The impact of Felsenstein's “Phylogenies and the comparative method” on evolutionary biology

Summary Programs in global environmental change research call for sweeping international cooperation and the creation of global networks. This paper analyzes to what extent research institutions in the field of global environmental change have responded to this call. Several bibliometric indicators of internationalization are discussed. A German and a U.S. sample are compared. The results indicate that a very discernable trend of recent internationalization can be observed. This is in line with a general internationalization trend across all fields, but at a much higher level. Given the political emphasis on capacity building in developing countries in this research field, however, there is only weak evidence of a more encompassing globalization process which also includes marginal world regions. Finally, the internationalization trend does not coincide with de-nationalization.     

DETERMINATION OF β-GLUCAN IN WORT AND BEER BY ITS BINDING WITH CALCOFLUOR,USING A FLUORIMETRIC FLOW-INJECTION-ANALYSIS (FIA) METHOD

The FIA-fluorimetric methods for the determination of β-glucan in worts and beers have been investigated, modified and improved. Fluorescence is excited by using a mercury lamp and a 338 nm band-pass excitation filter, and detected using a 425 nm long-pass emission filter. It has been found that an increase of the ionic strength of the eluent, up to a maxium of 1% Sodium Chloride, increases the range of β-glucan molecular weights effectively bound by Calcofluor. The influence of the low molecular weight components of wort and beer: dextrins, aminoacids, etc, has been studied and found that their effect is negligible. The interference of wort and beer colour on the measurement of β-glucan has been quantified and several approaches are given to overcome it. Thirty-six European beers have been analyzed for β-glucan content. The possible detection of the addition of exogenous β-glucanases to wort and beer is discussed.     

Transition to adulthood as a parent-youth project: Governance transfer, career promotion, and relational processes.

This study determined how youth (ages 17-21) and their parents jointly constructed and acted on goals and strategies pertinent to the transition to adulthood. Twenty parent-youth dyads were followed over an 8-month period using the qualitative action-project method. Data included their joint conversations, video recall of internal processes, self-monitoring logs, and researcher telephone monitoring. Detailed and repeated analysis of elements, functional steps, and goals resulted in the identification of an explicit joint project for each dyad that the participants saw as pertinent to the transition to adulthood. These projects referred broadly to the youth development of identity and social inclusion in the adult world and included the specific projects of career promotion, governance transfer, and parent-youth relational processes. The findings illustrate the complexity of the transition-to-adulthood process as well as its joint construction by parent and youth. Implications for practice include identifying and following the joint parent-youth transition project. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Timing error estimation for baseband multicarrier modulation

In this paper, the topic of timing error estimation for baseband discrete multitone modulation is addressed in the context of high‐speed digital subscriber line applications. To the authors' best knowledge, this problem is sparsely and not in depth treated in the literature. In this study the modified Cramer–Rao lower bound is derived, two conventional estimators are considered and a new one is proposed. Behavior of these estimators is evaluated in terms of bias, variance and computational complexity in a wide variety of scenarios, concluding that the proposed estimator appears to be superior in all instances. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Salting-out in Aqueous Solutions of Ionic Liquids and K3PO4: Aqueous Biphasic Systems and Salt Precipitation

The salting-out effect produced by the addition of potassium phosphate, K₃PO₄ to aqueous solutions of water-miscible ionic liquids, viz. 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethyl sulfate, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium methyl sulfate, or 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride (alkyl = butyl, octyl or decyl) is investigated. The effects are analyzed using both the corresponding temperature–composition pseudo-binary and composition ternary phase diagrams. Different regions of liquid-liquid and solid-liquid phase demixing are mapped. The phase behavior is interpreted taking into account the complex and competing nature of the interactions between the ionic liquid, the inorganic salt and water. In the case of solutions containing 1-octyl- or 1-decyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride, the smaller magnitude of the salting-out effects is explained in terms of the possibility of self-aggregation of the ionic liquid.     

Surface copper enrichment by reduction of copper chromite catalyst employed for carbon monoxide oxidation

The effect of prereduction on CO oxidation activity of unsupported copper-chromite oxide catalysts was examined. Results were found to be in good agreement with two mechanisms for a surface copper enrichment due to CO prereduction which produced an activity increase in the copper-chromite catalyst.     

Affine-permutation invariance of 2-D shapes.

Shapes provide a rich set of clues on the identity and topological properties of an object. In many imaging environments, however, the same object appears to have different shapes due to distortions such as translation, rotation, reflection, scaling, or skewing. Further, the order by which the object's feature points are scanned changes, i.e., the order of the pixels may be permuted. Relating two-dimensional shapes of the same object distorted by different affine and permutation transformations is a challenge. We introduce a shape invariant that we refer to as the intrinsic shape of an object and describe an algorithm, BLAISER, to recover it. The intrinsic shape is invariant to affine-permutation distortions. It is a uniquely defined representative of the equivalence class of all affine-permutation distortions of the same object. BLAISER computes the intrinsic shape from any arbitrarily affine-permutation distorted image of the object, without prior knowledge regarding the distortions or the undistorted shape of the object. The critical step of BLAISER is the determination of the shape orientation and we provide a detailed discussion on this topic. The operations of BLAISER are based on low-order moments of the input shape and, thus, robust to error and noise. Examples illustrate the performance of the algorithm.     

Electrochemical and morphological characterization of poly(12-pyrrol-1′-yl dodecanoic acid)

12-Pyrrol-1′-yl dodecanoic acid was prepared and electrochemically polymerized on ITO electrodes by three different methods. The electrochemical and morphological properties of poly(12-pyrrol-1′-yl dodecanoic acid) films were investigated by cyclic voltammetry, galvanostatic charge–discharge curves and AFM, which characteristics varied as function of deposition method. Films deposited by potentiodynamic and galvanostatic methods showed capacitive properties and are promising for application in polymeric capacitors.