Kenya vote on ICC withdrawal reflects the aversion of a continent

LSE’s Christine Skrbic analyses how perceived discrimination on the part of the International Criminal Court towards Africans led Kenyan MPs to pass a motion to withdraw from the Rome Statute

The Role of Non-native Interactions in the Folding of Knotted Proteins

Stochastic simulations of coarse-grained protein models are used to investigate the propensity to form knots in early stages of protein folding. The study is carried out comparatively for two homologous carbamoyltransferases, a natively-knotted N-acetylornithine carbamoyltransferase (AOTCase) and an unknotted ornithine carbamoyltransferase (OTCase). In addition, two different sets of pairwise amino acid interactions are considered: one promoting exclusively native interactions, and the other additionally including non-native quasi-chemical and electrostatic interactions. With the former model neither protein show a propensity to form knots. With the additional non-native interactions, knotting propensity remains negligible for the natively-unknotted OTCase while for AOTCase it is much enhanced. Analysis of the trajectories suggests that the different entanglement of the two transcarbamylases follows from the tendency of the C-terminal to point away from (for OTCase) or approach and eventually thread (for AOTCase) other regions of partly-folded protein. The analysis of the OTCase/AOTCase pair clarifies that natively-knotted proteins can spontaneously knot during early folding stages and that non-native sequence-dependent interactions are important for promoting and disfavoring early knotting events.Comment: Accepted for publication on PLOS Computational Biolog

'No research is insignificant': implementing a Students-as-Researchers Festival

There are increasing demands for Higher Education (HE) students to play a role in research-active communities and, similarly, for College Based Higher Education (CBHE) lecturers to develop their research practices. A cross-consortium Student Research Festival was designed to create a collaborative 'community of discovery' (Coffield and Williamson, 2011) and enable final year students to disseminate their research studies to a wider audience. The Festival drew on current HE pedagogies to build an open communicative space in which the three dimensions of practice architecture (Kemmis et.al., 2014) were embodied. The Festival was evaluated through a Collaborative Action Research project in order to establish how the sharing of research contributed to the participants' identity as researchers. Data were analysed using the a priori categories afforded by the practice architecture framework. Valuable insights emerged into the students' conception of research, as detached from the 'real' world and belonging to the privileged few. These views were challenged by the experience of the Festival, which narrowed the gap between student and researcher and unsettled existing roles. Recommendations include widening the scope of the Festival to include other stakeholders and embedding further research building opportunities in the undergraduate curriculum

Dynamics of doped [4]He and [3]He clusters from reptation quantum Monte Carlo

In this thesis we will address these open issues in the spectroscopy of doped 4He clusters. Some of the techniques developed to this purpose will turn out to be instrumental in tackling one of the hardest problems in quantum simulation today, namely the simulation of interacting fermions. In particular, we will address the splitting of roto-vibrational lines observed in the spectra of small CO@4HeN clusters for some cluster sizes N [25], that led in turn to ambiguous assignments of experimental lines around this size range [26]. Then, we will investigate the nature of the weak satellite band, experimentally seen to accompany the roto-vibrational line in the infrared spectrum of CO2 solvated in 4He nanodroplets [27]. Further, the controversial convergence of CO effective rotational constant towards the nanodroplet limit will be discussed. Finally, we will study the effect that particle exchanges in a quantum solvent exhibit on the spectra of embedded molecules. This physical issue is particularly interesting because the NCRI manifests itself in quantum clusters already for extremely small system sizes. Experimentally, this effect was studied by Grebenev et al. [28, 29] by comparing the rotational spectra of OCS molecule solvated with para-hydrogen molecules, that are indistinguishable bosons, and ortho-deuterium molecules, an essentially distinguishable bosonic mixture. On the theoretical side, this issue was tackled by finite temperature simulations of N2O solvated with distinguishable particles [11]. In this thesis we will address it by zero-temperature simulations of doped 3He clusters. The thesis is organized as follows. Quantum Monte Carlo methods are introduced in Chapter 1, with emphasis on RQMC. In Chapter 2 we present the implementation of RQMC for doped He clusters, together with several technical details of the simulation. Chapter 3 addresses the approach of CO effective rotational constant to its nanodroplet value. In Chapter 4 we cope with fine spectral features such as line splittings in small CO@4HeN clusters and the satellite band in the infrared spectra of CO2 solvated in 4He nanodroplets. To this purpose, we introduce symmetry-adapted, imaginary-time correlation functions (SAITCFs), that are specifically devised for an explicit theoretical characterization of individual excitations, as well as for an enhanced computational efficiency in the calculation of weak spectral features. Also, we show how RQMC data help to discriminate between different assignments of experimental lines proposed for CO@4HeN clusters around the cluster size where one of the splittings is observed. In Chapter 5 we address the effect of particle statistics on the rotational spectra of 3He-solvated molecules. We introduce a new method, based on a generalization of SAITCF approach that allows us to access rotational states of systems obeying Fermi statistics, still performing RQMC simulations for bosons. We apply this method to CO2 solvated with 3He atoms. Our preliminary results indicate that a certain amount of NCRI is found also in these fermionic clusters

CUDA programs for solving the time-dependent dipolar Gross-Pitaevskii equation in an anisotropic trap

