Transcriptional analysis of the bglP gene from Streptococcus mutans

BACKGROUND: An open reading frame encoding a putative antiterminator protein, LicT, was identified in the genomic sequence of Streptococcus mutans. A potential ribonucleic antitermination (RAT) site to which the LicT protein would potentially bind has been identified immediately adjacent to this open reading frame. The licT gene and RAT site are both located 5' to a beta-glucoside PTS regulon previously described in S. mutans that is responsible for esculin utilization in the presence of glucose. It was hypothesized that antitermination is the regulatory mechanism that is responsible for the control of the bglP gene expression, which encodes an esculin-specific PTS enzyme II. RESULTS: To localize the promoter activity associated with the bglP locus, a series of transcriptional lacZ gene fusions was formed on a reporter shuttle vector using various DNA fragments from the bglP promoter region. Subsequent beta-galactosidase assays in S. mutans localized the bglP promoter region and identified putative -35 and -10 promoter elements. Primer extension analysis identified the bglP transcriptional start site. In addition, a terminated bglP transcript formed by transcriptional termination was identified via transcript mapping experiments. CONCLUSION: The physical location of these genetic elements, the RAT site and the promoter regions, and the identification of a short terminated mRNA support the hypothesis that antitermination regulates the bglP transcript

Plenty : wanting, choosing,, overwhelming unloading

We seek well-being from products and fall prey to the media that promotes them to determine our wants and needs as equal. Consumption becomes an obsession. At some point we accumulate so much that we feel the need to organize or cleanse what’s overwhelmed us. To highlight the aesthetics of consumption, advertisement, and brand proliferation, I turn their tactics against themselves. Plenty: Wanting, Choosing, Overwhelming, Unloading explores, points out, embraces, and edits the complexity we live within. With the hope of better navigating the abundance of consumer choice and its visual bombardment, Plenty tracks and exposes the cycle of material desire as a way to be conscious of, and disempower, our consumptive impulse

Is the customer king?

Sales and service staff need to consider and influence a portfolio of relationships, not only customers, write Willy Bolander, Christopher R. Plouffe, Joseph A. Cote and Bryan Hochstei

Interactive Machine Comprehension with Information Seeking Agents

Existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) models do not scale effectively to real-world applications like web-level information retrieval and question answering (QA). We argue that this stems from the nature of MRC datasets: most of these are static environments wherein the supporting documents and all necessary information are fully observed. In this paper, we propose a simple method that reframes existing MRC datasets as interactive, partially observable environments. Specifically, we "occlude" the majority of a document's text and add context-sensitive commands that reveal "glimpses" of the hidden text to a model. We repurpose SQuAD and NewsQA as an initial case study, and then show how the interactive corpora can be used to train a model that seeks relevant information through sequential decision making. We believe that this setting can contribute in scaling models to web-level QA scenarios.Comment: ACL202

The Kepler DB, a Database Management System for Arrays, Sparse Arrays and Binary Data

The Kepler Science Operations Center stores pixel values on approximately six million pixels collected every 30-minutes, as well as data products that are generated as a result of running the Kepler science processing pipeline. The Kepler Database (Kepler DB) management system was created to act as the repository of this information. After one year of ight usage, Kepler DB is managing 3 TiB of data and is expected to grow to over 10 TiB over the course of the mission. Kepler DB is a non-relational, transactional database where data are represented as one dimensional arrays, sparse arrays or binary large objects. We will discuss Kepler DB's APIs, implementation, usage and deployment at the Kepler Science Operations Center

Interactive Language Learning by Question Answering

Humans observe and interact with the world to acquire knowledge. However, most existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks miss the interactive, information-seeking component of comprehension. Such tasks present models with static documents that contain all necessary information, usually concentrated in a single short substring. Thus, models can achieve strong performance through simple word- and phrase-based pattern matching. We address this problem by formulating a novel text-based question answering task: Question Answering with Interactive Text (QAit). In QAit, an agent must interact with a partially observable text-based environment to gather information required to answer questions. QAit poses questions about the existence, location, and attributes of objects found in the environment. The data is built using a text-based game generator that defines the underlying dynamics of interaction with the environment. We propose and evaluate a set of baseline models for the QAit task that includes deep reinforcement learning agents. Experiments show that the task presents a major challenge for machine reading systems, while humans solve it with relative ease.Comment: EMNLP 201

Assessing the validity of emotional intelligence measures

We describe an approach that enables a more complete evaluation of the validity of emotional intelligence measures. We argue that a source of evidence for validity is often overlooked by researchers and test developers, namely, evidence based on response processes. This evidence can be obtained through (a) a definition of the ability, (b) a description of the mental processes that operate when a person uses the ability, (c) the development of a theory of response behaviour that links variation in the construct with variation on the responses to the items of a measure, and (d) a test of the theory of response behaviour through one or more strategies that we describe. </jats:p

Infrared Emission from the Nearby Cool Core Cluster Abell 2597

We observed the brightest central galaxy (BCG) in the nearby (z=0.0821) cool core galaxy cluster Abell 2597 with the IRAC and MIPS instruments on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. The BCG was clearly detected in all Spitzer bandpasses, including the 70 and 160 micron wavebands. We report aperture photometry of the BCG. The spectral energy distribution exhibits a clear excess in the FIR over a Rayleigh-Jeans stellar tail, indicating a star formation rate of ~4-5 solar masses per year, consistent with the estimates from the UV and its H-alpha luminosity. This large FIR luminosity is consistent with that of a starburst or a Luminous Infrared Galaxy (LIRG), but together with a very massive and old population of stars that dominate the energy output of the galaxy. If the dust is at one temperature, the ratio of 70 to 160 micron fluxes indicate that the dust emitting mid-IR in this source is somewhat hotter than the dust emitting mid-IR in two BCGs at higher-redshift (z~0.2-0.3) and higher FIR luminosities observed earlier by Spitzer, in clusters Abell 1835 and Zwicky 3146.Comment: Accepted at Ap