Positioning analysis of second-tier convention destinations as perceived by association meeting planners in the United States of America

This research examines and compares the association meeting planners\u27 perceptions (cognitive, affective, and overall) and behavioral intentions of four selected second-tier convention destinations: Indianapolis, Nashville, Charlotte, and San Jose. The study measures both quantitative (structured) and qualitative (unstructured) perceptions to uncover perceived strengths and weaknesses of each convention city; This study can confirm that there are significant differences in the perceptions and the behavioral intentions for the four convention destinations. The findings of the study will be beneficial to both second-tier cities and association meeting planners. The second-tier cities will better understand planners\u27 site selection criteria and perceptions, which will help the cities to develop a more effective marketing strategy; The results will also be useful to the association meeting planners in terms of revealing industry peers\u27 opinions of important site selection criteria for second-tier cities

Effective Field Theory For Nuclei: Confronting Fundamental Questions in Astrophysics

Fundamental issues involving nuclei in the celebrated solar neutrino problem are discussed in terms of an effective field theory adapted to nuclear few-body systems, with a focus on the proton fusion process and the hep process. Our strategy in addressing these questions is to combine chiral perturbation theory -- an effective field theory of QCD -- with an accurate nuclear physics approach to arrive at a more effective effective field theory that reveals and exploits a subtle role of the chiral-symmetry scale in short-distance effects encoded in short-range nuclear correlations. Our key argument is drawn from the close analogy of the principal weak matrix element figuring in the hep process to the suppressed matrix elements in the polarized neutron-proton capture at threshold currently being measured in the laboratories.Comment: 11 pages. Invited talk given by MR at the International Conference on Few-Body Problems, Taipei, Taiwan, 6-10 March 200

Proton-coupled sugar transport in the prototypical major facilitator superfamily protein XylE.

The major facilitator superfamily (MFS) is the largest collection of structurally related membrane proteins that transport a wide array of substrates. The proton-coupled sugar transporter XylE is the first member of the MFS that has been structurally characterized in multiple transporting conformations, including both the outward and inward-facing states. Here we report the crystal structure of XylE in a new inward-facing open conformation, allowing us to visualize the rocker-switch movement of the N-domain against the C-domain during the transport cycle. Using molecular dynamics simulation, and functional transport assays, we describe the movement of XylE that facilitates sugar translocation across a lipid membrane and identify the likely candidate proton-coupling residues as the conserved Asp27 and Arg133. This study addresses the structural basis for proton-coupled substrate transport and release mechanism for the sugar porter family of proteins

Anti-periodic solutions to a parabolic hemivariational inequality

summary:In this paper we deal with the anti-periodic boundary value problems with nonlinearity of the form $b(u)$, where $b\in L^{\infty }_{{\rm loc}}({R}).$ Extending $b$ to be multivalued we obtain the existence of solutions to hemivariational inequality and variational-hemivariational inequality