A Specification Language for the WIDE Workflow Model

This paper presents a workflow specification language developed in the WIDE project. The language provides a rich organisation model, an information model including presentation details, and a sophisticated process model. Workflow application developers should find the language a useful and compact means to capture and investigate design details. Workflow system developers would discover the language a good vehicle to study the interaction between different features as well as facilitate the development of more advanced features. Others would attain a better understanding of the workflow paradigm and could use the language ms a basis of evaluation for the functionality of workflow systems

Explaining the Cross-Section of Stock Returns in Japan: Factors or Characteristics?

Japanese stock returns are even more closely related to their book-to-market ratios than are their U.S. counterparts, and thus provide a good setting for testing whether the return premia associated with these characteristics arise because the characteristics are proxies for covariance with priced factors. Our tests, which replicate the Daniel and Titman (1997) tests on a Japanese sample, reject the Fama and French (1993) three-factor model but fails to reject the characteristic model.

Interest-Rate Sensitivity of Real Estate Investment Trusts

This paper addresses the issue of whether REITs are sensitive to changes in short-term and long-term interest rates. REITs were found to be sensitive to changes in the long-term interest rates in 1973-1979, but in 1980-1985, REITs were sensitive to changes in both short-term and long-term rates. These sources of interest-rate sensitivity were also found to be different for equity and mortgage REITs. Equity REITs are sensitive to changes in expected inflation, whereas mortgage REITs are sensitive to both changes in expected inflation and changes in the real rate.

Variability in an effector gene promoter of a necrotrophic fungal pathogen dictates epistasis and effector-triggered susceptibility in wheat

The fungus Parastagonospora nodorum uses proteinaceous necrotrophic effectors (NEs) to induce tissue necrosis on wheat leaves during infection, leading to the symptoms of septoria nodorum blotch (SNB). The NEs Tox1 and Tox3 induce necrosis on wheat possessing the dominant susceptibility genes Snn1 and Snn3B1/Snn3D1, respectively. We previously observed that Tox1 is epistatic to the expression of Tox3 and a quantitative trait locus (QTL) on chromosome 2A that contributes to SNB resistance/susceptibility. The expression of Tox1 is significantly higher in the Australian strain SN15 compared to the American strain SN4. Inspection of the Tox1 promoter region revealed a 401 bp promoter genetic element in SN4 positioned 267 bp upstream of the start codon that is absent in SN15, called PE401. Analysis of the world-wide P. nodorum population revealed that a high proportion of Northern Hemisphere isolates possess PE401 whereas the opposite was observed in representative P. nodorum isolates from Australia and South Africa. The presence of PE401 removed the epistatic effect of Tox1 on the contribution of the SNB 2A QTL but not Tox3. PE401 was introduced into the Tox1 promoter regulatory region in SN15 to test for direct regulatory roles. Tox1 expression was markedly reduced in the presence of PE401. This suggests a repressor molecule(s) binds PE401 and inhibits Tox1 transcription. Infection assays also demonstrated that P. nodorum which lacks PE401 is more pathogenic on Snn1 wheat varieties than P. nodorum carrying PE401. An infection competition assay between P. nodorum isogenic strains with and without PE401 indicated that the higher Tox1-expressing strain rescued the reduced virulence of the lower Tox1-expressing strain on Snn1 wheat. Our study demonstrated that Tox1 exhibits both ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ characteristics. This offers an insight into a complex NE-NE interaction that is occurring within the P. nodorum population. The importance of PE401 in breeding for SNB resistance in wheat is discussed

Perfectionism and attitudes towards doping in athletes: The mediating role of achievement goal orientations

Perfectionism predicts attitudes towards doping in athletes. It is currently unclear, however, why this is the case. To help shed light on this particular issue, in the present study we provided a first examination of whether achievement goal orientations explain (mediate) the relationship between perfectionism and attitudes towards doping. A sample of 173 athletes (mean age 24.4 years) completed measures of perfectionistic strivings, perfectionistic concerns, ego-orientation, task-orientation, and attitudes towards doping. Based on bias-corrected bootstrapping of indirect effects, ego-orientation mediated the positive relationships between perfectionistic strivings and attitudes towards doping and perfectionistic concerns and attitudes towards doping. Task-orientation mediated the negative relationship between perfectionistic strivings and attitudes towards doping. In this regard, athletes high in either dimension of perfectionism have more favourable attitudes because of a tendency to define success as outperforming others. However, those athletes high in perfectionistic strivings may simultaneously hold less favourable attitudes because they also have a tendency to define success as improving their own performance

Dissipation effects in spin-Hall transport of electrons and holes

We investigate the spin-Hall effect of both electrons and holes in semiconductors using the Kubo formula in the correct zero-frequency limit taking into account the finite momentum relaxation time of carriers in real semiconductors. This approach allows to analyze the range of validity of recent theoretical findings. In particular, the spin-Hall conductivity vanishes for vanishing spin-orbit coupling if the correct zero-frequency limit is performed.Comment: 5 pages, no figures, version to appear in Phys. Rev.