Perceptions Of Service-orientation And Trust Of Tax Officers Between Millenials, X, And Baby Boomers

The purpose of this study is to examine differences in perceptions of generations related to service-orientation and trust to tax officers. Changes traditional paradigm of the relationship between tax officers and taxpayers from “cops and robbers” to "clients" cause the research in perception of service-orientation and trust to tax officers to be necessary in order to improve voluntary tax compliance. This study also explains perceptions of tax fairness in three perspectives which are vertical equity, horizontal equity, exchange equity. The survey was conducted in 2018 with 165 self-employment individual taxpayers consisting of three generations, Millennials, X, and Baby Boomers from two types of work, retail/production and services business. This study uses quota sampling to collect respondents and use ANOVA statistical tests. The results of the study indicate differences in perceptions regarding service-orientation between generations. However, there are no differences in perception related trust to tax officers between generations. This research also found that Millenials, X, and Baby Boomer have different perceptions of vertical equity, horizontal equity, and exchange equit

Genetic variability detected at the lactoferrin locus (LTF) in the Italian Mediterranean river buffalo

Lactoferrin (LTF) is multi-functional protein belonging to the whey protein fractions of the milk. The gene LTF encoding for such protein is considered a potential candidate for body measurement, milk composition and yield. This study reports on the genetic variability at LTF locus in the Italian Mediterranean river buffalo and its possible association with milk yield. Eleven polymorphic sites were found in the DNA fragment spanning the exons 15-16. In particular, the intron 15 was extremely polymorphic with 9 SNPs detected, whereas the remaining 2 SNPs were exonic mutations (g.88G>A at the exon 15 and g.1351G>A at the exon 16) and both synonymous. The genotyping of the informative samples evidenced 3 haplotypes, whose frequencies were 0.6; 0.3 and 0.1 respectively, whereas the analysis of the exonic SNPs showed a perfect condition of linkage disequilibrium (g.88A/g.1351G and g.88G/g.1351A). The association study carried out by using the SNP g.88G>A showed that buffalo LTF gene has no statistically significant influence on daily milk yield. This study adds knowledge to the genetic variability of a species less investigated than the other ruminant species, that may serve as a useful tool for large-scale screening of buffalo populations

TeV Particle Astrophysics II: Summary comments

A unifying theme of this conference was the use of different approaches to understand astrophysical sources of energetic particles in the TeV range and above. In this summary I review how gamma-ray astronomy, neutrino astronomy and (to some extent) gravitational wave astronomy provide complementary avenues to understanding the origin and role of high-energy particles in energetic astrophysical sources.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures; Conference summary talk for "TeV Particle Astrophysics II" at University of Wisconsin, Madison, 28-31 August 200

Seismic behaviour of traditional timber frame walls: experimental results on unreinforced walls

Timber frame buildings are well known as an efficient seismic resistant structure and they are used worldwide. Moreover, they have been specifically adopted in codes and regulations during the XVIII and XIX centuries in the Mediterranean area. These structures generally consist of exterior masonry walls with timber elements embedded which tie the walls together and internal walls which have a timber frame with masonry infill and act as shearwalls. In order to preserve these structureswhich characterizemany cities in theworld it is important to better understand their behaviour under seismic actions. Furthermore, historic technologies could be used even in modern constructions to build seismic resistant buildings using more natural materials with lesser costs. Generally, different types of infill could be applied to timber frame walls depending on the country, among which brick masonry, rubble masonry, hay and mud. The focus of this paper is to study the seismic behaviour of the walls considering different types of infill, specifically: masonry infill, lath and plaster and timber frame with no infill. Static cyclic tests have been performed on unreinforced timber frame walls in order to study their seismic capacity in terms of strength, stiffness, ductility and energy dissipation. The tests showed how in the unreinforced condition, the infill is able to guarantee a greater stiffness, ductility and ultimate capacity of the wall.The authors would like to acknowledge Eng. Filipe Ferreira and A.O.F. (Augusto Oliveira Ferreira & C Lda.) for their expertise and collaboration in the construction of the wall specimens. The first author would also like to acknowledge the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) for its financial support through grant SFRH / BD / 61908 / 2009

Molecular Genetic Variability Of Commercial And Wild Accessions Of Passion Fruit (passiflora Spp.) Targeting Ex Situ Conservation And Breeding.

