Crowdsourcing Linked Data on listening experiences through reuse and enhancement of library data

Research has approached the practice of musical reception in a multitude of ways, such as the analysis of professional critique, sales figures and psychological processes activated by the act of listening. Studies in the Humanities, on the other hand, have been hindered by the lack of structured evidence of actual experiences of listening as reported by the listeners themselves, a concern that was voiced since the early Web era. It was however assumed that such evidence existed, albeit in pure textual form, but could not be leveraged until it was digitised and aggregated. The Listening Experience Database (LED) responds to this research need by providing a centralised hub for evidence of listening in the literature. Not only does LED support search and reuse across nearly 10,000 records, but it also provides machine-readable structured data of the knowledge around the contexts of listening. To take advantage of the mass of formal knowledge that already exists on the Web concerning these contexts, the entire framework adopts Linked Data principles and technologies. This also allows LED to directly reuse open data from the British Library for the source documentation that is already published. Reused data are re-published as open data with enhancements obtained by expanding over the model of the original data, such as the partitioning of published books and collections into individual stand-alone documents. The database was populated through crowdsourcing and seamlessly incorporates data reuse from the very early data entry phases. As the sources of the evidence often contain vague, fragmentary of uncertain information, facilities were put in place to generate structured data out of such fuzziness. Alongside elaborating on these functionalities, this article provides insights into the most recent features of the latest instalment of the dataset and portal, such as the interlinking with the MusicBrainz database, the relaxation of geographical input constraints through text mining, and the plotting of key locations in an interactive geographical browser

Higher Derivative Corrections to R-charged Black Holes: Boundary Counterterms and the Mass-Charge Relation

We carry out the holographic renormalization of Einstein-Maxwell theory with curvature-squared corrections. In particular, we demonstrate how to construct the generalized Gibbons-Hawking surface term needed to ensure a perturbatively well-defined variational principle. This treatment ensures the absence of ghost degrees of freedom at the linearized perturbative order in the higher-derivative corrections. We use the holographically renormalized action to study the thermodynamics of R-charged black holes with higher derivatives and to investigate their mass to charge ratio in the extremal limit. In five dimensions, there seems to be a connection between the sign of the higher derivative couplings required to satisfy the weak gravity conjecture and that violating the shear viscosity to entropy bound. This is in turn related to possible constraints on the central charges of the dual CFT, in particular to the sign of c-a.Comment: 30 pages. v2: references added, some equations simplifie

ω-Transaminases for the amination of functionalised cyclic ketones

The potential of a number of enantiocomplementary ω-transaminases (ω-TAms) in the amination of cyclic ketones has been investigated. After a preliminary screening of several compounds with increasing complexity, different approaches to shift the equilibrium of the reaction to the amine products were studied, and reaction conditions (temperature and pH) optimised. Interestingly, 2-propylamine as an amine donor was tolerated by all five selected ω-TAms, and therefore used in further experiments. Due to the higher conversions observed and interest in chiral amines studies then focused on the amination of α-tetralone and 2-methylcyclohexanone. Both ketones were aminated to give the corresponding amine with at least one of the employed enzymes. Moreover, the amination of 2-methylcyclohexanone was investigated in more detail due to the different stereoselectivities observed with TAms used. The highest yields and stereoselectivities were obtained using the ω-TAm from Chromobacterium violaceum (CV-TAm), producing 2-methylcyclohexylamine with complete stereoselectivity at the (1S)-amine position and up to 24 : 1 selectivity for the cis : trans [(1S,2R) : (1S,2S)] isomer

Generalized iterated wreath products of symmetric groups and generalized rooted trees correspondence

Consider the generalized iterated wreath product $S_{r_1}\wr \ldots \wr S_{r_k}$ of symmetric groups. We give a complete description of the traversal for the generalized iterated wreath product. We also prove an existence of a bijection between the equivalence classes of ordinary irreducible representations of the generalized iterated wreath product and orbits of labels on certain rooted trees. We find a recursion for the number of these labels and the degrees of irreducible representations of the generalized iterated wreath product. Finally, we give rough upper bound estimates for fast Fourier transforms.Comment: 18 pages, to appear in Advances in the Mathematical Sciences. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1409.060

Fluctuations of a holographic quantum Hall fluid

We analyze the neutral spectrum of the holographic quantum Hall fluid described by the D2-D8' model. As expected for a quantum Hall state, we find the system to be stable and gapped and that, at least over much of the parameter space, the lowest excitation mode is a magneto-roton. In addition, we find magneto-rotons in higher modes as well. We show that these magneto-rotons are direct consequences of level crossings between vector and scalar modes.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures; v.2 figures improved, 2 figures added, and text clarified particularly in Sec. 5, to appear in JHE

The cultural capitalists: notes on the ongoing reconfiguration of trafficking culture in Asia

