Public Sector Spending and Regional Economic Development: Crowding Out or Adding Value?

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Revisiting the Old Industrial Region: Adaptation and Adjustment in an Integrating Europe

The position of old industrial regions (OIRs) has been neglected in recent regional development research, partly as a result of dominant discourses concerned with concepts such as the knowledge economy, learning regions and the new regionalism. One outcome of this conceptual overload is that empirical research has typically been confined to all too familiar case studies of regional success that tell a rather partial story. Yet the extension of the European integration project eastwards alongside growing competition from the urban and regional ‘hotspots’ of the global south prompts a series of largely unconsidered questions about the ability of OIRs to achieve sustainable economic development and social cohesion in the years ahead. Lacking the capital, technological and labour assets of more dynamic cities and regions, and with the historic legacy of deindustrialisation and the decline of traditional sectors, OIRs face some important dilemmas of adjustment and adaptation. In this paper our purpose is to engage with these issues through some preliminary empirical research into the recent fortunes of OIRs in Western Europe’s largest economies: France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Drawing upon material from the Eurostat database, our results hint at interesting patterns of divergence in the performance of OIRs in terms of processes of economic restructuring, employment change and social cohesion. In particular some important variations emerge in the trajectory of regions within different national contexts. Drawing upon recent thinking relating to commodity chains and global production networks, our results lead us to pose a series of questions that relate to the way regions are being repositioned within broader political and economic networks as part of unfolding processes of uneven development and changing spatial divisions of labour

Evolution in Economic Geography: Institutions, Regional Adaptation and Political Economy

Economic geography has, over the last decade or so, drawn upon ideas from evolutionary economics in trying to understand processes of regional growth and change, with the concept of path dependence assuming particular prominence. Recently, some prominent researchers have sought to delimit and develop an evolutionary economic geography (EEG) as a distinct approach, aiming to create a more coherent and systematic theoretical framework for research. This paper contributes to debates on the nature and development of EEG. It has two main aims. First, we seek to restore a broader conception of social institutions and agency to EEG, informed by the recent writings of institutional economists like Geoffrey Hodgson. Second, we link evolutionary concepts to political economy approaches, arguing that the evolution of the economic landscape must be related to the broader dynamics of capital accumulation, centred upon the creation, realisation and geographical transfer of value. As such, we favour the utilisation of evolutionary and institutional concepts within a geographical political economy approach rather than the construction of a separate and theoretically ‘pure’ EEG; evolution in economic geography, not an evolutionary economic geography

Vec2Vec: A Compact Neural Network Approach for Transforming Text Embeddings with High Fidelity

Vector embeddings have become ubiquitous tools for many language-related tasks. A leading embedding model is OpenAI's text-ada-002 which can embed approximately 6,000 words into a 1,536-dimensional vector. While powerful, text-ada-002 is not open source and is only available via API. We trained a simple neural network to convert open-source 768-dimensional MPNet embeddings into text-ada-002 embeddings. We compiled a subset of 50,000 online food reviews. We calculated MPNet and text-ada-002 embeddings for each review and trained a simple neural network to for 75 epochs. The neural network was designed to predict the corresponding text-ada-002 embedding for a given MPNET embedding. Our model achieved an average cosine similarity of 0.932 on 10,000 unseen reviews in our held-out test dataset. We manually assessed the quality of our predicted embeddings for vector search over text-ada-002-embedded reviews. While not as good as real text-ada-002 embeddings, predicted embeddings were able to retrieve highly relevant reviews. Our final model, Vec2Vec, is lightweight (<80 MB) and fast. Future steps include training a neural network with a more sophisticated architecture and a larger dataset of paired embeddings to achieve greater performance. The ability to convert between and align embedding spaces may be helpful for interoperability, limiting dependence on proprietary models, protecting data privacy, reducing costs, and offline operations.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, 5 table

Biofilm-forming capability of highly virulent, multidrug-resistant Candida auris

The emerging multidrug-resistant yeast pathogen Candida auris has attracted considerable attention as a source of healthcare–associated infections. We report that this highly virulent yeast has the capacity to form antifungal resistant biofilms sensitive to the disinfectant chlorhexidine in vitro

Simultaneous demultiplexing, data regeneration, and clock recovery with a single semiconductor optical amplifier-based nonlinear-optical loop mirror

We demonstrate simultaneous demultiplexing, data regeneration and clock recovery at 10Gbits/s, using a single semiconductor optical amplifier–based nonlinear-optical loop mirror in a phase-locked loop configuration

Structure and role for active site lid of lactate monooxygenase from Mycobacterium smegmatis

Lactate monooxygenase (LMO) catalyzes the FMN-dependent "coupled" oxidation of lactate and O-2 to acetate, carbon dioxide, and water, involving pyruvate and hydrogen peroxide as enzyme-bound intermediates. Other alpha-hydroxy acid oxidase family members follow an "uncoupled pathway," wherein the alpha-keto acid product quickly dissociates before the reduced flavin reacts with oxygen. Here, we report the structures of Mycobacterium smegmatis wild-type LMO and a wild-type-like C203A variant at 2.1 angstrom and 1.7 angstrom resolution, respectively. The overall LMO fold and active site organization, including a bound sulfate mimicking substrate, resemble those of other alpha-hydroxy acid oxidases. Based on structural similarity, LMO is similarly distant from lactate oxidase, glycolate oxidase, mandelate dehydrogenase, and flavocytochrome b(2) and is the first representative enzyme of its type. Comparisons with other alpha-hydroxy acid oxidases reveal that LMO has a longer and more compact folded active site loop (Loop 4), which is known in related flavoenzymes to undergo order/disorder transitions to allow substrate/product binding and release. We propose that LMO's Loop 4 has an enhanced stability that is responsible for the slow product release requisite for the coupled pathway. We also note electrostatic features of the LMO active site that promote substrate binding. Whereas the physiological role of LMO remains unknown, we document what can currently be assessed of LMO's distribution in nature, including its unexpected occurrence, presumably through horizontal gene transfer, in halophilic archaea and in a limited group of fungi of the genus Beauveria. Broad statement of impact This first crystal structure of the FMN-dependent alpha-hydroxy acid oxidase family member lactate monooxygenase (LMO) reveals it has a uniquely large active site lid that we hypothesize is stable enough to explain the slow dissociation of pyruvate that leads to its "coupled" oxidation of lactate and O-2 to produce acetate, carbon dioxide, and water. Also, the relatively widespread distribution of putative LMOs supports their importance and provides new motivation for their further study

Nanoporous aluminosilicate catalyzed Friedel–Crafts alkylation reactions of indoles with aldehydes and acetals

Nanoporous aluminosilicate materials efficiently catalyze Friedel-Crafts reactions of indoles to produce bisindolylalkane products. These reactions proceed rapidly and in high yields when acetals are used in place of the more commonly used carbonyl reagents. It is possible to capitalise on the large difference in the rates of reaction observed with aldehydes and acetals to develop a tandem acetalization-Friedel-Crafts protocol in which the acetal is generated in situ and undergoes subsequent reaction. © 2011 The Royal Society of Chemistry