Passiflora species are distributed throughout Latin America, and Brazil and Colombia serve as the centers of diversity for this genus. We performed cross-species amplification to evaluate 109 microsatellite loci in 14 Passiflora species and estimated the diversity and genetic structure of Passiflora cincinnata, Passiflora setaceae and Passiflora edulis. A total of 127 accessions, including 85 accessions of P. edulis, a commercial species, and 42 accessions of 13 wild species, were examined. The cross-species amplification was effective for obtaining microsatellite loci (average cross-amplification of 70%). The average number of alleles per locus (five) was relatively low, and the average diversity ranged from 0.52 in P. cincinnata to 0.32 in P. setacea. The Bayesian analyses indicated that the P. cincinnata and P. setacea accessions were distributed into two groups, and the P. edulis accessions were distributed into five groups. Private alleles were identified, and suggestions for core collections are presented. Further collections are necessary, and the information generated may be useful for breeding and conservation.1522933-5

Site-specific perturbations of alpha-synuclein fibril structure by the Parkinson's disease associated mutations A53T and E46K.

PMCID: PMC3591419This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Parkinson's disease (PD) is pathologically characterized by the presence of Lewy bodies (LBs) in dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra. These intracellular inclusions are largely composed of misfolded α-synuclein (AS), a neuronal protein that is abundant in the vertebrate brain. Point mutations in AS are associated with rare, early-onset forms of PD, although aggregation of the wild-type (WT) protein is observed in the more common sporadic forms of the disease. Here, we employed multidimensional solid-state NMR experiments to assess A53T and E46K mutant fibrils, in comparison to our recent description of WT AS fibrils. We made de novo chemical shift assignments for the mutants, and used these chemical shifts to empirically determine secondary structures. We observe significant perturbations in secondary structure throughout the fibril core for the E46K fibril, while the A53T fibril exhibits more localized perturbations near the mutation site. Overall, these results demonstrate that the secondary structure of A53T has some small differences from the WT and the secondary structure of E46K has significant differences, which may alter the overall structural arrangement of the fibrils

Ab-initio study of model guanine assemblies: The role of pi-pi coupling and band transport

Several assemblies of guanine molecules are investigated by means of first-principle calculations. Such structures include stacked and hydrogen-bonded dimers, as well as vertical columns and planar ribbons, respectively, obtained by periodically replicating the dimers. Our results are in good agreement with experimental data for isolated molecules, isolated dimers, and periodic ribbons. For stacked dimers and columns, the stability is affected by the relative charge distribution of the pi orbitals in adjacent guanine molecules. pi-pi coupling in some stacked columns induces dispersive energy bands, while no dispersion is identified in the planar ribbons along the connections of hydrogen bonds. The implications for different materials comprised of guanine aggregates are discussed. The bandstructure of dispersive configurations may justify a contribution of band transport (Bloch type) in the conduction mechanism of deoxyguanosine fibres, while in DNA-like configurations band transport should be negligible.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Higher spin interactions with scalar matter on constant curvature spacetimes: conserved current and cubic coupling generating functions

Cubic couplings between a complex scalar field and a tower of symmetric tensor gauge fields of all ranks are investigated on any constant curvature spacetime of dimension d>2. Following Noether's method, the gauge fields interact with the scalar field via minimal coupling to the conserved currents. A symmetric conserved current, bilinear in the scalar field and containing up to r derivatives, is obtained for any rank r from its flat spacetime counterpart in dimension d+1, via a radial dimensional reduction valid precisely for the mass-square domain of unitarity in (anti) de Sitter spacetime of dimension d. The infinite collection of conserved currents and cubic vertices are summarized in a compact form by making use of generating functions and of the Weyl/Wigner quantization on constant curvature spaces.Comment: 35+1 pages, v2: two references added, typos corrected, enlarged discussions in Subsection 5.2 and in Conclusion, to appear in JHE

Gauge thresholds in the presence of oblique magnetic fluxes

We compute the one-loop partition function and analyze the conditions for tadpole cancellation in type I theories compactified on tori in the presence of internal oblique magnetic fields. We check open - closed string channel duality and discuss the effect of T-duality. We address the issue of the quantum consistency of the toroidal model with stabilized moduli recently proposed by Antoniadis and Maillard (AM). We then pass to describe the computation of one-loop threshold corrections to the gauge couplings in models of this kind. Finally we briefly comment on coupling unification and dilaton stabilization in phenomenologically more viable modelsComment: 34 pages, 2 figures; references added, major changes to the discussion of the model proposed by Antoniadis and Maillar