Consistent treatment of hydrophobicity in protein lattice models accounts for cold denaturation

The hydrophobic effect stabilizes the native structure of proteins by minimizing the unfavourable interactions between hydrophobic residues and water through the formation of a hydrophobic core. Here we include the entropic and enthalpic contributions of the hydrophobic effect explicitly in an implicit solvent model. This allows us to capture two important effects: a length-scale dependence and a temperature dependence for the solvation of a hydrophobic particle. This consistent treatment of the hydrophobic effect explains cold denaturation and heat capacity measurements of solvated proteins.Comment: Added and corrected references for design procedure in main text (p. 2) and in Supplemental Information (p. 8

Where to go in the near future: diverging perspectives on online public service delivery

Although the electronic government is under heavy development, a clear vision doesn’t seem to exist. In this study 20 interviews among leaders in the field of e-government in the Netherlands resulted in different perspectives on the future of electronic public service delivery. The interviews revealed different objectives and interpretations of the presuppositions regarding citizens’ desires. Opinions about channel approaches and ‘trigger services’ appeared to vary. Furthermore, the respondents didn’t agree on the number of contact moments between citizen and government, had different opinions about digital skills, pled for various designs of the electronic government and placed the responsibility for electronic service delivery in different hands. Conclusion is that there is a lack of concepts on how to do things. Everybody talks about eGovernment, but all have different interpretations. \u

The social cognition of medical knowledge, with special reference to childhood epilepsy

This paper arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating different types of medical knowledge to their communicative context; the types of medical knowledge that are constituted in the three different text types analysed; and the relationship between these different types of medical knowledge and the discursive features of each text type. The paper argues that there is a cognitive dimension to the human experience of understanding and talking about one specialized from of medical knowledge. It recommends that texts be studied in medical communication courses not just in terms of their discrete formal features but also critically, in terms of the knowledge which they produce, transmit and reproduce

Interaction of ballistic quasiparticles and vortex configurations in superfluid He3-B

The vortex line density of turbulent superfluid He3-B at very low temperature is deduced by detecting the shadow of ballistic quasiparticles which are Andreev reflected by quantized vortices. Until now the measured total shadow has been interpreted as the sum of shadows arising from interactions of a single quasiparticle with a single vortex. By integrating numerically the quasi-classical Hamiltonian equations of motion of ballistic quasiparticles in the presence of nontrivial but relatively simple vortex systems (such as vortex-vortex and vortex-antivortex pairs and small clusters of vortices) we show that partial screening can take place, and the total shadow is not necessarily the sum of the shadows. We have also found that it is possible that, upon impinging on complex vortex configurations, quasiparticles experience multiple reflections, which can be classical, Andreev, or both.Comment: To appear in Phys Rev

ON THE EXPRESSIVE POWER OF THE RELATIONAL MODEL: A DATABASE DESIGNER\u27S POINT OF VIEW

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework for assessing the expressive power of data models and to apply this framework to the relational model of data. From a designer\u27s point of view, a data model such as the relational model should not only be formally defined and easy to understand, but should also provide a powerful set of constructs to model real-world phenomena. The expressive power of a data model, defined as the degree to which its constructs match with constructs encountered in reality, can be judged by two complementary principles: the interpretation principle and the representation principle. It is asserted that database designers attempt to minimize the number of ad hoc database constraints, and that a data model faithful to the two principles supports this design strategy. Subsequently, this constraint minimization strategy is used to assess the expressive power of a particular data model, i.e., the relational data model. The authors take the position that the expressive power of the relational model is not optimal, due to a lack of adherence to both the interpretation principle and the representation principle. The paper amplifies this position by means of a number of examples, all based on publications by Codd and Date