Today's IT organizations must ensure that IT services are aligned to business needs and actively support ongoing business processes. This means that internal IT service management processes are under constant improvement. However, to be able to know if the IT service provision develops in the right direction, there is a need to perform some kind of self-assessment of IT process maturity. In this p

It is clear that the formal inclusion of the national parliament as a political actor within the EU decision-making process has been one of the most important innovations of the Lisbon Treaty.Their role, however, remains controversial. It is on the one hand disputed whether national parliaments enjoy sufficient powers to tame'competence creep’. On the other hand, it is contested to what extent it

Flying insects are of utmost importance in ecology and for human living conditions. Certain species serve as indispensable pollinators to ensure the availability of food stuffs, while others are dangerous vectors for spreading deadly diseases, such as malaria. Agricultural pests reduce the yield of crops, and their abatement through pesticides cause many additional problems. Birds and bats are fre

The human host defense peptide LL-37 possesses antimicrobial activity but also affects host cell function and viability. Mast cells are involved in innate immunity but no data have been presented on effects of LL-37 on human mast cell viability and export of nucleic acids. Here, we demonstrated by immunofluorescence microscopy that synthesized LL-37 was internalized by human LAD2 mast cells and de

Digital activism, political activism mediated by digital technologies, offers the promise of increased visibility and political power for marginalized groups. Yet, this has not been the case outside of a few exceptions such as Black Lives Matter. This paper offers theoretical, conceptual critical research that explores why successful digital activism may elude marginalized groups. We ask why many

The integration of III-V semiconductors with Si in device fabrication is facilitated by the use of nanoscale structures such as nanowires. Nanowires are predominantly grown using Au seed particles; however, the seed material is known to affect the nanowire growth and properties. Here we present growth of GaAs nanowires using three different seed particle materials: Au, Ag, and a AgAu alloy. By com

In the past years Centers of Excellence (CoE) has risen to prominence as a funding instrument in science. The idea is that by focusing resources, people and attention within a center environment, and over a substantial time span, excellence in science can be promoted. Similarly, interdisciplinarity is often seen as an enabling condition or even necessary for frontier research. This article builds

Introduction: Cardiac syncope heralds significantly higher mortality compared with syncope due to noncardiac causes or unknown etiology, commonly considered a benign event. A few epidemiologic studies have examined the outcome of noncardiac/unexplained syncope comparing individuals with and without syncope, but with controversial results. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to clari

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a progressive disease of the central retina and the leading cause of irreversible vision loss in the western world. The involvement of abnormal complement activation in AMD has been suggested by association of variants in genes encoding complement proteins with disease development. A low-frequency variant (p.P167S) in the complement component C9 (C9) gene

The first step of the adaptive immune response involves the interaction of T cells that express T-cell receptors (TCRs) with peptide-loaded major histocompatibility complexes expressed by antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Exactly how this leads to activation of the TCR and to downstream signaling is uncertain, however. Recent findings suggest that one of the key events is the exclusion of the large

The use of wood as construction material in multi-story buildings increased in Europe during the last decades. Wood buildings are more sensitive to dynamic loading compared to conventional concrete buildings, especially in terms of vibroacoustic comfort. Furthermore, it is more difficult to predict the accurate response due to dynamic loading for wood buildings. This is due to factors such as a co

The newly developed website ’Den botaniska skattkammaren’ [The botanic treasury; www.botskatt.se] is presented. It is intended to be gradually filled with miscellaneous information about vascular plant taxa found in, or expected to be found in Swedish nature (i.e. including all kinds of ephemerals and garden escapes). The material included will partly be newly produced, partly reproduced with permThe newly developed website ’Den botaniska skattkammaren’ [The botanic treasury; www.botskatt.se] is presented. It is intended to be gradually filled with miscellaneous information about vascular plant taxa found in, or expected to be found in Swedish nature (i.e. including all kinds of ephemerals and garden escapes). The material included will partly be newly produced, partly reproduced with perm

OBJECTIVE. Previous studies have shown the possibility to reduce radiation dose in abdominal CT by 25–50% without negatively affecting detection of liver lesions. How radiation dose reduction affects characterization of liver metastases is not as well known. The objective of this study was to investigate how different levels of simulated dose reduction affect the detection and characterization of

This study argues that Brexit is as much an internal UK crisis of law, identity politics and democracy as it is the EU crisis of integration. Does Brexit bring us a new insight into how the legal order of the EU and its Member States are interrelated? Does it throw a new light on the EU law’s ability to produce a sense of collective European identity and solidarity which transcends national borderThis study argues that Brexit is as much an internal UK crisis of law, identity politics and democracy as it is the EU crisis of integration. Does Brexit bring us a new insight into how the legal order of the EU and its Member States are interrelated? Does it throw a new light on the EU law’s ability to produce a sense of collective European identity and solidarity which transcends national border

Ling Hon Lam encourages us to think of emotions in terms of space; when we sympathize with a character in a play or feel something for another person, that emotion takes place, for it moves us outside ourselves. In Chinese this relation between space and emotion is described by the term qingjing; a scenery of feeling or in Ling’s translation an “emotion-realm”.

A novel 2D particle tracking method, that uses 1) iteration, 2) fastquadratic sub-pixel estimation (with only 28 multiplications per movement), and3) a previous kernel, has been evaluated and compared with a full-searchblock-matching method. The comparison with high-frequency ultrasound data (40MHz) was conducted in silico and on phantoms, which comprised lateral, diagonal,and ellipsoidal movement

We have previously shown that there is a distinct longitudinal movement of the arterial wall during a cardiac cycle. This movement is larger in the intima-media region than in the adventitial region which introduces a substantial shear strain within the arterial wall. Our previously developed echo-tracking algorithm measured this shear strain by tracking two separate echoes, one in the intima-medi