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Selected AbstractsThe cyclic GMP-protein kinase G pathway regulates cytoskeleton dynamics and motility in astrocytesJOURNAL OF NEUROCHEMISTRY, Issue 1 2007Mariela Susana Borán Abstract We have previously demonstrated that inflammatory compounds that increase nitric oxide (NO) synthase expression have a biphasic effect on the level of the NO messenger cGMP in astrocytes. In this work, we demonstrate that NO-dependent cGMP formation is involved in the morphological change induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in cultured rat cerebellar astroglia. In agreement with this, dibutyryl-cGMP, a permeable cGMP analogue, and atrial natriuretic peptide, a ligand for particulate guanylyl cyclase, are both able to induce process elongation and branching in astrocytes resulting from a rapid, reversible and concentration-dependent redistribution of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) and actin filaments without significant change in protein levels. These effects are also observed in astrocytes co-cultured with neurons. The cytoskeleton rearrangement induced by cGMP is prevented by the specific protein kinase G inhibitor Rp-8Br-PET-cGMPS and involves downstream inhibition of RhoA GTPase since is not observed in cells transfected with constitutively active RhoA. Furthermore, dibutyryl-cGMP prevents RhoA-membrane association, a step necessary for its interaction with effectors. Stimulation of the cGMP-protein kinase G pathway also leads to increased astrocyte migration in an in vitro scratch-wound assay resulting in accelerated wound closure, as seen in reactive gliosis following brain injury. These results indicate that cGMP-mediated pathways may regulate physio-pathologically relevant responses in astroglial cells. [source] Beyond the Corporate SphereDESIGN MANAGEMENT REVIEW, Issue 1 2000Roger Sametz MUCH OF THE thinking and best practices related to branding and design in the corporate realm are of great value in the not-for-profit sector,particularly academia. Roger Sametz reframes fundamental branding strategies to better fit the academic culture, details the steps necessary to build a strong brand in this context, and shares examples of work Sametz Blackstone has done for several institutions. [source] Pro-War and Prothalamion: Queen, Colony, and Somatic Metaphor Among Spenser's "Knights of the Maidenhead"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2007Benjamin P. Myers This essay charts the points of contact - or more precisely the "overlay" - between Spenser's gender ethics, his experience of the Irish landscape, and his singular reception of the Petrarchan literary heritage. Spenser portrays the Queen as Petrarchan lover against the background of a male-driven conquest of the feminized landscape, a juxtaposition in which the love-frowardness of the Petrarchan lady is translated into the frowardness of a queen hesitant to take the expensive and potentially devastating steps necessary for the expansion of her empire. Spenser uses the traditional metaphor of the land as female body to link colonial approaches to land with staunchly Protestant conceptions of marriage, working a double sense of "husbandry" to criticize the Queen for her restraint in supporting the Irish project. In an act of colonial poetic production unmatched in its era, the Faerie Queene presents a system of similitudes centering on the female body, the land, and literary history in which each term is a means of morally interpreting the remaining two. To grasp the full weight behind the colonial politics and the gender politics of the Faerie Queene one must attempt to read these three terms, often interpreted independently, as a carefully constructed nexus of meaning. To do so is to read the poem reading itself. [source] The Political Economy of AIDS Treatment: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Generic SupplyINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2007Kenneth C. Shadlen This article examines the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and public health, with a focus on the extension of AIDS treatment in the developing world. While most of the literature on IP and health examines the conditions affecting poor countries' capacities to acquire essential medicines, I show the distinct,and more complicated,political economy of production and supply. IP regulations alter the structure of generic pharmaceutical sectors in the countries capable of supplying essential medicines, and changes in market structure affect actors' economic and political interests and capacities. These new constellations of interests and capacities have profound implications for the creation and maintenance of political coalitions in support of on-going drug supply. The result is that the global AIDS treatment campaign becomes marked by mismatches of interests and capacities: those actors capable of taking the economic, legal, and political steps necessary to increase the supply and availability of essential drugs have diminished interest in doing so, and those actors with an interest in expanding treatment may lack the capacities to address the problem of undersupply. By focusing centrally on actors' interests in and capacities for economic and political action, the article restores political economy to analysis of an issue-area that has been dominated by attention to international law. And by examining the fragility of the coalitions supporting the