Comparative modelling of the kinase IKK-beta and prediction of inhibitors

Peer reviewe

The power of affective touch within social robotics

There have been many leaps and bounds within social robotics, especially within human-robot interaction and how to make it a more meaningful relationship. This is traditionally accomplished through communicating via vision and sound. It has been shown that humans naturally seek interaction through touch yet the implications on emotions is unknown both in human-human interaction and social human-robot interaction. This thesis unpacks the social robotics community and the research undertaken to show a significant gap in the use of touch as a form of communication. The meaning behind touch will be investigated and what implication it has on emotions. A simplistic prototype was developed focusing on texture and breathing. This was used to carry out experiments to find out which combination of texture and movement felt natural. This proved to be a combination of synthetic fur and 14 breaths per minute. For human’s touch is said to be the most natural way of communicating emotions, this is the first step in achieving successful human-robot interaction in a more natural human-like way

Apparent competition drives community-wide parasitism rates and changes in host abundance across ecosystem boundaries

Species have strong indirect effects on others, and predicting these effects is a central challenge in ecology. Prey species sharing an enemy (predator or parasitoid) can be linked by apparent competition, but it is unknown whether this process is strong enough to be a community-wide structuring mechanism that could be used to predict future states of diverse food webs. Whether species abundances are spatially coupled by enemy movement across different habitats is also untested. Here, using a field experiment, we show that predicted apparent competitive effects between species, mediated via shared parasitoids, can significantly explain future parasitism rates and herbivore abundances. These predictions are successful even across edges between natural and managed forests, following experimental reduction of herbivore densities by aerial spraying over 20ha. This result shows that trophic indirect effects propagate across networks and habitats in important, predictable ways, with implications for landscape planning, invasion biology and biological control

Vehicle Detection for Traffic Flow Analysis

Soodamani, R & Varsani, V (2016), Vehicle Detection for Traffic Flow Analysis, ICCST2016, Paper presented at the IEEE International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology, 24-27 October 2016, Orlando, Florida. This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. The Version of Record, published in Security Technology (ICCST), 2016 is available online at IEEE Xplore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7815693, doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/CCST.2016.7815693. © IEEE 2016.This paper looks at some of the algorithms that can be used for effective detection and tracking of vehicles, in particular for statistical analysis. The main methods for tracking discussed and implemented are blob analysis, optical flow and foreground detection. A further analysis is also done testing two of the techniques using a number of video sequences that include different levels of difficulties.Final Accepted Versio

Characterization of sodium alginate extracted from brown seaweeds growing on Veraval coast, Gujarat

Marine environment is a major potential source of functional materials, including polysaccharides, vitamins, enzymes, oils, antioxidants and peptides. All these materials are extracted from different marine living organisms including microbes, plants and animals. Among these seaweeds or marine macroalgae are one of the important sources and they are a part of staple diet from time immemorial in the orient as they are nutritionally rich materials. Those species that adapted to these pressures will expand their living boundaries and higher potential of row material availability in industry like pharmaceutical market, textile, fertilizer and for animal and human consumption. The present study concerns about the specific brown seaweeds, which is suitable material for alginate and growing abundantly at seacoast of Gujarat. Out of many species of seaweeds growing on the coastline of Veraval, four species viz., Sargassum tenerrimum, Dictyota dichotoma, Spathoglossum asperum, Iyengaria stellata were selected for alginate extraction. The focus of this study is to utilize natural resources as alternatives and sustainability of human health to use sodium alginate as novel polymer and which is also biodegradable. It may be associated to other biologically active molecules and has a wide range of physicochemical and biochemical properties. Because of amazing properties, alginate and its salts are used in drug delivery system

Altering Plant Defenses: Herbivore-Associated Molecular Patterns and Effector Arsenal of Chewing Herbivores

