A Case Study of Regional Sport Organization Development in Triathlon

The current qualitative case study examined how a Regional Sport Organization (RSO) in New Zealand dealt with macro and micro environmental pressures in the development and evolution of increasing participation in the sport of triathlon over a 15-year period. Organizers managed a total participation increase from 300 adult participants in 1999 to close to 1,200 in 2012–13. An increase in child participants from 300 in 2004 to 3,400 in 2012–13 also took place. Archives of the results of the respective adult and children’s series of triathlon events from 1998–2013 were analyzed along with the environmental pressures. The findings indicated that informal and formal organizational responses to internal and external pressures directly or indirectly assisted in increasing sport participation of adults and children. These responses involved new events targeting different groups and periodic adaptive organizational infrastructure review/change. Implications of the research included the highlighted importance of ongoing sport product changes and enhancements and the use of formal internal and external review processes, such as the Organization Development Tool, for community or regional sports to support increased physical activity and participation

Efficient RNA interference depends on global context of the target sequence: quantitative analysis of silencing efficiency using Eulerian graph representation of siRNA

Several aspects of gene silencing by small interfering RNA duplexes (siRNA) influence the efficiency of the silencing. They can be divided into two categories, one covering the cell-specific factors and the other covering molecular factors of the RNA interference (RNAi). A prerequisite for sequence-based siRNA design is that hybridization thermodynamics is the dominant factor. Our assumption is that cell-specific parameters (cell line, degradation, cross-hybridization, target conformation, etc.) can be pooled into an average cellular factor. Our hypothesis is that the molecular basis of the positional dependence of siRNA-induced gene silencing is the uniqueness of context of a corresponding target sequence segment relative to all other such segments along the attacked RNA. We encode this context into descriptors derived from Eulerian graph representation of siRNAs and show that the descriptor based upon the contextual similarity and predicted thermodynamic stability correlates with the experimentally observed silencing efficiency of human lamin A/C gene. We further show that information encoded in this regression function is generalizable and can be used as a predictor of siRNA efficiency in unrelated genes (CD54 and PTEN). In summary, our method represents an evolution of siRNA design from the currently used algorithms which are only qualitative in nature

Validation of the Concept of a Common Typical Time of Disease Duration for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients Using the Fisher Information Processing of Tumor Imaging Results Combined With Network Phenotyping Strategy Quantification of Individual Patient Clinical Profile Patterns

A primary goal of current clinical cancer research is the identification of prognostic tumor subtypes. It is increasingly dear that tumor growth depends on both internal tumor factors, and factors that are external to the tumor, such as microenvironment. We recently showed that parameter values alone are less important than the patterns of all patient parameters together for the identification of prognostic subtypes and have identified a network phenotyping strategy method to quantitatively describe the dependency of the tumor on the environment, to characterize hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) subtypes. We have also shown that information about tumor mass together with patterns of other prognostic factors is related to survival. We now use a different patient cohort to validate this prognostic approach. A main finding is our identification of a common time of total disease duration (MD) for every HCC patient. Clinical prognosis at the time of baseline patient evaluation is then calculable as the difference between TDD and the time from disease onset to diagnosis (T-onset). We show that the total pattern of all parameter values and the differences in the relationships between this pattern and a reference pattern that, together with the tumor mass, best reflects the patient's prognosis at baseline. Our approach led us to identify 15 different composite HCC subtypes. Our results highlight the nearly identical TDD in all patients, which must therefore be a characteristic of the HCC disease, as opposed to the variable quantity of T-onset, which is impacted by multiple macro- and micro-environmental factors. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Theory of Circular Dichroism 1187 NEW APPROACH TO THE THEORY OF CIRCULAR DICHROISM

Using the semiclassical approach for the description of the propagation of the electromagnetic waves in optically active isotropic media we derive a new formula for the circular dichroism parameter. The theory is based on the idea of the time damped electromagnetic wave interacting with the molecules of the sample. In this theory, the Lambert–Beer law need not be taken as an empirical law, however, it follows naturally from the requirement that the electromagnetic wave obeys the Maxwell equations. Key words: Circular dichroism; Optically active media; CD spectroscopy; Quantum chemistry. In this paper, we are interested in the theory of the circular dichroism in isotropic media. It is well-known that the propagation of the left or right handed circularly polarized electromagnetic waves (LHCP or RHCP) in optically active media is different. If the molecule absorbs at the frequency of the electromagnetic wave, the absorption of the LHCP and RHCP waves is not equal. This effect is called the circular dichroism (CD) and is characterized by the difference of the corresponding absorption coefficients. This difference is usually denoted as the circular dichroism parameter (see e.g. refs 1,2) where b L and b R are defined by the Lambert–Beer la