Genuine savings with adjustment costs

In this paper, we consider how genuine savings would be altered if the adjustment costs of capitals are taken into account in the stylized capitalresource model. It is shown that, in order to derive the modified genuine savings, through shadow prices, the original genuine savings have to be divided by the marginal adjustment costs of the capital in question. This implies that economies with volatile savings harbor hidden costs even if they are judged as sustainable by conventional genuine savings indicators

How does end-to-end speech recognition training impact speech enhancement artifacts?

Jointly training a speech enhancement (SE) front-end and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) back-end has been investigated as a way to mitigate the influence of \emph{processing distortion} generated by single-channel SE on ASR. In this paper, we investigate the effect of such joint training on the signal-level characteristics of the enhanced signals from the viewpoint of the decomposed noise and artifact errors. The experimental analyses provide two novel findings: 1) ASR-level training of the SE front-end reduces the artifact errors while increasing the noise errors, and 2) simply interpolating the enhanced and observed signals, which achieves a similar effect of reducing artifacts and increasing noise, improves ASR performance without jointly modifying the SE and ASR modules, even for a strong ASR back-end using a WavLM feature extractor. Our findings provide a better understanding of the effect of joint training and a novel insight for designing an ASR agnostic SE front-end.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

Small-angle X-ray scattering from the concentrated bulk phase separated from an amphiphilic block-copolymer solution

Aqueous solutions of the doubly thermosensitive block copolymer poly(2-isopropyl-2-oxazoline)-b-poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) heated to 50 degrees C underwent a macroscopic liquid/liquid phase separation. The small-angle X-ray scattering intensity recorded from the concentrated phase settled on the bottom of a sample indicated that this phase was in the disordered state without any microphase separation, although the block copolymer was amphiphilic in water at 50 degrees C. It was also confirmed that the contribution to the scattering intensities of individual copolymer chains and their aggregates existing in the coexisting concentrated phase was very small, compared with the total scattering intensity of the phase-separated solution, when the concentrated phase was suspended in the form of colloidal droplets in the lean phase.Peer reviewe

Web access monitoring mechanism via Android WebView for threat analysis

Many Android apps employ WebView, a component that enables the display of web content in the apps without redirecting users to web browser apps. However, WebView might also be used for cyberattacks. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, although some countermeasures based on access control have been reported for attacks exploiting WebView, no mechanism for monitoring web access via WebView has been proposed and no analysis results focusing on web access via WebView are available. In consideration of this limitation, we propose a web access monitoring mechanism for Android WebView to analyze web access via WebView and clarify attacks exploiting WebView. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of this mechanism by modifying Chromium WebView without any modifications to the Android framework or Linux kernel. The evaluation results of the performance achieved on introducing the proposed mechanism are also presented here. Moreover, the result of threat analysis of displaying a fake virus alert while browsing websites on Android is discussed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism

Solution structure of multi-domain protein ER-60 studied by aggregation-free SAXS and coarse-grained-MD simulation

Multi-domain proteins (MDPs) show a variety of domain conformations under physiological conditions, regulating their functions through such conformational changes. One of the typical MDPs, ER-60 which is a protein folding enzyme, has a U-shape with four domains and is thought to have different domain conformations in solution depending on the redox state at the active centres of the edge domains. In this work, an aggregation-free small-angle X-ray scattering revealed that the structures of oxidized and reduced ER-60 in solution are different from each other and are also different from those in the crystal. Furthermore, structural modelling with coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation indicated that the distance between the two edge domains of oxidized ER-60 is longer than that of reduced ER-60. In addition, one of the edge domains has a more flexible conformation than the other

Protein complex prediction via verifying and reconstructing the topology of domain-domain interactions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>High-throughput methods for detecting protein-protein interactions enable us to obtain large interaction networks, and also allow us to computationally identify the associations of proteins as protein complexes. Although there are methods to extract protein complexes as sets of proteins from interaction networks, the extracted complexes may include false positives because they do not account for the structural limitations of the proteins and thus do not check that the proteins in the extracted complex can simultaneously bind to each other. In addition, there have been few searches for deeper insights into the protein complexes, such as of the topology of the protein-protein interactions or into the domain-domain interactions that mediate the protein interactions.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here, we introduce a combinatorial approach for prediction of protein complexes focusing not only on determining member proteins in complexes but also on the DDI/PPI organization of the complexes. Our method analyzes complex candidates predicted by the existing methods. It searches for optimal combinations of domain-domain interactions in the candidates based on an assumption that the proteins in a candidate can form a true protein complex if each of the domains is used by a single protein interaction. This optimization problem was mathematically formulated and solved using binary integer linear programming. By using publicly available sets of yeast protein-protein interactions and domain-domain interactions, we succeeded in extracting protein complex candidates with an accuracy that is twice the average accuracy of the existing methods, MCL, MCODE, or clustering coefficient. Although the configuring parameters for each algorithm resulted in slightly improved precisions, our method always showed better precision for most values of the parameters.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our combinatorial approach can provide better accuracy for prediction of protein complexes and also enables to identify both direct PPIs and DDIs that mediate them in complexes.</p

