Commutative Energetic Subsets of BCK-Algebras

The notions of a C-energetic subset and (anti) permeable C-value in BCK-algebras are introduced, and related properties are investigated. Conditions for an element t in [0, 1] to be an (anti) permeable C-value are provided. Also conditions for a subset to be a C-energetic subset are discussed. We decompose BCK-algebra by a partition which consists of a C-energetic subset and a commutative ideal

The Use of Social Media Interactivity Between Nevada E-Government Agencies and The Public: An Analysis of The Role and Impact of Twitter Accounts

Social media platforms have extended the information and communication technology (ICT) landscape in the public sector and have been used to increase e-government transparency, participation, and collaboration in the U.S. e-government. The use of social media platforms has improved a two-way communication for the interactivity with the public, which can provide insights to understand compliance with the Open Government initiative. However, many government agencies using social media have not thoroughly measured the impact of their digital interactions. Moreover, a lack of empirical studies of social media exist for improving the interactivity between governments and the public. Furthermore, scholars have not yet examined the interactivity of the social media between the Nevada’s e-government agencies and the public. Hence, public administrators should implement social media platforms for the potential innovative practices; thus, they must estimate how social media can support their task beyond the formal informing and educating goals (Mergel, 2016). With the analysis of Twitter accounts, this study examined the interactivity of social media between Nevada e-government agencies and the public and attempts to answer three fundamental questions: 1) How is the interactivity between the state of Nevada e-government agencies and the public measured? 2) What factors influence the interactivity of social media between Nevada’s e-government agencies and the public? 3) How can Nevada’s e-government agencies make use of social media to facilitate interactivity with the public? More specifically, this study proposed an analytical framework based on interactive theory and critical theory, which were used to develop an analytical framework for measuring social media contents as derived from Hao, Zheng, Zeng, and Fan’s (2016) study. Based on the research framework, the concept of interactivity was divided into two sub-dimensions that were the reflection of interactivity and transmission of interactivity (retweet). Based on the lack of limited measurement attempts by social media directors (Mergel, 2013a), a framework consisting of metrics, procedures, and outcomes is presented that aims to explore interactivity of social media between government agencies and the public. To investigate the government posts (structural features and content features), this study used mixed methods, which focused on collecting, analyzing, and mixing both quantitative and qualitative data. The benefits of mixed approaches provides a better understanding of research problems than either approach alone (Creswell & Clark, 2007). The results of this study demonstrated that the factors that could explain the degree of interactivity. The factor that influenced the interactivity were determined by two dimensions, which were structural features and content features. This study found that both structural features and content features affected dependent variables (reflection of interactivity and transmission of interactivity). The results of this study provided recommendations to improve the interactivity between Nevada e-government and citizens. Government posts should provide a variety of multimedia elements (e.g., video and pictures) and add more external links to facilitate information dissemination. Public administrations should offer valuable and beneficial original posts (tweets) to facilitate conversation from citizens, which make them more inclined to reply to the posts and express their opinions. The state of Nevada should continuously provide updated training with public administrators because technologies and the function of social media platforms are rapidly advancing in the contemporary era. Public administrations should accept the best business practices, namely, innovative ideas from domestic and international social media companies. By operating under such best practices, transaction costs might be reduced. In addition, Nevada state agencies should offer an outreach and education program to learn innovative functions of social media platforms. Public administrations should change from governing individuals and information to becoming a facilitator and moderator of discourse for implementation of social media platforms (Knox, 2016). This shift should involve releasing control of power and government posts (information) and should provide an incentive-centered design of social media platforms; then, citizens can choose how they want to participate in their communities, work together, and interact with their environment (Johnston, 2010). This study has applied Habermas’ critical theory and interactive theory to the use of social media platforms in public administration. These dual theories could promote the development of social media platforms in the public sector. However, public administrators have considered whether to use an alternative theoretical lens. Since power to the public for symmetric communication is related to cultures, rules, policies, and procedures, the legitimacy dilemma facing administrators will remain (Knox, 2016). Without changing organizational culture, procedures, or rules, the application of social media platforms will not be sufficient to expand the public sphere. Therefore, public administrators should implement social media platforms for potential innovative practices; thus, they should estimate how social media can support their task beyond the formal informing and educating goals (Mergel, 2016). Although this research was not designed to provide policy suggestions to the state of Nevada e-government, implications for policy should not be ignored because government policy is related to using social media platforms by agencies. The use of social media channels that offer innovative platforms provide bidirectional content for interaction with citizens. Obviously, one distinct advantage is that social media platforms is highly interactive and self-updating, which allows for quick response about disseminated information. However, the current political environment using social media can engender a more provocative system for today’s social media users. A key concern would be the degree to which Nevada state e-government requires its social media to be professionally managed to facilitate political debates. As noted by Pew Research, some politically active social media users enjoy the political debate and discussion facilitated by such engagement; however, a larger amount of users express resignation and frustration over the tone and content of political interactions (Duggan & Smith, 2016). Nevertheless, the results of this study illustrated that the use of social media platforms would be more beneficial for public presidential debates. Therefore, agencies should frequently provide updated political information with their followers to participate in government policy and decision-making. Currently, the use of Facebook and Twitter is prevalent for political debates. Facebook has many followers and Twitter users tend to follow a broader variety of connections. Although each platform has different mix of people and viewpoints, users of each site are connected to their followers and may have reciprocal influence on a broad range of political issues. From different perspectives of government policy, agencies can proactively start communication, which facilitate informal exchanges and participation in the formal work of government. This study has several limitations. First, this study investigates only the use of Twitter in Nevada state agencies; thus, the generalization of the results is problematic. Second, Nevada state e-government agencies do not have many followers as compared to other states, which means that the lack of tweet activities (replies, likes, and retweets) influences the results of this study. Third, although total government post (tweet) were significant during collection data, the responses such as comments, likes, and retweets generated were relatively small. The sample data were collected for 17 days (from October 15 to 31, 2016). Because of the period data collection, most contents were related to events for the 2016 presidential debate and Halloween holiday. Fourth, although the sample data was easily extracted and automatically processed utilizing NVIVO software, it does not include likes and other independent variables such as mentions and hashtags; and it only shows original posts related to tweet type. To test hypotheses, the data was required the number of retweets, replies, and likes for calculating the average daily ratio. Furthermore, this study has to measure the ratio of average number of daily forwards, comments (replies), and likes to see the relationship between the dependent variables and independent variables. Therefore, this sample data was also additionally analyzed by using Excel manually. Finally, this study categorizes only two features (structural and content) related to social media posts. Accordingly, Twitter’s contents in this research needed to utilize more categorizing feature words. Since the generalization of the results affect this study, future study should examine Twitter accounts for Nevada counties and cities. Even future research should investigate the assessment between the state of Nevada and other states, as well as the counties and cities of Nevada and those of other states. Future research should examine a survey or interview of local government officials to assess if e-polls conducted on their social media platforms might lead to policy, management, and reforms. The length of data collection should be expanded for future research to examine a period that extends beyond a crucial and highly partisan presidential election to include a more typical timeframe. In doing so, the results ascertained may be informative of whether and to what degree the outcomes generated would be different. In addition, future studies should investigate motivational factors of social media users’ commenting practices in online communities. It could be of interest for future studies to examine user habits across social media channels. It would also be desirable to study other types of user behaviors and make a comparison among them. Further studies should examine different types of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, as this study focused only Twitter. Additional research on the application, adoption, and implementation of social media platforms by administrators would be valuable. In particular, research on the complexity of politics-administrations dichotomy and legitimacy dilemmas is needed (Knox, 2016). Thus, it is vital to comprehend the use of social media platforms from the perspective of administrators. Future empirical research could attain the results on which social media platforms would trigger increased or decreased interactivity between administrations and the public as well as administrative legitimacy, transparency, collaboration, and participation. Scholars could apply the results to the citizens’ perspectives, and assess their emotions and sense of alienation from, or affinity for the use of social media platforms. Since this study utilizes two theories (interactivity and critical theory), future research should compare several different theories to social media platform capabilities. To further test of Habermas’ theory, future research should emphasize what types of communicative actions would be used when public administrators send, collect, and discuss information with citizens. Lastly, future research could inquire about how to validate the public’s claims, and how governments could utilize social media platforms for socialization and cultural reproduction

