Bowtie antennas are easy to manufacture and very popular within the GPR community. These antennas can be considered as an adaptation of a biconical antenna and ultimately evolved from a simple dipole (Figure 3).Figure 3.Geometric evolution from simple dipole antenna to bowtie.Biconical antennas are excellent ultra-wideband radiators, but are usually not suitable for GPR because of their broad radiation pattern (low directivity) and design, thus making them impractical for fieldwork [14]. Bowtie antennas are a natural evolution of biconical antennas and are commonly employed in GPR due to their reasonably ultra-wideband properties and overall simplicity. The input impedance of bow-tie antennas is frequency independent for a given flare angle.

This property is an attractive starting point for designing an adaptative antenna [15], but this dependence is usually eliminated by rounding the ends of the antenna [16]. There are other antenna designs that propose changes in the typical bowtie geometry in an attempt to improve different aspects of performance [17].Most bowtie antennas are designed and manufactured such that there is increasing resistance closer to the ends (Wu-King profile), which improves the resolution of the emitted wavelet (late-time ringing) (Figure 4). However, the benefits of this design are countered by a decreased in the efficiency of the antenna, with efficiency defined as the ratio of radiated power to input power. An alternative to resistive loading that does not decrease efficiency is capacity loading.

This technique is not yet widely used and still requires investigation, but interesting designs that show promising performances have been proposed; either capacitive only, or in combination with microwave absorbers acting as resistors [18,19].Figure 4.Examples of variation in the bowtie antenna Dacomitinib design. (a) Bowties existing on almost perfect electric conductor (PEC) surfaces. (b) Bowties with resistive loaded profile to improve the la
Although the accuracy of the existing numerical codes in aerospace structure simulation is increasing steadily, Aircraft Strength Testing (AST) is still considered the preferred means for reliable simulation. Airframe and component strength testing is used to measure and analyze structure parameters and performance (e.g., stress, displacement, vibration amplitude, and fatigue life) for the evaluation and validation of structure mechanical properties and theory design. Fatigue and static tests in ground testing facilities are one of the most important means of research of aircraft structure strength. Traditionally, the cable-based AST systems for aircraft structures usually involve large numbers of wires employed for communication among sensors and centralized data acquisition systems.

to form for 6 h at room temperature. Microsomes were sedi mented and the pellet resuspended in solubilization buffer, for 15 s agi tated on a Vortex Mixer and incubated for 15 min on ice. The solubilized microsomes were layered on a 0 15% sucrose gradient and centrifuged in an ultracentrifuge. After centrifugation, 13 fractions of 310 ul each were collected from the top, pre cipitated with TCA, resuspended in 40 ul SDS sample buffer, heated to 65 C for 10 min and protein resolved by SDS PAGE. Proteins were transferred to nitrocellulose and incubated with the indicated antibodies as described above. Crosslinking of the Sec61 complex in intact microsomes Microsomes were crosslinked in 50 ul B88, pH 7. 9, by addition of 6 ul freshly made 5 mg ml DSS in dry DMSO.

After 20 min at 20 C crosslinking was quenched by addition of 7. 5 ul 8. 4 M ammonium acetate. Proteins were denatured in SDS sample buffer at 65 C, separated by SDS PAGE and Sec61p, Sbh1p and Sss1p detected by immunoblotting with specific polyclonal antisera. Isolation of the heptameric Sec complex Microsomes were prepared as described in. Micro somes were sedimented and the pellet was resuspended in 100 ul solubilization buffer Glycerol, 0. 05% B Mercaptoethanol, 1x PI Entinostat Solubilization buffer with 3. 75% digitonin was added, and membranes solubilized for 30 min on ice. Insoluble debris were removed by centrifugation, the supernatant collected and the pellet treated again with 300 ul solubilization buffer with 3. 75% digitonin and centrifuged again.

