Authors’ Characteristic Writing Styles as Seen Through Their Use of Commas

Identifying the elements that make up an author’s characteristic writing style is one of the keys to determining the authorship or authenticity of a literary composition, The present study, which constitutes a preliminary attempt to uncover such a key, focuses on the placement of commas in sentences, a matter that has hitherto been neglected, analysing the characters that commas follow in works by four authors. It is concluded that the placement of commas differs from writer to writer and may therefore be considered one of the features that makes up an individual literary style, thus providing valuable information for verifying authenticity and speculating on questions of authorship.

     

Proposals for wastewater treatment by applying flocculating activity of cross-linked poly-gamma-glutamic acid

Cross-linked poly-gamma-glutamic acid (C-L gamma-PGA) markedly purified polluted water collected from rivers and ponds by flocculation and precipitation. This effect of C-L gamma-PGA occasionally required pretreatment with polyaluminum chloride (PAC). Components of polluted water in rivers or ponds are generally thought to be clay minerals, microorganisms and chemical compounds. In this study, the flocculating activities of C-L gamma-PGA against suspensions of bentonite, diatomaceous earth, Escherichia coli and Mycrocystis aeruginosa, and against solutions of crystal violet and bisphenol A were investigated. The mode of action of C-L gamma-PGA is thought to be based on electrostatic interaction between flocculants, C-L gamma-PGA and PAC, and the surface of polluted water components, which may lead to neutralization of the zeta-potential of those components.     

Biosynthesis of poly-gamma-glutamic acid in plants: transient expression of poly-gamma-glutamate synthetase complex in tobacco leaves

Transient expression of genes coding for the poly-gamma-glutamate (gammaPGA) synthetase system (pgs) was investigated in tobacco plants. Three genes of the pgs, pgsA, pgsB and pgsC, were separately placed under the control of the CaMV 35S promoter and introduced into tobacco leaves via Agrobacterium infection. Synthesized gammaPGA in plant tissues was detected immunologically with mouse anti-gammaPGA antiserum which specifically reacts with gammaPGA on a nitrocellulose membrane. Confirmation of gammaPGA biosynthesis in the transient expression analysis in tobacco tissue indicates that subunits of pgs complex were expressed and reassembled in a functional form.     

Effects of petrographic constituents in three Yallourn brown coal lithotypes on hydroliquefaction processes

Pale, medium-light and medium-dark lithotypes of Yallourn coal were hydrogenated with and without ZnCl₂-containing catalysts (400 °C, 9.8 MPa H₂ and 3 h). The degree of hydroliquefaction was examined petrographically. Without catalyst, the amounts of water produced can be correlated with the amounts of humodetrinite; whereas with catalyst, either humotelinite or humocollinite may contribute to coal liquefaction in addition to humodetrinite; with pale lithotypes in the presence of catalyst, three submaceral groups may be converted.     

An efficient maximum-likelihood-decoding algorithm for linear blockcodes with algebraic decoder

A new soft decoding algorithm for linear block codes is proposed. The decoding algorithm works with any algebraic decoder and its performance is strictly the same as that of maximum-likelihood-decoding (MLD). Since our decoding algorithm generates sets of different candidate codewords corresponding to the received sequence, its decoding complexity depends on the received sequence. We compare our decoding algorithm with Chase (1972) algorithm 2 and the Tanaka-Kakigahara (1983) algorithm in which a similar method for generating candidate codewords is used. Computer simulation results indicate, for some signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), that our decoding algorithm requires less average complexity than those of the other two algorithms, but the performance of ours is always superior to those of the other two