Chewing herbivores, such as caterpillars and beetles, while feeding on the host plant, cause extensive tissue damage and release a wide array of cues to alter plant defenses. Consequently, the cues can have both beneficial and detrimental impacts on the chewing herbivores. Herbivore-associated molecular patterns (HAMPs) are molecules produced by herbivorous insects that aid them to elicit plant defenses leading to impairment of insect growth, while effectors suppress plant defenses and contribute to increased susceptibility to subsequent feeding by chewing herbivores. Besides secretions that originate from glands (e.g., saliva) and fore- and midgut regions (e.g., oral secretions) of chewing herbivores, recent studies have shown that insect frass and herbivore-associated endosymbionts also play a critical role in modulating plant defenses. In this review, we provide an update on a growing body of literature that discusses the chewing insect HAMPs and effectors and the mechanisms by which they modulate host defenses. Novel “omic” approaches and availability of new tools will help researchers to move forward this discipline by identifying and characterizing novel insect HAMPs and effectors and how these herbivore-associated cues are perceived by host plant receptors

#fitspo or #loveyourself? The impact of fitspiration and self-compassion Instagram images on women's body image, self-compassion, and mood

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd This study experimentally examined the impact of exposure to fitspiration images and self-compassion quotes on social media on young women's body satisfaction, body appreciation, self-compassion, and negative mood. Female undergraduate students (N=160) were randomly assigned to view either Instagram images of fitspiration, self-compassion quotes, a combination of both, or appearance-neutral images. Results showed no differences between viewing fitspiration images compared to viewing neutral images, except for poorer self-compassion among those who viewed fitspiration images. However, women who viewed self-compassion quotes showed greater body satisfaction, body appreciation, self-compassion, and reduced negative mood compared to women who viewed neutral images. Further, viewing a combination of fitspiration images and self-compassion quotes led to positive outcomes compared to viewing only fitspiration images. Trait levels of thin-ideal internalisation moderated some effects. The findings suggest that self-compassion might offer a novel avenue for attenuating the negative impact of social media on women's body satisfaction

SDT: a virus classification tool based on pairwise sequence alignment and identity calculation

The perpetually increasing rate at which viral full-genome sequences are being determined is creating a pressing demand for computational tools that will aid the objective classification of these genome sequences. Taxonomic classification approaches that are based on pairwise genetic identity measures are potentially highly automatable and are progressively gaining favour with the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). There are, however, various issues with the calculation of such measures that could potentially undermine the accuracy and consistency with which they can be applied to virus classification. Firstly, pairwise sequence identities computed based on multiple sequence alignments rather than on multiple independent pairwise alignments can lead to the deflation of identity scores with increasing dataset sizes. Also, when gap-characters need to be introduced during sequence alignments to account for insertions and deletions, methodological variations in the way that these characters are introduced and handled during pairwise genetic identity calculations can cause high degrees of inconsistency in the way that different methods classify the same sets of sequences. Here we present Sequence Demarcation Tool (SDT), a free user-friendly computer program that aims to provide a robust and highly reproducible means of objectively using pairwise genetic identity calculations to classify any set of nucleotide or amino acid sequences. SDT can produce publication quality pairwise identity plots and colour-coded distance matrices to further aid the classification of sequences according to ICTV approved taxonomic demarcation criteria. Besides a graphical interface version of the program for Windows computers, command-line versions of the program are available for a variety of different operating systems (including a parallel version for cluster computing platforms)

View from the small chair: clients talk about their experiences of therapy

Relatively little research has been carried out into experiences of clients in therapy and/or counselling. There is even less regarding the understandings of experiences perceived as negative by the clients of therapy. Consequently, the purpose of the present research was to examine the experiences of clients that have experienced dissatisfaction in their encounter of psychotherapy. This is done by investigating the experiences and conceptualisations of nine participants who self-reported as having had a negative experience of their treatment. A grounded theory is applied in the research process resulting in three categories (client expectations; feeling unheard and the delicate dance of power) and five subcategories (safety within these four walls, alternative interpretations; same destination; view from the small chair and letting go) that contributed to participants labelling their experience as negative. The implications of these findings towards the best practise are discussed