISTANBUL’S IMAGE THROUGH LIGHT MAPPING

In the present study, historical and contemporary masterpieces in Istanbul will be discussed and analyzed considering “lighting scheme” as a design tool in the “lighting master plan”. The present image of the city will be analyzed together with the light mapping tool. It was intended to introduce a “conceptual lighting master plan” where a lighting vocabulary is introduced for both educational purpose and as a metaphor in line with the enormous historical background of Istanbul. The scheme can be an overview or road map of how lighting might be used to meet the various program requirements while it also enhances and entegrates with the architecture.Through the effective use of the lighting scheme, the unity and diversity in the history of the old city can be highlighted.

Mapping direct human impact on the topography of Hungary

Summary. Similarly to other European countries, human impacts of various types are discernible in all regions of Hungary. Restricting the infl uence of human activities to direct transformation of topographic conditions, primary and secondary landforms created, the main categories of symbols included in the legend of an overview map refer to water management (fl ood-control dykes, dams and canals); to housing development, industry and transportation (landfi lls, sealed, levelled and ter-raced surfaces; motorway/railway embankments and cuts), to agriculture (terraces, hollow roads) as well as to other human activities with geomorphic impact (military and sports facilities). Th e map symbols are designed to provide some indication of the relative extent of human action and the size of anthropogenic landforms. Usually two (large or small scale impact) or three (large, medium or small scale) relative size categories are applied. Th e data base for the map is processed at 1:500,000 scale, allowing some reduction in scale for fi nal publication in an international ”Atlas of Human mpact I on Topography” under preparation by members of the IAG Working Group ”Human Impact on the Landscape”, created in 2005.Zusammenfassung.

Rethinking cities in the Middle East: political economy, planning, and the lived space

Urbanisation is an economic, political, and socio-cultural complexity, and so is its interaction with cityscapes. However, this truism rarely finds an expression in academic research. It is obvious that economic transitions would determine the quality and volume of the built environment. Municipal and state decision making further shape the nature of urban spaces, and socio-cultural transformations influence perceived notions of the lived space and, in turn, reshape the physical landscape itself. Nevertheless, research on cities in the Middle East and elsewhere remains fairly limited in scope, with little cross-discipline ‘conversation’ among scholars in different fields which attempts to account for such complexity. This is all the more surprising as life in cities has become, over the past half century or so, the most significant form of human collective dwelling; in the Middle East over half the population currently lives in urban settings and the numbers are forecast to grow in the future.1 This review article is the result of a dialogue between an architect and an economic historian in response to the foregoing. We have united in an attempt to offer a more integrative approach to Middle East urbanism, accounting for the interactions of the political economy of this region, planning, and the lived space. The key questions on which we focus are why and how do state transformation and economic structural change impact upon urban space. In seeking the answers we examine the long-term trajectory of cities as they went through the first period of globalisation under imperial intervention and/or direct colonial rule; gradually came under independent, inward-looking, national regimes; and presently experience the second wave of globalisation and the opening of local economies to international markets. Such a narrative explores common themes in the historical trajectories of cities' lives. Our long-term, geographically extensive overview (Map 1) is bound to miss some specific developments that have made a significant impact on the transformations of cities in the region; our aim is not to totalise Middle East experiences and reduce a variety of narratives to a simplistic linear model of change. Even more so, our study of the Middle East is mostly focused on Egypt, the Asian Arab countries (the mashraq), Israel/Palestine, and Turkey, the geographical unit which roughly corresponded with the Ottoman Empire, the last state to control the Middle East before the age of nations. We acknowledge that any bird's eye view perspective is bound to do some injustice to historically specific contexts, and city transitions that occurred in such contexts. We would welcome any future work that brings our suggestion here, namely to integrate political economy with the study of urban development and city life, to bear on more specific research on urbanism in the Middle East.

Age differences and the acquisition of spatial knowledge in a three-dimensional environment: Evaluating the use of an overview map as a navigation aid

This study examined age differences in the use of an electronic three-dimensional (3D) environment, and how the age differences were affected by the use of an overview map as a navigation aid. Task performance and the subjects’ acquisition of configural knowledge of the 3D-environment were assessed. Impact of spatial ability and prior experience on these measurements were also investigated. One group of older subjects ( n = 24 ) and one group of younger subjects ( n = 24 ) participated. An overall hypothesis for the work presented here was that differences in learning to and performing navigational tasks in the physical world are similar in learning and performing navigational tasks in the virtual world. The results showed that the older participants needed more time to solve the tasks; and similar to navigation in the physical world, the older participants were less likely to create configural knowledge. It could not be established that older participants benefited more from an overview map as cognitive support than younger subjects, except in the subjective sense: the older users felt more secure when the map was there. The map seemed to have supported the older users in creating a feeling of where objects were located within the environment, but it did not make them more efficient. The results have implications for design; in particular, it brings up the difficult issue of balancing design goals such as efficiency in terms of time and functionality, against maintaining a sense of direction and location in navigational situations.