The function of ITGBL1 in the process of cartilage formation and its potential as a therapeutic agent for cartilage disease.

Department of Biological SciencesIn general, facial bones are not formed as bones from the beginning. Bone formation occurs through endochondral bone formation process after cartilage is formed. Frog face is simpler than human or mouse, so it is easy to find which gene is involved in facial formation. For this reason, experiments were conducted on Xenopus laevis and other experimental animals. The cell is not a major component of cartilage, but the extracellular matrix secreted from the chondrocyte is the main component that gives the elasticity and stiffness of cartilage tissue [1]. In order to complete cartilage tissue, cartilage cells continuously interact with the extracellular matrix surrounding the cells, and the process of secreting cartilage matrix must be accompanied for a long time. This process of forming cartilage tissue is called chondrogenesis. Recent studies have shown that chondrocytes interact with extracellular matrix through various types of integrin molecules, the integrin signal is differentially regulated according to the differentiation of chondrocytes and the state of the cartilage, which helps the cartilage cells to recognize the surrounding environment [2]. It is also known that the integrin signal can induce cartilage-related diseases as well as cartilage differentiation. Integrin signaling is one for the major sources of damage to articular cartilage by amplifying the inflammatory response in both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. Fragmented cartilage ECMs combine with synovial fibroblasts and integrins of immune cells in cartilage tissues to exacerbate the inflammatory response by increasing catabolic factor secretion such as IL-6, 8, and MMP [3-6]. To investigate the process of cartilage formation, we analyzed the genes that differentiation into facial cartilage by expressing in cartilage cells of Xenopus laevis. In this research, we have discovered that a novel secreted protein ITGBL1 promotes cartilage formation by modulating integrin-ECM interactions during chondrogenesis in a model animal and human bone marrow stem cell. Further ITGBL1 inhibited catabolic signals induced by IL-1?? treatment in primary chondrocytes. We believe ITGBL1 possesses dual functions which promote cartilage formation and inhibit catabolic signals in chondrocytes simultaneously. In this study first identified the function of ITGBL1 protein, which regulates integrin signaling in cartilage formation and chondrocyte differentiation and found that ITGBL1 protein also inhibits cartilage damage and promotes cartilage regeneration in arthritic conditions.ope

