Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic control of manno(fructo)kinase activity in Escherichia coli

Mutants of Escherichia coli unable to use fructose by means of the phosphoenolpyruvate/glycose phosphotransferase system mutate further to permit growth on that ketose by derepression of a manno(fructo)kinase (Mak+ phenotype) present in only trace amounts in the parent organisms (Mak-o phenotype). The mak gene was located at min 8.8 on the E. coli linkage map as an ORF designated yajF, of hitherto unknown function; it specifies a deduced polypeptide of 344 aa. The derepression of Mak activity was associated with a single base change at position 71 (codon 24) of the gene, where GCC (alanine) in Mak-o has been changed to GAC (aspartate) in Mak+. By cloning selected portions of the total 1,032-bp mak gene into a plasmid that also carried a temperature-sensitive promoter, we showed that the mutation resided in a 117-bp region that does not specify sequences necessary for Mak activity but was located 46 bp upstream of a 915-bp portion that does. Mak+ and Mak-o strains differ greatly in the heat stability of the enzyme: at 61°C, mak-o cloned into a mak-o recipient loses 50% of its activity in approximately 6 min, whereas it takes over 30 min to achieve a similar reduction in the activity of mak+ cloned into a mak-o strain. However, the Mak activity of the cloned fragment specifying the enzyme without the regulatory region lost activity with a half-life of 29 min irrespective of whether it was derived from a mak+ or a mak-o donor, which indicates that the A24D mutation contributes to the high enzyme activity of Mak+ mutants by serving to protect Mak from denaturation.
A Taxonomy of Beta Based on Investment Outcomes

As the population of smart beta products has exploded, the quest to differentiate among them has focused on portfolio construction. The authors of this article aim to shift the conversation back to what actually matters to asset owners: investment outcomes. Their taxonomy of smart beta strategies, supported by a comprehensive analysis of simulated historical returns over three decades covering both developed and emerging markets, distinguishes between three stated portfolio construction objectives (enhanced diversification, factor investing, and fundamental weighting) and two investment outcomes (core exposure and style investing). The investment outcomes are characterized by performance patterns as well as such qualitative considerations as benchmark sensitivity, turnover levels, and underlying beliefs about market inefficiencies and the merits of broad diversification. Their classifications highlight how smart beta is more than just factor investing, with which it has become increasingly identified. Some strategies aimed at enhanced diversification are style neutral and thus suitable for core, while others, in fact, deliver backdoor style tilts. As in all things, with smart beta, caveat emptor.
The Actin Cytoskeleton Is Required for Receptor-mediated Endocytosis in Mammalian Cells*

Actin filament organization is essential for endocytosis in yeast. In contrast, the actin-depolymerizing agent cytochalasin D has yielded ambiguous results as to a role for actin in receptor-mediated endocytosis in mammalian cells. We have therefore re-examined this issue using highly specific reagents known to sequester actin monomers. Two of these reagents, thymosin β4 and DNase I, potently inhibited the sequestration of transferrin receptors into coated pits as measured in a cell-free system using perforated A431 cells. At low concentrations, thymosin β4 but not DNase I was stimulatory. Importantly, the effects of both reagents were specifically neutralized by the addition of actin monomers. A role for the actin cytoskeleton was also detected in intact cells where latrunculin A, a drug that sequesters actin monomers, inhibited receptor-mediated endocytosis. Biochemical and morphological analyses suggest that these reagents inhibit later events in coated vesicle budding. These results provide new evidence that the actin cytoskeleton is required for receptor-mediated endocytosis in mammalian cells.
Is Local Civil Society Conductive to European Participatory Engineering

Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Maloney, W. , & Deth, J. W. v. (2008). Is local civil society conducive to European participatory engineering? In B. Kohler-Koch, D. d. Bièvre, & W. Maloney (Eds.), Opening EU-governance to civil society: gains and challenges (pp. 239-257). Mannheim: Universität Mannheim, Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES). https:// nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-195364
The temporal dimension in search models : horizon, age, experience

In economics, it is today usual to use search models to modelize labor market, and assess public policy on this market. In this thesis, we introduce the age heterogeneity of workers in a search model which takes into account both labor market flows and endogenous wage distribution. We show that this heterogeneity affects greatly agents' economic behaviors in terms of wage setting, search intensity, and matches' productivity, by its two dimensions, the workers' experience and the workers' horizon. This model allows us to decompose the wage trajectory of workers over their life cycle into three main channels : the wage game, the human capital accumulation and the presence of institutions. Besides, we show that this last channel, as composed of unemployment benefits indexed on workers' last wage, accounts for the simultaneous strong wage progression and weak workers' mobility observed in the French data. Yet, the horizon can also be technological : firms' embodied technology becomes obsolete with time. Given this technological horizon, the presence of tenure-growing unemployement benefits yields a distorsion which fastens obsolescence. In this context, only a tenure-growing firing tax allows the economy to reach its social optimum.
Is the Federal Reserve Bank Stock Market Bubble-Neutral?

