Changing the face of consulting: the women's initiative at Deloitte

Deloitte & Touche was hiring the best and brightest men and women, and proportionately losing 80 percent of the women before they reached partner level.Sex discrimination against women ; Women executives

A venting alarm system for cryogenic liquids

Alarm system for cryogenic fluid storage tank

Bacterial Active Community Cycling in Response to Solar Radiation and Their Influence on Nutrient Changes in a High-Altitude Wetland

Indexación: Web of Science; Scopus.Microbial communities inhabiting high-altitude spring ecosystems are subjected to extreme changes in solar irradiance and temperature throughout the diel cycle. Here, using 16S rRNA gene tag pyrosequencing (cDNA) we determined the composition of actively transcribing bacteria from spring waters experimentally exposed through the day (morning, noon, and afternoon) to variable levels of solar radiation and light quality, and evaluated their influence on nutrient recycling. Solar irradiance, temperature, and changes in nutrient dynamics were associated with changes in the active bacterial community structure, predominantly by Cyanobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, Proteobacteria, and 35 other Phyla, including the recently described Candidate Phyla Radiation (e.g., Parcubacteria, Gracilibacteria, OP3, TM6, SR1). Diversity increased at noon, when the highest irradiances were measured (3.3-3.9 H', 1125 W m(-2)) compared to morning and afternoon (0.6-2.8 H'). This shift was associated with a decrease in the contribution to pyrolibraries by Cyanobacteria and an increase of Proteobacteria and other initially low frequently and rare bacteria phyla (< 0.5%) in the pyrolibraries. A potential increase in the activity of Cyanobacteria and other phototrophic groups, e.g., Rhodobacterales, was observed and associated with UVR, suggesting the presence of photo activated repair mechanisms to resist high levels of solar radiation. In addition, the percentage contribution of cyanobacterial sequences in the afternoon was similar to those recorded in the morning. The shifts in the contribution by Cyanobacteria also influenced the rate of change in nitrate, nitrite, and phosphate, highlighted by a high level of nitrate accumulation during hours of high radiation and temperature associated with nitrifying bacteria activity. We did not detect ammonia or nitrite oxidizing bacteria in situ, but both functional groups (Nitrosomona and Nitrospira) appeared mainly in pyrolibraries generated from dark incubations. In total, our results reveal that both the structure and the diversity of the active bacteria community was extremely dynamic through the day, and showed marked shifts in composition that influenced nutrient recycling, highlighting how abiotic variation affects potential ecosystem functioning.http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2016.01823/ful

Cognitive outcome and gamma noise power unrelated to neuregulin 1 and 3 variation in schizophrenia

Background Neuregulins are a family of signalling proteins that orchestrate a broad range of cellular responses. Four genes encoding Neuregulins 1–4 have been identified so far in vertebrates. Among them, Neuregulin 1 and Neuregulin 3 have been reported to contribute to an increased risk for developing schizophrenia. We hypothesized that three specific variants of these genes (rs6994992 and rs3924999 for Neuregulin 1 and rs10748842 for Neuregulin 3) that have been related to this illness may modify information processing capacity in the cortex, which would be reflected in electrophysiological parameters (P3b amplitude or gamma noise power) and/or cognitive performance. Methods We obtained DNA from 31 patients with schizophrenia and 23 healthy controls and analyzed NRG1 rs6994992, NRG1 rs3924999 and NRG3 rs10748842 promoter polymorphisms by allelic discrimination with real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). We compared cognitive outcome, P300 amplitude parameters and an electroencephalographic measure of noise power in the gamma band between the groups dichotomized according to genotype. Results Contrary to our hypothesis, we could not detect any significant influence of variation in Neuregulin 1/Neuregulin 3 polymorphisms on cognitive performance or electrophysiological parameters of patients with schizophrenia. Conclusions Despite our findings, we cannot discard that other genetic variants and, more likely, interactions between those variants and with genetic variation related to different pathways may still influence cerebral processing in schizophrenia

Observation of surface solitons in chirped waveguide arrays

We report the observation of surface solitons in chirped semi-infinite waveguide arrays whose waveguides exhibit exponentially decreasing refractive indices. We show that the power threshold for surface wave formation decreases with an increase of the array chirp and that for sufficiently large chirp values linear surface modes are supported.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Optics Letter

Frequency and damping evolution during experimental seismic response of civil engineering structures

The results of the seismic tests on several reinforced-concrete shear walls and a four-storey frame are analysed in this paper. Each specimen was submitted to the action of a horizontal accelerogram, with successive growing amplitudes, using the pseudodynamic method. An analysis of the results allows knowing the evolution of the eigen frequency and damping ratio during the earthquakes thanks to an identification method working in the time domain. The method is formulated as a spatial model in which the stiffness and damping matrices are directly identified from the experimental displacements, velocities and restoring forces. The obtained matrices are then combined with the theoretical mass in order to obtain the eigen frequencies, damping ratios and modes. Those parameters have a great relevance for the design of this type of structures

Late time tails of the massive vector field in a black hole background

We investigate the late-time behavior of the massive vector field in the background of the Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes. For Schwarzschild black hole, at intermediately late times the massive vector field is represented by three functions with different decay law $\Psi_{0} \sim t^{-(\ell + 3/2)} \sin{m t}$, $\Psi_{1} \sim t^{-(\ell + 5/2)} \sin{m t}$, $\Psi_{2} \sim t^{-(\ell + 1/2)} \sin{m t}$, while at asymptotically late times the decay law $\Psi \sim t^{-5/6} \sin{(m t)}$ is universal, and does not depend on the multipole number $\ell$. Together with previous study of massive scalar and Dirac fields where the same asymptotically late-time decay law was found, it means, that the asymptotically late-time decay law $\sim t^{-5/6} \sin{(m t)}$ \emph{does not depend} also \emph{on the spin} of the field under consideration. For Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes it is observed two different regimes in the late-time decay of perturbations: non-oscillatory exponential damping for small values of $m$ and oscillatory quasinormal mode decay for high enough $m$. Numerical and analytical results are found for these quasinormal frequencies.Comment: one author and new material are adde

DNA Torsional Solitons in Presence of localized Inhomogeneities

In the present paper we investigate the influence of inhomogeneities in the dynamics and stability of DNA open states, modeled as propagating solitons in the spirit of a Generalized Yakushevish Model. It is a direct consecuence of our model that there exists a critical distance between the soliton's center of mass and the inhomogeneity at which the interaction between them can change the stability of the open state.Furtherly from this results was derived a renormalized potential funtion.Comment: RevTex, 13 pages, 3 figures, final versio

Optimization of soliton ratchets in inhomogeneous sine-Gordon systems

Unidirectional motion of solitons can take place, although the applied force has zero average in time, when the spatial symmetry is broken by introducing a potential $V(x)$, which consists of periodically repeated cells with each cell containing an asymmetric array of strongly localized inhomogeneities at positions $x_{i}$. A collective coordinate approach shows that the positions, heights and widths of the inhomogeneities (in that order) are the crucial parameters so as to obtain an optimal effective potential $U_{opt}$ that yields a maximal average soliton velocity. $U_{opt}$ essentially exhibits two features: double peaks consisting of a positive and a negative peak, and long flat regions between the double peaks. Such a potential can be obtained by choosing inhomogeneities with opposite signs (e.g., microresistors and microshorts in the case of long Josephson junctions) that are positioned close to each other, while the distance between each peak pair is rather large. These results of the collective variables theory are confirmed by full simulations for the inhomogeneous sine-Gordon system