The Impact of Football Games on Crime: A Routine Activity Approach

Routine activities theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979) suggests a change in people's routine activities can contribute to a change in crime rates. This thesis aims to apply routine activities theory to examine the impact of football games on crime by focusing on how a change of football fans' routine activities can affect a change in crime at the aggregate level. Using a quasi experimental design, the study paired the 76 game days with the 76 comparable non-game days. Two analytical strategies were applied, including a binomial test and a t test. The results of the study suggest that football games have some impact on crime. On average, there are small increases in burglary and auto theft and a moderate increase in car prowl (theft of auto) on a game day

Identification of hot regions in protein-protein interactions by sequential pattern mining

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Identification of protein interacting sites is an important task in computational molecular biology. As more and more protein sequences are deposited without available structural information, it is strongly desirable to predict protein binding regions by their sequences alone. This paper presents a pattern mining approach to tackle this problem. It is observed that a functional region of protein structures usually consists of several peptide segments linked with large wildcard regions. Thus, the proposed mining technology considers large irregular gaps when growing patterns, in order to find the residues that are simultaneously conserved but largely separated on the sequences. A derived pattern is called a cluster-like pattern since the discovered conserved residues are always grouped into several blocks, which each corresponds to a local conserved region on the protein sequence.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The experiments conducted in this work demonstrate that the derived long patterns automatically discover the important residues that form one or several hot regions of protein-protein interactions. The methodology is evaluated by conducting experiments on the web server MAGIIC-PRO based on a well known benchmark containing 220 protein chains from 72 distinct complexes. Among the tested 218 proteins, there are 900 sequential blocks discovered, 4.25 blocks per protein chain on average. About 92% of the derived blocks are observed to be clustered in space with at least one of the other blocks, and about 66% of the blocks are found to be near the interface of protein-protein interactions. It is summarized that for about 83% of the tested proteins, at least two interacting blocks can be discovered by this approach.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This work aims to demonstrate that the important residues associated with the interface of protein-protein interactions may be automatically discovered by sequential pattern mining. The detected regions possess high conservation and thus are considered as the computational hot regions. This information would be useful to characterizing protein sequences, predicting protein function, finding potential partners, and facilitating protein docking for drug discovery.</p

Commuting tillage operations of HRP under hydraulic cylinder movements on plough-breast performance

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BIOMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF BADMINTON DIFFERENT FORWARD STEPS

The purpose of this study was to compare the biomechanical variables between 2-step and 3-step forward steps in badminton. Eight collegiate elite male badminton players participated in this study. Eight Vicon T-20 cameras (300 Hz) were used to record the 3D kinematics data and a Kistler force plate (1500 Hz) was used to collect the GRF data of the last steps. A Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank nonparametric statistical test was conducted to compare the differences between two kinds of forward step movements. The results showed that the movement time for 3-step movement was significantly faster than 2-step. We recommend that the badminton players should practice 3-step forward footwork technique. The additional strength and power training for lower limbs should be carried out for the footwork training

On the Improvement of Wiener Attack on RSA with Small Private Exponent

RSA system is based on the hardness of the integer factorization problem (IFP). Given an RSA modulus N=pq, it is difficult to determine the prime factors p and q efficiently. One of the most famous short exponent attacks on RSA is the Wiener attack. In 1997, Verheul and van Tilborg use an exhaustive search to extend the boundary of the Wiener attack. Their result shows that the cost of exhaustive search is 2r+8 bits when extending the Weiner's boundary r bits. In this paper, we first reduce the cost of exhaustive search from 2r+8 bits to 2r+2 bits. Then, we propose a method named EPF. With EPF, the cost of exhaustive search is further reduced to 2r-6 bits when we extend Weiner's boundary r bits. It means that our result is 214 times faster than Verheul and van Tilborg's result. Besides, the security boundary is extended 7 bits

Excoecarianin, Isolated from Phyllanthus urinaria Linnea, Inhibits Herpes Simplex Virus Type 2 Infection through Inactivation of Viral Particles

Phyllanthus urinaria Linnea (Euphorbiaceae) is one of the traditional medicinal plants widely used by oriental people to treat various diseases. We have previously demonstrated that the acetone extract of P. urinaria inhibits herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) but not HSV-1 infection. In a continuing effort to clarify the antiviral mechanisms of P. urinaria, we isolated the pure compound excoecarianin from the whole plant of P. urinaria through acetone extraction, and investigated its anti-HSV-1 and HSV-2 activities. Our results indicated that excoecarianin protected Vero cells from HSV-2 but not HSV-1 infection, and its 50% inhibitory concentration (IC50) was 1.4 ± 0.1 μM. The antiviral effective concentration of excoecarianin did not affect the viability or the morphology of Vero cells. Although excoecarianin inhibited HSV-2 infection, the inhibitory effect, however, was most prominent when excoecarianin was concurrently added with the virus. Pretreatment of Vero cells with excoecarianin with removal of the drug prior to infection did not yield any antiviral effects, and the same observation was made for post viral entry treatment. Subsequent studies revealed that excoecarianin inactivated HSV-2 virus particles to prevent viral infection. A synergistic antiviral effect against HSV-2 was also observed when Vero cells were treated with a combination of acyclovir (ACV) and excoecarianin. These results suggested that excoecarianin merits to be further explored as an entry inhibitor against HSV-2 and could potentially be investigated for combinatorial drug treatment with nucleoside analogues such as ACV in therapeutic management of HSV-2 infection

Tillage condition effects on soil/plow-breast flow interaction of a horizontally reversible plow

Abstract : The horizontally reversible plow (HRP) is commonly utilized because of higher performances than the regular mold-board plow. Soil/plow surface flow interaction during HRP tillage trends to incur so severe pressure on the plow-breast as to reduce the plow life. This paper numerically characterized the soil/plow-breast flow interaction and subsequently assessed tillage-condition effects on the plow-breast surface. These tillage conditions herein involved tool speed and operation-al depth. The simulations showed that for either tool speed or operational depth the maximum pressure appeared at the plow-shank of the plow-breast and that the soil pressures were increased with them. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based predictions qualitatively agreed with the preliminary experimental results at the identified settings with scanning electronic microscopy. Once again, CFD analysis is demonstrated to be feasible and effective enough to provide insight into improve the horizontally reversible plow by predicting real soil behaviors

Influence of Socioeconomic Factors, Gender and Indigenous Status on Smoking in Taiwan.

The indigenous Austronesian minority of Taiwan is heavily affected by health disparities which may include suffering from a greater burden of the tobacco epidemic. While a lack of representative data has historically precluded an investigation of the differences in smoking between Taiwanese ethnicities, these data have recently become available through an annual population-based telephone survey conducted by the Health Promotion Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare (previously known as the Bureau of Health Promotion (BHP), Department of Health). We used the BHP monitoring data to observe the prevalence of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke exposure among indigenous and non-indigenous Taiwanese surrounding a tobacco welfare tax increase in 2006, investigate ethnic differences in smoking prevalence and environmental tobacco smoke exposure each year between 2005 and 2008, and perform multiple logistic regression to estimate measures of association between potential risk factors and smoking status. Despite significant ethnic and gender differences in smoking prevalence, smoking status was not found to be significantly associated with ethnicity after controlling for socioeconomic and demographic factors