Employment opportunities for technical communicators in East Tennessee, 2001

This study was initiated to reveal employment opportunities for technical communicators in the Knoxville-Oak Ridge, Tennessee area. Two methods were used to accomplish this goal: a telephone survey of area businesses to determine whether or not they hired or currently employed technical communicators; and an e-mail survey of practitioners to identify workplace realities for technical communicators in our geographic area. The results of the telephone survey suggest that there are fewer companies that employ technical communicators on a permanent basis when compared to a similar survey conducted ten years earlier, but more companies willing to hire technical communicators on a contract basis. The companies that do employ technical communicators tend to be scientifically or technologically based. Results from the e-mail survey indicate that technical communicators still need strong writing and editing skills, along with the ability to communicate effectively in group or task meetings to perform well in their positions. Technical communicators also perform well in their jobs if they have strong organizational skills and some background in science, technology or business. From the findings shown above, technical communicators in our area need to be able to fashion themselves as contract employees if necessary, and need to have strong writing, editing, and communication skills to thrive in the current business climate

The thermodynamics of creating correlations: Limitations and optimal protocols

We establish a rigorous connection between fundamental resource theories at the quantum scale. Correlations and entanglement constitute indispensable resources for numerous quantum information tasks. However, their establishment comes at the cost of energy, the resource of thermodynamics, and is limited by the initial entropy. Here, the optimal conversion of energy into correlations is investigated. Assuming the presence of a thermal bath, we establish general bounds for arbitrary systems and construct a protocol saturating them. The amount of correlations, quantified by the mutual information, can increase at most linearly with the available energy, and we determine where the linear regime breaks down. We further consider the generation of genuine quantum correlations, focusing on the fundamental constituents of our universe: fermions and bosons. For fermionic modes, we find the optimal entangling protocol. For bosonic modes, we show that while Gaussian operations can be outperformed in creating entanglement, their performance is optimal for high energies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Extractable Work from Correlations

Work and quantum correlations are two fundamental resources in thermodynamics and quantum information theory. In this work we study how to use correlations among quantum systems to optimally store work. We analyse this question for isolated quantum ensembles, where the work can be naturally divided into two contributions: a local contribution from each system, and a global contribution originating from correlations among systems. We focus on the latter and consider quantum systems which are locally thermal, thus from which any extractable work can only come from correlations. We compute the maximum extractable work for general entangled states, separable states, and states with fixed entropy. Our results show that while entanglement gives an advantage for small quantum ensembles, this gain vanishes for a large number of systems.Comment: 5+6 pages; 1 figure. Some minor changes, close to published versio

Thermodynamic cost of creating correlations

We investigate the fundamental limitations imposed by thermodynamics for creating correlations. Considering a collection of initially uncorrelated thermal quantum systems, we ask how much classical and quantum correlations can be obtained via a cyclic Hamiltonian process. We derive bounds on both the mutual information and entanglement of formation, as a function of the temperature of the systems and the available energy. While for a finite number of systems there is a maximal temperature allowing for the creation of entanglement, we show that genuine multipartite entanglement---the strongest form of entanglement in multipartite systems---can be created at any temperature when sufficiently many systems are considered. This approach may find applications, e.g. in quantum information processing, for physical platforms in which thermodynamic considerations cannot be ignored.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, substantially rewritten with some new result

Cardiac Toxicity after Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer: Myths and Facts

Radiotherapy is an important component in the multidisciplinary treatment of breast cancer. In recent years, the cardiac risks of radiation have been discussed several times. This problem has long been known and resolved from the radiotherapeutic point of view. The current data is briefly described here

Conformation-dependent ligand hot spots in the spliceosomal RNA helicase BRR2

The conversion of hits to leads in drug discovery involves the elaboration of chemical core structures to increase their potency. In fragment-based drug discovery, low-molecular-weight compounds are tested for protein binding and are subsequently modified, with the tacit assumption that the binding mode of the original hit will be conserved among the derivatives. However, deviations from binding mode conservation are rather frequently observed, but potential causes of these alterations remain incompletely understood. Here, two crystal forms of the spliceosomal RNA helicase BRR2 were employed as a test case to explore the consequences of conformational changes in the target protein on the binding behaviour of fragment derivatives. The initial fragment, sulfaguanidine, bound at the interface between the two helicase cassettes of BRR2 in one crystal form. Second-generation compounds devised by structure-guided docking were probed for their binding to BRR2 in a second crystal form, in which the original fragment-binding site was altered due to a conformational change. While some of the second-generation compounds retained binding to parts of the original site, others changed to different binding pockets of the protein. A structural bioinformatics analysis revealed that the fragment-binding sites correspond to predicted binding hot spots, which strongly depend on the protein conformation. This case study offers an example of extensive binding-mode changes during hit derivatization, which are likely to occur as a consequence of multiple binding hot spots, some of which are sensitive to the flexibility of the protein

Emergent nanoscale superparamagnetism at oxide interfaces

Atomically sharp oxide heterostructures exhibit a range of novel physical phenomena that do not occur in the parent bulk compounds. The most prominent example is the appearance of highly conducting and superconducting states at the interface between the band insulators LaAlO3 and SrTiO3. Here we report a new emergent phenomenon at the LaMnO3/SrTiO3 interface in which an antiferromagnetic insulator abruptly transforms into a magnetic state that exhibits unexpected nanoscale superparamagnetic dynamics. Upon increasing the thickness of LaMnO3 above five unit cells, our scanning nanoSQUID-on-tip microscopy shows spontaneous formation of isolated magnetic islands of 10 to 50 nm diameter, which display random moment reversals by thermal activation or in response to an in-plane magnetic field. Our charge reconstruction model of the polar LaMnO3/SrTiO3 heterostructure describes the sharp emergence of thermodynamic phase separation leading to nucleation of metallic ferromagnetic islands in an insulating antiferromagnetic matrix. The model further suggests that the nearby superparamagnetic-ferromagnetic transition can be gate tuned, holding potential for applications in magnetic storage and spintronics

A note on stability in food matrices of Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis-controlling bacteriophages

Background: Lytic bacteriophages are bacterial viruses that upon infection kill their host cells and therefore have re-emerged as biological control agents of bacterial pathogens, particularly in the field of food related infections. Here, we investigated the stability in different food matrices of five phage isolates capable of controlling the foodborne pathogen Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis (SE). Results: We found that twophages, originally isolated fromfood sources,were up to 5 logsmore stable than three phages isolated from sewage, in ten food matrices (fresh and processed) at both 4\ub0C and 18\ub0C. Conclusion: Lytic phages isolated from contaminated food sources seem to be a better choice when structuring phage cocktails to be used in the control of SE in food management protocols