Immigrant Entrepreneurs Creating Jobs and Strengthening the U.S. Economy in Growing Industries

The focus of this report evolved from a 2010 conference at Babson College on "Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Massachusetts" sponsored by The Immigrant Learning Center, Inc. (ILC) from which two key ideas emerged. One is that there is an "immigrant entrepreneurship ecology" that includes immigrant neighborhood storefront businesses; immigrant high-tech and health science entrepreneurs; immigrant non-tech growth businesses; and immigrant transnational businesses. A second idea was that these growing, non-tech industries (including transportation, food and building services) have not attracted much attention. Interestingly, these sectors can be crucial to the expansion of the green economy. Within this context, The ILC decided to look at these three sectors in Massachusetts as well as in New York and Pennsylvania.Moreover, the report dramatically illustrates how immigrant entrepreneurs look for niches in underserved markets. For example, vans and other alternatives to mass transit serve unmet transportation needs in urban areas. Food intended to be a "taste of home" for compatriots in local restaurants and grocery stores becomes popular and influences the eating habits of other Americans. Workers who enter industries like landscaping or cleaning because they don't require much English gain experience and see opportunities to start their own companies. Businesses like these add value to American life by expanding the economy rather than taking away from native businesses

Stealing the spotlight: CUL4-DDB1 ubiquitin ligase docks WD40-repeat proteins to destroy

Recent investigation of Cullin 4 (CUL4) has ushered this class of multiprotein ubiquitin E3 ligases to center stage as critical regulators of diverse processes including cell cycle regulation, developmental patterning, DNA replication, DNA damage and repair, and epigenetic control of gene expression. CUL4 associates with DNA Damage Binding protein 1 (DDB1) to assemble an ubiquitin E3 ligase that targets protein substrates for ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis. CUL4 ligase activity is also regulated by the covalent attachment of the ubiquitin-like protein NEDD8 to CUL4, or neddylation, and the COP9 signalosome complex (CSN) that removes this important modification. Recently, multiple WD40-repeat proteins (WDR) were found to interact with DDB1 and serve as the substrate-recognition subunits of the CUL4-DDB1 ubiquitin ligase. As more than 150–300 WDR proteins exist in the human genome, these findings impact a wide array of biological processes through CUL4 ligase-mediated proteolysis. Here, we review the recent progress in understanding the mechanism of CUL4 ubiquitin E3 ligase and discuss the architecture of CUL4-assembled E3 ubiquitin ligase complexes by comparison to CUL1-based E3s (SCF). Then, we will review several examples to highlight the critical roles of CUL4 ubiquitin ligase in genome stability, cell cycle regulation, and histone lysine methylation. Together, these studies provide insights into the mechanism of this novel ubiquitin ligase in the regulation of important biological processes

Defining the Genetic Basis for Seed Yield in Arabidopsis thaliana

Seed number per fruit is a vitally important trait because it determines total agricultural yield. Despite its importance, the genes that direct seed yield remain relatively unknown. We are using Recombinant Inbred Lines (RILs) in the weedy plant Arabidopsis thaliana to explore the heritability of seed yield and genetically map the genes responsible. Up to eight fruits were collected per plant from each RIL. Seeds were scanned using a flatbed scanner and counted using Adobe Photoshop CS6. With this data, we performed an ANOVA to calculate heritability, the amount of variance in the seed yield trait due to genetics. The heritability of seed yield was found to be 23.24 percent. Using the same data set, we are currently performing composite interval mapping to identify the genomic regions that contain the genes that direct seed yield, an analysis we will report on. Locating the genomic regions that contain seed yield is the first vital step in defining the gene network that directs seed number in fruit

Institutional corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices: the influence of leadership styles and their perceived ethics and social responsibility role

This paper investigates leader's perceptions of ethics and social responsibility (PRESOR) on organisation's institutional CSR practices. The results indicate that while the managers in this study perceive that ethics and social responsibility play an important role in determining the organisation's long-term and short-term gains, they do not think that ethics and social responsibility are the only important factors in determining firm's profitability and survival, as indicated by the non-significant results of the PRESOR (social responsibility and profitability) dimension. Another objective was to determine the types of leadership style in influencing the adoption and practices of CSR. As oppose to many previous studies, the results indicate that among the leadership styles, transactional leadership influences institutional CSR practices, while transformational leadership does not. This finding implies that for CSR practices to be implemented, leaders need to use rewards, rules and regulations in a Malaysian context. In other words, in order to institutionalise CSR practices in Malaysia, corporations should start by introducing extrinsic incentives

Loss of vesicular dopamine release precedes tauopathy in degenerative dopaminergic neurons in a Drosophila model expressing human tau.

