Toward Comprehensive Refugee Legislation in Hong Kong? Reflections on Reform of the 'Torture Screening' Procedures

Commentpublished_or_final_versio

Lattice Kinetics of Diffusion-Limited Coalescence and Annihilation with Sources

We study the 1D kinetics of diffusion-limited coalescence and annihilation with back reactions and different kinds of particle input. By considering the changes in occupation and parity of a given interval, we derive sets of hierarchical equations from which exact expressions for the lattice coverage and the particle concentration can be obtained. We compare the mean-field approximation and the continuum approximation to the exact solutions and we discuss their regime of validity.Comment: 24 pages and 3 eps figures, Revtex, accepted for publication in J. Phys.

Defining forgiveness: Christian clergy and general population perspectives.

The lack of any consensual definition of forgiveness is a serious weakness in the research literature (McCullough, Pargament &amp; Thoresen, 2000). As forgiveness is at the core of Christianity, this study returns to the Christian source of the concept to explore the meaning of forgiveness for practicing Christian clergy. Comparisons are made with a general population sample and social science definitions of forgiveness to ensure that a shared meaning of forgiveness is articulated. Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy (N = 209) and a general population sample (N = 159) completed a postal questionnaire about forgiveness. There is agreement on the existence of individual differences in forgiveness. Clergy and the general population perceive reconciliation as necessary for forgiveness while there is no consensus within psychology. The clergy suggests that forgiveness is limitless and that repentance is unnecessary while the general population suggests that there are limits and that repentance is necessary. Psychological definitions do not conceptualize repentance as necessary for forgiveness and the question of limits has not been addressed although within therapy the implicit assumption is that forgiveness is limitless.</p

Large-scale analysis of microRNA expression, epi-transcriptomic features and biogenesis.

MicroRNAs are important genetic regulators in both animals and plants. They have a range of functions spanning development, differentiation, growth, metabolism and disease. The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has made it a relatively straightforward task to detect these molecules and their relative expression via sequencing. There are a large number of published studies with deposited datasets. However, there are currently few resources that capitalize on these data to better understand the features, distribution and biogenesis of miRNAs. Herein, we focus on Human and Mouse for which the majority of data are available. We reanalyse sequencing data from 461 samples into a coordinated catalog of microRNA expression. We use this to perform large-scale analyses of miRNA function and biogenesis. These analyses include global expression comparison, co-expression of miRNA clusters and the prediction of miRNA strand-specificity and underlying constraints. Additionally, we report for the first time a global analysis of miRNA epi-transcriptomic modifications and assess their prevalence across tissues, samples and families. Finally, we report a list of potentially mis-annotated miRNAs in miRBase based on their aggregated modification profiles. The results have been collated into a comprehensive online repository of miRNA expression and features such as modifications and RNA editing events, which is available at: http://wwwdev.ebi.ac.uk/enright-dev/miratlas. We believe these findings will further contribute to our understanding of miRNA function in animals and benefit the miRNA community in general

Comparison of spirometry criteria for the diagnosis of COPD: results from the BOLD study

To access publisher full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links fieldPublished guidelines recommend spirometry to accurately diagnose chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, even spirometry-based COPD prevalence estimates can vary widely. We compared properties of several spirometry-based COPD definitions using data from the international Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD)study. 14 sites recruited population-based samples of adults aged > or =40 yrs. Procedures included standardised questionnaires and post-bronchodilator spirometry. 10,001 individuals provided usable data. Use of the lower limit of normal (LLN) forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV(1)) to forced vital capacity (FVC) ratio reduced the age-related increases in COPD prevalence that are seen among healthy never-smokers when using the fixed ratio criterion (FEV(1)/FVC <0.7) recommended by the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease. The added requirement of an FEV(1) either <80% predicted or below the LLN further reduced age-related increases and also led to the least site-to-site variability in prevalence estimates after adjusting for potential confounders. Use of the FEV(1)/FEV(6) ratio in place of the FEV(1)/FVC yielded similar prevalence estimates. Use of the FEV(1)/FV

Mirnovo: genome-free prediction of microRNAs from small RNA sequencing data and single-cells using decision forests.

The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) remains an important problem, particularly given the growth of high-throughput sequencing, cell sorting and single cell biology. While a large number of miRNAs have already been annotated, there may well be large numbers of miRNAs that are expressed in very particular cell types and remain elusive. Sequencing allows us to quickly and accurately identify the expression of known miRNAs from small RNA-Seq data. The biogenesis of miRNAs leads to very specific characteristics observed in their sequences. In brief, miRNAs usually have a well-defined 5' end and a more flexible 3' end with the possibility of 3' tailing events, such as uridylation. Previous approaches to the prediction of novel miRNAs usually involve the analysis of structural features of miRNA precursor hairpin sequences obtained from genome sequence. We surmised that it may be possible to identify miRNAs by using these biogenesis features observed directly from sequenced reads, solely or in addition to structural analysis from genome data. To this end, we have developed mirnovo, a machine learning based algorithm, which is able to identify known and novel miRNAs in animals and plants directly from small RNA-Seq data, with or without a reference genome. This method performs comparably to existing tools, however is simpler to use with reduced run time. Its performance and accuracy has been tested on multiple datasets, including species with poorly assembled genomes, RNaseIII (Drosha and/or Dicer) deficient samples and single cells (at both embryonic and adult stage)