The resulting super natant was united with the first supernatant and centrifuged in an ultracentrifuge to remove the ribosome associated hetero trimeric Sec61 complex. The supernatant was subse quently referred as digitonin extract. Solubilization buffer was added to 150 ul digitonin extract and heptameric Sec complex containing the Sec71p glycopro tein precipitated with ConA Sepharose. To con trol for the saturation of the ConA precipitation, the supernatant was centrifuged for 10 min, 4 C and 10000 g, and precipitated again with 100 ul ConA Sepharose. The supernatant was collected. Both, ConA precipitates were centrifuged and washed with equilibration buffer. This step was repeated 2��. The ConA beads and the TCA precipitated extracts were resuspended in 40 ul SDS sample buffer with DTT, heated to 65 C for 10 min and resolved in SDS PAGE as described above.

Proteasome binding Proteasomes were isolated and proteasome binding experi ments to proteoliposomes performed as in Kalies et al. Modelling of Sec61L7p We homology modeled S. cerevisiae Sec61p and Sec61L7p using the software MODELLER 9. 10. In order to obtain better homology models we used the multi template hom ology modeling approach with default parameters. We identified the templates considering both sequence similarity and resolution of the crystal structures. The pu tative templates can be classified into two groups, The first group consists of prokaryotic crystal structures with rela t

us in the other clus ter except for miR 17 3p and miR 363 that do not share homology with the other miRNAs. As further corroborating test, we observed that, when search ing the target coding genes of homologous miRNAs the list of predicted targets is identical for all miRNAs. Moreover, we notice that only two homologous groups of miRNAs in the cluster are not part of F3. If we look at their sequence in detail we observe that they are very similar to miR 20a with only two mismatches, one in the loop and one after the supplemen tary pairing region. This can represent a partial functional redundancy since all the known key regions in target recognition are identical. Conversely, miR 92 does not share Carfilzomib any significant homology with the other members of the cluster.

Taking into consideration all the redundancies in the clusters, most of the transcript targets in F3 are probably under the regulation effect of the expressed miR NAs. It is worth noting that a cross hybridization effect in miRNAs could be considered the mechanism responsible for these association in clusters. But, as reported by the authors of the dataset, each primer and probe con tained zip coded sequences specifically assigned to each miRNA to increase the specificity of each reaction so that even small differences in miRNA were amplified and detected. So, this artifact can be discarded as explanation for the emerging of clusters of miRNA. Statistical Rele vance, Interestingly, in F3, only 2 miRNAs out of 7 do not belong to any of these two clusters.

Their role was shown respectively to be related to the molecular pathogenesis of ovarian cancer as well as to schizophrenia and Human T cell leuke mia Virus 1 transformation. Six more miRNAs that belong to these two clus ters could not be part of our analysis, as they were not part of Lius original dataset. Given the high density of miRNAs in these clusters, we used the hypergeometric dis tribution to compute the probability associated with the hypothesis that a random sampling would give the same result in terms of number of cluster members in cluster miR 17 92, in cluster miR 106 363 and in both. The reference group for computing the probability consists of the total number of detected miR NAs. The resultant probabilities were Bonferroni cor rected and were equal to 3. 6 �� 10?3, 0. 045 and 2. 3 �� 10?7 respectively.

All three are statistically significant. Speculations on Molecular Clinical Implications Ultimately, we speculated on how the two clusters that emerge in F3 can, along with the molecular analysis performed on F1, discriminate between gliosarcomas and non gliosarcomas. This choice is due to the fact that our analysis has shown that the combination of fac tors that carry the more coherent functional information was the com bination able to discriminate glioscarcomas from other tumors. Believing that such a coherence could hide strong biological meanings we focused on gliosarcomas the efforts to detect emergent properties. This co

MMPs synthe sis by altering SOCS1 e pression levels in the SW1353 chondrosarcoma cells. When nontransfected SW1353 cells were stimulated with IL 1B, MMP 1, MMP 3, and MMP 13 secretion were significantly increased, consistent with previous reports. In con trast, the SOCS1 overe pressing chondrocytes produced significantly lower levels of MMPs on addition of IL 1B. Conversely, levels of MMP 1, MMP 3, and MMP 13 were significantly increased in the SOCS1 knockdown SW1353 cell line that was transfected with lentiviral SOCS1 shRNA. The secretion of TIMP 1 from SOCS1 overe pressing or knockdown cell lines was not altered under all of these conditions. Also, ADAMTS 4 mRNA e pression was suppressed in the SOCS1 overe pressing SW1353 cells and increased in the SOCS1 knockdown SW1353 cells.

