Electronic Commerce Issues in the Australian Manufacturing Industry

This paper reports on findings into the benefits, challenges and success factors of electronic commerce in the Australian manufacturing industry among the top 500 Australian publicly listed companies. The paper investigates anticipated and identified challenges, benefits and success factors of electronic commerce, and possible relationships between them. The results showed that manufacturing industry encountered similar challenges, identified similar success factors and achieved similar benefits as the other sectors of Australian economy. Although this research addresses well-established business enterprises in Australia, the nature of electronic commerce is such that it is global and the findings should be applicable to large organizations over a much wider scope. Some of the findings could as well be applicable to small and medium size businesses/organizations

Case-Studies in Physiology: The exercise pressor response to indoor rock climbing

Introduction. This paper assessed the blood pressure, heart rate, and mouth-pressure responses to indoor rock climbing (bouldering) and associated training exercises. Case Presentation. Six well-trained male rock climbers (mean ± SD age = 27.7 ± 4.7 y; stature = 177.7 ± 7.3 cm; mass = 69.8 ± 12.1 kg) completed two boulder problems (6b and 7a+ on the Fontainebleau Scale) and three typical training exercises (Maximum voluntary contraction [MVC] isometric pull-up, 80% MVC pull-ups to fatigue, campus-board to fatigue). Blood pressure and heart rate were measured via an indwelling femoral arterial catheter, and mouth pressure via a mouthpiece manometer. Bouldering evoked a peak systolic pressure of 200 ± 17 mmHg (44 ± 21% increase from baseline), diastolic pressure of 142 ± 26 mmHg (70 ± 32% increase), mean arterial pressure of 163 ± 18 mmHg (56 ± 25% increase), and heart rate of 157 ± 20 b⸱min−1 (81 ± 30% increase). The highest systolic pressure was observed during the campus-board exercise (218 ± 33 mmHg), although individual values as high as 273/189 mmHg were recorded. Peak mouth pressure during climbing was 31 ± 46 mmHg, and this increased independent of climb difficulty. Conclusions. Indoor rock climbing and associated exercises evoke a substantial pressor response, resulting in high blood pressures that may exceed those observed during other resistance exercises. These findings may inform risk stratification for climbers

Direct observation shows superposition and large scale flexibility within cytoplasmic dynein motors moving along microtubules

Cytoplasmic dynein is a dimeric AAA+ motor protein that performs critical roles in eukaryotic cells by moving along microtubules using ATP. Here using cryo-electron microscopy we directly observe the structure of Dictyostelium discoideum dynein dimers on microtubules at near-physiological ATP concentrations. They display remarkable flexibility at a hinge close to the microtubule binding domain (the stalkhead) producing a wide range of head positions. About half the molecules have the two heads separated from one another, with both leading and trailing motors attached to the microtubule. The other half have the two heads and stalks closely superposed in a front-to-back arrangement of the AAA+ rings, suggesting specific contact between the heads. All stalks point towards the microtubule minus end. Mean stalk angles depend on the separation between their stalkheads, which allows estimation of inter-head tension. These findings provide a structural framework for understanding dynein’s directionality and unusual stepping behaviour

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Genome-wide association analyses for lung function and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease identify new loci and potential druggable targets

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterized by reduced lung function and is the third leading cause of death globally. Through genome-wide association discovery in 48,943 individuals, selected from extremes of the lung function distribution in UK Biobank, and follow-up in 95,375 individuals, we increased the yield of independent signals for lung function from 54 to 97. A genetic risk score was associated with COPD susceptibility (odds ratio per 1 s.d. of the risk score (∼6 alleles) (95% confidence interval) = 1.24 (1.20-1.27), P = 5.05 × 10‾⁴⁹), and we observed a 3.7-fold difference in COPD risk between individuals in the highest and lowest genetic risk score deciles in UK Biobank. The 97 signals show enrichment in genes for development, elastic fibers and epigenetic regulation pathways. We highlight targets for drugs and compounds in development for COPD and asthma (genes in the inositol phosphate metabolism pathway and CHRM3) and describe targets for potential drug repositioning from other clinical indications.This work was funded by a Medical Research Council (MRC) strategic award to M.D.T., I.P.H., D.S. and L.V.W. (MC_PC_12010). This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource under application 648. This article presents independent research funded partially by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the UK Department of Health. This research used the ALICE and SPECTRE High-Performance Computing Facilities at the University of Leicester. Additional acknowledgments and funding details can be found in the Supplementary Note

Complete sets of metamorphoses: Twofold 4-cycle systems into twofold 6-cycle systems

Let (X,C) denote a twofold k-cycle system with an even number of cycles. If these k-cycles can be paired together so that: (i) each pair contains a common edge; (ii) removal of the repeated common edge from each pair leaves a (2k-2)-cycle; (iii) all the repeated edges, once removed, can be rearranged exactly into a collection of further (2k-2)-cycles; then this is a metamorphosis of a twofold k-cycle system into a twofold (2k-2)-cycle system. The existence of such metamorphoses has been dealt with for the case of 3-cycles (Gionfriddo and Lindner, 2003) [3] and 4-cycles (Yazc, 2005) [7]. If a twofold k-cycle system (X,C) of order n exists, which has not just one but has k different metamorphoses, from k different pairings of its cycles, into twofold (2k-2)-cycle systems, such that the collection of all removed double edges from all k metamorphoses precisely covers 2 , we call this a complete set of twofold paired k-cycle metamorphoses into twofold (2k-2)-cycle systems. In this paper, we show that there exists a twofold 4-cycle system (X,C) of order n with a complete set of metamorphoses into twofold 6-cycle systems if and only if n≡0,1,9,16 (mod 24), n≠9

Decomposing complete tripartite graphs into 5-cycles when the partite sets have similar size

The problem of finding necessary and sufficient conditions to decompose a complete tripartite graph into 5-cycles was first posed at a conference in 1994 (Mahmoodian and Mirzakhani in Combinatorics Advances, 1995). Since then, many cases of the problem have been solved by various authors; however the case when the partite sets have odd and distinct sizes remains open. In this note, we introduce a new approach to the problem by embedding previously known decompositions into larger ones. Via this approach, we show that when the partite sets have asymptotically similar sizes, the conjectured necessary conditions for a decomposition are also sufficient