Establishment of an arabinose-inducible system in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia

A pBBad22T-derived conditioned arabinose (Ara)-inducible expression system was evaluated in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia (an opportunistic pathogen and has gained increasing attention as a cause of healthcare-associated infection). S. maltophilia cannot grow well when Ara is the sole available carbon source. The induction kinetic study, optimal inducer concentration determination, and depletion experiment were performed by using a xylE gene fusion construct, pBxylE, to monitor the expression of pBBad22T in S. maltophilia. For induction survey, the expression of catechol 2,3-dioxygenase (C23O), encoded by xylE gene, continuously increases during an 8-h induced course and can be modulated by different inducer concentrations. The applied induction condition of pBBad22T in S. maltophilia is the inducer concentration ranging from 0.1% to 0.5% for an induction time of 4 h. For repression evaluation, the C23O expression is rapidly turned off within 30 min after the removal of Ara. Accordingly, the established Ara-inducible system can provide a convenient tool for the study of S. maltophilia

Exploring the value co-destruction model for on-line deviant behaviors of hotel customers

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd This study aims to build a value co-destruction model by exploring the online deviant behavior of hotel customers. Desire for revenge and desire for recovery are considered mediators. Hotel guests in notable Taiwan locations were surveyed via the Internet (no. = 601 valid responses). This study finds that negative emotion indirectly impacts negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) with desire for revenge as a mediator. Furthermore, desire for recovery has the potential to mitigate the impact of negative emotion on negative eWOM. However, the desire for recovery is less intense than the desire for revenge. Based on these findings, this study concludes that emotion, by itself, does not result in action. Respondents only commit negative eWOM because they want to hurt the firm that wronged them. Respondents are also willing to entertain the idea of service recovery. However, desire for revenge is a stronger mediating factor

Assessing impacts of typhoons and the Chi-Chi earthquake on Chenyulan watershed landscape pattern in Central Taiwan using landscape metrics

The Chi-Chi earthquake (M-L = 7.3) occurred in the central part of Taiwan on September 21, 1999. After the earthquake, typhoons Xangsane and Toraji produced heavy rainfall that fell across the eastern and central parts of Taiwan on November 2000 and July 2001. This study uses remote sensing data, landscape metrics, multivariate statistical analysis, and spatial autocorrelation to assess how earthquake and typhoons affect landscape patterns. It addresses variations of the Chenyulan watershed in Nantou County, near the earthquake's epicenter and crossed by Typhoon Toraji. The subsequent disturbances have gradually changed landscape of the Chenyulan watershed. Disturbances of various types, sizes, and intensities, following various tracks, have various effects on the landscape patterns and variations of the Chenyulan watershed. The landscape metrics that are obtained by multivariate statistical analyses showed that the disturbances produced variously fragmented patches, interspersed with other patches and isolated from patches of the same type across the entire Chenyulan watershed. The disturbances also affected the isolation, size, and shape-complexity of patches at the landscape and class levels. The disturbances at the class level more strongly affected spatial variations in the landscape as well as patterns of grasslands and bare land, than variations in the watershed farmland and forest. Moreover, the earthquake with high magnitude was a starter to create these landscape variations in space in the Chenyulan watershed. The cumulative impacts of the disturbances on the watershed landscape pattern had existed, especially landslides and grassland in the study area, but were not always evident in space and time in landscape and other class levels

Modeling manufacturing processes using a genetic programming-based fuzzy regression with detection of outliers

Fuzzy regression (FR) been demonstrated as a promising technique for modeling manufacturing processes where availability of data is limited. FR can only yield linear type FR models which have a higher degree of fuzziness, but FR ignores higher order or interaction terms and the influence of outliers, all of which usually exist in the manufacturing process data. Genetic programming (GP), on the other hand, can be used to generate models with higher order and interaction terms but it cannot address the fuzziness of the manufacturing process data. In this paper, genetic programming-based fuzzy regression (GP-FR), which combines the advantages of the two approaches to overcome the deficiencies of the commonly used existing modeling methods, is proposed in order to model manufacturing processes. GP-FR uses GP to generate model structures based on tree representation which can represent interaction and higher order terms of models, and it uses an FR generator based on fuzzy regression to determine outliers in experimental data sets. It determines the contribution and fuzziness of each term in the model by using experimental data excluding the outliers. To evaluate the effectiveness of GP-FR in modeling manufacturing processes, it was used to model a non-linear system and an epoxy dispensing process. The results were compared with those based on two commonly used FR methods, Tanka's FR and Peters' FR. The prediction accuracy of the models developed based on GP-FR was shown to be better than that of models based on the other two FR methods

Lepton-Flavor Violation via Right-Handed Neutrino Yukawa Couplings in Supersymmetric Standard Model