AbstractThis paper argues that the Fed was not stock market bubble-neutral during the last several years. This nonneutrality implies two options: first, the Fed has used monetary policies to prevent the building of the stock market bubble or, second, the Fed has contributed to its development and subsequent deflation. We supply representative quotes from the FOMC transcripts to establish that the Fed has paid significant attention to the valuation of the stock market. These quotes confirm that the stock market's valuation was an important variable in the Fed's decision-making and its conduct of monetary policy. We also conduct econometric modeling, by extending the Taylor rule and using data for the 1987–2000 period, to argue that the Fed, perhaps unintentionally, has contributed to the stock market's overvaluation and subsequent decline.
Public Relations in the news

Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism explores contemporary UK national and local newspapers at a significant and pivotal moment in their development when some pundits are busily, if mistakenly, announcing their demise. The book offers a detailed examination of features which previous studies have tended to neglect, such as editorial formats (News, Op Ed pages, readers’ letters, cartoons, obituaries, advice columns, features and opinion columns), aspects of newspaper design (page layout, photographs, supplements, online editions, headlines, the emergence of the compact and Berliner editions), newspaper contents (sport, sex and Page 3, royalty, crime, moral panics and politics) as well as the content of newspapers which is not generated by in house journalists (advertising, TV listings, horoscopes, agency copy and public relations materials). This innovative and accessibly written collection provides journalism and media students with an invaluable study of newspapers in the digital age.
The role of infectious aerosols in disease transmission in pigs.

Airborne transmission is of significance for a number of infectious diseases in pigs. The general principles of the airborne pathway, including aerosol production, decay and inhalation, are reviewed. Practical issues regarding aerosol sampling and sample analysis are also discussed. Details of the aerobiology of porcine diseases, including foot-and-mouth disease, Aujesky's disease, and respiratory diseases, are explained. Some additional, potentially airborne diseases are discussed in terms of the evidence for their aerosol transmission. In order to prevent airborne diseases in pigs, dust reduction, air filtration, air disinfection, vaccination and the establishment of disease-free regions could be considered.
Continuous-Time Mean-Variance Portfolio Selection with Constraints on Wealth and Portfolio

We consider continuous-time mean-variance portfolio selection with bankruptcy prohibition under convex cone portfolio constraints. This is a long-standing and difficult problem not only because of its theoretical significance, but also for its practical importance. First of all, we transform the above problem into an equivalent mean-variance problem with bankruptcy prohibition without portfolio constraints. The latter is then treated using martingale theory. Our findings indicate that we can directly present the semi-analytical expressions of the pre-committed efficient mean-variance policy without a viscosity solution technique but within a general framework of the cone portfolio constraints. The numerical simulation also sheds light on results established in this paper.
Reinventing Social Enterprise in China: Language, Institution and Strategy

This paper views social enterprise development in China as a process of institutional reinvention. This process indicates the foreign concept or practice’s being modified to fit local realities and being combined with local elements to shape a course of development different from that in the home context. In particular, based on a comprehensive analysis of interviews and media reports, this article provides knowledge in four aspects. First, I reveal an updated scenario about how the social enterprise concept is translated. This work identifies systematic variation in the discourse patterns used to distinguish different ways of understanding and discussing “social enterprise” in Chinese. Second, this paper analyzes social-cognitive tensions that complicate and reinvent the perception and use of this concept. Third, I demonstrate how incumbent government officials open up opportunities for social enterprise development. Finally, I discuss how grassroots supporters strategically explore local meanings and political opportunities to facilitate social enterprise development. Besides empirically specifying the reinvention process, this paper downplays the heroic focus in social enterprise studies and invites more researches on common and distinct patterns of how contextual forces give shape to the local form of social enterprises.
Comparison of Personalised Systems

Personalization is omnipresent everywhere in today's modern world applications. It is primarily employed to improve user experience by adapting and learning from the patterns and information extracted from the user. There are various methods of making a system learn from the user behaviour. This paper gives a review of some of the techniques used for user profiling and personalisation systems. The paper puts forth the characteristics and advantages of user profiling and why it is so essential in today's world, with specific reference to internet usage. It also explains which factors of the usage should be taken into consideration and the importance of these factors in user profiling. The paper elaborates on the studied techniques with respect to internet usage because of its ever-growing nature, complexity in learning from the vast source, adapting to changes in usage patterns and the ultimate objective of providing a better user experience while being on-line. The commonality and differences in various proposed techniques are also summarised and highlighted.
Valve interstitial cell culture: Production of mature type I collagen and precise detection

