878 research outputs found
Also By The Same Author: AKTiveAuthor, a Citation Graph Approach to Name Disambiguation
No full textThe desire for definitive data and the semantic web drive for inference over heterogeneous data sources requires co-reference resolution to be performed on those data. In particular, name disambiguation is required to allow accurate publication lists, citation counts and impact measures to be determined. This paper describes a graph-based approach to author disambiguation on large-scale citation networks. Using self-citation, co-authorship and document source analyses, AKTiveAuthor clusters papers, achieving precision of 0.997 and recall of 0.818 over a test group of eight surname clusters
The majority of genes in the pathogenic Neisseria species are present in non-pathogenic Neisseria lactamica, including those designated as 'virulence genes'
No full textThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited - © 2006 Snyder and Saunders; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.Background: Neisseria meningitidis causes the life-threatening diseases meningococcal meningitis and meningococcal septicemia. Neisseria gonorrhoeae is closely related to the meningococcus, but is the cause of the very different infection, gonorrhea. A number of genes have been implicated in the virulence of these related yet distinct pathogens, but the genes that define and differentiate the species and their behaviours have not been established. Further, a related species, Neisseria lactamica is not associated with either type of infection in normally healthy people, and lives as a harmless commensal. We have determined which of the genes so far identified in the genome sequences of the pathogens are also present in this non-pathogenic related species. Results: Thirteen unrelated strains of N. lactamica were investigated using comparative genome hybridization to the pan-Neisseria microarray-v2, which contains 2845 unique gene probes. The presence of 127 'virulence genes' was specifically addressed; of these 85 are present in N. lactamica. Of the remaining 42 'virulence genes' only 11 are present in all four of the sequenced pathogenic Neisseria. Conclusion: Assessment of the complete dataset revealed that the vast majority of genes present in the pathogens are also present in N. lactamica. Of the 1,473 probes to genes shared by all four pathogenic genome sequences, 1,373 hybridize to N. lactamica. These shared genes cannot include genes that are necessary and sufficient for the virulence of the pathogens, since N. lactamica does not share this behaviour. This provides an essential context for the interpretation of gene complement studies of the pathogens.This study is supported by the Wellcome Trust
Population-associated differences between the phase variable LPS biosynthetic genes of Helicobacter pylori
No full textThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited - © 2006 Salaün and Saunders; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.Background: Population structures are normally determined using genes under minimal functional selection. In this study we have assessed genes that are not always essential, show differences in alleles between strains, and are involved in the directly host-selectable phenotype of LPS biosynthesis. Results: Eight complete LPS biosynthesis genes, seven of which are associated with phase variation in some or all strains of Helicobacter pylori, have been sequenced and their divergence analyzed. The differences observed indicate that recombination within these genes largely reflects exchange between strains within the population lineages previously determined on the basis of MLST using housekeeping genes. This indicates that the differences that are used for MLST are likely to broadly associate with genes under functional selection, and differences in strain behaviour. However, instances of exchange between the subpopulations were identified, including the hpAfrica2 subpopulation. Further, there were other differences in gene complements and the chromosomal location of genes indicative of greater diversity within the population than is revealed by the available genome sequences and comparative genome hybridization studies. Conclusion: These results indicate that the described population structure based upon MLST is broadly a good basis for studying the biology of H. pylori, but that individual alleles may not follow these associations. As a consequence, when working in unsequenced strains, it is necessary to carefully check the presence, sequence, and distribution of any individual gene of interest.This work is supported by a Wellcome Trust Advanced Fellowship
Hydrogen from Radiolysis of Aqueous Fluid Inclusions during Diagenesis
No full textAcknowledgments We are grateful to J. Bowie and J. Still for skilled technical support and the staff at ICL-UK’s Boulby mine (especially Thomas Edwards), STFC’s Boulby underground Laboratory and the UK Centre for Astrobiology MINAR programme team (especially Sean Paling) for their support and supervised access to the site. The critical comments of two reviewers helped to improve the manuscript. Author Contributions John Parnell undertook the sampling. Nigel Blamey performed all analytical work. John Parnell wrote the manuscript.Peer reviewe
L’assurance-vie face aux nouveaux instruments financiers et à la déréglementation
No full textDeregulation is the outcome of the unification of the industry throughout Europe. Insurance companies have been slow to react to
the sweeping change we are witnessing. This is partly owing to the
legislation in force in each of the member countries. But, with the
emergence of a single European market, the situation is beginning to
change.