Dirac cohomology, elliptic representations and endoscopy

The first part (Sections 1-6) of this paper is a survey of some of the recent developments in the theory of Dirac cohomology, especially the relationship of Dirac cohomology with (g,K)-cohomology and nilpotent Lie algebra cohomology; the second part (Sections 7-12) is devoted to understanding the unitary elliptic representations and endoscopic transfer by using the techniques in Dirac cohomology. A few problems and conjectures are proposed for further investigations.Comment: This paper will appear in `Representations of Reductive Groups, in Honor of 60th Birthday of David Vogan', edited by M. Nervins and P. Trapa, published by Springe

Universal properties of superconformal OPEs for 1/2 BPS operators in 3≤D≤63\leq D \leq 6

We give a general analysis of OPEs of 1/2 BPS superfield operators for the $D=3,4,5,6$ superconformal algebras OSp(8/4,R), PSU(2,2), F${}_4$ and OSp($8^*/4$) which underlie maximal AdS supergravity in $4\leq D+1\leq 7$. \\ The corresponding three-point functions can be formally factorized in a way similar to the decomposition of a generic superconformal UIR into a product of supersingletons. This allows for a simple derivation of branching rules for primary superfields. The operators of protected conformal dimension which may appear in the OPE are classified and are shown to be either 1/2 or 1/4 BPS, or semishort. As an application, we discuss the "non-renormalization" of extremal $n$-point correlators.Comment: To be published in NJP Focus Issue: Supersymmetry in condensed matter and high energy physic

MCL-CAw: A refinement of MCL for detecting yeast complexes from weighted PPI networks by incorporating core-attachment structure

Abstract Background The reconstruction of protein complexes from the physical interactome of organisms serves as a building block towards understanding the higher level organization of the cell. Over the past few years, several independent high-throughput experiments have helped to catalogue enormous amount of physical protein interaction data from organisms such as yeast. However, these individual datasets show lack of correlation with each other and also contain substantial number of false positives (noise). Over these years, several affinity scoring schemes have also been devised to improve the qualities of these datasets. Therefore, the challenge now is to detect meaningful as well as novel complexes from protein interaction (PPI) networks derived by combining datasets from multiple sources and by making use of these affinity scoring schemes. In the attempt towards tackling this challenge, the Markov Clustering algorithm (MCL) has proved to be a popular and reasonably successful method, mainly due to its scalability, robustness, and ability to work on scored (weighted) networks. However, MCL produces many noisy clusters, which either do not match known complexes or have additional proteins that reduce the accuracies of correctly predicted complexes. Results Inspired by recent experimental observations by Gavin and colleagues on the modularity structure in yeast complexes and the distinctive properties of "core" and "attachment" proteins, we develop a core-attachment based refinement method coupled to MCL for reconstruction of yeast complexes from scored (weighted) PPI networks. We combine physical interactions from two recent "pull-down" experiments to generate an unscored PPI network. We then score this network using available affinity scoring schemes to generate multiple scored PPI networks. The evaluation of our method (called MCL-CAw) on these networks shows that: (i) MCL-CAw derives larger number of yeast complexes and with better accuracies than MCL, particularly in the presence of natural noise; (ii) Affinity scoring can effectively reduce the impact of noise on MCL-CAw and thereby improve the quality (precision and recall) of its predicted complexes; (iii) MCL-CAw responds well to most available scoring schemes. We discuss several instances where MCL-CAw was successful in deriving meaningful complexes, and where it missed a few proteins or whole complexes due to affinity scoring of the networks. We compare MCL-CAw with several recent complex detection algorithms on unscored and scored networks, and assess the relative performance of the algorithms on these networks. Further, we study the impact of augmenting physical datasets with computationally inferred interactions for complex detection. Finally, we analyse the essentiality of proteins within predicted complexes to understand a possible correlation between protein essentiality and their ability to form complexes. Conclusions We demonstrate that core-attachment based refinement in MCL-CAw improves the predictions of MCL on yeast PPI networks. We show that affinity scoring improves the performance of MCL-CAw.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/1/1471-2105-11-504.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/2/1471-2105-11-504-S1.PDFhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/3/1471-2105-11-504-S2.ZIPhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/4/1471-2105-11-504.pdfPeer Reviewe

Universal Rights and Wrongs

This paper argues for the important role of customers as a source of competitive advantage and firm growth, an issue which has been largely neglected in the resource-based view of the firm. It conceptualizes Penrose’s (1959) notion of an ‘inside track’ and illustrates how in-depth knowledge about established customers combines with joint problem-solving activities and the rapid assimilation of new and previously unexploited skills and resources. It is suggested that the inside track represents a distinct and perhaps underestimated way of generating rents and securing long-term growth. This also implies that the sources of sustainable competitive advantage in important respects can be sought in idiosyncratic interfirm relationships rather than within the firm itself