Collagen often acts as an extracellular and intracellular marker for in vitro experiments, and its quality defines tissue constructs. To validate collagen detection techniques, cardiac valve interstitial cells were isolated from pigs and cultured under two different conditions; with and without ascorbic acid. The culture with ascorbic acid reached higher cell growth and collagen deposition, although the expression levels of collagen gene stayed similar to the culture without ascorbic acid. The fluorescent microscopy was positive for collagen fibers in both the cultures. Visualization of only extracellular collagen returned a higher correlation coefficient when comparing the immunolabeling and second harmonic generation microscopy images in the culture with ascorbic acid. Lastly, it was proved that the hydroxyproline strongly contributes to the second‐order susceptibility tensor of collagen molecules, and therefore the second harmonic generation signal is impaired in the culture without ascorbic acid.
A dynamic semantic space modelling approach for short essay grading

The assessment of knowledge is considered as one of the most important aspect of the learning process. Despite its development over decades the underlying problem of `How best to assess learning? ' still remains. In the field of education, essay questions are considered as the most appropriate question types for assessment compared to closed questions to evaluate the knowledge of the students. However, evaluation of answers of essay type questions consumes a long time, effort and includes unavoidable human errors. Therefore, the development of an automated essay assessment system is beneficial due to those reasons. The focus of this research is to present a novel approach for automated essay scoring (AES) using Vector Space Models (VSMs) and Natural Language Processing techniques. It employs model answer based evaluation for the scoring process. In order to handle variations in the students' essay answers, NLP techniques (lemmatization, tokenization, handling of spelling mistakes, relation of objects, upper and lower case of words, short term resolution) were used. Proposed approach does not need any pre-training prior to each essay questions compared to most of the existing systems. Importance of this approach is that it does not need any domain specific corpus; instead, a sematic space is built using same students' answers. The scores were derived by comparing the semantic similarity or deviation between the model answer and the student answers and finally provide an accurate and consistent score. Results suggested that there is a strong correlation between the system score and the average human score.
Injury patterns in rural and urban Uganda

Objectives—To describe and contrast injury patterns in rural and urban Uganda. Settings—One rural and one urban community in Uganda. Methods—Community health workers interviewed adult respondents in households selected by multistage sampling, using a standardized questionnaire. Results—In the rural setting, 1673 households, with 7427 persons, were surveyed. Injuries had an annual mortality rate of 92/100 000 persons, and disabilities a prevalence proportion of 0.7%. In the urban setting 2322 households, with 10 982 people, were surveyed. Injuries had an annual mortality rate of 217/100 000, and injury disabilities a prevalence proportion of 2.8%. The total incidence of fatal, disabling, and recovered injuries was 116/1000/year. Leading causes of death were drowning in the rural setting, and road traffic in the city. Conclusion—Injuries are a substantial burden in Uganda, with much higher rates than those in most Western countries. The urban population is at a higher risk than the rural population, and the patterns of injury differ. Interventions to control injuries should be a priority in Uganda.
Study of Internal versus External Gettering of Iron during Slow Cooling Processes for Silicon Solar Cell Fabrication

The eect of slow cooling after dierent high temperature treatments on the in- terstitial iron concentration and on the electron lifetime of p-type mc-Si wafers has been in- vestigated. The respective impacts of internal relaxation gettering and external segregation gettering of metal impurities during an extended phosphorous diusion gettering are studied. It is shown that the enhanced reduction of interstitial Fe during extended P-gettering is due to an enhanced segregation gettering while faster impurities like Cu and Ni are possibly reduced due to an internal gettering eect.
A hybrid genetic-neural model for predicting protein structural classes

A genetic algorithm (GA) for feature selection in conjunction with neural network was applied to predict protein structural classes based on single amino acid and all dipeptide composition frequencies. These sequence parameters were encoded as input features for a GA in feature selection procedure and classified with a three-layered neural network to predict protein structural classes. The system was established through optimization of the classification performance of neural network which was used as evaluation function. In this study, self-consistency and jackknife tests on a database containing 498 proteins were used to verify the performance of this hybrid method, and were compared with some of prior works. The adoption of a hybrid model, which encompasses genetic and neural technologies, demonstrated to be a promising approach in the task of protein structural class prediction.
Capacitor based asymmetric cascaded multilevel inverter with capability of charge balance control methods