According to the author, Nigel J. Sedgewick, insurers, while
remaining competitive, should adopt a more offensive stance by not
only gaining more control over general expenses, but also by
broadening their range of products to include caps, floors, swaps
and others
HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY: A CHRISTIAN VISION FOR PUBLIC POLICY
No full textPreface / Charles W. Colson and Nigel M. De S. Cameron -- Introduction -- Can we prevent the "abolition of man"? -- C.S. Lewis's challenge to the twenty-first century / Charles W. Colson - - Ch. 1. Christian vision for the biotech century: toward a strategy / Nigel M. de S. Cameron -- Ch. 2. The biotech revolution: major issues in the biosciences / David A. Prentice -- Ch. 3. The new genetics and the dignity of humankind / C. Ben Mitchell -- Ch. 3. Techno sapiens: nanotechnology, cybernetics, transhumanism and the remaking of humankind / C. Christopher Hook -- Ch. 5. Promise and peril: clinical implications of the new genetics / David Stevens -- Ch. 6. The human embryo in debate / William Saunders - - Ch. 7. Learning from our mistakes: the pro-life cause and the new bioethics / Paige Comstock Cunningham -- Ch. 8. An unnatural assault on natural law: regulating biotechnology using a just research technology / Nathan A. Adams IV -- Ch. 9. Lessons from the cloning debate : the need for a secular approach / Wesley J. Smith -- Ch. 10. Biotech and public policy: the European debate / Henk Jochemsen -- Ch. 11. Confronting technology at the beginning of life: a morally grounded policy agenda for the United States / Richard Doerflinger -- Appendix: the sanctity of life in a brave new world: a manifesto on biotechnology and human dignity -- Contributors -- Inde
A standing ovation for Nigel: An informal study
No full textThis article analyses a series of emails thanking Nigel for his stewardship of JASSS and the characteristics of their authors. It identifies a correlation between two measures of author activity in social simulation research, but no pattern between these activity measures and the email timing. Instead, the sequence suggests a classic standing ovation effect.</p
Distributed human computation framework for linked data co-reference resolution
No full textDistributed Human Computation (DHC) is a technique used to solve computational problems by incorporating the collaborative effort of a large number of humans. It is also a solution to AI-complete problems such as natural language processing. The Semantic Web with its root in AI is envisioned to be a decentralised world-wide information space for sharing machine-readable data with minimal integration costs. There are many research problems in the Semantic Web that are considered as AI-complete problems. An example is co-reference resolution, which involves determining whether different URIs refer to the same entity. This is considered to be a significant hurdle to overcome in the realisation of large-scale Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we propose a framework for building a DHC system on top of the Linked Data Cloud to solve various computational problems. To demonstrate the concept, we are focusing on handling the co-reference resolution in the Semantic Web when integrating distributed datasets. The traditional way to solve this problem is to design machine-learning algorithms. However, they are often computationally expensive, error-prone and do not scale. We designed a DHC system named iamResearcher, which solves the scientific publication author identity co-reference problem when integrating distributed bibliographic datasets. In our system, we aggregated 6 million bibliographic data from various publication repositories. Users can sign up to the system to audit and align their own publications, thus solving the co-reference problem in a distributed manner. The aggregated results are published to the Linked Data Cloud
Host iron binding proteins acting as niche indicators for Neisseria meningitidis
No full textThis is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited - Copyright @ 2009 Jordan, Saunders.Neisseria meningitidis requires iron, and in the absence of iron alters its gene expression to increase iron acquisition and to make the best use of the iron it has. During different stages of colonization and infection available iron sources differ, particularly the host iron-binding proteins haemoglobin, transferrin, and lactoferrin. This study compared the transcriptional responses of N. meningitidis, when grown in the presence of these iron donors and ferric iron, using microarrays. Specific transcriptional responses to the different iron sources were observed, including genes that are not part of the response to iron restriction. Comparisons between growth on haemoglobin and either transferrin or lactoferrin identified changes in 124 and 114 genes, respectively, and 33 genes differed between growth on transferrin or lactoferrin. Comparison of gene expression from growth on haemoglobin or ferric iron showed that transcription is also affected by the entry of either haem or ferric iron into the cytoplasm. This is consistent with a model in which N. meningitidis uses the relative availability of host iron donor proteins as niche indicators. Growth in the presence of haemoglobin is associated with a response likely to be adaptive to survival within the bloodstream, which is supported by serum killing assays that indicate growth on haemoglobin significantly increases survival, and the response to lactoferrin is associated with increased expression of epithelial cell adhesins and oxidative stress response molecules. The transferrin receptor is the most highly transcribed receptor and has the fewest genes specifically induced in its presence, suggesting this is the favoured iron source for the bacterium. Most strikingly, the responses to haemoglobin, which is associated with unrestricted growth, indicates a low iron transcriptional profile, associated with an aggressive phenotype that may be adaptive to access host iron sources but which may also underlie the lethal features of meningococcal septicaemia, when haemoglobin may become a major source of iron.This study is funded by the EPA Cephalosporin Trust; and the Computational Biology Research Group (CBRG)
Measure Attractors For Stochastic Navier-Stokes Equations
No full text: We show existence of measure attractors for 2-D stochastic Navier-Stokes equations with general multiplicative noise. Keywords: Stochastic Navier--Stokes equations, measure attractors AMS subject classification: Primary: 35Q30, 60H15, 60G60; Secondary: 35R60, 76D05, 60J25 The research of the first author was supported by an EPSRC Visiting Fellowship at the University of Hull and also partially by the KBN grant 2PO3A 064 08. Submitted to EJP on 15 May, 1997. Final version accepted on May 20, 1998. MEASURE ATTRACTORS FOR STOCHASTIC NAVIER--STOKES EQUATIONS MAREK CAPI ' NSKI AND NIGEL J. CUTLAND Abstract. We show existence of measure attractors for 2-D stochastic Navier-Stokes equations with general multiplicative noise. 1. Introduction This paper is concerned with existence of attractors in connection with stochastic Navier-Stokes equations in dimension 2. For deterministic Navier-Stokes equations, the existence of a global attractor in dimension 2 goes back to the work of Ladyzh..
- …