production and supply of generic drugs, the article points to the limits of transnational activist networks as enduring agents of change. [source] Wavelength selection with Tabu SearchJOURNAL OF CHEMOMETRICS, Issue 8-9 2003J. A. Hageman Abstract This paper introduces Tabu Search in analytical chemistry by applying it to wavelength selection. Tabu Search is a deterministic global optimization technique loosely based on concepts from artificial intelligence. Wavelength selection is a method which can be used for improving the quality of calibration models. Tabu Search uses basic, problem-specific operators to explore a search space, and memory to keep track of parts already visited. Several implementational aspects of wavelength selection with Tabu Search will be discussed. Two ways of memorizing the search space are investigated: storing the actual solutions and storing the steps necessary to create them. Parameters associated with Tabu Search are configured with a Plackett,Burman design. In addition, two extension schemes for Tabu Search, intensification and diversification, have been implemented and are applied with good results. Eventually, two implementations of wavelength selection with Tabu Search are tested, one which searches for a solution with a constant number of wavelengths and one with a variable number of wavelengths. Both implementations are compared with results obtained by wavelength selection methods based on simulated annealing (SA) and genetic algorithms (GAs). It is demonstrated with three real-world data sets that Tabu Search performs equally well as and can be a valuable alternative to SA and GAs. The improvements in predictive abilities increased by a factor of 20 for data set 1 and by a factor of 2 for data sets 2 and 3. In addition, when the number of wavelengths in a solution is variable, measurements on the coverage of the search space show that the coverage is usually higher for Tabu Search compared with SA and GAs. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Survey of the year 2000 commercial optical biosensor literatureJOURNAL OF MOLECULAR RECOGNITION, Issue 5 2001Rebecca L. Rich Abstract We have compiled a comprehensive list of the articles published in the year 2000 that describe work employing commercial optical biosensors. Selected reviews of interest for the general biosensor user are highlighted. Emerging applications in areas of drug discovery, clinical support, food and environment monitoring, and cell membrane biology are emphasized. In addition, the experimental design and data processing steps necessary to achieve high-quality biosensor data are described and examples of well-performed kinetic analysis are provided. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Fellowship in the American Academy of Nurse PractitionersJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF NURSE PRACTITIONERS, Issue 11 2009FAANP UMC Health System Endowed Chair for Patient Safety, FNP-BC, Professor, Rodney W. Hicks PhD Abstract The purpose of this column is to describe the process of application and selection for fellowship in the Fellows of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (FAANP). Fellows are invited and selected based on their accomplishments in four priority areas: research, practice, education, and policy. Based on the 10-year history of the FAANP, current members provide guidance for potential applicants on the steps necessary for making a successful application. [source] Non-Fourier-encoded parallel MRI using multiple receiver coilsMAGNETIC RESONANCE IN MEDICINE, Issue 2 2004Dimitris Mitsouras Abstract This paper describes a general theoretical framework that combines non-Fourier (NF) spatially-encoded MRI with multichannel acquisition parallel MRI. The two spatial-encoding mechanisms are physically and analytically separable, which allows NF encoding to be expressed as complementary to the inherent encoding imposed by RF receiver coil sensitivities. Consequently, the number of NF spatial-encoding steps necessary to fully encode an FOV is reduced. Furthermore, by casting the FOV reduction of parallel imaging techniques as a dimensionality reduction of the k -space that is NF-encoded, one can obtain a speed-up of each digital NF spatial excitation in addition to accelerated imaging. Images acquired at speed-up factors of 2× to 8× with a four-element RF receiver coil array demonstrate the utility of this framework and the efficiency afforded by it. Magn Reson Med 52:321,328, 2004. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Application of LQ modelling and optimization in urban traffic controlOPTIMAL CONTROL APPLICATIONS AND METHODS, Issue 6 2003Majura F. Selekwa Abstract The increasing congestion on urban streets demands traffic control signal timing to be well co-ordinated and optimized even during the transition between timing patterns used in different periods of time-of-day (TOD). The TOD timing plans, defined by fixed-time co-ordination parameters, need to change from one TOD period to another. The current methods used in transitioning are aimed at achieving quick transition rather than optimizing traffic flow during the transition period. As a result, they generally cause increased vehicle delays during the transition period particularly for vehicles on the minor street, which face lengthened red times. This paper proposes a quadratic optimization method that can be used to reduce disutility measures to motorists during the transition period. The