Personal Printers and Ink in São Paulo and Recife: Getting New Things Done

Team ethnography for a desktop printer manufacturer in two Brazilian cities on desktop printers and printing is reported here. Our team aimed to resolve an initial puzzle about printers and ink and explored what was going on with the desktop printers as they were acquired, used, and maintained. Our work expanded to encompass the LAN house, small shops, often operated by entrepreneurs, that provide access to the Internet and to printing. The research led to an intrapreneurial modification of a long-standing desktop printer business model by the client. The article concludes by exploring how entrepreneurs (shop owners and teams doing ethnography for hire) and intrapreneurs (those who venture from within a large enterprise) widen the scope of their venturing to encompass wider social and political issues like moral panic, poverty reduction programs, and building social capital in low-income communities in the course of entrepreneurial venturing

Cheese in Chijnaya: Communal Entrepreneurship in Rural Peru

Individual entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship may be more common both in daily life and in the research literature, but community- based entrepreneurship also plays an important role in economic development. We present a case study of community entrepreneurship in a rural area of the Andes, where the community of Chijnaya operates a successful cheese production business. Buying milk from its farmer members in the community, the business produces cheeses that are sold in regional urban markets and beyond. This account draws on decades of ethnographic research and collaboration with the community. Here, we discuss the history of the community in general and of the cheese enterprise in particular. The organizational structure of the business is outlined along with a description of the production processes. We end with an analysis of problems faced by the community in moving the enterprise forward toward a more profitable future and a discussion of the relevance of this case to entrepreneurship studies

DEVELOPMENT AND TURBINE ENGINE PERFORMANCE OF THREE ADVANCED RHENIUM CONTAINING SUPERALLOYS FOR SINGLE CRYSTAL AND DIRECTIONALLY SOUDIFIED BLADES AND VANES

ABSTRACT Turbine inlet temperatures over the next few years will approach 1650°C (3000°F) at maximum power for the latest large commercial turbofan engines, resulting in high fuel efficiency and thrust levels approaching 445 kN (100,000 lbs). High reliability and durability must be intrinsically designed into these turbine engines to meet operating economic targets and ETOPS certification requirement This level of performance has been brought about by a combination of advances in air cooling for turbine blades and vanes, design technology for stresses and airflow, single crystal and directionally solidified casting process improvements and the development and use of rhenium (Re) containing high y' volume fraction nickel-base superalloys with advanced coatings, including full-airfoil ceramic thermal bather coatings. Re additions to cast airfoil superalloys not only improve creep and thermo-mechanical fatigue strength but also environmental properties, including coating performance. Re dramatically slows down diffusion in these alloys at high operating temperatures. A team approach has been used to develop a family of two nickel-base single crystal alloys (CMSX-4. containing 3% Re and CMSX0-10 containing 6% Re) and a directionally solidified, columnar grain nickel-base alloy (CM 186 LC: containing 3% Re) for a variety of turbine engine applications. A range of critical properties of these alloys is reviewed in relation to turbine component engineering performance through engine certification testing and service experience. Industrial turbines are now commencing to use this aero developed turbine technology in both small and large frame units in addition to aero-derivative industrial engines. These applications are demanding with high reliability required for turbine airfoils out to 25,000 hours, with perhaps greater than 50% of the time spent at maximum power. Combined cycle efficiencies of large frame industrial engines is scheduled to reach 60% in the U.S. ATS programme. Application experience to a total 1.3 million engine hours and 28,000 hours individual blade set service for CMSX-4 first stage turbine blades is reviewed for a small frame industrial engine. INTRODUCTION During the last 30 years, turbine inlet temperatures have increased by about 500°C (900°F). About 70% of this increase is due to more efficient design of air cooling for turbine blades and vanes, particularly the advent of serpentine convection an

RNA-seq analyses of blood-induced changes in gene expression in the mosquito vector species, Aedes aegypti

