Queer Call for the Glocal Comparative

A review of Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue's Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Duke University Press, Durham, 2003)

Queer(ing) Taiwan and its future: from an agenda of mainstream self-enlightenment to one of sexual citizenship

As parts of an ongoing reflection on the tongzhi (roughly equivalent to lesbian/gay/queer, hereafter abbreviated as l/g/q) developments in Taiwan, three critical theses are put forward in this essay. The first is a historical understanding of the excitingly prosperous l/g/q emergence in the 1990s. I offer here a contextual analysis which views this phenomenal rise as the amplified effects of what I call a ‘self-enlightening’ process pursued by the mainstream society since the democratization process started in the late 1980s. Yet as fortunate as it seems, this coincidence also dictated the specific form the l/g/q movement has taken as well as caused its apparent ‘cool-off’ near the year 2000. The second is the follow-up critical observation, along the line already mapped out, on the latest change of direction – i.e. what I call the ‘civic turn’ of the l/g/q movement since 2000. This in effect further proves my thesis put forth in the first section and also points at a general perspective on the relative strength (or lack of it) of the Taiwan society versus political power. At the end, O distinguish the l/g/q civil movement in Taiwan from its US counterpart by showing the local transformations of this largely imported discourse with the purpose of providing a glocal comparative framework. To further demonstrate the glocal difference, I also anticipate the historical significance of this new phase of development itself as well as for Taiwan in general

PhD

thesisDPN-linked isocitric dehydrogenase has been purified over 700-fold from bovine heart mitochondrial acetone powder. The purified protein exhibits a major component having a sedimentation constant of 10.3 S, and the molecular weight has been estimated to be about 3 or 4 x 10 to the fifth power. The turnover number was calculated to be about 8000 moles of DPNH formed per minute per mole of enzyme. ADP has been found to affect this enzyme in several ways. The nucleotide stabilizes the enzyme under conditions of low ionic strength. ADP also enhances the activity of the enzyme, and this effect has been found to be due to a marked diminution of the Km for isocitrate. In addition, Km for metal ions is also reduced by ADP. At low isocitrate concentrations, such as may exist in mitochondria, the enzyme is virtually dependent of ADP for activity. The activating effect of ADP is highly specific since, of a large number of nucleotides tested, only ADP and dADP are stimulatory. In the presence of low concentrations of isocitrate, the pH optimum is displaced from pH 6.7 in the absence of ADP to about pH 7.2 in the absence if ADP leads to similar shift of the pH optimum. The enzyme is inhibited by DPNH, ATP, and ADPR; the inhibition is competitive with DPN+. TPNH potentiates the DPNH inhibition, and both TPNH and DPNH apparently can form fluorimetrically discernible complexes with the enzyme. On the other hand, the TPN-linked isocitric dehydrogenase of bovine heart has been found to be insensitive to DPN+, DPNH, ATP, and ADP. The mechanism of activation by ADP is probably a conformational change in the enzyme which results in the active site become more accessible to substrate. In the ultracentrifuge, it has been shown that the sedimentation velocity of the enzyme is markedly increased by ADP, a finding which suggests that aggregation has occurred. The significance of these finding has been discussed in terms of a possible positive-plus negative feedback control mechanism for mitochondrial oxidation. In addition, stereospecific synthesis of threo-D-isocitrate-?-T and of threo-Ds-isocitrate-?-T have been accomplished enzymically. Oxidation of these compounds by DPN-linked isocitric dehydrogenase revealed that the ?-hydrogen of isocitrate was transferred stereo-specifically and directly to the ?-side of DPN+, and that the ?-hydrogen of isocitrate was retained in ?-ketoglutarate. The ?-hydrogen was also retained during the reaction with TPN-linked isocitric dehydrogenase, thus indicating that the enol form of oxalosuccinate is not likely to occur as a free intermediate in the oxidation of isocitrate. Thus, in all respects, the hydrogen transfer mediated by DPN-linked isocitric dehydrogenase was the same as that catalyzed by the TPN-specific enzyme

General Equilibrium Analysis of Hold-Up Problem and Non-Exclusive Franchise Contract

In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium model that examines the emergence of non-exclusive franchise contracts in the presence of the franchisor hold-up problem. Our model of an endogenous franchising network underscores the trade-off between th

Combining multiple classifications of chemical structures using consensus clustering

Consensus clustering involves combining multiple clusterings of the same set of objects to achieve a single clustering that will, hopefully, provide a better picture of the groupings that are present in a dataset. This Letter reports the use of consensus clustering methods on sets of chemical compounds represented by 2D fingerprints. Experiments with DUD, IDAlert, MDDR and MUV data suggests that consensus methods are unlikely to result in significant improvements in clustering effectiveness as compared to the use of a single clustering method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

DIDA: Distributed Indexing Dispatched Alignment

One essential application in bioinformatics that is affected by the high-throughput sequencing data deluge is the sequence alignment problem, where nucleotide or amino acid sequences are queried against targets to find regions of close similarity. When queries are too many and/or targets are too large, the alignment process becomes computationally challenging. This is usually addressed by preprocessing techniques, where the queries and/or targets are indexed for easy access while searching for matches. When the target is static, such as in an established reference genome, the cost of indexing is amortized by reusing the generated index. However, when the targets are non-static, such as contigs in the intermediate steps of a de novo assembly process, a new index must be computed for each run. To address such scalability problems, we present DIDA, a novel framework that distributes the indexing and alignment tasks into smaller subtasks over a cluster of compute nodes. It provides a workflow beyond the common practice of embarrassingly parallel implementations. DIDA is a cost-effective, scalable and modular framework for the sequence alignment problem in terms of memory usage and runtime. It can be employed in large-scale alignments to draft genomes and intermediate stages of de novo assembly runs. The DIDA source code, sample files and user manual are available through http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/dida. The software is released under the British Columbia Cancer Agency License (BCCA), and is free for academic use