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The discovery of atmospheric micro(nano)plastic transport and ocean-atmosphere exchange points to a highly complex marine plastic cycle, with negative implications for human and ecosystem health. Yet, observations are currently limited. In this Perspective, we quantify the processes and fluxes of the marine-atmospheric micro(nano)plastic cycle, with the aim of highlighting the remaining unknowns in atmospheric micro(nano)plastic transport. Between 0.013 and 25 million metric tons per year of micro(nano)plastics are potentially being transported within the marine atmosphere and deposited in the oceans. However, the high uncertainty in these marine-atmospheric fluxes is related to data limitations and a lack of study intercomparability. To address the uncertainties and remaining knowledge gaps in the marine-atmospheric micro(nano)plastic cycle, we propose a future global marine-atmospheric micro(nano)plastic observation strategy, incorporating novel sampling methods and the creation of a comparable, harmonized and global data set. Together with long-term observations and intensive investigations, this strategy will help to define the trends in marine-atmospheric pollution and any responses to future policy and management actions. Atmospheric transport of microplastics could be a major source of plastic pollution to the ocean, yet observations currently remain limited. This Perspective quantifies the known budgets of the marine-atmospheric micro(nano)plastic cycle and proposes a future global observation strategy.

This research article presents a diagnosis and synthesis of three case studies of universities that have transformed themselves as organisations towards sustainability with signature pathway approaches. These took place in 2016 at Leuphana Universitat Luneburg, Arizona State University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. These universitiesfirstinvested significant time, energy, and human resources in learning about and researching themselves,beforeembarking along differentiated pathways of transformation, in turn, made up of common patterns of rubrics in specific action strategies. The common patterns delineated by the action strategies can be understood as intrinsic competencies for systemic change. These describe the assets of, for example, actors researching, learning about, and diagnosing their own organisations, their awareness of system boundaries and qualities, and the relationship and interdependency between the organisation and its surrounding society and ecosystems. Any blueprint of organisational transformation for sustainability should, therefore, be rooted in the intrinsic logic of the organisations in question. 33 tangible systemic rubrics of transformation also emerged which could be useful for actors (whether student, administrative, academic, entre/intrapreneur, leadership or activist) to prioritise asset development within their organisations, and which might act as pragmatic design aspirations, guiding and encouraging university actors along transformation pathways.

To date, little is known about how gay male parents discursively create and sustain family identity and how they position themselves in relation to the dominant heteronormative discourses of the tr...

Eviction might be considered a form of infrastructure: as a process of binding and unbinding people to a world in movement, producing the grounds on which action can take place. Going beyond a causal relationship between infrastructure and displacement, we may posit that eviction can be seen as a distributed, ongoing, system which binds people and creates the grounds for action. So, what might infrastructural theory reveal about evictions? How might we begin to study eviction as infrastructure?

Universities will play a profound role in a century in which society will be judged by its capacity for self-transformation in response to pandemic crises of climate change and capitalism. Frameworks of analysis of sustainability in organisations could benefit from tangible systemic rubrics for transformation. This research delineates core elements of organisational transformations for sustainability at universities. Criteria were woven into a framework that has value as a diagnostic tool, spanning three scales and five theoretical perspectives: behavioural science, corporate governance and responsibility, organisational change management, socio-ecological systems and sustainability in education and research. This was geared towards what organisational transformation for sustainability entails with universities specifically, if leverage points can be identified, and what the moral imperatives are of universities pursuing sustainability transformation. The orientation was to deduce distinct ‘rules of the game’ to diagnose organisational transformations for sustainability through descriptive and prescriptive criteria. The findings suggest high capacity for organisational transformation involves extroverted engagement, where potential rubrics help standardise comparison of environmental social governance issues in similar cultural and regional contexts. Students, academics, researchers and practitioners co-create knowledge in a ‘republic of stakeholders’, through a dialogical process of organisational-societal learning. Internally, an integrated approach, cross-linking information and disciplines from a network of actors has benefits for psychological wellbeing. Criteria for diagnosis could be formulated into an instrument through testing the analytical framework in transdisciplinary research cases. Future research might well focus on institutional differentiation and evolution of public research universities that navigate departures from traditional models, co-creating in reflexive iterations to achieve leverage for sustainability transformation.

