Lack of continuity between Cronobacter biotypes and species as determined using multilocus sequence typing

The accuracy of the Cronobacter biotyping scheme was compared with the 7-loci multilocus sequence typing scheme. Biotyping did not reliably assign species level identification, as only half (17/31) of the biotype variants were unique to any of the seven Cronobacter species and the remaining biotypes were shared across the genus

Optimal Sterilization Policies in Interdependent Economies

In this paper, a two-country leader-follower model with imperfect asset substitution is used to derive the optimal sterilization coefficients for two-country flexible and fixed exchange rate regimes. It is found that, in general, incomplete sterilization is optimal. However, both the origin and the type of macroeconomic shocks the economies experience are important in determining the appropriate degree of sterilization. We also find that sterilization policies have spill-over effects (strategic complements) in both cases. Thus, in a competitive policy-making environment, greater sterilization by one country leads to greater sterilization by the other country. Further, the impact of increasing capital market integration is examined in particular. We show that greater integration compounds this problem, leading to full sterilization as the optimal outcome under perfect capital mobility

Neo lines: Alan Hollinghurst and the apogee of the eighties

When Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in October 2004, it sealed the arrival in fiction of a retrospective exploration of the 1980s which had already been unmistakable in British culture. While the political continuities from Margaret Thatcher’s social revolution have been a central topic in the analysis of Tony Blair’s administrations, the return of the 1980s in popular culture has also been evident for years. Literature has not been insulated from this climate. Since the turn of the millennium Nicola Barker’s Five Miles From Outer Hope (2001), Tim Lott’s Rumours of a Hurricane (2002) and David Peace’s GB84 (2004) have been prominent examples of the ‘neo-1980s’ novel in Britain. It is on Hollinghurst’s book, however, that this essay will focus. To whose 1980s does The Line of Beauty return us? What is at stake

My English poetry

Some of Professor Joseph Aquilina's poems in English have been published sporadically in various numbers ofThe Journal of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Malta and in the press, both during his lifetime and after. The present paper includes the text ofan unpublished lecture the author gave in the 1970s in which he spoke about his poetic works in English, how they were conceived, and about their place in Maltese literature and Commonwealth literature. Some of these poems are being reproducedfor the first time.peer-reviewe

Review of Lattice Supersymmetry and Gauge-Gravity Duality

We review the status of recent investigations on validating the gauge-gravity duality conjecture through numerical simulations of strongly coupled maximally supersymmetric thermal gauge theories. In the simplest setting, the gauge-gravity duality connects systems of D0-branes and black hole geometries at finite temperature to maximally supersymmetric gauged quantum mechanics at the same temperature. Recent simulations show that non-perturbative gauge theory results give excellent agreement with the quantum gravity predictions, thus proving strong evidence for the validity of the duality conjecture and more insight into quantum black holes and gravity.Comment: v2: Minor comments and references added. Invited review for the International Journal of Modern Physics