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hematophagy is a common trait of insect vectors of disease. Extensive genome-wide transcriptional changes occur in mosquitoes after blood meals, and these are related to digestive and reproductive processes, among others. Studies of these changes are expected to reveal molecular targets for novel vector control and pathogen transmission-blocking strategies. The mosquito <it>Aedes aegypti </it>(Diptera, Culicidae), a vector of Dengue viruses, Yellow Fever Virus (YFV) and Chikungunya virus (CV), is the subject of this study to look at genome-wide changes in gene expression following a blood meal.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Transcriptional changes that follow a blood meal in <it>Ae. aegypti </it>females were explored using RNA-seq technology. Over 30% of more than 18,000 investigated transcripts accumulate differentially in mosquitoes at five hours after a blood meal when compared to those fed only on sugar. Forty transcripts accumulate only in blood-fed mosquitoes. The list of regulated transcripts correlates with an enhancement of digestive activity and a suppression of environmental stimuli perception and innate immunity. The alignment of more than 65 million high-quality short reads to the <it>Ae. aegypti </it>reference genome permitted the refinement of the current annotation of transcript boundaries, as well as the discovery of novel transcripts, exons and splicing variants. <it>Cis</it>-regulatory elements (CRE) and <it>cis</it>-regulatory modules (CRM) enriched significantly at the 5'end flanking sequences of blood meal-regulated genes were identified.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study provides the first global view of the changes in transcript accumulation elicited by a blood meal in <it>Ae. aegypti </it>females. This information permitted the identification of classes of potentially co-regulated genes and a description of biochemical and physiological events that occur immediately after blood feeding. The data presented here serve as a basis for novel vector control and pathogen transmission-blocking strategies including those in which the vectors are modified genetically to express anti-pathogen effector molecules.</p

Mutations involving the SRY-related gene SOX8 are associated with a spectrum of human reproductive anomalies.

© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. SOX8 is an HMG-box transcription factor closely related to SRY and SOX9. Deletion of the gene encoding Sox8 in mice causes reproductive dysfunction but the role of SOX8 in humans is unknown. Here, we show that SOX8 is expressed in the somatic cells of the early developing gonad in the human and influences human sex determination. We identified two individuals with 46, XY disorders/differences in sex development (DSD) and chromosomal rearrangements encompassing the SOX8 locus and a third individual with 46, XY DSD and a missense mutation in the HMG-box of SOX8. In vitro functional assays indicate that this mutation alters the biological activity of the protein. As an emerging body of evidence suggests that DSDs and infertility can have common etiologies, we also analysed SOX8 in a cohort of infertile men (n=274) and two independent cohorts of women with primary ovarian insufficiency (POI; n=153 and n=104). SOX8 mutations were found at increased frequency in oligozoospermic men (3.5%; P < 0.05) and POI (5.06%; P=4.5×10 -5 ) as compared with fertile/normospermic control populations (0.74%). The mutant proteins identified altered SOX8 biological activity as compared with the wild-type protein. These data demonstrate that SOX8 plays an important role in human reproduction and SOX8 mutations contribute to a spectrum of phenotypes including 46, XY DSD, male infertility and 46, XX POI.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Measuring Health Utilities in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review of the Literature.

BACKGROUND: The objective of this review was to evaluate the use of all direct and indirect methods used to estimate health utilities in both children and adolescents. Utilities measured pre- and post-intervention are combined with the time over which health states are experienced to calculate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). Cost-utility analyses (CUAs) estimate the cost-effectiveness of health technologies based on their costs and benefits using QALYs as a measure of benefit. The accurate measurement of QALYs is dependent on using appropriate methods to elicit health utilities. OBJECTIVE: We sought studies that measured health utilities directly from patients or their proxies. We did not exclude those studies that also included adults in the analysis, but excluded those studies focused only on adults. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We evaluated 90 studies from a total of 1,780 selected from the databases. 47 (52%) studies were CUAs incorporated into randomised clinical trials; 23 (26%) were health-state utility assessments; 8 (9%) validated methods and 12 (13%) compared existing or new methods. 22 unique direct or indirect calculation methods were used a total of 137 times. Direct calculation through standard gamble, time trade-off and visual analogue scale was used 32 times. The EuroQol EQ-5D was the most frequently-used single method, selected for 41 studies. 15 of the methods used were generic methods and the remaining 7 were disease-specific. 48 of the 90 studies (53%) used some form of proxy, with 26 (29%) using proxies exclusively to estimate health utilities. CONCLUSIONS: Several child- and adolescent-specific methods are still being developed and validated, leaving many studies using methods that have not been designed or validated for use in children or adolescents. Several studies failed to justify using proxy respondents rather than administering the methods directly to the patients. Only two studies examined missing responses to the methods administered with respect to the patients' ages

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Changing Relations: Newcomers and Established Residents in Garden City, Kansas

Garden City is located in southwest Kansas, 215 miles west of Wichita and 309 miles southeast of Denver, Colorado. At an elevation of approximately 2,900 feet, it rests amid a semiarid region of short grass and sandsage prairie. With an estimated population of 25,000, it is not only the Finney County seat but a trade and service center for small agricultural communities and unincorporated rural settlements in a five-state area of the southern High Plains (Garden City Planning Department 1989). What follows is an attempt by the Changing Relations Project--six sojourners--to understand and explain how Garden City has met and accommodated its newest arrivals