Small tourism businesses in Pushkar, India: destination development through communication networks

This paper uses the ‘communication network’ perspective (Szarka 1990) to identify how small hospitality and tourism businesses in Pushkar, India, cope with a lack of support agency assistance in skills learning and knowledge transfer. The methodological process involves participant observation and in-depth interviews. The findings reveal the role of the employee and the visitor as primary influencers in the communication networks of the businesses. However, the visitor role has decreased since the early days of tourism, with employees being the main learning network for businesses, transferring knowledge throughout the destination by employment rotation and poaching. The paper calls for holistic small tourism business studies, which seek to understand the interconnectedness of network contributions within a locality

The carnivalesque and event evolution: a study of the Beltane Fire Festival

This paper centres on the Beltane Fire Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. The objectives are to: first, identify the stages of the festival’s evolution and their respective characteristics; second, distinguish features corresponding to the carnivalesque; and, finally, examine the changes in event evolution, particularly regulatory interventions, and their effect. A qualitative approach comprising interviews with internal and external festival stakeholders was utilised. It is argued that there are three stages in the festival’s evolution: revival and early development; development and regulation; and, maturation. The characteristics of these evolutionary stages are identified. As the festival has developed and been subject to increasing regulation, features of the carnivalesque have been reduced

Preliminary Report on the 22 December 2003, M 6.5 San Simeon, California Earthquake

The Mw 6.5 San Simeon earthquake struck the central California coast on 22 December 2003 at 19:15:56 UTC (11:15:56 am local time.) The epicenter was located 11 km northeast of the town of San Simeon, and 39 km west-northwest of Paso Robles (Figure 1), as reported by the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN, the California region of the Advanced National Seismic System [ANSS]). The mainshock nucleated at 35.702°N, 121.108°W and a depth of 7.1 km, and the rupture propagated unilaterally to the southeast. The strong directivity of the rupture resulted in a concentration of damage and aftershock..

Generation of recombinant hyperimmune globulins from diverse B-cell repertoires

Plasma-derived polyclonal antibody therapeutics, such as intravenous immunoglobulin, have multiple drawbacks, including low potency, impurities, insufficient supply and batch-to-batch variation. Here we describe a microfluidics and molecular genomics strategy for capturing diverse mammalian antibody repertoires to create recombinant multivalent hyperimmune globulins. Our method generates of diverse mixtures of thousands of recombinant antibodies, enriched for specificity and activity against therapeutic targets. Each hyperimmune globulin product comprised thousands to tens of thousands of antibodies derived from convalescent or vaccinated human donors or from immunized mice. Using this approach, we generated hyperimmune globulins with potent neutralizing activity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) in under 3 months, Fc-engineered hyperimmune globulins specific for Zika virus that lacked antibody-dependent enhancement of disease, and hyperimmune globulins specific for lung pathogens present in patients with primary immune deficiency. To address the limitations of rabbit-derived anti-thymocyte globulin, we generated a recombinant human version and demonstrated its efficacy in mice against graft-versus-host disease

A Novel Phase Variation Mechanism in the Meningococcus Driven by a Ligand-Responsive Repressor and Differential Spacing of Distal Promoter Elements

Phase variable expression, mediated by high frequency reversible changes in the length of simple sequence repeats, facilitates adaptation of bacterial populations to changing environments and is frequently important in bacterial virulence. Here we elucidate a novel phase variable mechanism for NadA, an adhesin and invasin of Neisseria meningitidis. The NadR repressor protein binds to operators flanking the phase variable tract and contributes to the differential expression levels of phase variant promoters with different numbers of repeats likely due to different spacing between operators. We show that IHF binds between these operators, and may permit looping of the promoter, allowing interaction of NadR at operators located distally or overlapping the promoter. The 4-hydroxyphenylacetic acid, a metabolite of aromatic amino acid catabolism that is secreted in saliva, induces NadA expression by inhibiting the DNA binding activity of the repressor. When induced, only minor differences are evident between NadR-independent transcription levels of promoter phase variants and are likely due to differential RNA polymerase contacts leading to altered promoter activity. Our results suggest that NadA expression is under both stochastic and tight environmental-sensing regulatory control, both mediated by the NadR repressor, and may be induced during colonization of the oropharynx where it plays a major role in the successful adhesion and invasion of the mucosa. Hence, simple sequence repeats in promoter regions may be a strategy used by host-adapted bacterial pathogens to randomly switch between expression states that may nonetheless still be induced by appropriate niche-specific signals