Aims Active amyloid-β (Aβ) immunotherapy in Alzheimer's disease (AD) induces removal of Aβ and phosphorylated tau (ptau). Glycogen synthase kinase (GSK)-3β is a kinase, responsible for phosphorylation of tau, activation of which can be induced by phosphorylated double-stranded RNA-dependent protein kinase (pPKR). Using a post-mortem cohort of immunized AD cases, we investigated the effect of Aβ immunization on GSK-3β expression and pPKR. Methods We immunostained 11 immunized AD cases and 28 unimmunized AD cases for active, inactive and total GSK-3β, and for pPKR. Quantification of protein load was performed in the hippocampal region including CA1, subiculum and entorhinal cortex. Results All three areas showed a significant decrease in the three forms of GSK-3β (P

This contribution presents how the novel social scientific methodology of Action Research (AR) can assess campus-driven initiatives to see how to enhance governance for sustainability at Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s). Maastricht University (UM) in particular has a unique form of maintaining the student-driven, bottom-up component, and has pioneered in recent years in student activism for sustainability. Its Green Office’s (GO) mandate is to manage the sustainability portfolio of UM in the areas of research, education, operations, governance and community engagement, in a student-driven staff-supported manner. The drive was to see how AR can be used as a tool to assess and influence organisational transformation towards sustainability at an HEI. Other theories and lenses used included an organisational change management approach to embedding sustainability, assessment strategies from CSR, and insights from behavioural change. AR provides a moment for reflection after a full cycle—diagnose, plan, act, and evaluate action—has taken place. This paper represents the outcome of the reflection of this continuous process of transformation after one year of engagement by the researcher, with the focus on the internal causal mechanisms from which an organisational transformation gains traction and propagates. It was chosen as the approach best-suited for answering the primary research question of “how do universities manage their organisational transformation towards sustainability and how can this be effectively achieved”, especially against the backdrop of university’s unsustainability so as to enable the co-production and design of solutions at the organisational level. AR also requires a lot of ‘conventional’ research—such as the construction of an analytical framework, interviews with key stakeholders and a content analysis of documents produced by the GO and UM—before any meaningful reflection on interventions, the core of AR, can take place. In the context of organisational transformation towards embedding sustainability at UM, AR has enabled the researcher to come closer to seeing how operational, social, and governance processes take place up close, which conventional ‘desk’ research might not have otherwise gained access to. The researcher and the participants/co-researchers of the study have been able to learn from each other and from the initial findings of interventions and conceptual framework used to analyse organisational transformations towards sustainability. The AR ‘team’ therefore functions at the interface of the internal properties of the university and its external environment at the societal or regime level, using this approach to forge collaborative partnerships within organisations and with local stakeholders. It is hoped valuable lessons can be gleaned for others seeking to use the AR approach to study transformational processes that enhance the role of universities for sustainable development against the global imperative created by UNESCO’s Global Action Programme of Education for Sustainable Development and the UNSDG’s.

This special issue sets an agenda for research into early software design, and this introduction outlines drivers and issues for that agenda. It argues that looking at software from a design perspective, understanding software as a designed artifact, and considering how design reaches into the whole software life cycle can bring significant benefits both to our understanding of what works in software design and to our approach to tools and practices. The special issue presents outputs from an NSF-funded workshop on 'Studying Professional Software Design' held in 2010 at UC Irvine in which participants analyzed the same professional design sessions from different analytic perspectives. The workshop dialogues provide an example of what's critically needed to drive this research agenda: empirically grounded dialogues between research and practitioners.

In the absence of significant body forces the passive manipulation of fluid interfacial flows is naturally achieved by control of the specific geometry and wetting properties of the system. Numerous ‘microfluidic’ systems on Earth and ‘macrofluidic’ systems aboard spacecraft routinely exploit such methods and the term ‘capillary fluidics’ is used to describe both length-scale limits. In this work a collection of analytic solutions is offered for passive and weakly forced flows where a bulk capillary liquid is slowly drained or supplied by a faster capillary flow along at least one interior edge of the container. The solutions are enabled by an assumed known pressure (or known height) dynamical boundary condition. Following a series of assumptions this boundary condition can be in part determined a priori from the container dimensions and further quantitative experimental evidence, but not proof, is provided in support of its expanded use herein. In general, a small parameter arises in the scaling of the problems permitting a decoupling of the edge flow from the global bulk meniscus flow. The quasi-steady asymptotic system of equations that results may then be easily solved in closed form for a useful variety of geometries including uniform and tapered sections possessing at least one critically wetted interior edge. Draining, filling, bubble displacement and other imbibing flows are studied. Cursory terrestrial and drop tower experiments agree well with the solutions. The solutions are valued for the facility they provide in computing designs for selected capillary fluidics problems by way of passive transport rates and meniscus displacement. Because geometric permutations of any given design are myriad, such analytic tools are capable of efficiently identifying and comparing critical design criteria (i.e. shape and size) and the impact of various wetting conditions resulting from the fluid properties and surface conditions. Sample optimizations are performed to demonstrate the utility of the method.

