1,720,959 research outputs found
West Nile Region, Uganda - Integrated and Multi Scalar Planning (Koboko, Arua, Nebbi)
Get PDFArua, due to its strategic geographical position, is a rapidly growing
urban centre in Ugandan West Nile region and an important base
for humanitarian operations. Refugees from South Sudan and the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) currently form 23% of the regional
population, with around 700.000 registered refugees (UNHCR, 2018)
and unregistered migrants contributing to the figures The Ugandan
Government plans to upgrade Arua to a “regional city”, to include
the enlargement of its boundaries and the enhancement of air and
rail infrastructure among others, envisioning it as a potential logistic
node for North-Western Uganda. However, no strategic framework
is provided at regional, city or neighbourhood scales to promote a
synergic development with neighbouring towns (Koboko and Nebbi),
districts and countries (DRC and South Sudan). Although rapid
urbanization is already threatening existing socio-ecological assets and
increasing conflict potential related to land rights and access to basic
infrastructure and services, there is a lack of appropriate assessment
and strategic tools to address the complex transformation of these
territories.
Moving from the results of previous capacity development initiatives
in the framework of the Ugandan Support for Municipal Infrastructure
Development (USMID) program, a project for a comprehensive profiling
of the region across different planning scales has been initiated by UNHabitat in August 2018 with the financial support from the Booyoung
Foundation, with the aim of supporting a better understanding of
the West Nile Region as a metropolitan system along the Nebbi-AruaKoboko development corridor. Among other priorities, exploring
how decision making at territorial scale would also influence city
and neighbourhood level was in the focus of the regional profile.
Politecnico di Milano has been selected as the implementing partner
with UN-Habitat to draft a multidisciplinary analysis of the existing
situation at regional and territorial scale, including development of
specific metropolitan cartography, while UN-Habitat’s Public Space
and Urban Economy teams have conducted in-dept research on urban
economy and municipal finance, as well as a public space assessment
and recommendations at neighbourhood scale in each municipality.
This report outlines the results of the research activity, including desktop
research and field studies, complemented by a factfinding mission and
workshops held in the West Nile Region in October and November
2018 for the effective interaction with local experts and stakeholders,
at both national and local level. The following chapters synthesize
main findings with the aim of providing a set of recommendations
Structural and functional features of modified heat-stable toxins produced by entheropathogenic Klebsiella cells
No full textStructural and functional features of modified heat stable toxin produced by entheropathogenic Klebsiella cells
No full textHeat-stable enterotoxins (STs) are 18- or 19-amino acid peptides (STa or ST1) produced by enteropathogenic bacteria with small differences in their amino acid sequence and a highly conserved carboxy terminus. All STs contain a core of three disulfide bridges whose integrity is believed to be necessary for full biologic activity. We previously reported that strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae transformed by the plasmid pSLM004 produce a modified toxin not recognized by MAb raised against genuine Escherichia coli ST. Investigation of the chemical structure of the modified toxins revealed that three new toxins were present. These were purified to homogeneity by a series of sequential chromatography on reverse-phase columns using guanylate cyclase to monitor the enterotoxic activity during purification procedures. The sequence of the modified toxins was obtained by a combination of Edman degradation and mass spectrometry, showing that they are proteolytically processed forms of E. coli ST1b. In particular, toxin A-2 lacks the cysteine at position 18 and then is not able to form the disulfide bridge cysteine-10-cysteine-18. All three toxins showed the ability to stimulate guanylate cyclase and to elicit chloride secretion in Caco-2 cell monolayers mounted in Ussing chambers. Toxin A-1 and toxin B demonstrated greatly reduced immunoreactivity whereas toxin A-2 was not recognized at all in the ELISA. It is likely that the three modified toxins were generated by Klebsiella specific proteolytic processing of the original pretoxin. These results have important implications for the diagnosis and prevention of heat-stable toxin-induced diarrhea
Structural and functional features of modified heat stable toxin produced by entheropathogenic Klebsiella cells
No full textHeat-stable enterotoxins (STs) are 18- or 19-amino acid peptides (STa or ST1) produced by enteropathogenic bacteria with small differences in their amino acid sequence and a highly conserved carboxy terminus. All STs contain a core of three disulfide bridges whose integrity is believed to be necessary for full biologic activity. We previously reported that strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae transformed by the plasmid pSLM004 produce a modified toxin not recognized by MAb raised against genuine Escherichia coli ST. Investigation of the chemical structure of the modified toxins revealed that three new toxins were present. These were purified to homogeneity by a series of sequential chromatography on reverse-phase columns using guanylate cyclase to monitor the enterotoxic activity during purification procedures. The sequence of the modified toxins was obtained by a combination of Edman degradation and mass spectrometry, showing that they are proteolytically processed forms of E. coli ST1b. In particular, toxin A-2 lacks the cysteine at position 18 and then is not able to form the disulfide bridge cysteine-10-cysteine-18. All three toxins showed the ability to stimulate guanylate cyclase and to elicit chloride secretion in Caco-2 cell monolayers mounted in Ussing chambers. Toxin A-1 and toxin B demonstrated greatly reduced immunoreactivity whereas toxin A-2 was not recognized at all in the ELISA. It is likely that the three modified toxins were generated by Klebsiella specific proteolytic processing of the original pretoxin. These results have important implications for the diagnosis and prevention of heat-stable toxin-induced diarrhea
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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