While a number of genome-wide association studies have identified microtubule-associated protein tau as a strong risk factor for Parkinson's disease (PD), little is known about the mechanism through which human tau can predispose an individual to this disease. Here, we demonstrate that expression of human wild-type tau is sufficient to disrupt the survival of dopaminergic neurons in a Drosophila model. Tau triggers a synaptic pathology visualized by vesicular monoamine transporter-pHGFP that precedes both the age-dependent formation of tau-containing neurofibrillary tangle-like pathology and the progressive loss of DA neurons, thereby recapitulating the pathological hallmarks of PD. Flies overexpressing tau also exhibit progressive impairments of both motor and learning behaviors. Surprisingly, contrary to common belief that hyperphosphorylated tau could aggravate toxicity, DA neuron degeneration is alleviated by expressing the modified, hyperphosphorylated tau(E14). Together, these results show that impairment of VMAT-containing synaptic vesicle, released to synapses before overt tauopathy may be the underlying mechanism of tau-associated PD and suggest that correction or prevention of this deficit may be appropriate targets for early therapeutic intervention

Identification of tacit knowledge associated with experience: a Chinese software industry study

This paper reports on a research project that aimed at identifying the professional and personal experience from individuals in the SMEs in the Software (SW) industry sector in China. This study employed an inductive qualitative approach based on a single case study and grounded theory (GT) data analysis. The SW company is a SME that specialises in multimedia SW research and development and is located in Xiamen City (Fujian Province, South of China). Six participants, selected on the basis of their role in SW design and development, were interviewed using a semi‐structured interview script. These in‐depth interviews ranged from 100 to 120 minutes in length. After completing the open coding of the six interview transcripts, the researcher obtained 121 codes and 215 quotations from the interview data. These codes were grouped and organized into a category hierarchy that included 6 main structured categories as the result of axial coding. The results of the study enabled the development of a taxonomy and classification of tacit knowledge related to experience in the different stages of the SW development process. The study also showed that each identified category of tacit knowledge is not necessarily confined to one specific SW development stage or even to a specific role in the process. This emergent theory challenges traditional perceptions that each stage requires very precise types of skills, experience and even types of individuals

“Col/Ler Number of Fruits per Main Stem” QTL Mapping

Understanding fruit yield is important to the agricultural economy. The genetics of fruit production have not been fully defined for any plant. In order to identify the gene responsible for fruit production, we used a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population of plants from the species Arabidopsis thaliana. We counted the number of fruit on each line and an ANOVA was performed in order to calculate the heritability for fruit production. We will report on our composite interval mapping experiment using this data

SDF-Pack: Towards Compact Bin Packing with Signed-Distance-Field Minimization

Robotic bin packing is very challenging, especially when considering practical needs such as object variety and packing compactness. This paper presents SDF-Pack, a new approach based on signed distance field (SDF) to model the geometric condition of objects in a container and compute the object placement locations and packing orders for achieving a more compact bin packing. Our method adopts a truncated SDF representation to localize the computation, and based on it, we formulate the SDF minimization heuristic to find optimized placements to compactly pack objects with the existing ones. To further improve space utilization, if the packing sequence is controllable, our method can suggest which object to be packed next. Experimental results on a large variety of everyday objects show that our method can consistently achieve higher packing compactness over 1,000 packing cases, enabling us to pack more objects into the container, compared with the existing heuristics under various packing settings

Isochron dating of sediments using luminescence of K-feldspar grains

A new method for dating well-bleached sediments is presented, with results for thirteen samples from China. The method uses an isochron constructed from the measurement of natural radiation doses received by potassium-feldspar grains in a range of grain sizes using the infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) signal. The age of deposition of the sediment is calculated from this isochron and from the internal dose rate to the grains from 40K and 87Rb in the crystal lattice. This procedure appears to overcome age underestimation due to anomalous fading, a phenomenon that has precluded conventional luminescence dating of K-feldspars and would be applicable to K-feldspars for which the natural dose is beyond the linear dose response region. Also, since the isochron IRSL method is reliant on only the internal dose rate, it overcomes problems related to (1) changes in past dose rate due to postdepositional migration of radionuclides, (2) changes in water content as water-lain sediments dry out, (3) spatial heterogeneity in the gamma dose rate, and (4) uncertainties in the cosmic ray dose rate during the period of sample burial. Copyright 2008 by the American Geophysical Union.published_or_final_versio