These data suggest that SOCS1 effect ively modulates the catabolic response of chondrocytes to Entinostat IL 1B. To verify the inhibitory effects of SOCS1 in primary HACs, we investigated the changes in MMPs and ADAMTS 4 e pression after IL 1B stimulation in HACs that were transiently electrotransfected with pShuttle2 SOCS1 vectors. SOCS1 was increased at least by 19 fold compared with empty vector transfected HACs. The IL 1B induced MMPs and ADAMTS 4 mRNA e pression levels were significantly downregulated in SOCS1 overe pressing HACs, similar to the SOCS1 overe pressing SW1353 cells. Effects of SOCS1 on MAPK and NF ��B signaling pathway IL 1B signaling involves activation of both MAPK and NF ��B pathways. Indeed, SOCS1 overe pression de creased the phosphorylation level of p38 and JNK after IL 1B stimulation, whereas SOCS1 knockdown increased their phosphorylation.

as reflected by the low luciferase activity. These data suggest that SOCS1 inhibits NF ��B activity via preventing I��B from degradation. To ascertain the contributions of MAP kinase and NF ��B pathways to each MMP production, the SOCS1 knockdown chondrocytes were pretreated with various kinase inhibitors 1 hour before IL 1B stimulation. The p38 inhibitor SB202190 significantly suppressed the produc tion of MMPs, even at a lower dose. JNK and ERK inhibitors also inhibited MMPs secretion in a dose dependent manner. Although the After IL 1B stimulation, the phosphorylation levels of NF ��B p65 did not change at the serine 311 or 536 sites in the SOCS1 overe pressing cells, although the levels of phospho NF ��B p65 were increased in the SOCS1 knockdown cells.

As NF ��B activity is controlled by the inhibitor protein I��B, we inves tigated the change in the amount of I��B. The SOCS1 overe pression prevented the I��B degradation, whereas the SOCS1 knockdown could not. Accordingly, the NF ��B dependent gene e pression was significantly decreased in the SOCS1 overe pressing chondrocytes, effect of SN50 was less dramatic than that of MAP kinase inhibitors, blocking of NF ��B translocation re duced MMP 1 and MMP 13 production. Effects of SOCS1 on TAK1 kinase TAK1 is a MAPK kinase kinase family protein that is ac tivated by several cytokines,

Indeed, in outdoor environments a variety of weather conditions may appear, i.e., highly sunny or cloudy days with different intensities, clear days alternating with different cloud densities, etc.Moreover, it is well known that in outdoor environments, particularly in sunny days, infrared radiation enters the sensor impacting the different spectral channels. The control of illumination factors is addressed in Section 2.2.2.Based on a given camera-based sensor with its corresponding accessories, we study the image accuracy for crop line and weed detection in agronomical images with specific reference to maize crops, where an area 3 m wide must be covered.

This accuracy is studied from two points of view, making the main findings of this paper: (a) geometrical arrangement, based on extrinsic parameters and (b) software corrections for improving the image quality, derived from the uncontrolled illumination in this kind of outdoor environments. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes materials and methods used for accuracy determination considering the above two points of view. In Section 3 accuracy results are provided. Finally, Section 4 presents the relevant conclusions.2.?Materials and Methods2.1. MaterialsThe camera-based sensor consists of three essential physical parts: (a) CCD-based device embedded in a housing with its electronic equipment and interfaces for power supply and to the computer; (b) optical lens and (c) ultraviolet and infrared cut filter. Figure 1 displays these parts assembled as a whole in Figure 1(a) and separated in Figure 1(b).