In this paper we present new versions of previously published numerical programs for solving the dipolar Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation including the contact interaction in two and three spatial dimensions in imaginary and in real time, yielding both stationary and non-stationary solutions. New versions of programs were developed using CUDA toolkit and can make use of Nvidia GPU devices. The algorithm used is the same split-step semi-implicit Crank-Nicolson method as in the previous version (R. Kishor Kumar et al., Comput. Phys. Commun. 195, 117 (2015)), which is here implemented as a series of CUDA kernels that compute the solution on the GPU. In addition, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) library used in the previous version is replaced by cuFFT library, which works on CUDA-enabled GPUs. We present speedup test results obtained using new versions of programs and demonstrate an average speedup of 12 to 25, depending on the program and input size.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; to download the programs, click other formats and download the sourc

Knowledge About Head and Neck Cancer in the Population of Vojvodina: A Comparative Study

In 2009, the Institute of Oncology of Vojvodina reported the total of 553 newly registered patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) in the Province of Vojvodina, with a lethal outcome in 332 HNC patients. These facts impose the need of investigating the health education of the general population and proposing possible prevention measures. The present prospective study included 200 subjects classified into two groups. Group I (100 subjects) consisted of randomly selected adults from urban and rural regions of Vojvodina. Group II (100 subjects) included the adults from the same regions affected by HNC. All subjects answered the anonymous questionnaire which complied with the standards of a similar European Union research project “About Face”. The results showed that 96% of the subjects from the Group II and only 77% of the subjects from the Group I were familiar with the term ’’head and neck cancer” what represented a significant difference. The results from Vojvodina were significantly better than those from the European study (23%). Most subjects were informed about HNC through television programs (60%), hospital leaflets (41%) or internet (37%). Both the patients and the citizens of Vojvodina were better informed about the most common localizations of HNC - pharynx and larynx, but less informed about other HNC localizations than the citizens of seven European countries. The citizens and the HNC patients from Vojvodina were equally well informed about some risk factors (e.g. smoking, alcoholism, aging and sun exposure) as the citizens in Europe. Both the patients and the general population of Vojvodina are mostly worried about the consequences/side effects of the applied surgical treatment. The obtained results may be a good starting point in the prevention and early detection of HNC in Vojvodina

Unapređivanje pismenog izražavanja učenika u mlađim razredima osnovne škole primenom korelacijsko-integracijskog sistema

Rad je zasnovan na teorijsko-empirijskom istraživanju načina kojima je moguće područjem književnosti unaprediti pismeno izražavanje učenika u mlađim razredima osnovne škole primenom korelacijsko-integracijskog sistema pri obradi i utvrđivanju sadržaja iz književnosti. Istražuju se načini kojima se poboljšava recepcija dela i učenici motivišu za stvaralaštvo na osnovu estetskog doživljaja koje je delo kod njih proizvelo. Rad se bavi i motivacijom i istražuje mogućnosti podsticanja učeničkog misaono–emocionalnog potencijala. Književni tekstovi se mogu sagledavati sa aspekta culture izražavanja, ili jezika, time se ostvaruju bitni programski zahtevi. Istraživanja u našoj disertaciji usmerena su na traganje za inovativnim načinima povezivanja književnosti i kulture izražavanja kako bi se bogatio leksički fond učenika, razvijala, negovala i unapredila njihova kultura pismenog izražavanja. Svi časovi u eksperimentalnim grupama realizovani su u skladu sa korelacijsko-integracijskim metodičkim sistemom u užem smislu funkcionalnim povezivanjem nastavnih područja u okviru predmeta srpski jezik i književnost. Cilj rada je da istraži, analizira i ukaže na prednosti svrsishodnog, unutarpredmetnog povezivanja sadržaja iz različitih područja srpskog jezika i književnosti u skladu sa programskim zahtevima. Doktorska disertacija se sastoji iz teorijskog dela i rezultata eksperimentalnog i empirijskog istraživanja. Teorijske hipoteze proverene su putem kauzalne metode, eksperimenta sa paralelnim grupama. Teorijski okvir istraživanja usredsređen je na sagledavanje teorijskih polazišta za definisanje ključnih pojmova istraživanja, utemeljenja metodičkih sistema i sagledavanje metodičkih pristupa obradi književnog teksta u cilju podsticanja učenika na usmeno i pismeno izražavanje. Uz teorijsku analizu, objašnjenja i prikaze date su prikladne metodičke aplikacije. Za potrebe istraživanja konstruisani su testovi pismenog izražavanja (od I do IV razreda osnovne škole), evidenciona lista sa skalom procene aktivnosti učenika na časovima i metodičke aplikacije. Na osnovu analize dobijenih rezultata uočeno je da se korelacijom i integracijom nastave književnosti i kulture izražavanja književni tekst sagledava sa više stanovišta, omogućuje se raznovrsniji pristup datoj problematici, obogaćuje se leksički fond učenika i povećava motivacija za rad na času. Ovakvim funkcionlalnim načinom pristupanja znanja i veštine se stiču sa više razumevanja, istraživački i stvaralački se prilazi književnom delu. Otkrivanjem značenja nepoznatih, ili manje poznatih leksema podstiče se kognitivno-emocionalni razvoj učenika. Putem ovakvog pristupa tekstu učenici su motivisani za dublje razumevanje književnog teksta