Assembly of Ordered Polystyrene Nanoparticles on Self- Assembled Monolayers

Spontaneous assembly of nanoparticles onto a surface is a promising bottom-up concept for the fabrication of new functional materials that can be used for various applications in the nanotechnology. In this paper, we describe a system based on gold/polystyrene (Au/PS) Janus particles arranged onto Au self-assembled monolayer (SAM) of 1-dodecanthiol (NDA). The micro-size Au/PS Janus particles are self-assembled onto Au surface and are dissolved into polystyrene (PS) nanoparticles. The SAM of NDA plays two different roles; it dissolves the original Au/PS Janus particles and organizes the PS nanoparticles onto the Au surface. Overall, our proposed method for the assembly of large-scale area nanoparticles can be extended for further uses in the surface science

Protein (Multi-)Location Prediction: Using Location Inter-Dependencies in a Probabilistic Framework

Knowing the location of a protein within the cell is important for understanding its function, role in biological processes, and potential use as a drug target. Much progress has been made in developing computational methods that predict single locations for proteins, assuming that proteins localize to a single location. However, it has been shown that proteins localize to multiple locations. While a few recent systems have attempted to predict multiple locations of proteins, they typically treat locations as independent or capture inter-dependencies by treating each locations-combination present in the training set as an individual location-class. We present a new method and a preliminary system we have developed that directly incorporates inter-dependencies among locations into the multiple-location-prediction process, using a collection of Bayesian network classifiers. We evaluate our system on a dataset of single- and multi-localized proteins. Our results, obtained by incorporating inter-dependencies are significantly higher than those obtained by classifiers that do not use inter-dependencies. The performance of our system on multi-localized proteins is comparable to a top performing system (YLoc+), without restricting predictions to be based only on location-combinations present in the training set.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013

Game theoretic aspects of distributed spectral coordination with application to DSL networks

In this paper we use game theoretic techniques to study the value of cooperation in distributed spectrum management problems. We show that the celebrated iterative water-filling algorithm is subject to the prisoner's dilemma and therefore can lead to severe degradation of the achievable rate region in an interference channel environment. We also provide thorough analysis of a simple two bands near-far situation where we are able to provide closed form tight bounds on the rate region of both fixed margin iterative water filling (FM-IWF) and dynamic frequency division multiplexing (DFDM) methods. This is the only case where such analytic expressions are known and all previous studies included only simulated results of the rate region. We then propose an alternative algorithm that alleviates some of the drawbacks of the IWF algorithm in near-far scenarios relevant to DSL access networks. We also provide experimental analysis based on measured DSL channels of both algorithms as well as the centralized optimum spectrum management

A Story of Collaboration: Haifa Council of Volunteer Organizations and Shatil

The present essay tells the story of a partnership between two organizations: the Haifa Council of Volunteer Organizations (CVO) and the Haifa branch of Shatil (The New Israel Fund’s Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change Organizations in Israel). They have cooperated for many years and, in the last two years, have further tightened their partnership. The first part of this essay presents a theoretical framework that serves as a basis for the case study discussed in the second part. The summary offers a number of open ended questions for further consideration and research