Field-testing is an important topic in the validation of new infrastructure as well as in the assessment of obsolete and defi cient infrastructure. There is a need for accurate and inexpensive diagnostics methods that enable the prediction of the actual load carrying capacity of bridges through load testing. A major diffi culty in testing bridges is the measurement of vertical defl ections. The...

The introduction of non-natural entities into proteins by chemical modification has numerous applications in fundamental biological science and for the development and manipulation of peptide and protein therapeutics. The reduction of native disulfide bonds provides a convenient method to access two nucleophilic cysteine residues that can serve as ideal attachment points for such chemical modif...

Persistent IDentifiers (PIDs) such as DOIs, Handles, ARK identifiers play a significant role in the identification of a wide variety of assets that are created and used in scholarly endeavours, including research papers, datasets, images, etc. Motivated by concerns about long-term persistence, among others, PIDs are minted outside the information access protocol of the day, HTTP. Yet, value-add...

A path in an edge-colored graph G is rainbow if no two edges of the path are colored the same. The rainbow connection number rc(G) of G is the smallest integer k for which there exists a k-edge-coloring of G such that every pair of distinct vertices of G is connected by a rainbow path. Let f(d) denote the minimum number such that rc(G) ≤ f(d) for each bridgeless graph G with diameter d. In this...

Several authors have studied the graphs for which every edge is a chord of a cycle; among 2-connected graphs, one characterization is that the deletion of one vertex never creates a cut-edge. Two new results: among 3-connected graphs with minimum degree at least 4, every two adjacent edges are chords of a common cycle if and only if deleting two vertices never creates two adjacent cut-edges; am...

the bilateral axillary arteries had been routinely prepared for selective cerebral perfusion at the Hiroshima University Hospital. The addition of FA-P might be another strategy in other institutions. Because there are unpredictable factors in acute aortic dissection, decisions need to be made stepwise and be based on real-time information at each step. Although our initial assessment was incor...

A tailored therapy to patient requirements by combining endovascular and surgical steps can be necessary to prolong the life of a vascular access. Stent grafts play a growing role for the therapy of dialytic access complications. Randomized multi-center trials, however, support the on-label use of stent grafts in the treatment of graft venous outflow and in-stent restenosis. The main contraindi...

This paper discusses the knowledge transfer process in offshore outsourcing. The focus is a case study of software offshore outsourcing from Japan to Vietnam. Initial results confirm that willingness to cooperate and good impressions facilitate the knowledge transfer process. In addition, communication barriers, cultural differences, lack of equivalence in individual competence, and lack of com...

A conjecture of Fan and Raspaud [3] asserts that every bridgeless cubic graph contains three perfect matchings with empty intersection. Kaiser and Raspaud [6] suggested a possible approach to this problem based on the concept of a balanced join in an embedded graph. We give here some new results concerning this conjecture and prove that a minimum counterexample must have at least 32 vertices.