The Bacillus cereus GerN and GerT protein homologs have distinct roles in spore germination and outgrowth, respectively

The GerT protein of Bacillus cereus shares 74% amino acid identity with its homolog GerN. The latter is a Na+/H+-K+ 19 antiporter that is required for normal spore germination in inosine. The germination properties of single and double mutants of B. cereus ATCC10876 reveal that unlike GerN, which is required for all germination responses that involve the GerI germinant receptor, the GerT protein does not have a significant role in germination, although it is required for the residual GerI-mediated inosine germination response of a gerN mutant. In contrast, GerT has a significant role in outgrowth; gerT mutant spores do not outgrow efficiently under alkaline conditions, and outgrow more slowly than wild type in the presence of high NaCl concentrations. The GerT protein in B. cereus therefore contributes to the success of spore outgrowth from the germinated state during alkaline or Na+ stress

Prisoners’ gang-related activity: the importance of bullying and moral disengagement

Gang-related activity can have a significant impact on the effective management of prisons in the UK, yet little is known about the characteristics of the prisoners involved. I it this study, 141 adult male prisoners' gang-related activity was examined in relation to their bullying behaviour and use of moral disengagement. Results showed that prisoners most involved in gang-related activity were likely to have spent a longer total time in the prison system, be perpetrators of bullying and have high levels of moral disengagement. Findings also show that moral disengagement partially mediates the relationship between bullying and gang-related activity Implications for treatment programmes and the prison estate are discussed

Blood on the Snow, Soot on the Carpet: Belief as Pedagogy in Terry Pratchett’s \u3ci\u3eHogfather\u3c/i\u3e

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, children largely refuse to conform to the ideas that adults form about them as a class. While the adults of the Discworld seem to regard childhood as a time of innocence and wonder, the children who inhabit Pratchett’s universe show themselves to be violent, cynical, manipulative, and naturally skeptical of any phenomena which they cannot directly sense. As such, when the beloved seasonal figure of the Hogfather, a former Winter Solstice deity transformed over time into a gift-giving fat man with a taste for sherry and pork-pies, is assaulted by entities who want to make human beings less fanciful, the Discworld’s anthropomorphic representation of Death takes it upon himself to keep up the pretense that the Hogfather is alive, well, and making his usual rounds. This is necessary because, as the novel argues, belief in fantasies is necessary for children to grow into functional adults – the child must start by believing in something relatively concrete, like a jolly fat man who delivers toys to children who behave themselves all year, in order to believe in abstract concepts like ‘justice’ and ‘mercy.’ Belief in figures like the Hogfather tempers the natural cruelty of children, teaching them how to live in harmony with one another as adults, but this belief must be encouraged through empirical evidence, since the children’s natural skepticism leads them to see through the pleasant illusions conjured for them by adults

The Effects of Accentuated Eccentric Loading on Velocity and Muscle Activation in the Bench Press

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Heterogeneity, Communication, Coordination and Voluntary Provision of a Public Good

The results of twenty-four laboratory sessions are evaluated with respect to the role of alternative definitions of equity when communication is introduced into an environment in which voluntary contributions determine the level of public good provision to small groups of individuals. Individuals experience both non-communication and communication treatments. Additional treatments include the extent to which subjects have information about others’ payoffs from (preferences for) the consumption of public goods and about others’ incomes and payoff functions (preferences). With communication, participants in incomplete information environments are less able to coordinate their contributions while those in complete information environments succeed more often. Under complex heterogeneity payoff distributions widen with the introduction of communication. The data do not support the emergence of a particular pattern of coordination across all treatments.

The Adaptive Priority Queue with Elimination and Combining

Priority queues are fundamental abstract data structures, often used to manage limited resources in parallel programming. Several proposed parallel priority queue implementations are based on skiplists, harnessing the potential for parallelism of the add() operations. In addition, methods such as Flat Combining have been proposed to reduce contention by batching together multiple operations to be executed by a single thread. While this technique can decrease lock-switching overhead and the number of pointer changes required by the removeMin() operations in the priority queue, it can also create a sequential bottleneck and limit parallelism, especially for non-conflicting add() operations. In this paper, we describe a novel priority queue design, harnessing the scalability of parallel insertions in conjunction with the efficiency of batched removals. Moreover, we present a new elimination algorithm suitable for a priority queue, which further increases concurrency on balanced workloads with similar numbers of add() and removeMin() operations. We implement and evaluate our design using a variety of techniques including locking, atomic operations, hardware transactional memory, as well as employing adaptive heuristics given the workload.Comment: Accepted at DISC'14 - this is the full version with appendices, including more algorithm

Key dating features for timber-framed dwellings in Surrey

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ The Vernacular Architecture Group 2013. MORE OpenChoice articles are open access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0.The main component of the Surrey Dendrochronology Project is the accurate dating of 177 ‘dwellings’, nearly all by tree-ring analysis. The dates are used to establish date ranges for 52 ‘key features’, which cover many aspects of timber-framing from building type to details of carpentry. It is shown that changes of method and fashion were in many cases surprisingly rapid, almost abrupt in historical terms. Previous dating criteria for timber-framed dwellings in the county have been refined and new criteria introduced. Clusters of change from the 1440s and the 1540s are shown and some possible historical links suggested.The Heritage Lottery Fund, the Domestic Buildings Research Group (Surrey), the Surrey Archaeological Society and the historical societies of Charlwood, Farnham and Nutfield

An aid to accessing the distal internal carotid artery

Accessing the distal internal carotid artery can be a challenge to even the most experienced vascular surgeon. In most patients, the need for distal exposure can be anticipated in advance, thereby enabling the surgeon to consider simple measures, such as nasolaryngeal intubation, or more complex interventions, such as temporomandibular subluxation, to facilitate access. Once the procedure is underway, however, neither of these strategies can be used. The advantage of the approach described in this article is that it can be used at any time during the operation

Interaction of Laser Radiation with Plasmas and Nonadiabatic Motion of Particles in Magnetic Fields

Contains reports on two research projects.United States Atomic Energy Commission (Contract AT(30-1)-3285

Critical States in Disordered Superconducting Films

When subject to a pair-breaking perturbation, the pairing susceptibility of a disordered superconductor exhibits substantial long-ranged mesoscopic fluctuations. Focusing on a thin film subject to a parallel magnetic field, it is proposed that the quantum phase transition to the bulk superconducting condensate may be preempted by the formation of a glass-like phase with multi-fractal correlations of a complex order parameter. Although not universal, we argue that such behavior may be a common feature of quantum critical phenomena in disordered environments.Comment: 7 pages, 1 eps figur