More on Electric and Magnetic Fluxes in SU(2)

The free energies of static charges and center monopoles are given by their fluxes. While electric fluxes show the universal behaviour of the deconfinement transition, the monopole free energies vanish in the thermodynamic limit at all temperatures and are thus irrelevant for the transition. Magnetic fluxes may, however, be used to measure the topological susceptibility without cooling.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX2e (ws-procs9x6.cls), 1 eps-figure, talk presented by L.v.S. at Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum V, Gargnano, Italy, September 10-14, 200

Recent advances in crystalline and amorphous particulate protein formulations for controlled delivery

AbstractThe number of particulate delivery systems for biologics is negligible compared to liquid dosage forms, signifying the complications associated with development of solid protein delivery systems. Particulate protein delivery systems can improve stability, reduce viscosity of suspensions at high protein concentration and allow for controlled drug release. This review discusses current advances in controlled delivery of particulate protein formulations. While the focus lies on protein crystals and delivery systems employing protein crystals, amorphous protein particles will also be addressed. Crystallization and precipitations methods and modifications allowing controlled delivery with and without encapsulation are summarized and discussed

GDPR Privacy Type Clustering: Motivational Factors for Consumer Data Sharing

The GDPR introduced restrictive privacy-preserving measures, affecting the daily life of (online) consumers. Moreover, literature shows that privacy preferences are constantly evolving. This is the first study introducing a GDPR exercising-oriented approach to identify consumer privacy types. Based on a representative sample of the German online population, we cluster consumers according to their privacy importance (“intention to act”) and GDPR knowledge (“ability to act”) and derive four consumer privacy type clusters: fundamentalists, amateurs, pragmatists, and unconcerned. We investigate motivational factors for changing privacy settings and find significant differences between consumers’ intentions and actions for selected factors. This provides evidence for the privacy paradox. Contrarily, intentions and actions align for other factors, which supports the hypothesis that action-based consent might lower the privacy paradox. Finally, we suggest the development of standardized scales and corresponding clustering methodologies for consumer privacy type clustering to increase comparability over time and across populations

Consumer Preferences for Privacy Management Systems

This work presents insights into consumer preferences regarding Privacy Management Systems in the context of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The authors perform a Choice-Based Conjoint experiment with consumers (n = 589) to elicit preferences over four attributes and compute usage likelihoods for all product configurations. Results show that data sharing for marketing purposes and discounts are the most important attributes for consumers. Furthermore, consumers prefer digital access to privacy-related information, detailed rights management for data sharing and no data sharing for marketing purposes. Moreover, a cluster analysis reveals differing importance weights across clusters. The study concludes that incorporating consumer preferences into the design and development process of Privacy Management Systems could increase their use and effectiveness, ultimately strengthening consumers’ privacy rights and companies’ legal compliance. The authors suggest researching legal, business, and consumer requirements more holistically to converge these perspectives to improve Privacy Management Systems adoptions

More on electric and magnetic fluxes in SU(2)

Also published in: arXiv:hep-lat/0212019v1, 12 Dec 2002: 1-3The free energies of static charges and center monopoles are given by their fluxes. While electric fluxes show the universal behaviour of the deconfinement transition, the monopole free energies vanish in the thermodynamic limit at all temperatures and are thus irrelevant for the transition. Magnetic fluxes may, however, be used to measure the topological susceptibility without cooling.Lorenz von Smekal with Philippe de Forcrand and Oliver Jah

RNA chaperone activity and RNA-binding properties of the E. coli protein StpA

The E. coli protein StpA has RNA annealing and strand displacement activities and it promotes folding of RNAs by loosening their structures. To understand the mode of action of StpA, we analysed the relationship of its RNA chaperone activity to its RNA-binding properties. For acceleration of annealing of two short RNAs, StpA binds both molecules simultaneously, showing that annealing is promoted by crowding. StpA binds weakly to RNA with a preference for unstructured molecules. Binding of StpA to RNA is strongly dependent on the ionic strength, suggesting that the interactions are mainly electrostatic. A mutant variant of the protein, with a glycine to valine change in the nucleic-acid-binding domain, displays weaker RNA binding but higher RNA chaperone activity. This suggests that the RNA chaperone activity of StpA results from weak and transient interactions rather than from tight binding to RNA. We further discuss the role that structural disorder in proteins may play in chaperoning RNA folding, using bioinformatic sequence analysis tools, and provide evidence for the importance of conformational disorder and local structural preformation of chaperone nucleic-acid-binding sites

Welchen völkerrechtlichen Status hat Gaza?

Gastbeitrag zum Nahostkrieg. Die Politik meidet die Frage nach dem Status des Gazastreifens. Gründe sind nicht nur Schwierigkeiten einer rechtlichen Einordnung, sondern auch die Sorge vor einer Aufwertung der Hamas

Impact of Higher Airspace Operations on Air Traffic in Europe

Historically, higher airspace has been used for military exercises and as transit for space vehicles. Riding on commercial space operations' coattails, more and more vehicles are under development that will make use of higher airspace resources. This will lead to increasing interactions with conventional air traffic since these new vehicles will have to transit through lower airspaces. The management of these operations is necessary to ensure the safe and practicable shared usage of these airspaces. This paper outlines an assessment of the impact of higher airspace operations on conventional air traffic in Europe. Initially, a synthesis of possible use cases was performed, and demand scenarios were developed that served as input to a fast-time simulation. The impact on air traffic was measured by means of flight efficiency parameters. The simulation results showed that the impact is dependent on the type of operation. High-altitude platform system flights and orbital launches cause the largest deviations in flight distance, flight duration and fuel consumption. Higher airspace operation parameters, including location, time, and duration, strongly affect the impact on the conventional air traffic

An agent-based model of wood markets: Scenario analysis

We present an agent-based model of wood markets. The model covers softwood and hardwood markets for sawlogs, energy wood, and industrial wood. Our study region is a mountainous area in Switzerland that is close to the border, and therefore partially depends on the wood markets of the adjacent countries. The wood markets in this study region are characterized by many small-scale wood suppliers, and a mix of private and publicowned forests. The model was developed to investigate the availability of wood in the study region under different market conditions. We defined several scenarios that are relevant to policy makers and analyzed them with a focus on the two most important assortments of wood in the study region, namely, sawlogs softwood and energy wood softwood. The development of the prices and amounts sold in the scenarios are compared to a business-as-usual scenario. The scenarios were designed to investigate i) the influence of intermediaries, ii) the influence of the profit-orientation of forest owners, iii) the influence of the exchange rate, and iv) the consequences of set-asides in the study region. The presented model has a large potential to support the planning of policy measures as it allows capturing emergent phenomena, and thereby facilitates identifying potential consequences of policy measures planned prior to their implementation. This was demonstrated by discussing the scenario findings with respect to Switzerland's forestry policy objective of increasing the harvested amount of wood to the sustainable potential. We showed that a higher profit-orientation of forest owners would be beneficial for this objective, but also revealed potential conflicts of different economic goals