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Phase velocities of surface acoustic waves in several boron nitride films were investigated by Brillouin light scattering. In the case of films with predominantly hexagonal crystal structure, grown under conditions close to the nucleation threshold of cubic BN, four independent elastic constants have been determined from the dispersion of the Rayleigh and the first Sezawa mode. The large elastic anisotropy of up to c11/c33 = 0.1 is attributed to a pronounced texture with the c-axes of the crystallites parallel to the film plane. In the case of cubic BN films the dispersion of the Rayleigh wave provides evidence for the existence of a more compliant layer at the substrate-film interface. The observed broadening of the Rayleigh mode is identified to be caused by the film morphology.
In den Modellierungssystemen des CAD/CAM werden oft unterschiedliche Methoden zur mathematischen Beschreibung von Freiformkurven und -flächen eingesetzt. Als Basisfunktionen können sowohl Monome, Bernstein-Polynome, B-Spline-Basisfunktionen als auch nicht lineare Funktionen auftreten. In den einzelnen CAD-Systemen kann der maximal zulässige Grad dieser Basisfunktionen variieren. Müssen nun Daten zwischen verschiedenen CAD-Systemen ausgetauscht werden, so muß u. U. eine Basistransformation
und/oder eine Gradanpassung durchgeführt werden. Diese Transformationen sind i.a. nicht exakt möglich. Hier sind geeignete, möglichst optimale Approximationen nötig. Bisher wurden verschiedene Verfahren entwickelt. Das älteste geht zurück auf Forrest [Forr72]. Farin [FAR90] invertiert den Prozeß der Graderhöhung. Watkins und Worsey [Wat88] sowie Lachance [Lach88] reduzieren den Polynomgrad in der Tschebyscheff-Basis. Hoschek et al. [Hos89] sowie Plass und Stone [Plas83] approximieren die Kurve bzw. Fläche punktweise. Dadurch lassen sich alle Kurven- und Flächenrepräsentationen durch eine Bézier-Darstellung approximieren. Ein Approximationsfehler kann jedoch auch nur punktweise garantiert werden. Durch einen anschließenden Parameteriterationsprozeß läßt sich eine weitere Approximationsverbesserung erzielen. Eine solche Parameterkorrektur ist jedoch nur dann sinnvoll, wenn die Parametrisierung der Approximationskurve bzw. -fläche frei gewählt werden kann. In Fällen, in denen die Funktionswerte dei; zu approximierenden Flächen bzgl. ihrer Parameterwerte mit anderen Flächen korrespondieren, darf keine Parameteränderung durchgeführt werden, wie z.B. bei der Approximation sogenannter Eigenschaftsflächen, die eine bestimmte Eigenschaft einer anderen Fläche, wie etwa die Gausskrümmung oder die Normalenrichtung darstellen. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Verfahren zur optimalen Gradreduktion von Bézierkurven und -flächen vorgestellt. Damit eine \(C^0\)-stetige Approximation innerhalb einer vom Benutzer vorgegebenen Fehlertoleranz durchgeführt werden kann, muß die Approximation mindestens eine Berührordnung ersten Grades mit der Originalkurve bzw. -fläche aufweisen. Mit Hilfe arithmetischer Operationen auf Bézierdarstellungen [Faro88], [Schr92] werden lineare Gleichungssysteme für eine optimale Belegung der freien Parameter aufgestellt, sowie eine Fehlerkurve bzw. -fläche in Bézierform berechnet, um die Einhaltung einer Fehlertoleranz zu gewährleisten.
Data integration aims at providing uniform access to heterogeneous data, managed by distributed source systems. Data sources can range from legacy systems, databases, and enterprise applications to web-scale data management systems. The materialized approach to data integration, extracts data from the sources, transforms and consolidates the data, and loads it into an integration system, where it is persistently stored and can be queried and analyzed.
To support materialized data integration, so called Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) systems have been built and are widely used to populate data warehouses today. While ETL is considered state-of-the-art in enterprise data warehousing, a new paradigm known as MapReduce has recently gained popularity for web-scale data transformations, such as web indexing or page rank computation.
The input data of both, ETL and MapReduce programs keeps changing over time, while business transactions are processed or the web is crawled, for instance. Hence, the results of ETL and MapReduce programs get stale and need to be recomputed from time to time. Recurrent computations over changing input data can be performed in two ways. The result may either be recomputed from scratch or recomputed in an incremental fashion. The idea behind the latter approach is to update the existing result in response to incremental changes in the input data. This is typically more efficient than the full recomputation approach, because reprocessing unchanged portions of the input data can often be avoided.
