The impact of emotional ‘affect’ on municipal budget transparency in South Africa: a randomised control trial using PAIA requests

This paper aims to assess the effectiveness and transparency outcomes of an access to information mechanism in South Africa enshrined in the Protection of Access to in Information (PAIA) Act of 2000. A randomized control trial is conducted to assess whether emotional influences known as ‘affect’ in PAIA requests can improve the transparency outcomes of the request process. The hypothesis that aggressive requests can achieve more transparent outcomes is supported by the data, with response times to requests being 3.6 days shorter on average in the treatment group relative to the control group. However, aggression in requests has a weak effect in terms improving other transparency outcomes. The robustness of the outcomes is limited by low response rates overall leading to limited measurable statistical significance. The social implication suggested by the results is that the PAIA request mechanism is often ineffective in achieving increased transparency, and is subject to manipulation

Carving difficulties and perinatal death in daughter groups of bulls of the mry breed

International audienc

Development of a selection system for the detection of L-ribose isomerase expressing mutants of Escherichia coli

L-Arabinose isomerase (E.C. 5.3.1.14) catalyzes the reversible isomerization between L-arabinose and L-ribulose and is highly selective towards L-arabinose. By using a directed evolution approach, enzyme variants with altered substrate specificity were created and screened in this research. More specifically, the screening was directed towards the identification of isomerase mutants with L-ribose isomerizing activity. Random mutagenesis was performed on the Escherichia coli L-arabinose isomerase gene (araA) by error-prone polymerase chain reaction to construct a mutant library. To enable screening of this library, a selection host was first constructed in which the mutant genes were transformed. In this selection host, the genes encoding for L-ribulokinase and L-ribulose-5-phosphate-4-epimerase were brought to constitutive expression and the gene encoding for the native L-arabinose isomerase was knocked out. L-Ribulokinase and L-ribulose-5-phosphate-4-epimerase are necessary to ensure the channeling of the formed product, L-ribulose, to the pentose phosphate pathway. Hence, the mutant clones could be screened on a minimal medium with L-ribose as the sole carbon source. Through the screening, two first-generation mutants were isolated, which expressed a small amount of L-ribose isomerase activity

Clinical infections and nonsurgical treatment of parapharyngeal space infections complicating throat infection

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Emoto - visualising the online response to London 2012.

In recent years we have moved from data scarcity to data abundance. As a response, a variety of methods have been adopted in art, design, business, science and government to understand and communicate meaning in data through visual form. emoto (emoto2012.org) is one such project, it visualised the online audience response to a major global event, the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. emoto set out to both give expression to and augment online social phenomena, that are emergent and only recently made possible by access to huge real-time data streams. This report charts the development and release of the project, and positions it in relation to current debates on data and visualisation, for example, around the bias and accessibility of the data, and how knowledge practices are changing in an era of so-called 'big data.