A competitive integration model of exogenous and endogenous eye movements

We present a model of the eye movement system in which the programming of an eye movement is the result of the competitive integration of information in the superior colliculi (SC). This brain area receives input from occipital cortex, the frontal eye fields, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, on the basis of which it computes the location of the next saccadic target. Two critical assumptions in the model are that cortical inputs are not only excitatory, but can also inhibit saccades to specific locations, and that the SC continue to influence the trajectory of a saccade while it is being executed. With these assumptions, we account for many neurophysiological and behavioral findings from eye movement research. Interactions within the saccade map are shown to account for effects of distractors on saccadic reaction time (SRT) and saccade trajectory, including the global effect and oculomotor capture. In addition, the model accounts for express saccades, the gap effect, saccadic reaction times for antisaccades, and recorded responses from neurons in the SC and frontal eye fields in these tasks. © The Author(s) 2010

Multi-level analysis of electronic health record adoption by health care professionals: A study protocol

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The electronic health record (EHR) is an important application of information and communication technologies to the healthcare sector. EHR implementation is expected to produce benefits for patients, professionals, organisations, and the population as a whole. These benefits cannot be achieved without the adoption of EHR by healthcare professionals. Nevertheless, the influence of individual and organisational factors in determining EHR adoption is still unclear. This study aims to assess the unique contribution of individual and organisational factors on EHR adoption in healthcare settings, as well as possible interrelations between these factors.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A prospective study will be conducted. A stratified random sampling method will be used to select 50 healthcare organisations in the Quebec City Health Region (Canada). At the individual level, a sample of 15 to 30 health professionals will be chosen within each organisation depending on its size. A semi-structured questionnaire will be administered to two key informants in each organisation to collect organisational data. A composite adoption score of EHR adoption will be developed based on a Delphi process and will be used as the outcome variable. Twelve to eighteen months after the first contact, depending on the pace of EHR implementation, key informants and clinicians will be contacted once again to monitor the evolution of EHR adoption. A multilevel regression model will be applied to identify the organisational and individual determinants of EHR adoption in clinical settings. Alternative analytical models would be applied if necessary.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The study will assess the contribution of organisational and individual factors, as well as their interactions, to the implementation of EHR in clinical settings.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results will be very relevant for decision makers and managers who are facing the challenge of implementing EHR in the healthcare system. In addition, this research constitutes a major contribution to the field of knowledge transfer and implementation science.</p

Big Bang nucleosynthesis and physics beyond the Standard Model

The Hubble expansion of galaxies, the 2.73\dK blackbody radiation background and the cosmic abundances of the light elements argue for a hot, dense origin of the universe --- the standard Big Bang cosmology --- and enable its evolution to be traced back fairly reliably to the nucleosynthesis era when the temperature was of \Or(1) MeV corresponding to an expansion age of \Or(1) sec. All particles, known and hypothetical, would have been created at higher temperatures in the early universe and analyses of their possible effects on the abundances of the synthesized elements enable many interesting constraints to be obtained on particle properties. These arguments have usefully complemented laboratory experiments in guiding attempts to extend physics beyond the Standard SU(3)_{\c}{\otimes}SU(2)_{\L}{\otimes}U(1)_{Y} Model, incorporating ideas such as supersymmetry, compositeness and unification. We first present a pedagogical account of relativistic cosmology and primordial nucleosynthesis, discussing both theoretical and observational aspects, and then proceed to examine such constraints in detail, in particular those pertaining to new massless particles and massive unstable particles. Finally, in a section aimed at particle physicists, we illustrate applications of such constraints to models of new physics.Comment: 156 pages LaTeX, including 18 PostScript figures; uses ioplppt.sty, epsf, and personal style file (incl.); Revised and updated to include, e.g. implications of new deuterium observations in primordial clouds; 2-up PostScript version (78 pages) available at ftp://ftp.physics.ox.ac.uk/pub/local/users/sarkar/BBNreview.ps.gz ; to appear in Reports on Progress in Physic

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead