REGION, The journal of ERSA - Special Issue: Well-being in cities and regions: measurement, analysis and policy practices

This special issue on "Well-being in cities and regions: measurement, analysis and policy practices" is edited by Paolo Veneri (OECD, Paris, France) and Arjen J.E. Edzes (University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands). With the exception of the editorial, all contributions to this special issue have already been published in earlier issues of REGION, for the sake of immediate exposure of the content

Industrial Melanism in the Peppered Moth Is Not Associated with Genetic Variation in Canonical Melanisation Gene Candidates

Industrial melanism in the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is an iconic case study of ecological genetics but the molecular identity of the gene determining the difference between the typical and melanic (carbonaria) morphs is entirely unknown. We applied the candidate gene approach to look for associations between genetic polymorphisms within sixteen a priori melanisation gene candidates and the carbonaria morph. The genes were isolated and sequence characterised in B. betularia using degenerate PCR and from whole-transcriptome sequence. The list of candidates contains all the genes previously implicated in melanisation pattern differences in other insects, including aaNAT, DOPA-decarboxylase, ebony, tan, tyrosine hydroxylase, yellow and yellow2 (yellow-fa). Co-segregation of candidate gene alleles and carbonaria morph was tested in 73 offspring of a carbonaria male-typical female backcross. Surprisingly, none of the sixteen candidate genes was in close linkage with the locus controlling the carbonaria-typical polymorphism. Our study demonstrates that the ‘carbonaria gene’ is not a structural variant of a canonical melanisation pathway gene, neither is it a cis-regulatory element of these enzyme-coding genes. The implication is either that we have failed to characterize an unknown enzyme-coding gene in the melanisation pathway, or more likely, that the ‘carbonaria gene’ is a higher level trans-acting factor which regulates the spatial expression of one or more of the melanisation candidates in this study to alter the pattern of melanin production

Spontaneous Charging and Crystallization of Water Droplets in Oil

We study the spontaneous charging and the crystallization of spherical micron-sized water-droplets dispersed in oil by numerically solving, within a Poisson-Boltzmann theory in the geometry of a spherical cell, for the density profiles of the cations and anions in the system. We take into account screening, ionic Born self-energy differences between oil and water, and partitioning of ions over the two media. We find that the surface charge density of the droplet as induced by the ion partitioning is significantly affected by the droplet curvature and by the finite density of the droplets. We also find that the salt concentration and the dielectric constant regime in which crystallization of the water droplets is predicted is enhanced substantially compared to results based on the planar oil-water interface, thereby improving quantitative agreement with recent experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, submitted for publicatio

The TREC2001 video track: information retrieval on digital video information

The development of techniques to support content-based access to archives of digital video information has recently started to receive much attention from the research community. During 2001, the annual TREC activity, which has been benchmarking the performance of information retrieval techniques on a range of media for 10 years, included a ”track“ or activity which allowed investigation into approaches to support searching through a video library. This paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive picture of the different approaches taken by the TREC2001 video track participants but instead we give an overview of the TREC video search task and a thumbnail sketch of the approaches taken by different groups. The reason for writing this paper is to highlight the message from the TREC video track that there are now a variety of approaches available for searching and browsing through digital video archives, that these approaches do work, are scalable to larger archives and can yield useful retrieval performance for users. This has important implications in making digital libraries of video information attainable

Sadržaj

Sadržaj broja 74. časopisa "Dijete, vrtić, obitelj

Vrtići kao primjeri održivosti

Mogu li sveučilišta uciti od vrtića?! Na tako postavljeno pitanje, odgovor daje autor Wals u svom članku Zrcaljenje, Gestaltswitching i transformativno socijalno učenje – Početni koraci za razvoj kompetencija održivosti

Migratiepatronen in dynamisch perspectief Een pilotstudie naar veranderende patronen van arbeidsmigratie uit Polen, Bulgarije en Roemenië.

__Abstract__ Sinds de toetreding in 2004 en 2007 van nieuwe EU-lidstaten zijn er naar schatting 340.000 Middenen Oost-Europeanen in Nederland komen wonen en werken (Van der Heijden et al. 2013). De meeste van hen zijn Polen, Roemenen en Bulgaren. Dit aantal overstijgt de aanvankelijke verwachtingen van de Nederlandse overheid (Tijdelijke Commissie, 2011, p. 41) en gaat gepaard met een toegenomen publieke en politieke aandacht voor de thematiek van arbeidsmigranten uit Midden- en Oost- Europa. Een centraal thema daarin is de aard van de arbeidsmigratie. Is vooral sprake van tijdelijke migratie of juist van vestigingsmigratie

Adaptive colour change and background choice behaviour in peppered moth caterpillars is mediated by extraocular photoreception.

Light sensing by tissues distinct from the eye occurs in diverse animal groups, enabling circadian control and phototactic behaviour. Extraocular photoreceptors may also facilitate rapid colour change in cephalopods and lizards, but little is known about the sensory system that mediates slow colour change in arthropods. We previously reported that slow colour change in twig-mimicking caterpillars of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is a response to achromatic and chromatic visual cues. Here we show that the perception of these cues, and the resulting phenotypic responses, does not require ocular vision. Caterpillars with completely obscured ocelli remained capable of enhancing their crypsis by changing colour and choosing to rest on colour-matching twigs. A suite of visual genes, expressed across the larval integument, likely plays a key role in the mechanism. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that extraocular colour sensing can mediate pigment-based colour change and behaviour in an arthropod