Incremental recomputation techniques have been studied by the database research community mainly in the context of the maintenance of materialized views and have been adopted by all major commercial database systems today. However, neither today's ETL tools nor MapReduce support incremental recomputation techniques. The situation of ETL and MapReduce programmers nowadays is thus much comparable to the situation of database programmers in the early 1990s. This thesis makes an effort to transfer incremental recomputation techniques into the ETL and MapReduce environments. This poses interesting research challenges, because these environments differ fundamentally from the relational world with regard to query and programming models, change data capture, transactional guarantees and consistency models. However, as this thesis will show, incremental recomputations are feasible in ETL and MapReduce and may lead to considerable efficiency improvements.
Optimal degree reductions, i.e. best approximations of \(n\)-th degree Bezier curves
by Bezier curves of degree \(n\) - 1, with respect to different norms are studied. It
is shown that for any \(L_p\)-norm the euclidean degree reduction where the norm is applied to the euclidean distance function of two curves is identical to componentwise degree reduction. The Bezier points of the degree reductions are found to lie on parallel lines through the Bezier points of any Taylor expansion of degree \(n\) - 1 of the original curve. This geometric situation is shown to hold also in the case of constrained degree reduction. The Bezier points of the degree reduction are explicitly given in the unconstrained case for \(p\) = 1 and \(p\) = 2 and in the constrained case for \(p\) = 2.
Abstract: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a frequently occurring malignant disease with still low survival rates, highlighting the need for novel therapeutics. Merosesquiterpenes are secondary metabolites from marine sponges, which might be useful as antitumor agents. To address this issue, we made use of a compound library comprising 11 isolated merosesquiterpenes. The most cytotoxic compounds were smenospongine > ilimaquinone ≈ dactylospontriol as shown in different human CRC cell lines. Alkaline Comet assays and γH2AX immunofluorescence microscopy demonstrated DNA strand break formation in CRC cells. Western blot analysis revealed an activation of the DNA damage response with CHK1 phosphorylation, stabilization of p53 and p21, which occurred both in CRC cells with p53 knockout and in p53-mutated CRC cells. This resulted in cell cycle arrest followed by a strong increase in the subG1 population, indicative of apoptosis, and typical morphological alterations. In consistency, cell death measurements showed apoptosis following exposure to merosesquiterpenes. Gene expression studies and analysis of caspase cleavage revealed mitochondrial apoptosis via BAX, BIM and caspase-9 as main cell death pathway. Interestingly, the compounds were equally effective in p53-wildtype and p53-mutant CRC cells. Finally, the cytotoxic activity of the merosesquiterpenes was corroborated in intestinal tumor organoids, emphasizing their potential for CRC chemotherapy.
The consumption of red meat is probably carcinogenic to humans and is associated with an increased risk to develop colorectal cancer (CRC). Red meat contains high amounts of heme iron, which is thought to play a causal role in tumor formation. In this study, we investigated the genotoxic and cytotoxic effects of heme iron (i.e., hemin) versus inorganic iron in human colonic epithelial cells (HCEC), human CRC cell lines and murine intestinal organoids. Hemin catalyzed the formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and induced oxidative DNA damage as well as DNA strand breaks in both HCEC and CRC cells. In contrast, inorganic iron hardly affected ROS levels and only slightly increased DNA damage. Hemin, but not inorganic iron, caused cell death and reduced cell viability. This occurred preferentially in
non-malignant HCEC, which was corroborated in intestinal organoids. Both hemin and inorganic iron were taken up into HCEC and CRC cells, however with differential kinetics and efficiency. Hemin caused stabilization and nuclear translocation of Nrf2, which induced heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) and ferritin heavy chain (FtH). This was not observed after inorganic iron treatment. Chemical inhibition or genetic knockdown of HO-1 potentiated hemin-triggered ROS
generation and oxidative DNA damage preferentially in HCEC. Furthermore, HO-1 abrogation strongly augmented the cytotoxic effects of hemin in HCEC, revealing its pivotal function in colonocytes and highlighting the toxicity of free intracellular heme iron. Taken together, this study demonstrated that hemin, but not inorganic iron, induces ROS and DNA damage, resulting in a preferential cytotoxicity in non-malignant intestinal epithelial cells. Importantly, HO-1
conferred protection against the detrimental effects of hemin.
Computational-Fluid-Dynamics (CFD)-Simulationen in Kombination mit Tropfenpopulationsbilanzen führen zu einem praxisgerechten Standard, um auf Basis verfügbarer Prozessdaten den Strömungsverlauf – und damit die Verweilzeitverteilung – in liegenden Abscheidern beliebiger Größe zu berechnen. Durch Implementierung des Tropfenverhaltens wird auch die Berechnung eines tropfenspezifischen Abscheider-Wirkungsgrades ermöglicht. Die Methodenentwicklung erfolgte mit baugleichen Anlagen an drei verschiedenen Standorten. Die darauf beruhenden CFD-Simulationen wurden erfolgreich mit experimentellen Daten der beteiligten Industriepartner validiert.