In this paper, we provide an analysis of three pairs of professional software designers, each working on a provided design problem. To understand these sessions, we track the ideas that were generated, relate them to one another, and categorize them according to the subject being discussed. This data is then used to divide the sessions into design cycles, each of which represents a period of focus on a given aspect of the system being designed. We observe that the designers often consider two subjects at a time, and rotate through subjects in an effort to develop them evenly. The sessions are also characterized by a great deal of repetition, as the designers regularly reconsider previously stated ideas in new contexts.

In this paper, we report on our experience in designing and deliv-ering two new software design courses in the Informatics major at UC Irvine. When the major was created in 2004, it explicitly con-tained slots for two software design courses to be created from the ground up. The authors led this effort, focusing one course on the topic of system design and one course on the topic of implementation design . We discuss the philosophy and pedagogy behind the courses, present key class activities, and reflect on having offered each course twice over the past two years.

This review of pollution in the open oceans updates a report on this topic prepared by GESAMP five years previously (Reports and Studies No. 79, GESAMP, 2009). GESAMP (the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection, www.gesamp.org) is an advisory body consisting of specialized experts nominated by the Sponsoring Agencies (IMO, FAO, UNESCO-IOC, UNIDO, WMO, IAEA, UN, UNEP).

Strategies on how to improve energy efficiency at universities as part of the global energy transition are barely understood. This study aims to contribute to this body of knowledge, by investigating the energy efficiency transition at Maastricht University. Using the Multi-Level Perspective of transition studies, this research investigates the landscape trends in relation to energy efficiency at Dutch universities, the energy efficiency regime of Maastricht University and the impact of the student-driven and staff-supported Green Office, conceptualized as organizational niche, on this regime. The results suggest that before the Green Office was established, Maastricht University was trapped in a lock-in. Any external push to advance energy efficiency was missing and the institution’s organizational capacity to work on this issue was very limited, thus allowing only for incremental, technology-driven improvements of energy efficiency in buildings. After successful lobbying of students, the university introduced the Green Office as a student-led and staff-supported sustainability unit. The results suggest that the Green Office—at least temporarily—enabled the university to break through this lock-in by expanding its organizational capacity to work towards energy efficiency through the mobilization of students. As a result, the Green Office implemented several additional projects on energy efficiency in IT, buildings and strategy development that all effected dimensions of the regime.

Active amyloid-β (Aβ) immunotherapy in Alzheimer's disease (AD) induces removal of Aβ and phosphorylated tau (ptau). Glycogen synthase kinase (GSK)-3β is a kinase, responsible for phosphorylation of tau, activation of which can be induced by phosphorylated double-stranded RNA-dependent protein kinase (pPKR). Using a post-mortem cohort of immunized AD cases, we investigated the effect of Aβ immunization on GSK-3β expression and pPKR.We immunostained 11 immunized AD cases and 28 unimmunized AD cases for active, inactive and total GSK-3β, and for pPKR. Quantification of protein load was performed in the hippocampal region including CA1, subiculum and entorhinal cortex.All three areas showed a significant decrease in the three forms of GSK-3β (P 0.05) and a nonsignificant trend towards lower pPKR load in the immunized AD cases compared with the unimmunized AD cases.The lower GSK-3β expression generated by Aβ immunotherapy shows evidence of a modification of the signalling pathway induced by GSK-3β leading to the overall reduction of tau, supporting the contention that in humans, GSK-3β unifies Aβ and tau-related neuropathology.

cote interne IRCAM: Mitsufuji14b; None / None; National audience; The following article describes research on source detection in multi channel (3DTV) audio streams. The problem is extremely complex due to the fact that multiple layers can be present in scenes (background music, ambience, commentator). In this work a new algorithm is developed that exploits the information from the different audio channels to detect, and possibly localize and separate independent audio sources. An algorithm based on online Non-negative Tensor Deconvolution is realized, to deal with sound sources with time dependent positions in the channel matrix. The evaluation is made on 3DTV 5.1 film soundtracks and on synthetic mixes of 3DTV 5.1 audio with target sounds from a sound effects database: a significant improvement of the detection performance is shown, compared with other decomposition techniques.

In this paper, we summarize a number of evaluation methods from the field of information visualization and how they can be applied in the domain of cyber security. We focus on techniques that have been validated during our own studies with organizations of varying sizes including small business and the United States Air Force. Recommendations are also provided for experimental design.

