Molecular cloning and characterization of a thermostable α-amylase exhibiting an unusually high activity

An α-amylase gene was cloned from the thermophilic bacterium Bacillus subtilis isolated from Indonesian oil palm shell waste. The gene expressed an extracellular enzyme. Optimal hydrolysis conditions for the enzyme were 70°C and pH 6.0. The specific activity of the enzyme was 16.0 kU per mg of protein, which was higher than for other thermostable amylases. Hydrolytic products of the enzyme using starch and glycogen were mainly maltohexaose and maltopentaose. The enzyme had a K _m value of 0.099 mg/mL for amylopectin, more than 10 times lower than for amylose. The catalytic efficiency of the enzyme using amylopectin was 39,200 mL/mg·s and was 3,270 mL/mg·s using amylose. The enzyme liquefied corn starch at pH 5.0, which was successfully converted to glucose using commercial glucoamylase and pullulanase without pH adjustment. The enzyme has advantages for industrial applications.     

Solving House Allocation Problems with Risk-Averse Agents

This paper solves the fair and optimal house allocation problem (Sun and Yang, Econ Lett 81:73–79, 2003) when the agents preferences are represented by nonlinear utility functions using techniques for global mixed integer nonlinear optimization. A small simulation study indicates that if quasi-linear specifications are adopted as approximations to nonlinear utility functions and if the fair and optimal allocation is identified based on this approximation, then the prices are typically higher on average and the resulting allocation is typically non-fair.     

Variability of the downwelling diffuse attenuation coefficient with consideration of inelastic scattering

In situ time-series measurements of spectral diffuse downwelling irradiance from the Bermuda Testbed Mooring are presented. Averaged diffuse attenuation coefficients of downwelling irradiance, Kd,and their elastic and inelastic components are investigated at seven wavelengths. At shorter wavelengths (<510 nm), Kd is weakly dependent on the solar zenith angle owing to the prevailing scattering effect and therefore can be considered a quasi-inherent optical property. At longer wavelengths (>510 nm), Kd shows a strong dependence on the solar zenith angle. As depth increases, inelastic scattering plays a greater role for the underwater light field at red wavelengths.     

Improvement of borrowing channel assignment for patterned traffic load by online cellular probabilistic self-organizing map

This paper describes an improvement of borrowing channel assignment (BCA) for patterned traffic load by using the short-term traffic prediction ability of cellular probabilistic self-organizing map (CPSOM). The fast growing cellular mobile systems demand more efficient and faster channel allocation techniques today. In case of patterned traffic load, the traditional BCA methods are not efficient to further enhance the performance because heavy-traffic cells cannot borrow channels from their neighboring cells with light or medium traffic that may have unused nominal channels. The performance can be increased if the short-term traffic load can be predicted. The predicted results can then be used for channel re-assignment. Therefore, the unused nominal channels of the light-or-medium-traffic cells can be transferred to the heavy-traffic cells that need more nominal channels. In this paper, CPSOM is used online for traffic prediction. In this sense, the proposed CPSOM-based BCA method is able to enhance the performance for patterned traffic load compared with the traditional BCA methods. Simulation results corroborate that the proposed method enables the system to work with better performance for patterned traffic load than the traditional BCA methods.     

A high energy gamma ray calibration source

A high energy gamma ray calibration source is obtained by the fast neutron irradiation of polytetrafluoride and lead.     

A simple recirculating laminar flow tank system for plant uptake studies or bioassays

A simplified, low cost water tank system is described for experiments under continuously recirculating laminar flow conditions. These conditions are suitable for studying metal uptake into aquatic plants (via leaves and/or roots) and filamentous algae. They may also be used for bioassay work with animals.     

Development and preliminary evaluation of a pediatric measure of community integration: The Pediatric Community Participation Questionnaire (PCPQ).

Objective: To develop and evaluate a new pediatric measure of community integration: the Pediatric Community Participation Questionnaire (PCPQ). Participants: 105 youths with physical disabilities. Measures: In addition to the PCPQ, demographic and disability-related questions and the Functional Disability Inventory (FDI) were administered. Results: The PCPQ demonstrated convergent validity through its high association with functional ability, discriminant validity through its ability to discriminate between ambulatory and nonambulatory participants, and excellent internal consistency. Conclusions: Community participation, an important component of positive overall development, may be particularly important for youths with physical disabilities. The findings from this study provide preliminary support for the validity and reliability of the PCPQ, supporting its use as a measure of community participation with this population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

CONTRIBUTION OF PRIOR KNOWLEDGE TO PROBABILISTIC PREDICTION OF FAMINE

The contribution of prior knowledge in prediction of change in food crop prices using ordinary linear regression (OLR) and Gaussian process (GP) based on a probabilistic approach in famine predictions was established in this study. Prior information was obtained from previous results and incorporated into a new dataset. For GP, both approaches incorporating weight-space view and function-space view were applied and results compared. The function-space view produced a more suitable model than the weight-space view and OLR. Probabilistic inference showed better famine prediction accuracy than the conventional inference approach. Addition of prior information into the prediction framework improved prediction. It is recommended that in addition to the developed model, further modeling should be carried out to include the effects of variables such as bumper harvest, availability of inexpensive alternative foodstuffs for consumption, imported foodstuffs to remedy famine, effect of neighborhood price, and cross-border trade.     

A novel feature selection method and its application

In this paper, a novel feature selection method based on rough sets and mutual information is proposed. The dependency of each feature guides the selection, and mutual information is employed to reduce the features which do not favor addition of dependency significantly. So the dependency of the subset found by our method reaches maximum with small number of features. Since our method evaluates both definitive relevance and uncertain relevance by a combined selection criterion of dependency and class-based distance metric, the feature subset is more relevant than other rough sets based methods. As a result, the subset is near optimal solution. In order to verify the contribution, eight different classification applications are employed. Our method is also employed on a real Alzheimer’s disease dataset, and finds a feature subset where classification accuracy arrives at 81.3 %. Those present results verify the contribution of our method.