Figure 1.CCD sensor, lens and UV/IR cut filter: (a) integrated. (b) Batimastat separated.The CCD is a Kodak KAI 04050M/C sensor with a Bayer color filter with GR pattern; resolution of 2,336 �� 1,752 pixels and 5.5 �� 5.5 ��m pixel-size. This device is part of the SVS4050CFLGEA model [20] which is robust enough and very suitable for agricultural applications. This device offers several externally controlled possibilities: (a) exposure time, which determines the time taken to capture the image; (b) Red, Green and Blue gains, where a value can be set for each channel, including gains auto-calculation; (c) definition of specific Regions Of Interest (ROIs); (d) information about the operating temperature. This Gigabit Ethernet device connected to a cRIO-9082 with dual-core controller, 1.33 GHz and LX150 FPGA running under LabView 2011 from National Instruments [21] is robust enough and specifically designed for real-time processing, so both features are very suitable for our agricultural application. Because the application occurs in harsh environments (containing dust, drops of liquid from sprayers, etc.

The resonant shell is fixed on the base by a standard screw. The metallic sealing cap is used to package the resonant shell and isolate any environmental disturbances. The spoke structures on the bottom are designed to decrease the vibration coupling of the operating modes. Piezoelectric electrodes can be glued along the bottom spokes to excite the operating mode. It should be noted that the diameter of the resonant shell in this study is around 20 mm (medium-sized type), and the sealing cap is filled with a gas such as dry air. Despite operating under a non-vacuum condition, the gyroscope can provide tactical accuracy in a range of 1�C5 ��/h [2]. This characteristic makes the vibratory cylinder gyroscope competitive in terms of production cost.Figure 1.Physical structure of the vibratory cylinder gyroscope.

The operating principle of the cylinder gyroscope is well understood. In brief, there is a pair of operating modes in the form of standing waves with a circumferential waves number of 2. The two modes referred to as the exciting mode and sensing mode are circumferentially spaced relative to each other by 45��. The exciting mode of the resonant shell is a standing wave vibration generated by piezoelectric or electrostatic excitation. When the gyroscope rotates, the sensing mode can be detected due to the Coriolis effect, hence the rotation rate of the gyroscope is obtained after circuit demodulation. For more information on the theory of the gyroscope, the reader can refer to the [21�C23].3.

?Theoretical Study of the Acoustic CouplingSince the resonant shell of the vibratory cylinder gyroscope vibrates in the standing wave mode, its circumferential vibration is actually the topic in this study. Based on the elastic shell theory and the acoustic mode theory, a dynamic model is derived to qualitatively analyze the structural-acoustic coupling effect of the gyroscope.The resonant shell has radius R1, thickness h and height L. The resonant shell is enclosed by a sealing cap of radius R2. Let u, v and w be, respectively, the tangential, axial and radial displacement of a point of the shell at the angular position ��, as shown in Figure 2. Let ��r denote the mass density of the resonant shell, and it is assumed that the sealing cap is filled with dry air of density ��g.Figure 2.Schematic representation of the model.

Before the acoustic effect is studied, the air damping should be taken into account. As a matter of experience, the amplitude of the shell vibration can be on the order of micrometers, and the operating frequency is below 20 kHz [2,20,24,25]. Therefore we can conclude that the vibration velocity of the shell is relatively low. Thus only the linear damping Entinostat is introduced in the analysis. The quadratic or cubic damping can also be considered in the analysis, and similar results will be obtained [26,27].

Hardware as well as algorithmic issues and results that show the feasibility of the proposal are presented.2.?Hardware of the Tactile Based Human-Machine Driving InterfaceThe basic operation of the developed system is illustrated in Figure 1. The person who drives the wheelchair or trolley grasps the handlebar and the resulting force map is registered by the tactile sensor. This information is processed by a microcontroller and different patterns are extracted from the force map. These patterns are associated with user intention. For instance: accelerate, decelerate, turn to the left, etc. According to the intention detected (and other parameters which will be explained in Section 3), the control electronics generates the appropriate signals in order to activate the wheel motors and make the chair move.