Hospital outbreaks of group A streptococcal (GAS) infection can be devastating and occasionally result in the death of previously well patients. Approximately one in ten cases of severe GAS infection is healthcare-associated. This guidance, produced by a multidisciplinary working group, provides an evidence-based systematic approach to the investigation of single cases or outbreaks of healthcare-associated GAS infection in acute care or maternity settings. The guideline recommends that all cases of GAS infection potentially acquired in hospital or through contact with healthcare or maternity services should be investigated. Healthcare workers, the environment, and other patients are possible sources of transmission. Screening of epidemiologically linked healthcare workers should be considered for healthcare-associated cases of GAS infection where no alternative source is readily identified. Communal facilities, such as baths, bidets and showers, should be cleaned and decontaminated between all patients especially on delivery suites, post-natal wards and other high risk areas. Continuous surveillance is required to identify outbreaks which arise over long periods of time. GAS isolates from in-patients, peri-partum patients, neonates, and post-operative wounds should be saved for six months to facilitate outbreak investigation. These guidelines do not cover diagnosis and treatment of GAS infection which should be discussed with an infection specialist.

Despite the availability of a host of software design notations and associated tools, software developers are known to frequently turn to the whiteboard when faced with a specific design problem. There, they typically engage in an informal form of software design that relies heavily on sketching. However, whereas whiteboards afford flexibility and fluidity, they at the same time limit a designer in only being able to draw and erase content. This paper presents Calico, a novel software design tool that leverages electronic whiteboards to enhance the design experience with explicit support for the creative, exploratory aspects of design. Specifically, Calico offers a grid, scraps, and a palette together with gesture-based input to address several natural behaviors exhibited by software designers, including frequent shifts in focus, use of low-detail models, and use of a mix of notations. To evaluate Calico, we performed a laboratory experiment involving eight pairs of graduate students and collected and analyzed six corporate design sessions that employed Calico. Results are promising and indicate the benefits of Calico, while they at the same time highlight several ways in which it can be enhanced.

Design is an inherently creative process, particularly so during the early stages of design when a solution is just beginning to form. At this time, the more formal models and modeling languages to which we are so accustomed in software engineering serve a limited if non-existent role. But this does not mean that modeling is not relevant during early design; on the contrary, it is critical. It is just that a different form of modeling and overall design process takes place. In this paper, we present early results from our foray into exploring how designers can be supported in the early, highly creative stages of software design. We particularly build upon the existing body of work in creativity and general design, and apply key lessons found there to the construction of Calico, a prototype sketching tool for modeling in early design.

On airport runways, blue light fixtures denote taxiways between the runway and the airport terminal. Blue optics transmit mostly short-wavelength radiation, which makes traditional incandescent lamps a poor choice of light source; the resulting fixture efficiency could be less than one percent. LEDs are replacing incandescent lamps in this application. But unlike incandescent sources, LEDs do not radiate enough heat to melt ice and snow from the fixture optics. To meet Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations for weatherability, some LED-based fixtures incorporate electric heaters that, when switched on, nearly negate the energy-savings benefit of converting to LED sources. In this study, we explored methods for conduction and convection of LED junction heat to taxiway fixture optics for the purpose of minimizing snow and ice buildup. A more efficient LED-based system compared to incandescent that would require no additional heaters was demonstrated.

Scientific fields of study such as astrobiology, nanotechnology, and cave and karst science involve the study of images and associated biological, physiochemical, and geological data. In order to ensure interdisciplinary analysis, it is important to make these kinds of datasets available for analysis and curation by the scientific community. The goal of this project is to design and develop an online workspace that enables scientists to collaboratively view, analyze, and annotate such datasets. The prototype contains scanning electron micrographs of karst and cave samples. The target users are the interdisciplinary community of scientists who study karst samples to learn more about critical biological and geological processes and the microbial communities often found in karst terrain. The prototype can inform the design and development of collaborative workspaces in other interdisciplinary fields.

Current commercially available prostheses based on myoelectric control have limited functionality, leading to many amputees abandoning use. Myoelectric control using surface electrodes has a number of limitations and lacks specificity for deep muscles, presenting a continued need for more robust strategies. We propose a new strategy for sensing muscle activity based on real-time ultrasound imaging. Results from our previous work demonstrate that complex motions could be classified with 92% accuracy in real-time. However, arm and hand repositioning during natural movements tend to alter the geometry of forearm musculature, possibly affecting performance. In this study, we evaluated the robustness of the image-based control strategy in the presence of varied forearm positions on able-bodied subjects. Ultrasound images of the forearm muscles were collected during two different scenarios using a Sonix RP with a 5–14 MHz linear probe. The subject was asked to perform four hand motions at eight different arm positions and three levels of wrist pronation. Images were analyzed to generate activity patterns for each motion and then classified. Results demonstrate that forearm positions do not significantly compromise reliability. We also show that performance could be further improved by including additional training activity patterns corresponding to motions performed in a few selected arm positions.