Automated solution-phase synthesis of HIV- and Leishmania-associated oligosaccharides to probe structure-dependent immune responses

Infectious disease associated-oligosaccharides are important target molecules for synthesis to enable studies of their functions in infection mechanisms both in humans and animals. Unlike solid-phase automated chemical syntheses of oligonucleotides and oligopeptides that serve to provide these molecules for systematic structure-function relationships, automated chemical synthesis of oligosaccharides has been restricted due to the need to manage stereochemistry of each linkage and to the greater complexity of the monomeric carbohydrate building blocks. A new solution-phase automation platform that relies on fluorous solid-phase extraction (FSPE) to purify intermediates potentially offers easier access to complicated oligosaccharides with several features such as simpler monitoring of reactions, only 2-3 equivalents of building block usage per glycosylation cycle, labor savings, and easier access to previously constructed compounds. In addition, the fluorous allyl-tag used to simplify purification in the automation platform also allows not only direct incorporation into microarrays but also ready modification of the tag for facile conjugation to polymeric vehicles. Herein are reported the development of methods for this automation platform for the first construction of HIV- and Leishmania-associated oligosaccharides. Automated methods to make phosphate-linked sugars as well as conventional glycosidic linkages are demonstrated. Several Leishmania-associated oligosaccharides--including capping structures, phosphate-linked capping structures and phosphoglycan repeats--were synthesized as probes for carbohydrate microarrays to screen sera of infect animals. The further development of efficient conjugation chemistry allowed the multivalent modification of latex beads and degradable micro-/nanoparticles with these bioactive oligosaccharides to probe carbohydrate-related structure/function relationships in the stimulation of cellular immune responses

THE INCREASING CALLS FOR A HUMAN RIGHT TO WATER AND PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE IN WATER POLICY

The historical pendulum between public and private sectors and mixed econometric outcomes of recent private sector participation in water management indicate that decision making of water policy is very much a political process rather than an economic or technical based one. Consequently, it gets more important to understand how water policy is formulated and implemented and under what political influences, as well as what institutional arrangements in the processes of bidding, monitoring, negotiating, and regulating have been attempted, succeeded or failed. This study aims to answers to these questions by assessing four cases in the Global South: Cochabamba (Bolivia), Uruguay, Johannesburg (South Africa), and Manila (Philippines), where the government implemented either or both private sector participation and re-municipalization in past decades. By employing the Advocacy Coalition Framework, Stakeholder Analysis, and Discourse Network Analysis, this study analyzes the coalitions which hold different policy core beliefs on water, their strategies to translate their beliefs on policy making, and institutional arrangements to adjust the policy after internal and external events. The content analysis with secondary data collected by Nexis Lexis and two interviews with experts were employed to obtain in-depth understanding on the cases. The study concludes that grassroots civil society organizations, which call for a human right to water and participatory governance, have increased their political leverage by forming powerful coalitions in water management policy subsystem. Their calls have been reflected in new constitutions in Bolivia and Uruguay, and new institutional arrangements in Johannesburg and Manila, to acknowledge the responsibility of the state as a water provider and leader of water conservation and to foster more institutionalized civic spaces in water management

Fabrication and tuning of plasmonic optical nanoantennas around droplet epitaxy quantum dots by cathodoluminescence

We use cathodoluminescence to locate droplet epitaxy quantum dots with a precision $\lesssim$ nm before fabricating nanoantennas in their vicinity by electron-beam lithography. Cathodoluminescence is further used to evidence the effect of the antennas as a function of their length on the light emitted by the dot. Experimental results are in good agreement with numerical simulations of the structures

Socioeconomic Status and Health: Focusing on Co-Morbidity of Self Rated Health and Psychological Well-Being

Despite the well-documented associations between social and economic positions and diverse health conditions, the necessity and urgency of exploring the social and economic consequences of an array of health dimensions together have been proposed as a critical area of research to fully appreciate socioeconomic-health inequalities. The overall objective of the present study is to estimate the variance and covariation of two dimensions of health, i.e., self-rated health and psychological well-being, simultaneously, with specific attention to the social and economic influences, utilizing the multivariate response model. We use the 2005 National Health Interview Survey. Primary results indicate that variance in both self-rated health and psychological distress becomes attenuated with the adjustment of social and economic status, although variation in each outcome remains unexplained to some substantial degree. In addition, there is a strong and positive relationship between these two health outcomes in that individuals who are unhealthy tend also to have poor psychological resources (correlation = .34) and the substantial portion of co-morbidity between health conditions is attributable to the social and economic factors (about 37%)