ECONOMIC COOPERATION IN TURKISH CULTURE: PUBLIC GOODS GAMES AND LONELY ELEPHANTS

While the public good experiment has been used to analyze cooperation among various groups in Western Europe and North America, it has not been extensively used in other contexts such as Turkey. This project seeks to rectify that and explore how Turkish university students informally self govern. By employing the public good experiment among a cohort of students attending universities in Ýzmir, Turkey and Adýyaman, Turkey, we hope to quantitatively analyze the factors which lead to altruistic punishment, to antisocial punishment, and ultimately to enhanced cooperation in Turkish society.Cooperation, Free Riding, Altruism, Punishment, Trust, Experimental Economics, Public Good Experiments

The Chicago & Alton Railroad: the Only Way

Review of: The Chicago & Alton Railroad: The Only Way. Glendinning, Gene V

From Virtue to Sympathy: Perspectives in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Literature on the Disintegration of the Social Bond

In general, developments in English literature of the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century tend to place increasing attention on individual experience and greater variety in characters\u27 aims, motives, and desires. Along with this tendency, the literature reflects alterations in the conceptual understanding of benevolence and sympathy that coincide with other significant changes in perspective, particularly a shift in the general understanding of the construction of the world and society. That is, works of the earlier period reflect perspectives and values of a society motivated by similar goals and desires, while those later works tend to portray characters at odds, in limited or more extreme fashion, with the social structures or larger social, political, and economic forces. The literature also reflects a changing awareness of the relationship between the self and history. Characters or the authors\u27 personas first know themselves within a grand design of history with a universal ordering principle; later, they perceive themselves outside of history and submerging themselves in reenvisioned history or in self-history. The effect of the shifts in these larger perspectives is to undermine the essential understanding of sympathy as a shared, bonding, and redemptive experience that underlies all possibility for community. An examination of the varying notions of sympathy in works by Alexander Pope, Jane Austen, Ann Yearsley, Joanna Baillie, Ann Bannerman, Dorothy Wordsworth, and William Wordsworth from 1730 to 1816 reveals a variety of ways in which an understanding of sympathy changes: from a fully integrated and immediate virtue-based response within a functioning social structure -- that is, sympathy as idealism -- to a more self-defining reaction within the chaotic realities of individual imaginative experience. Understanding the development of and shifts in the concept of sympathy begins, however, with a review of principal statements of four moral sense philosophers of the early to mid-eighteenth century -- Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Subtle differences in the way they describe human response to the circumstances of another reflect an increasing awareness of distinctive rather than shared experience

Genetic Code Expansion in Mammalian Cells

Proteins in nature are synthesized from a conservative set of 20 canonical amino acids, limiting the chemical space of biological systems. Over the last few decades, scientists have developed methods to expand the genetic code of living organisms, introducing new, non-canonical amino acids with diverse chemistries into proteins. These methods rely on engineering of the translational machinery often importing an aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aaRS)/tRNA pair that does not cross-react with the endogenous aaRS/tRNA pairs. This approach has allowed for co-translational incorporation of a variety of non-canonical amino acids, including amino acids for photocrosslinking, biophysical probes, amino acids bearing post-translational modifications or bio-orthogonal chemical handles for protein labelling and imaging. These designer amino acids allow researchers to probe, image and control protein function in vivo with great precision and minimal perturbation. Cultured mammalian cells present an attractive model for studying human biology and disease. The first aaRS/tRNA pair used for genetic code expansion in mammalian cells was the Escherichia coli (Ec) tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (TyrRS) and Bacillus stearothermophilus (Bs) tyrosyl-tRNA (tRNATyr), however, this pair was quickly supplanted by Methanosarcina barkeri (Mb) and Methanosarcina mazei (Mm) pyrrolysyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pairs (PylRS/tRNAPyl), which are easily engineered to incorporate a wide variety of useful non-canonical amino acids. The developments in the genetic code expansion in mammalian cells have allowed researchers to study role of post-translational modifications, dissect signalling pathways, label and identify cell proteomes and identify protein-protein interactions directly in vivo. This thesis presents several key advances in, and applications of, genetic code expansion in mammalian cells. Chapter 1 introduces the relevant aspects of protein translation and summarises the progress in the field of genetic code expansion to date. Chapter 2 describes genetic encoding of phosphoserine and its non-hydrolyzable analogue in mammalian cells. The engineered phosphoseryl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pair (SepRSv1.0/tRNAv1.0CUA) derived from Methanococcus mariplaudis and Methanocaldococcus janaschii (Mj) is shown to be orthogonal in mammalian cells. Subsequently, phosphoserine incorporation into a reporter protein is optimised by engineered translation elongation factor 1 alpha, engineered eukaryotic release factor 1 and metabolic engineering of the mammalian cell line. Overall this approach achieves an order of magnitude improvement in protein yield over unoptimised system. Incorporation of non-hydrolysable phosphonate analogue of phosphoserine in an engineered cell line is subsequently demonstrated and used for synthetic activation of a protein kinase. Chapter 3 describes two methodological advances in the use of genetic code expansion for protein imaging. Firstly, we demonstrate the use of genetic code expansion for super-resolution microscopy. Secondly, we identify aberrantly extended endogenous proteins ending with the amber stop codon as a source of non-specific labelling. We then proceed to minimise this background by optimisation of the labelling protocol and use the resulting protocol for live-cell imaging of a recently discovered microprotein. Chapter 4 experimentally demonstrates the orthogonality of a recently discovered PylRS/tRNAPyl pair from Methanomethylophilus alvus (Ma) in mammalian cells. We further demonstrate that this pair is mutually orthogonal to the widely used MmPylRS/tRNAPyl pair, establishing a new, orthogonal pair for genetic code expansion in mammalian cells. The two pairs are used to site-specifically direct two distinct amino acids into a reporter protein

The Tootin\u27 Louie: A History of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway

Review of: The Tootin\u27 Louie: A History of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway, by Don L. Hofsommer

The Chicago & Alton Railroad: the Only Way

Review of: The Chicago & Alton Railroad: The Only Way. Glendinning, Gene V