The system provides output signals similar to those generated by the joystick which is incorporated by power wheelchairs.Figure 1.System scheme.2.1. Tactile SensorThe tactile sensor can be a discrete array of force sensors or can be made as a single sensor matrix using many different technologies (piezoresistive, capacitive, optical, etc.) [12]. A common and low cost realization consists of an array of electrodes with a conductive rubber or polymer placed atop [13].In the case of the first prototype of this paper, an array of piezoresistive sensors has been used (see Figure 2). Its size is 6 �� 12 elements (two sub-arrays of 6 �� 6 elements, one per hand). Each tactile element (tactel) works as a variable resistor so that the higher the force applied, the lower its electrical resistance.

The signal conditioning electronics scans the array and provides a force value for every tactel, so the force map can be built.Figure 2.Piezoresistive matrix of the first prototype of tactile sensor.Figure 3 shows the implementation of the matrix of Figure 2. It is composed of one rigid Printed Circuit Board (PCB) per row in each sub-array. Then the PCBs are joined together with soldered flexible tinned bridges that make the columns of the matrix (see Figure 3a). Dacomitinib The tactels are commercial FSR 402 force sensors [14] from Interlinks Electronics (Camarillo, CA, USA), soldered on the upper side of the PCBs. They must lie on a flat surface as they are sensitive to folds that cause undesired interferences [10]. The assembled structure is mounted, embracing the wheelchair handlebar, as can be seen in Figure 3b.

Figure 3.First prototype of the proposed device. (a) Raw tactile sensor prior to embracing the handlebar; (b) resulting implementation.This first prototype was used to carry out several experiments that focused on knowing how the force maps evolve while the chair is being driven by an attendant. However, the tinned bridges that join the PCBs are fragile and the structure had to be frequently taken apart for repair.

Computer vision systems can be classified into three main levels [5]. The lower level includes the image capture and simple pixel based functions such as arithmetical operations between images. The intermediate level includes operations such as segmentation, matching, preprocessing, convolution or motion estimation. The upper level typically is applied to recognize, classify or capture scene interpretation. Currently, there are a lot of FPGA-based computer vision systems that mainly employ parallel computing in order to increase the processing speed in these computationally intensive applications [6]. High-resolution images and videos require complex compression and coding algorithms [7]. These applications require substantial processing resources and it is possible to find several works that employs the parallel computing features of FPGAs [8�C10].

The term Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is currently applied to refer to a set of applications that collect and distribute sensorial data around the sensors [11,12]. Although we can find WSNs with several kinds of sensors, the use of camera as sensor nodes allows the definition of visual sensor nodes that are employed in application such as surveillance. In these applications, the use in the nodes of FPGA-based image processing allows one to satisfy requirements such as low power consumption, small circuitry scale, Anacetrapib and reconfigurability of the hardware architecture.In this paper, a review of the different FPGA-based sensor systems in Spain is presented.

Although FPGA research reached
Scenario-supported approaches enable innovation managers to align the development process of new products or services according to new criteria and to predict and test market capability with regard to implementation opportunities. Moreover, this step can reduce the risk of failure due to inappropriateness for the market. The present study cooperated with a manufacturing company (T Company) to survey the business processes of logistics in enterprises. To study the business process of logistics in traditional manufacture enterprises, some sample diagrams were used for analyzing the processes in real logistic environments. The business process was studied to determine the real work flow in a logistic company, which is important for cloud services that need to be developed in the logistic cloud. In this section, some logistic processes (pallet inventory, pallet monitoring, and global logistic tracking) are studied for the purpose of deploying IoT technologies. These technologies are used for developing cloud-based services in the proposed logistic cloud discussed in Section 4.3.1. RFID/Zigbee-Based Pallet InventoryThe pallets in T Company carry cargo that is ready to ship to third parties.

The second attractive aspect is the possibility of acquiring objects of different dimensions: from small evidences to very large objects [14].The reference system is materialized onto the shoe soles themselves, by positioning some targets on them. Targets are placed irregularly at a maximum distance of about 15 cm on the soles. A first scan is performed to define the object bounding box and to calibrate the instrument according to the materials the soles are made of. A high accuracy acquisition is then performed. The instrument is able to compute its position in real time, by recognizing the targets it acquires while surveying the object: in this way acquired data are in real time aligned in a unique reference system, the one materialized on the object.