transition is modeled as a linear dynamic process, and the disutility measures are modeled as the sum of squares of the deviations of the co-ordination parameters,that is, cycle length, phase split, and offset,from the optimal values during the transition. A linear quadratic (LQ) optimization technique of optimal control is used to determine the step size and the number of steps necessary to complete the transition with minimum disutility. The proposed transition period optimization method has the advantage that the user need not specify minimum and maximum cycle length to achieve optimization, as is the case with current methods. Simulation results for three co-ordinated intersections showed that the proposed method reduces total vehicle delay when compared to the ,immediate' transition method embedded in CORSIM traffic simulation software. This is due to the fact that vehicles on the minor street approaches get proportional green time without significantly affecting green times on the major street approach green phase. However, the method showed a slight increase in total delay for vehicles on the major street. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Steps toward the ripening of relationship sciencePERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS, Issue 1 2007HARRY T. REIS Recent decades have seen remarkable growth in research and theorizing about relationships. E. Berscheid (1999) invigorated this growth by proclaiming "The Greening of Relationship Science," the emergence of a multidisciplinary science of interpersonal relationships with enormous potential to advance knowledge about human behavior and to provide an empirically informed framework for improving the human condition. Here I discuss several steps necessary to move the field from a green science toward a more mature, ripened one, including the need to be action oriented but in a theory-building way, to become more cumulative and collective, and to develop an integrated network of theories, constructs, and their observable manifestations. Perceived partner responsiveness is one possible central organizing theme for the diverse phenomena relationship scientists study. [source] Assimilation of satellite-derived soil moisture from ASCAT in a limited-area NWP modelTHE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY, Issue 648 2010Jean-François Mahfouf Abstract A simplified Extended Kalman Filter is developed for the assimilation of satellite-derived surface soil moisture from the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) instrument (on board the polar-orbiting satellite METOP) in a limited-area NWP model where soil water vertical transfers are described by a force,restore method. An analytic formulation of the land surface scheme Jacobians is derived to simplify the coupling between land surface and atmospheric data assimilation systems. Various steps necessary before the assimilation of ASCAT products are defined: projection of satellite data on the model grid, screening based on various criteria, bias correction using a CDF matching technique, and specification of model and observation errors. Three-dimensional variational data assimilation experiments are then performed during a four-week period in May 2009 over western Europe. A control assimilation is also run where the soil moisture evolves freely. Forecasts from these analyses show that the assimilation of ASCAT data slightly reduces the daytime low-level relative humidity positive bias of the control run. Forecast skill scores with respect to other variables are rather neutral. A comparison of the control run with the operational system where soil moisture is corrected from short-range forecast errors of screen-level observations show similar improvements but are more pronounced. These differences come from the fact that the number of screen-level observations from the surface network over Europe is significantly larger than those provided by a polar-orbiting satellite. These results are consistent with those obtained at ECMWF using soil moisture products derived from other satellite instruments (X-band radiometer TMI and C-band scatterometer ERS). Several avenues for improving this preliminary methodology are proposed. Copyright © 2010 Royal Meteorological Society [source] The ins and outs of HIV replicationCELLULAR MICROBIOLOGY, Issue 5 2005Candace Gomez Summary The life cycle of HIV-1 involves a series of steps necessary for the successful infection of human target cells. First the RNA genome enters the cytoplasm after the fusion of the viral membrane and that of the target cell. The RNA genome is then converted to DNA form through the process of reverse transcription. The DNA genome is then integrated into the host cell DNA. Next, viral proteins and more copies of the viral genome are produced. These components assemble to form new virions that are then able to propagate. The cellular proteins involved in HIV-1 entry have been known for more than a decade now and the study of the cellular and viral components involved in HIV-1 entry has led to the development of many therapeutic strategies and drugs designed to block viral replication. Recently, there have been significant advances in the understanding of HIV-1 assembly as a consequence of the identification of the cellular factors that mediate this process. This review will provide a basic outline of the current understanding of HIV-1 entry and exit. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||