Phylogenetic Analysis of E. zuernii and E. bovis with Nuclear 18S rRNA and Mitochondrial CO1 Genes

Poster Sessio

Dynamics of proteins with different molecular structures under solution condition

Incoherent quasielastic neutron scattering (iQENS) is a fascinating technique for investigating the internal dynamics of protein. However, low flux of neutron beam, low signal to noise ratio of QENS spectrometers and unavailability of well-established analyzing method have been obstacles for studying internal dynamics under physiological condition (in solution). The recent progress of neutron source and spectrometer provide the fine iQENS profile with high statistics and as well the progress of computational technique enable us to quantitatively reveal the internal dynamic from the obtained iQENS profile. The internal dynamics of two proteins, globular domain protein (GDP) and intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) in solution, were measured with the state-of-the art QENS spectrometer and then revealed with the newly developed analyzing method. It was clarified that the average relaxation rate of IDP was larger than that of GDP and the fraction of mobile H atoms of IDP was also much higher than that of GDP. Combined with the structural analysis and the calculation of solvent accessible surface area of amino acid residue, it was concluded that the internal dynamics were related to the highly solvent exposed amino acid residues depending upon protein’s structure

Elucidation of the mechanism of subunit exchange in αB crystallin oligomers

AlphaB crystallin (αB-crystallin) is a key protein for maintaining the long-term transparency of the eye lens. In the eye lens, αB-crystallin is a “dynamical” oligomer regulated by subunit exchange between the oligomers. To elucidate the unsettled mechanism of subunit exchange in αB-crystallin oligomers, the study was carried out at two different protein concentrations, 28.5 mg/mL (dense sample) and 0.45 mg/mL (dilute sample), through inverse contrast matching small-angle neutron scattering. Interestingly, the exchange rate of the dense sample was the same as that of the dilute sample. From analytical ultracentrifuge measurements, the coexistence of small molecular weight components and oligomers was detected, regardless of the protein concentration. The model proposed that subunit exchange could proceed through the assistance of monomers and other small oligomers; the key mechanism is attaching/detaching monomers and other small oligomers to/from oligomers. Moreover, this model successfully reproduced the experimental results for both dense and dilute solutions. It is concluded that the monomer and other small oligomers attaching/detaching mainly regulates the subunit exchange in αB-crystallin oligomer

Maximum and minimum lactate levels within 24 hours after veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation induction are risk factors for intensive care unit mortality: a retrospective observational study

Introduction: Lactate level and clearance were hypothesized to be potential prognostic factors for mortality in patients withrefractory cardiogenic shock who underwent veno-arterial (VA) extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). This study aimed to determine the prognosis of VA-ECMO patients and whether the lactate level at intensive care unit (ICU) admission(La) and at 24 h after VA-ECMO induction (L24), minimum (L24min) or maximum (L24max) lactate level within 24 h after VAECMO induction, and/or maximum lactate level after ICU admission (Lmax) could predict ICU mortality in VA-ECMO patients.Materials and Methods: This retrospective observational study included consecutive patients who underwent VA-ECMO for severe cardiogenic shock and admitted to the ICU in a hospital from April 2009 to March 2017. Risk factors for ICU mortalitywith respect to lactate levels after VA-ECMO induction were determined through multiple logistic regression analysis.Results: VA-ECMO induction was performed in 67 adult patients, of whom 23 (34.3%) survived to ICU discharge. La, L24min,L24max, and Lmax were risk factors for ICU mortality in VA-ECMO patients after adjustment for the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II score and use of continuous renal replacement therapy and refractory ventricular arrhythmia after VA-ECMO induction, which were confounding factors in univariate analysis (La: odds ratio [OR], 1.44; 95% confidence interval[CI], 1.13-2.05; L24min: OR, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.01-2.56; L24max: OR, 1.44; 95% CI, 1.11-2.02; Lmax: OR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.14-2.21).Conclusion: Lactate levels can be a therapeutic target and indicator of the need for improved patient management after VAECMO induction