As an out
The VI-Ts diagram determined by the scatter points of remotely sensed vegetation index (VI) and land surface temperature (Ts) has been widely used to retrieve information on the partitioning of available surface energy [1-3] and surface moisture status [4-9]. All these applications are under the condition of homogenous atmospheric forcing such as solar radiation and air temperature over a sampling window for defining a VI-Ts diagram, so the size of the sampling window cannot be too large. If the sampling window covers full ranges of land surface moisture (from dry to well-watered) and VI (from bare soil to closed canopy), the VI-Ts diagram typically represents a right triangle when canopy temperature is assumed to be equal to Ts of well-watered bare soil [2, 8, 10] (Figure 1).

The triangular VI-Ts diagram has been widely applied in previous studies [2-5]. The key point in these applications is how to define an ideal VI-Ts diagram, while the key point in the definition of the VI-Ts diagram is how to determine a dry edge in the VI-Ts diagram. Two automatic methods were proposed to define the dry edge in previous studies [5, 9, 11]. However, these two traditional methods require enough pixels that cover full ranges of land surface moisture and VI. Practically, it is difficult to find enough ideal pixels within a limited sampling Carfilzomib window, especially when using a satellite data with moderate / coarse resolution, such as 1 km MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. Generally, a natural land surface at the 1 km scale is usually a mixture of vegetation and non-vegetation Batimastat (water and soil). Since water and soil surfaces have similar properties of low VI value, water surface can be considered as soil surface saturated by water.

An innovative approach is represented by Laser – Self – Mixing (LSM) interferometry, which does not require any reference arms or external detectors and it is conveniently replicable because of a robust and almost self-aligned setup, an intrinsic resolution more than adequate for most industrial applications, and a simple and single-channelled reading electronics. Although the LSM has been widely studied and exploited for metrological applications since more than three decades, it has rarely been applied to the simultaneous measurements of more than one DOF.Recently, the authors reported on a compact interferometric system based on the LSM effect, capable of tracking the longitudinal displacement of a target with sub-micron resolution up to 1 meter simultaneously with yaw and pitch rotations up to �� 0.

45�� [9], and with straightness and flatness displacements up to �� 1 mm [10].In this paper, we extend the measurement technique to the evaluation of the roll angle up to �� 0.45��, and we finally present an integrated all-interferometric sensor totally based on the LSM effect for the measurement of six DOFs of a moving target. The described sensor is composed of six laser sources and a suitably designed reflective target, formed by three reciprocally tilted mirrors. The measurement technique is based on the differential measurement of linear displacement by pairs of identical self-mixing interferometers (SMIs), each formed only by a laser diode package with integrated monitor photodiode, a collimated lens, and a reflective surface orthogonal to the optical axis.

Throughout the manuscript, the coordinate convention illustrated in Figure 1 will be adopted:-the x-axis is the direction of linear motion and any displacement along this axis will be indicated by ��x;-the y-axis is the direction of the straightness displacement indicated by ��y;-the z-axis is the direction of the flatness displacement indicated by ��z;-roll is the angular motion around the x-axis and any rotation around this axis will be indicated by ��x;-pitch is the angular motion around the y-axis and any rotation around this axis will be indicated by ��y;-yaw is the angular motion around the z-axis and any rotation around this axis will be indicated by ��z.Figure 1.Coordinate system convention, linear (at the left) and angular (at the right).

The paper is organized as follows: the self-mixing interference GSK-3 principle is introduced in Section 2. The measurement technique for two rotations (yaw and pitch) is reported in Section 3. The extension of the basic principle to the assessment of transverse DOFs is described in Section 4. Considerations about the performance and the integration of the system for the simultaneous measurement of more DOFs are discussed in Section 5 and 6, respectively. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 7.2.?Laser-Self-Mixing Interference2.1.