In this paper an asymmetric cascaded multilevel inverter based on using a capacitor as one of its input voltage sources is proposed. This inverter is also provided to use charge balance control methods. In order to generate all voltage levels (even and odd) at the output, two different algorithms are proposed to determine the magnitude of the dc voltage sources. The main advantage of this topology is reducing the substitution of dc voltage sources and so decreasing the inverter maintenance cost. The ability of the proposed topology in generation all voltage levels by using charge balance control methods is verified by PSCAD/EMTDC simulation results on a 15-level inverter.
Streptococcal Cysteine Proteinase Releases Biologically Active Fragments of Streptococcal Surface Proteins (*)

Streptococcus pyogenes are important pathogenic bacteria which produce an extracellular cysteine proteinase contributing to their virulence and pathogenicity. S. pyogenes also express surface molecules, M proteins, that are major virulence determinants due to their antiphagocytic property. In the present work live S. pyogenes bacteria of the M1 serotype were incubated with purified cysteine proteinase. Several peptides were solubilized, and analysis of their protein-binding properties and amino acid sequences revealed two internal fibrinogen-binding fragments of M1 protein (17 and 21 kDa, respectively), and a 36-kDa IgG-binding NH2-terminal fragment of protein H, an IgGFc-binding surface molecule. M protein also plays a role in streptococcal adherence, and removal of this and other surface proteins could promote bacterial dissemination, whereas the generation of soluble complexes between immunoglobulins and immunoglobulin-binding streptococcal surface proteins could be an etiological factor in the development of glomerulonephritis and rheumatic fever. Thus, in these serious complications to S. pyogenes infections immune complexes are found in affected organs. The cysteine proteinase also solubilized a 116-kDa internal fragment of C5a peptidase, another streptococcal surface protein. Activation of the complement system generates C5a, a peptide stimulating leukocyte chemotaxis. C5a-mediated granulocyte migration was blocked by the 116-kDa fragment. This mechanism, by which phagocytes could be prevented from reaching the site of infection, may also contribute to the pathogenicity and virulence of S. pyogenes.
Airway Occlusion Pressure to Titrate Positive End-expiratory Pressure in Patients with Dynamic Hyperinflation

Background Although the use of external positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) is recommended for patients with intrinsic PEEP, no simple method exists for bedside titration. We hypothesized that the occlusion pressure, measured from airway pressure during the phase of ventilator triggering (P0.1t), could help to indicate the effects of PEEP on the work of breathing (WOB). Methods Twenty patients under assisted ventilation with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were studied with 0, 5, and 10 cm H2O of PEEP while ventilated with a fixed level of pressure support. Results PEEP 5 significantly reduced intrinsic PEEP (mean ± SD, 5.2 ± 2.4 cm H2O at PEEP 0 to 3.6 ± 1.9 at PEEP 5;P < 0.001), WOB per min (12.6 ± 6.7 J/min to 9.1 ± 5.9 J/min;P = 0.003), WOB per liter (1.2 ± 0.4 J/l to 0.8 ± 0.4 J/l;P < 0.001), pressure time product of the diaphragm (216 ± 86 cm H2O · s−1 · min−1 to 155 ± 179 cm H2O · s−1 · min−1;P = 0.001) and P0.1t (3.3 ± 1.5 cm H2O to 2.3 ± 1.4 cm H2O;P = 0.002). At PEEP 10, no further significant reduction in muscle effort nor in P0.1t (2.5 ± 2.1 cm H2O) occurred, and transpulmonary pressure indicated an increase in end-expiratory lung volume. Significant correlations were found between WOB per min and P0.1t at the three levels of PEEP (P < 0.001), and between the changes in P0.1tversus the changes in WOB per min (P < 0.005), indicating that P0.1t and WOB changed in the same direction. A decrease in P0.1 with PEEP indicated a decrease in intrinsic PEEP with a specificity of 71% and a sensitivity of 88% and a decrease in WOB with a specificity of 86% and a sensitivity of 91%. Conclusion These results show that P0.1t may help to assess the effects of PEEP in patients with intrinsic PEEP.
Future Wireless Mobile Networks

In this article, the authors outline some key benefits that stem from the use of mechanical relaying within or across the cells in future wireless mobile networks. The authors have argued that, when information messages that can be stored are elastic enough and subsequently carried by mobile nodes, before relayed to other terminals or the BS at a later time, interference and energy consumption levels can be dramatically decreased during network operation due to the locality of the transmissions. In addition, mechanical relaying allows for innovative resource-management techniques to be deployed in the network, such as providing load balancing or switching-off BSs with low levels of utilization. To fully understand the issues regarding mechanical relaying, it is necessary to examine in a more detailed manner the required architectural changes together with the implementation aspects of integrating the mechanical relaying paradigm with the current and emerging mobile networks such as LTE advanced. This will be part of our future line of enquiry.