Various lepton-flavor violating (LFV) processes in the supersymmetric standard model with right-handed neutrino supermultiplets are investigated in detail. It is shown that large LFV rates are obtained when $\tan \beta$ is large. In the case where the mixing matrix in the lepton sector has a similar structure as the Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix and the third-generation Yukawa coupling is as large as that of the top quark, the branching ratios can be as large as $Br(\mu\rightarrow e\gamma)\simeq 10^{-11}$ and $Br(\tau\rightarrow\mu\gamma)\simeq 10^{-7}$, which are within the reach of future experiments. If we assume a large mixing angle solution to the atmospheric neutrino problem, rate for the process $\tau\rightarrow\mu\gamma$ becomes larger. We also discuss the difference between our case and the case of the minimal $SU(5)$ grand unified theory

Heavy Quark Fragmentation Functions for D-wave Quarkonium and Charmed Beauty Mesons

At the large transverse momentum region, the production of heavy-heavy bound-states such as charmonium, bottomonium, and $\bar bc$ mesons in high energy $e^+e^-$ and hadronic collisions is dominated by parton fragmentation. We calculate the heavy quark fragmentation functions into the D-wave quarkonium and $\bar bc$ mesons to leading order in the strong coupling constant and in the non-relativistic expansion. In the $\bar b c$ meson case, one set of its D-wave states is expected to lie below the open flavor threshold. The total fragmentation probability for a $\bar b$ antiquark to split into the D-wave $\bar b c$ mesons is about $2 \times 10^{-5}$, which implies that only 2\% of the total pseudo-scalar ground state $B_c$ comes from the cascades of these orbitally excited states.Comment: 26 pages in RevteX and 3 figures in postscript. Also available at http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~cheung/paper.htm

Global surveillance of cancer survival 1995-2009: analysis of individual data for 25,676,887 patients from 279 population-based registries in 67 countries (CONCORD-2)

BACKGROUND: Worldwide data for cancer survival are scarce. We aimed to initiate worldwide surveillance of cancer survival by central analysis of population-based registry data, as a metric of the effectiveness of health systems, and to inform global policy on cancer control. METHODS: Individual tumour records were submitted by 279 population-based cancer registries in 67 countries for 25·7 million adults (age 15-99 years) and 75,000 children (age 0-14 years) diagnosed with cancer during 1995-2009 and followed up to Dec 31, 2009, or later. We looked at cancers of the stomach, colon, rectum, liver, lung, breast (women), cervix, ovary, and prostate in adults, and adult and childhood leukaemia. Standardised quality control procedures were applied; errors were corrected by the registry concerned. We estimated 5-year net survival, adjusted for background mortality in every country or region by age (single year), sex, and calendar year, and by race or ethnic origin in some countries. Estimates were age-standardised with the International Cancer Survival Standard weights. FINDINGS: 5-year survival from colon, rectal, and breast cancers has increased steadily in most developed countries. For patients diagnosed during 2005-09, survival for colon and rectal cancer reached 60% or more in 22 countries around the world; for breast cancer, 5-year survival rose to 85% or higher in 17 countries worldwide. Liver and lung cancer remain lethal in all nations: for both cancers, 5-year survival is below 20% everywhere in Europe, in the range 15-19% in North America, and as low as 7-9% in Mongolia and Thailand. Striking rises in 5-year survival from prostate cancer have occurred in many countries: survival rose by 10-20% between 1995-99 and 2005-09 in 22 countries in South America, Asia, and Europe, but survival still varies widely around the world, from less than 60% in Bulgaria and Thailand to 95% or more in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and the USA. For cervical cancer, national estimates of 5-year survival range from less than 50% to more than 70%; regional variations are much wider, and improvements between 1995-99 and 2005-09 have generally been slight. For women diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005-09, 5-year survival was 40% or higher only in Ecuador, the USA, and 17 countries in Asia and Europe. 5-year survival for stomach cancer in 2005-09 was high (54-58%) in Japan and South Korea, compared with less than 40% in other countries. By contrast, 5-year survival from adult leukaemia in Japan and South Korea (18-23%) is lower than in most other countries. 5-year survival from childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is less than 60% in several countries, but as high as 90% in Canada and four European countries, which suggests major deficiencies in the management of a largely curable disease. INTERPRETATION: International comparison of survival trends reveals very wide differences that are likely to be attributable to differences in access to early diagnosis and optimum treatment. Continuous worldwide surveillance of cancer survival should become an indispensable source of information for cancer patients and researchers and a stimulus for politicians to improve health policy and health-care systems

Search for resonances in the mass distribution of jet pairs with one or two jets identified as b-jets in proton–proton collisions at √s=13TeV with the ATLAS detector

Searches for high-mass resonances in the dijet invariant mass spectrum with one or two jets identi-fied as b-jets are performed using an integrated luminosity of 3.2fb−1of proton–proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of √s=13TeVrecorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Noevidence of anomalous phenomena is observed in the data, which are used to exclude, at 95%credibility level, excited b∗quarks with masses from 1.1TeVto 2.1TeVand leptophobic Z bosons with masses from 1.1TeVto 1.5TeV. Contributions of a Gaussian signal shape with effective cross sections ranging from approximately 0.4 to 0.001pb are also excluded in the mass range 1.5–5.0TeV