Acknowledgement Patterns in Research Articles: a Bibliometric Study based on Journal of Natural Rubber Research 1986-1997

Analyses the acknowledgements included in the research articles and short communications published in Journal of Natural Rubber Research (1986-1997) in respect of types, frequency of occurrence, individuals acknowledged, etc. Results indicate that 74% items contain acknowledgements; an average acknowledgement per item is 2.2; the most common type of acknowledgments relates to technical support. Peer interactive communication accounts for 44% of the total acknowledgements. The result of the study substantiates the earlier findings that a small number of individuals are highly acknowledged and the rest are acknowledged infrequently

Will mobile video become the killer application for 3G? - an empirical model for media convergence

Mobile carriers have continually rolled out 3G mobile video applications to increase their revenue and profits. The presumption is that video is superior to the already successful SMS, ringtones, and pictures, and can create greater value to users. However, recent market surveys revealed contradicting results. Motivated by this discrepancy, we propose in this paper a parsimonious model for user acceptance of mobile entertainment as digital convergence. Integrating research on Information Systems, Flow, and Media Psychology, we take a unique approach to user acceptance of digital convergence - platform migration. Our key proposition is that the interaction between media types and the platform-specific constraints is the key determinant of user evaluation. Particularly, users' involvement in the media is determined by both the entertaining time span on the original platform and the attentional constraint of the new platform. The mismatch between the two spans can result in lower level involvement, which in turn cause no or even negative user emotional responses. The model was tested with empirical data. We discuss the theoretical contributions, strategic and design implications, and future research directions derived from this theoretical framewor

A New Class of Solutions to the Strong CP Problem with a Small Two-Loop theta

We present a new class of models which produce zero theta (QCD} angle at the tree and one-loop level due to hermiticity of sub-blocks in the extended quark mass matrices. The structure can be maintained typically by non-abelian generation symmetry. Two examples are given for this class of solutions.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Acknowledgement Patterns in Research Articles: a Bibliometric Study based on Journal of Natural Rubber Research 1986-1997

Analyses the acknowledgements included in the research articles and short communications published in Journal of Natural Rubber Research (1986-1997) in respect of types, frequency of occurrence, individuals acknowledged, etc. Results indicate that 74% items contain acknowledgements; an average acknowledgement per item is 2.2; the most common type of acknowledgments relates to technical support. Peer interactive communication accounts for 44% of the total acknowledgements. The result of the study substantiates the earlier findings that a small number of individuals are highly acknowledged and the rest are acknowledged infrequently

Integrative genomic mining for enzyme function to enable engineering of a non-natural biosynthetic pathway.

The ability to biosynthetically produce chemicals beyond what is commonly found in Nature requires the discovery of novel enzyme function. Here we utilize two approaches to discover enzymes that enable specific production of longer-chain (C5-C8) alcohols from sugar. The first approach combines bioinformatics and molecular modelling to mine sequence databases, resulting in a diverse panel of enzymes capable of catalysing the targeted reaction. The median catalytic efficiency of the computationally selected enzymes is 75-fold greater than a panel of naively selected homologues. This integrative genomic mining approach establishes a unique avenue for enzyme function discovery in the rapidly expanding sequence databases. The second approach uses computational enzyme design to reprogramme specificity. Both approaches result in enzymes with >100-fold increase in specificity for the targeted reaction. When enzymes from either approach are integrated in vivo, longer-chain alcohol production increases over 10-fold and represents >95% of the total alcohol products

Initial conditions for R+εR^2 cosmology

A pure gravity cosmology based on the R+εR^2 Lagrangian is known to exhibit inflation for a wide range of initial conditions. In this paper we use the wave function from quantum cosmology to describe this inflation as a chaotic inflationary phase immediately following the quantum creation of the Universe. We evaluate, compare, and discuss the distributions over initial conditions that are fixed by the two boundary-condition proposals of Hartle and Hawking ("no boundary") and Vilenkin ("tunneling from nothing"). We find that among all classical inflationary trajectories that begin on the classical-quantum boundary, those that lead to an inflation of at least 70 e-foldings make up a fraction of ∼exp(-10^12) in the former case and ∼1-exp(-8×10^10) in the latter. Thus, in the simplest interpretation, the observable Universe would be the outcome of a rare event for the first boundary-condition proposal and a typical event for the second

Non-Additive Interactions Unlock Small-Particle Mobility in Binary Colloidal Monolayers

We examine the organization and dynamics of binary colloidal monolayers composed of micron-scale silica particles interspersed with smaller-diameter silica particles that serve as minority component impurities. These binary monolayers are prepared at the surface of ionic liquid droplets over a range of size ratios ($\sigma=0.16-0.66$) and are studied with low-dose minimally perturbative scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The high resolution of SEM imaging provides direct tracking of all particle coordinates over time, enabling a complete description of the microscopic state. In these bidisperse size mixtures, particle interactions are non-additive because interfacial pinning to the droplet surface causes the equators of differently sized particles to lie in separate planes. By varying the size ratio we control the extent of non-additivity in order to achieve phase behavior inaccessible to strictly 2D systems. Across the range of size ratios we tune the system from a mobile small-particle phase ($\sigma<0.24$), to an interstitial solid ($0.240.33$). These distinct phase regimes are classified through measurements of hexagonal ordering of the large-particle host lattice and the lattice's capacity for small-particle transport. Altogether, we explain these structural and dynamic trends by considering the combined influence of interparticle interactions and the colloidal packing geometry. Our measurements are reproduced in molecular dynamics simulations of 2D non-additive hard disks, suggesting an efficient method for describing confined systems with reduced dimensionality representations.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, also see supplementary ancillary fil

Electron Transfer Dissociation with Supplemental Activation to Differentiate Aspartic and Isoaspartic Residues in Doubly Charged Peptide Cations

Electron-transfer dissociation (ETD) with supplemental activation of the doubly charged deamidated tryptic digested peptide ions allows differentiation of isoaspartic acid and aspartic acid residues using the c + 57 or z• − 57 peaks. The diagnostic peak clearly localizes and characterizes the isoaspartic acid residue. Supplemental activation in ETD of the doubly charged peptide ions involves resonant excitation of the charge reduced precursor radical cations and leads to further dissociation, including extra backbone cleavages and secondary fragmentation. Supplemental activation is essential to obtain a high quality ETD spectrum (especially for doubly charged peptide ions) with sequence information. Unfortunately, the low-resolution of the ion trap mass spectrometer makes detection of the diagnostic peak, [M-60], for the aspartic acid residue difficult due to interference with side-chain loss from arginine and glutamic acid residues