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Desire for life and protecting lives has come to the fore during the pandemic. Borders have been closed to stop the spread of Covid-19. The virus does not respect borders, yet physical distance is crucial. Three things have become clear. One is the level of uncertainty about which measures are most efficient. The other is that the neo-liberal philosophy with “just in time” deliveries on a global m
Biliary tract cancers (BTC) are rare and often diagnosed in late stages with advanced, nonresectable disease. The targeted agents panitumumab and bevacizumab have shown promising outcomes in combination with chemotherapy in other gastrointestinal (GI) cancers. We wanted to investigate if panitumumab or bevacizumab was the most promising drug to add to chemotherapy. Eighty-eight patients were rando
Chronic pancreatitis (CP) should be suspected in the case of recurrent upper abdominal pain of unknown origin and/or clinical signs of exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI). Alcohol is the most common etiological factor associated with CP, others being smoking, male gender, and hereditary forms. CP is often associated with recurrent episodes of acute exacerbations. As of today, there is no accep
BACKGROUND: There is a lack of evidence-based recommendations for the age at which women with a family history of cancers other than breast cancer should start breast cancer screening. METHODS: Using Swedish family cancer data sets, the authors conducted a nationwide cohort study including 5,099,172 Swedish women born after 1931 (follow-up, 1958-2015). Accounting for calendar time, they calculated
Gut-associated lymphoid tissues (GALTs) comprise key intestinal immune inductive sites, including the Peyer’s patches of the small intestine and different types of isolated lymphoid follicle (ILF) found along the length of the gut. Our understanding of human GALT is limited due to a lack of protocols for their isolation. Here we describe a technique that, uniquely among intestinal cell isolation p
Objectives Despite the limited invasiveness of endoscopic transsphenoidal surgery (ETSS), some degree of nasal structure destruction is unavoidable. Our objective was to evaluate sinonasal morbidity and self-reported health before and 6 months after ETSS for pituitary tumors, and to identify possible predictive factors for deterioration in sinonasal health. Design Prospective observational cohort
Recent qualitative and quantitative research on the interrelationships between innovation, job quality and employment shows a strong association between job quality and product, process, and to a lesser extent organizational innovation. This is theorized as the interaction of two systems – job quality and innovation systems. Increased employment and improved job quality are found to result from inRecent qualitative and quantitative research on the interrelationships between innovation, job quality and employment shows a strong association between job quality and product, process, and to a lesser extent organizational innovation. This is theorized as the interaction of two systems – job quality and innovation systems. Increased employment and improved job quality are found to result from in
Context. Observations of the Galactic bulge suggest that the disk formed through secular evolution rather than gas dissipation and/or mergers, as previously believed. This would imply very similar chemistry in the disk and bulge. Some elements, such as the α-elements, are well studied in the bulge, but others like the neutron-capture elements are much less well explored. Stellar mass and metallici
Dermatan sulfate epimerase 1 (DS-epi1, EC 5.1.3.19) catalyzes the conversion of d-glucuronic acid to l-iduronic acid on the polymer level, a key step in the biosynthesis of the glycosaminoglycan dermatan sulfate. Here, we present the first crystal structure of the catalytic domains of DS-epi1, solved at 2.4 Å resolution, as well as a model of the full-length luminal protein obtained by a combinati
We report a new design of an acoustophoretic trapping device with significantly increased capacity and throughput, compared to current commercial acoustic trapping systems. Acoustic trapping enables nanoparticle and extracellular vesicle (EV) enrichment without ultracentrifugation. Current commercial acoustic trapping technology uses an acoustic single-node resonance and typically operates at flow
Self-Aware Adaptive computing systems are capable of adapting their behavior and resources thousands of times based on changing environmental conditions and demands. This allows them to automatically find the best way to accomplish a given goal with the resources at hand. This capability would benefit the full range of computer systems, from embedded devices to servers to supercomputers. Although
A feedback-based approach to process scheduling in a single-processor system was recently proposed, that deeply relies on the control theory for its entire design. In this work, a literature benchmark is used to compare said approach to classical ones, with particular reference to the real-time case. Two are the main results. First, in the case of a schedulable process set, the proposed "control-t
Recent papers [6, 8] have demonstrated that process schedulers can be designed entirely as feedback controllers - quite novel an approach with respect to the way the control theory is typically applied to computing systems. This work takes a more technological attitude with respect to the methodological ones just quoted. The realisation of a control-theoretical process scheduler on a kernel writte
A novel way to formalise the problem of preemptive feedback scheduling is presented, based on discrete-time linear dynamic systems. Despite its extreme simplicity, the obtained formalism is suitable both for representing (and therefore dynamically analysing) existing scheduling methods, and for synthesizing new ones in a totally system-theoretical perspective. Also, by further specialising the cla
In the production of beer, good temperature control of the starch mashing phase is very important for both the final product quality and the process efficiency. A precise tuning of the said control is, however, complicated by the highly non-linear nature of the process, and often also by the actuation scheme. Based on suitably extended literature models, this article shows how object-oriented mode
This manuscript is part of a long-term research, aimed at establishing methodologically grounded relationships between model- and relay-based tuning of industrial regulators, and at consequently deriving synthesis procedures that couple the advantages of model-based tuning to the simplicity and clarity of relay-based identification. In this work, the addressed controller structure is the "PI+p", i
A closed-loop and an open-loop active vibration control technique are critically compared, accounting for the effects of finite precision arithmetic. The main result is that the relevance of such effects is pointed out and characterised, as rigorously as possible at the present state of the research, in a suitably idealised context, and with specifically devised indicators. Also, the differences b
The domain of active control of narrowband disturbances, of either vibrational or acoustic noise source, poses several methodological and implementational issues. Besides all the problems that normally arise in digital control, some specific issues are related to the attenuation of harmonic or quasi-harmonic signals, which require the usage of control blocks approaching, or even touching, the stab
