Evaluation of electrospray differential mobility analysis for virus particle analysis: Potential applications for biomanufacturing.

The technique of electrospray differential mobility analysis (ES-DMA) was examined as a potential potency assay for routine virus particle analysis in biomanufacturing environments (e.g., evaluation of vaccines and gene delivery products for lot release) in the context of the International Committee of Harmonisation (ICH) Q2 guidelines. ES-DMA is a rapid particle sizing method capable of characterizing certain aspects of the structure (such as capsid proteins) and obtaining complete size distributions of viruses and virus-like particles. It was shown that ES-DMA can distinguish intact virus particles from degraded particles and measure the concentration of virus particles when calibrated with nanoparticles of known concentration. The technique has a measurement uncertainty of ≈20%, is linear over nearly 3 orders of magnitude, and has a lower limit of detection of ≈10(9)particles/mL. This quantitative assay was demonstrated for non-enveloped viruses. It is expected that ES-DMA will be a useful method for applications involving production and quality control of vaccines and gene therapy vectors for human use

J. Baird Callicott’s \u27Earth Insights\u27

Critique of J. Baird Callicott\u27s attempt to formaluate a global environmental ethic

Regulation, governance and informality: an empirical analysis of selected countries

The Informal Economy provides employment to more than 60 per cent of the labour population in the developing world despite being a site unfettered by regulations and social norms of fairness governing pay and work conditions. In assessing the factors behind an informal agent’s decision to formalize, it is asserted that rigidity in regulatory mechanism is the primary cause that impedes the process of formalization. However whether flexible regulations can encourage formalization by making gains of formalization more accessible and certain remains a question. In this paper we argue that flexible regulations does not necessarily manifest into the incentives that are essential for formalization. Reducing rigidities in regulation has a significant pay off only in the ambit of good governance. More specifically we hypothesise that degree of intensity of regulation will hardly matter in containing informality; rather what matters is the quality of governance and capability of the institutions to put the regulations into effect. Using secondary data for 46 countries over the period between 1980 and 2008, we empirically investigate into the linkages between governance, regulation and informal employment by developing static and dynamic panel data models and establish that in curbing informality what turns out to be crucial is the interaction between quality of governance and regulation

Sequential decoding of a general classical-quantum channel

Since a quantum measurement generally disturbs the state of a quantum system, one might think that it should not be possible for a sender and receiver to communicate reliably when the receiver performs a large number of sequential measurements to determine the message of the sender. We show here that this intuition is not true, by demonstrating that a sequential decoding strategy works well even in the most general "one-shot" regime, where we are given a single instance of a channel and wish to determine the maximal number of bits that can be communicated up to a small failure probability. This result follows by generalizing a non-commutative union bound to apply for a sequence of general measurements. We also demonstrate two ways in which a receiver can recover a state close to the original state after it has been decoded by a sequence of measurements that each succeed with high probability. The second of these methods will be useful in realizing an efficient decoder for fully quantum polar codes, should a method ever be found to realize an efficient decoder for classical-quantum polar codes.Comment: 12 pages; accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society

Ontology of core data mining entities

In this article, we present OntoDM-core, an ontology of core data mining entities. OntoDM-core defines themost essential datamining entities in a three-layered ontological structure comprising of a specification, an implementation and an application layer. It provides a representational framework for the description of mining structured data, and in addition provides taxonomies of datasets, data mining tasks, generalizations, data mining algorithms and constraints, based on the type of data. OntoDM-core is designed to support a wide range of applications/use cases, such as semantic annotation of data mining algorithms, datasets and results; annotation of QSAR studies in the context of drug discovery investigations; and disambiguation of terms in text mining. The ontology has been thoroughly assessed following the practices in ontology engineering, is fully interoperable with many domain resources and is easy to extend

Dust composition and mass-loss return from the luminous blue variable R71 in the LMC

We present an analysis of mid-and far-infrared (IR) spectrum and spectral energy distribution (SED) of the LBV R71 in the LMC.This work aims to understand the overall contribution of high-mass LBVs to the total dust-mass budget of the interstellar medium (ISM) of the LMC and compare this with the contribution from low-mass asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. As a case study, we analyze the SED of R71. We compiled all the available photometric and spectroscopic observational fluxes from various telescopes for a wide wavelength range (0.36 -- 250\,$\mu$m). We determined the dust composition from the spectroscopic data, and derived the ejected dust mass, dust mass-loss rate, and other dust shell properties by modeling the SED of R71. We noted nine spectral features in the dust shell of R71 by analyzing Spitzer spectroscopic data. Among these, we identified three new crystalline silicate features. We computed our model spectrum by using 3D radiative transfer code MCMax. Our model calculation shows that dust is dominated by amorphous silicates, with some crystalline silicates, metallic iron, and a very tiny amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules. The presence of both silicates and PAHs indicates that the dust has a mixed chemistry. We derived a dust mass of 0.01 M$_\odot$, from which we arrive at a total ejected mass of $\approx$ 5 M$_\odot$. This implies a time-averaged dust mass-loss rate of 2.5$\times$10$^{-6}$ M$_\odot$\,yr$^{-1}$ with an explosion about 4000 years ago. We assume that the other five confirmed dusty LBVs in the LMC loose mass at a similar rate, and estimate the total contribution to the mass budget of the LMC to be $\approx$ 10$^{-5}$ M$_\odot$\,yr$^{-1}$, which is comparable to the contribution by all the AGB stars in the LMC. Based on our analysis on R71, we speculate that LBVs as a class may be an important dust source in the ISM of the LMC.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 table