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Fire safety remains a major challenge for engineered timber buildings. Their combustible nature challenges the design principles of compartmentation and structural integrity beyond burnout, which are inherent to the fire resistance framework. Therefore, self-extinction is critical for the fire-safe design of timber buildings.\ud \ud \ud \ud This paper is the first of a three-part series that seeks to establish the fundamental principles underpinning a design framework for self-extinction of engineered timber. The paper comprises: a literature review introducing the body of work developed at material and compartment scales; and the design of a large-scale testing methodology which isolates the fundamental phenomena to enable the development and validation of the required design framework.\ud \ud \ud \ud Research at the material scale has consolidated engineering principles to quantify self-extinction using external heat flux as a surrogate of the critical mass loss rate, and mass transfer or Damköhler numbers. At the compartment scale, further interdependent, complex phenomena influencing self-extinction occurrence have been demonstrated. Time-dependent phenomena include encapsulation failure, fall-off of charred lamellae and the burning of the movable fuel load, while thermal feedback is time-independent. The design of the testing methodology is described in reference to these fundamental phenomena.

A 78-year-old right-handed man was admitted to our department with a gait disorder that had begun 45 days ago. He had a history of alcohol and tobacco use, moderate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma without treatment, lung adenocarcinoma in complete remission, and psoriasis. His gait disorder had evolved progressively.

Pancreatoblastoma is a rare paediatric malignant neoplasm. The treatment of choice is complete surgical resection. However, it is often unresectable due to its large size, local infiltration or distant metastasis. Since the condition is rare, there is currently no standard treatment regimen. We outline the case of a 4-year-old child who presented with abdominal pain and distention, together with an enlarged liver and elevated serum α-fetoprotein levels. Imaging studies showed the presence of an abnormal pancreatic tumour and multiple nodular lesions in the liver, the biopsies from which led to a diagnosis of pancreatoblastoma. In this case, the patient received cycles of neoadjuvant chemotherapy, combining cisplatin and doxorubicin. The patient subsequently underwent scheduled surgery in which the primary pancreatic lesion was resected, obtaining a circumscribed and nodular specimen measuring 7 × 6 cm and weighing 150 g. Given the extent of the metastasis, the child is currently awaiting a liver transplant. Fil: Cao, Gabriel Fernando. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Hospital General de Niños Pedro Elizalde (ex Casa Cuna); Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Mendez, Julián. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Hospital General de Niños Pedro Elizalde (ex Casa Cuna); Argentina Fil: Navacchia, Daniel. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Hospital General de Niños Pedro Elizalde (ex Casa Cuna); Argentina

Thymomas are rare tumours characterised by their slow growth and capacity to invade directly by contiguity. While distant dissemination is infrequent, all sub-types of thymoma have the capacity to metastasise to extrathoracic organs. We present here the case of a female patient with a liver mass discovered 13 years after the removal of a mediastinal thymoma and after ten years from thyroidectomy for papillary carcinoma. The histopathological study showed that the lesion contained an epithelial component, which was immunohistochemically positive for pankeratin. It was accompanied by numerous small lymphocytes testing positive for TdT, CD3, CD4, CD5, CD8, CD99, and CD43. The result was consistent with hepatic metastatic thymoma sub-type B1, according to the World Health Organisation classification (WHO). Our case highlights the importance of morphological and immunohistological examinations in the differential diagnosis of visceral masses in patients with a history of thymoma. Given the infrequency of its metastasis and the increased risk of developing other primary tumours that these patients have, these studies play a significant role.

This paper analyzes typical odometer errors during calibration. As part of the testing, theoretical values are compared to real data. The measures were performed under different conditions in order to also evaluate differences in performance when using a workbench, smooth surfaces, accelerations and deceleration, steady state, soft and hard rotations. Theoretical and real displacements feed the consciousness system in order to analyze their impact on the decision strategy, and therefore analyzes the deviations and differences in the control strategy. Results show that deviations can be substantial if there is no other mechanism to avoid them. As a consequence the system ends up taking riskier options than those taken when ultrasound information exists.

Regarding energy efficiency, resource management in complex hard- and software systems that is based on the information typically available to the OS alone does not yield best results. Nevertheless, general-purpose resource management should stay independent of application-specific information. To resolve this dilemma, we propose a generic, ontology-based approach to resource scheduling that is context-aware and takes information of running applications into account. The central task here is to recognize situations that might necessitate an adaptation of resource scheduling. This task is performed by logical reasoning over OWL ontologies. Our initial study shows that current OWL 2 EL reasoner systems can perform recognition of exemplary situations relevant to resource management within 4 seconds.

For service management systems the early recognition of situations that necessitate a rebinding or a migration of services is an important task. To describe these situations on differing levels of detail and to allow their recognition even if only incomplete information is available, we employ the ontology language OWL 2 and the reasoning services defined for it. In this paper we provide a case study on the performance of state of the art OWL 2 reasoning systems for answering class queries and conjunctive queries modeling the relevant situations for service rebinding or migration in the differing OWL 2 profiles.