Most analysis of the international flows of the illicit art market has described a global situation in which a postcolonial legacy of acquisition and collection exploits cultural heritage by pulling it westwards towards major international trade nodes in the USA and Europe. As the locus of consumptive global economic power shifts, however, these traditional flows are pulled in other directions: notably for the present commentary, towards and within Asia

Interactions in vivo between the Vif protein of HIV-1 and the precursor (Pr55GAG) of the virion nucleocapsid proteins

The abnormality of viral core structure seen in vif-defective HIV-1 grown in PBMCs has suggested a role for Vif in viral morphogenesis. Using an in vivo mammalian two-hybrid assay, the interaction between Vif and the precursor (Pr55GAG) of the virion nucleocapsid proteins has been analysed. This revealed the amino-terminal (aa 1–22) and central (aa 70–100) regions of Vif to be essential for its interaction with Pr55GAG, but deletion of the carboxy-terminal (aa 158–192) region of the protein had only a minor effect on its interaction. Initial deletion studies carried out on Pr55GAG showed that a 35-amino-acid region of the protein bridging the MA(p17)–CA(p24) junction was essential for its ability to interact with Vif. Site-directed mutagenesis of a conserved tryptophan (Trp21) near the amino terminus of Vif showed it to be important for the interaction with Pr55GAG. By contrast, mutagenesis of the highly conserved YLAL residues forming part of the BC-box motif, shown to be important in Vif promoting degradation of APOBEC3G/3F, had little or no effect on the Vif–Pr55GAG interaction

An Exact Fluctuating 1/2-BPS Configuration

This work explores the role of thermodynamic fluctuations in the two parameter giant and superstar configurations characterized by an ensemble of arbitrary liquid droplets or irregular shaped fuzzballs. Our analysis illustrates that the chemical and state-space geometric descriptions exhibit an intriguing set of exact pair correction functions and the global correlation lengths. The first principle of statistical mechanics shows that the possible canonical fluctuations may precisely be ascertained without any approximation. Interestingly, our intrinsic geometric study exemplifies that there exist exact fluctuating 1/2-BPS statistical configurations which involve an ensemble of microstates describing the liquid droplets or fuzzballs. The Gaussian fluctuations over an equilibrium chemical and state-space configurations accomplish a well-defined, non-degenerate, curved and regular intrinsic Riemannian manifolds for all physically admissible domains of black hole parameters. An explicit computation demonstrates that the underlying chemical correlations involve ordinary summations, whilst the state-space correlations may simply be depicted by standard polygamma functions. Our construction ascribes definite stability character to the canonical energy fluctuations and to the counting entropy associated with an arbitrary choice of excited boxes from an ensemble of ample boxes constituting a variety of Young tableaux.Comment: Minor changes, added references, 30 pages, 4 figures, PACS numbers: 04.70.-s: Physics of black holes; 04.70.-Bw: Classical black holes; 04.50.Gh Higher-dimensional black holes, black strings, and related objects; 04.60.Cf Gravitational aspects of string theory, accepted for publication in JHE

Inflammatory thresholds and the species-specific effects of colonising bacteria in stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

There has been increasing interest in the use of newer, culture-independent techniques to study the airway microbiome of COPD patients. We investigated the relationships between the three common potentially pathogenic microorganisms (PPMs) Haemophilus influenzae, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Moraxella catarrhalis, as detected by quantitative PCR (qPCR), and inflammation and health status in stable patients in the London COPD cohort

Physicochemical analysis of rotavirus segment 11 supports a 'modified panhandle' structure and not the predicted alternative tRNA-like structure (TRLS)

.Rotaviruses are a major cause of acute gastroenteritis, which is often fatal in infants. The viral genome consists of 11 double-stranded RNA segments, but little is known about their cis-acting sequences and structural elements. Covariation studies and phylogenetic analysis exploring the potential structure of RNA11 of rotaviruses suggested that, besides the previously predicted "modified panhandle" structure, the 5' and 3' termini of one of the isoforms of the bovine rotavirus UKtc strain may interact to form a tRNA-like structure (TRLS). Such TRLSs have been identified in RNAs of plant viruses, where they are important for enhancing replication and packaging. However, using tRNA mimicry assays (in vitro aminoacylation and 3'- adenylation), we found no biochemical evidence for tRNA-like functions of RNA11. Capping, synthetic 3' adenylation and manipulation of divalent cation concentrations did not change this finding. NMR studies on a 5'- and 3'-deletion construct of RNA11 containing the putative intra-strand complementary sequences supported a predominant panhandle structure and did not conform to a cloverleaf fold despite the strong evidence for a predicted structure in this conserved region of the viral RNA. Additional viral or cellular factors may be needed to stabilise it into a form with tRNA-like properties