Automated recognition of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in near-real-time data

This paper presents a new method and first applications of software that we have developed to autonomously detect CMEs in image sequences from LASCO (Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph). The crux of the software is the detection of CMEs as bright ridges in (time, height) maps using the Hough transform. The next step employs clustering and morphological closing operations to mark out different CMEs. The output is a list of events, similar to the classic catalogs, with starting time, principle angle, angular width and velocity estimation for each CME. In addition we present a new type of CME overview map that clearly shows all detected CMEs in a (principal angle, time of occurrence) coordinate system. In contrast to catalogs assembled by human operators, these CME detections can be done without any human interference on real-time data 24 h per day (see http://sidc.oma.be/cactus for the real-time output with data covering the last 4 days). Therefore the detection is not only more immediate, but, more importantly, also more objective. In this paper we describe the software and validate its performance by comparing its output with the SOHO LASCO CME catalog. Experimental results on real-time data show that the developed technique can achieve excellent results in measuring starting time and principal angle and good results for the angular width and velocity measurement compared to the CMEs listed in the catalog. Its overall success rate is presently about 94%. The software also reveals CMEs or other features that have not been listed in the catalog. Such unreported cases might influence CME statistics and they demonstrate that also the present catalogs do not have a 100% success rate. This inevitably leads to a discussion on the definition of a CME. Prospects for improvement and exploitation are discussed.

A Primer in Financial Economics

ABSTRACTThis paper is divided into three parts. Taken together, the three parts intend to provide the reader with an overview of the first 101 years of financial economics, with particular attention on those developments that are of special interest to actuaries. In Section 1, S.F. Whelan attempts to capture the flavour of the subject and, in particular, to give an overview or road map of this discipline, highlighting actuarial input. In Section 2, D.C. Bowie gives a concise and self-contained overview of the Modigliani and Miller insights (or MM Theorems, as they are often known). In Section 3, A.J. Hibbert considers the novel option pricing method proposed by Black, Merton, and Scholes. These two insights are highlights of this newscience, and, in both cases, contradict our intuition.T.S. Elliot, the mathematically trained poet, described the darkness that intercedes between the idea and the action as the ‘shadow’. There is a shadow to be considered between these insights and their application. The demonstration of the results requires, of course, some idealised circumstances, and therefore the extent and degree of their applicability to the non- idealised problems encountered by actuaries requires some delicate considerations. An attempt is made to outline these further considerations.

Ariadne: a Java-based guided tour system for the World Wide Web

This paper presents a Guided tour system for the WWW, called Ariadne, which implements the ideas of trails and guided tours, originating from the hypertext field. Ariadne appears as a Java applet to the user and it stores guided tours in a database format separated from the WWW documents included in the tour. The main advantages of the system compared to similar systems are: (1) an independent user interface which does not affect the layout of the documents being part of the tour, (2) branching tours where the user may follow alternative routes, (3) composition of existing tours into aggregate tours, (4) overview map with indication of which parts of a tour have been visited and support for getting back on track. Ariadne is available as a research prototype, and it has been tested among a group of university students as well as casual users on the Internet.

“Desktop Knowledge”: A New Focus for Medical Education and Decision Support

Physicians today are faced with "data overload" and, paradoxically, "information underload"--the inability to locate pertinent, needed knowledge in a sea of data with which they are inundated. Increasingly, the professional functions of the physician are becoming focused on the desktop workstation, in terms of its ability to provide "windows" into local databases and knowledge resources, and to serve as an access port to other networked resources. A challenge we now face is to develop means for structuring the vast potentially available knowledge resources in such a manner that access to pertinent knowledge can be facilitated, and to develop acceptable interfaces to the knowledge resources so that a user can effectively navigate through them. The complexity of this task is due to the nature of the knowledge resources--knowledge can be in a variety of forms, ranging from textual and pictorial material, to structured representations, to more dynamic embodiments in the form of procedures. In the Decision Systems Group we have focused on the development of a prototype desktop knowledge management environment known as Explorer-2, with the objective of providing a consistent interface for access to a wide variety of knowledge. Our accomplishments to date encompass the incorporation into the Explorer-2 environment of adaptations of textbook chapters and books, image data bases, simulations, and expert systems. Navigational aids are provided by a semantic net browser using both MeSH and augmented taxonomies and by a graphical overview map.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

The systematic evaluation of landslide incidence and susceptibility in the United States

A landslide overview map of the United States published in 1976, at a scale of 1∶7,500,000, shows areas of landslides and areas susceptible to future landsliding. The map was prepared by classifying geologic units shown on the geologic map of the United States according to high, medium, or low incidence of landslides and susceptibility to landsliding. The compilation showed that landsliding was most prevalent in fine-grained clastic rocks, particularly where they are interbedded with more resistant rocks; in highly sheared rocks, particularly melanges; and in loose slope accumulations of fine-grained surface debris. The influence of climate, structure, and lithology on landsliding in various parts of the country could not be shown on the map. These factors are compared for the Colorado Plateau in the western United States and the Appalachian Highlands in the eastern United States.

ERROR ON CHOROPLETHIC MAPS: DEFINITION, MEASUREMENT, REDUCTION

ABSTRACT Communication, whether oral, written, or graphic depends upon the ability of one individual to transfer information to another. In this essay we have tried to illustrate the fact that error in choroplethic mapping inhibits the transfer of information and that there are methods for improving this type of map as a communicative tool. We have done this by first defining overview, tabular, and boundary map uses. Second, techniques for the measurement of the error components of these three uses have been developed. Third, new reiterative and forcing manipulative techniques for choroplethic map data processing have been evolved. Lastly, the relationship between map accuracy and the information carrying capacity of a choroplethic map is set forth in hypothetical terms.