UEL is a system that computes unifiers for unification problems formulated in the description logic $\mathcal{EL}$. $\mathcal{EL}$ is a description logic with restricted expressivity, but which is still expressive enough for the formal representation of biomedical ontologies, such as the large medical ontology SNOMED CT. We propose to use UEL as a tool to detect redundancies in such ontologies by computing unifiers of two formal concepts suspected of expressing the same concept of the application domain. UEL can be used as a plug-in of the popular ontology editor Protege, or as a standalone unification application.

The regulatory properties of maize phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase were significantly altered by site-directed mutagenesis of residues 226 through 232. This conserved sequence element, RTDEIRR, is part of a surface loop at the dimer interface. Mutation of individual residues in this sequence caused various kinetic changes, including desensitization of the enzyme to key allosteric effectors or alteration of the K(0.5 PEP) for the substrate phosphoenolpyruvate. R231A, and especially R232Q, displayed decreased apparent affinity for the activator glucose-6-phosphate. Apparent affinity for the activator glycine was reduced in D228N and R232Q, while the maximum activation caused by glycine was greatly reduced in R226Q and E229A. R226Q and E229A also showed significantly lower sensitivity to the inhibitors malate and aspartate. E229A exhibited a low K(0.5 PEP), while the K(0.5 PEP )of R232Q was significantly higher than that of wild type. Thus these seven residues are critical determinants of the enzyme's kinetic responses to activators, inhibitors and substrate. The present results support an earlier suggestion that Arg 231 contributes to the binding site of the allosteric activator glucose-6-phosphate, and are consistent with other proposals that the substrate phosphoenolpyruvate allosterically activates the enzyme by binding at or near the glucose-6-phosphate site. The results also suggest that the glycine binding site may be contiguous with the glucose-6-phosphate binding site. Glu 229, which extends from this interface region through the interior of the protein and emerges near the aspartate binding site, may provide a physical link for propagating conformational changes between the allosteric activator and inhibitor binding regions.

Energy efficiency of software is an increasingly important topic. To achieve energy efficiency, a system should automatically optimize itself to provide the best possible utility to the user for the least possible cost in terms of energy consumption. To reach this goal, the system has to continuously decide whether and how to adapt itself, which takes time and consumes energy by itself. During this time, the system could be in an inefficient state and waste energy. We envision the application of predictive situation recognition to initiate decision making before it is actually needed. Thus, the time of the system being in an inefficient state is reduced, leading to a more energyefficient reconfiguration.

The AdvancedTCA (ATCA) telecom industry standard has been selected as the hardware platform for the “Phase-II Upgrade” of ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. In November 2014 a project dedicated to the study of the impact of the ATCA integration in the actual counting rooms was launched analysing the impact on the cooling infrastructures. A spare rack equipped with two ATCA shelves, high power dissipating load blades, temperature and air velocity sensors were installed in a lab. Vertical and horizontal cooling performance were checked and some crtitical aspects identified.

This paper incorporates a probabilistic fire loss assessment method for reinforced concrete structures into a cost-benefit analysis to optimize a structural fire design. Economic losses in case of failure and survival of the structure are both quantified with, in the latter case, an estimate of the damage and repairs costs. As a case study, a cost-benefit optimization of the position of rebars in a concrete column is investigated. The column response in fire is evaluated using finite element simulations in SAFIR. Variations in cover thickness result in variations in failure probabilities and, for cases where no failure occurs, variations in repair costs due to heat penetration and residual out-of-plane deformation of the column. The optimum cover thickness is the one that offers the best trade-off between the various repair costs across the range of likely fire intensity levels. This optimum is sensitive to repair decisions such as the tolerance on the acceptable residual out-of-plane deformation after a fire. For the studied cases, the optimum cover thickness is smaller in slender columns than in stocky columns due to greater out-of-plane deformations in the former.

Common structural fire design relies on recommendations from design codes, or (a single or small set of) more advanced numerical analyses. When applying such procedures to the design of structures under normal loading conditions, adequate safety is ensured through calibrated safety factors and ample experience with structural failures. This is however not the case when considering accidental fire loading, where the stochasticity in the structural fire behaviour is rarely fully acknowledged. Therefore, a significant interest in the use of probabilistic approaches to evaluate structural fire performance, which take into account the uncertainty associated with model parameters, can be observed among researchers, with a special focus on the development of fragility curves. The calculation of fragility curves is, however, a laborious task, demanding huge computational expense, mainly attributed to the adoption of advanced calculation procedures and the need for a large number of model evaluations. The present study contributes to addressing the limitations imposed by these computational requirements through the development of surrogate models for fire exposed structural members. To achieve this, a framework for carrying out probabilistic studies of structures under fire through the use of surrogate modelling is presented. The framework is applied to a concrete column subjected to a standard fire and proves efficiency and accurateness for the selected simple example. Future studies will investigate the applicability of the framework to structural assemblies under physically-based fires.