THE BIOSAFETY PROTOCOL AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS

International Relations/Trade,

Pop-out from abrupt visual onsets

We report a novel psychophysical paradigm that distinguishes the information present in abrupt stimulus onset from that in the following display. The task is to pick the one odd item from a set added to a pre-existing background of similar items. When all new items are added simultaneously, observers are impaired even at distinguishing one red item amongst several green ones. An asynchrony of about 40ms between target and distracter items restores performance, with evidence that it is cortical, rather than stimulus timing difference that is significant. The results are consistent with a role for neural synchrony in dynamic grouping

A Biologically Supported Error-Correcting Learning Rule

We show that a form of synaptic plasticity recently discovered in slices of the rat visual cortex (Artola et al. 1990) can support an error-correcting learning rule. The rule increases weights when both pre- and postsynaptic units are highly active, and decreases them when pre-synaptic activity is high and postsynaptic activation is less than the threshold for weight increment but greater than a lower threshold. We show that this rule corrects false positive outputs in feedforward associative memory, that in an appropriate opponent-unit architecture it corrects misses, and that it performs better than the optimal Hebbian learning rule reported by Willshaw and Dayan (1990)

Centreless governance for the management of a global R&D process: Public-Private Partnerships and Plant-Genetic Resource Management

Public-private partnership is one new model of centreless or networked governance that has emerged in recent years. This article examines the development and use of partnerships in the management and funding of public pulse breeding programs. The paper evaluates the theory of innovation and knowledge management and uses case study and social network analysis to examine the nature and strength of the international public pulse breeding system and analyzes in detail the three major national public pulse breeding systems in Australia, the US and Canada. Australia appears to have the most developed system of public-private partnerships, centred on the Grains Research Development Corporation and, CLIMA. Canada lacks a centralized national body such as the GRDC, but possesses a regional system centred on a university research centre (the Crop Development Centre) and a hybrid organization (the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers). The US is remarkable for the lack of any significant public-private partnerships in public pulse breeding

To choose or not to choose: how to deal with China's growing power and influence

This paper collects 10 items published on the ASPI blog The Strategist by eight authors on one of the most important public policy issues of this decade and beyond: how to deal with China’s growing power and influence. The hope is that this debate will start to identify points of shared thinking and expose the areas where further work is needed to improve the quality of policy outcomes. ASPI will continue to publish on the topic. There is no more important subject for the future of Australia and for a stable Asia–Pacific

Collaboration and the Generation of New Knowledge in Networked Innovation Systems: A Bibliometric Analysis

AbstractCanola, a high-value, export-oriented agricultural commodity, was developed in Canada over the course of 40 years in public institutions, driven by imported technology and imported research scientists. The evolution of canola R&D closely mirrors the evolution of the Triple Helix Models of innovation. Through the application of longitudinal citation analysis, using five-year intervals, publications from Canadian public institutions involved in canola R&D have been analyzed. In the most recent five- year interval, the relative citation rates of public sector research increased by 60% compared to the global average. A unique fixed-effect negative binomial regression model is used to demonstrate the critical relationship between the institutional arrangement that governs collaboration and the production of knowledge that underscores technological innovation

Aflatoxin-Related Immune Dysfunction in Health and in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Disease

Both aflatoxin and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) cause immune suppression and millions of HIV-infected people in developing countries are chronically exposed to aflatoxin in their diets. We investigated the possible interaction of aflatoxin and HIV on immune suppression by comparing immune parameters in 116 HIV positive and 80 aged-matched HIV negative Ghanaians with high (≥0.91 pmol/mg albumin) and low (<0.91 pmol/mg albumin) aflatoxin B1 albumin adduct (AF-ALB) levels. AF-ALB levels and HIV viral load were measured in plasma and the percentages of leukocyte immunophenotypes and cytokine expression were determined using flow cytometry. The cross-sectional comparisons found that (1) among both HIV positive and negative participants, high AF-ALB was associated with lower perforin expression on CD8+ T-cells (P = .012); (2) HIV positive participants with high AF-ALB had significantly lower percentages of CD4+ T regulatory cells (Tregs; P = .009) and naive CD4+ T cells (P = .029) compared to HIV positive participants with low AF-ALB; and (3) HIV positive participants with high AF-ALB had a significantly reduced percentage of B-cells (P = .03) compared to those with low AF-ALB. High AF-ALB appeared to accentuate some HIV associated changes in T-cell phenotypes and in B-cells in HIV positive participants