Inversin, a novel gene in the vertebrate left-right axis pathway, is partially deleted in the inv mouse

A DNA fragment containing the recA gene of Gluconobacter oxydans was isolated and further characterized for its nucleotide sequence and ability to functionally complement various recA mutations. When expressed in an Escherichia coli recA host, the G. oxydans recA protein could efficiently function in homologous recombination and DNA damage repair. The recA gene's nucleotide sequence analysis revealed a protein of 344 amino acids with a molecular mass of 38 kDa. We observed an E. coli-like LexA repressor-binding site in the G. oxydans recA gene promoter region, suggesting that a LexA-like mediated response system may exist in G. oxydans. The expression of G. oxydans recA in E. coli RR1, a recA+ strain, surprisingly caused a remarkable reduction of the host wild-type recA gene function, whereas the expression of both Serratia marcescens recA and Pseudomonas aeruginosa recA gene caused only a slight inhibitory effect on function of the host wild-type recA gene product. Compared with the E. coli RecA protein, the identity of the amino acid sequence of G. oxydans RecA protein is much lower than those RecA proteins of both S. marcescens and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This result suggests that the expression of another wild-type RecA could interfere with host wild-type recA gene's function, and the extent of such an interference is possibly correlated to the identity of the amino acid sequence between the two classes of RecA protein.     

A custom ink‐jet printing system using a novel pretreatment method

A low‐cost and environmental‐friendly direct dye‐based ink‐jet printing system was developed. A novel ink‐jet pretreatment method was employed, in which the cationic fixing agent, Matexil FC‐ER, was applied as the colourless fixing ink and applied only on image areas of the fabric by ink‐jet printer. It was found that this new pretreatment method could more effectively enhance the colour strength and improve the wash fastness (greyscale ≥ 3) when compared with traditional exhaust application. The cross‐staining of non‐image areas of fabric was also apparently decreased using this new method. The light fastness of ink‐jet pretreated samples was slightly reduced as the presence of Matexil FC‐ER made dyes more sensitive to light.     

Variational learning from implicit bandit feedback

Machine Learning - Recommendations are prevalent in Web applications (e.g., search ranking, item recommendation, advertisement placement). Learning from bandit feedback is challenging due to the...     

Biomimetic Approach for the Production of 3D Woven Spherical Composite Applied in Apparel Protection and Performance

Applied Composite Materials - Current sports bras are typically manufactured via a cut and sew process resulting in a high volume of post-production material waste. Seams derived from this cut and...     

Learning via human feedback in continuous state and action spaces

This paper considers the problem of extending Training an Agent Manually via Evaluative Reinforcement (TAMER) in continuous state and action spaces. Investigative research using the TAMER framework enables a non-technical human to train an agent through a natural form of human feedback (negative or positive). The advantages of TAMER have been shown on tasks of training agents by only human feedback or combining human feedback with environment rewards. However, these methods are originally designed for discrete state-action, or continuous state-discrete action problems. This paper proposes an extension of TAMER to allow both continuous states and actions, called ACTAMER. The new framework utilizes any general function approximation of a human trainer’s feedback signal. Moreover, a combined capability of ACTAMER and reinforcement learning is also investigated and evaluated. The combination of human feedback and reinforcement learning is studied in both settings: sequential and simultaneous. Our experimental results demonstrate the proposed method successfully allowing a human to train an agent in two continuous state-action domains: Mountain Car and Cart-pole (balancing).     

Performance Analysis of Smart Relaying with Equal Gain Combining

Relaying communications has been proposed as a way to provide spatial diversity. In general, one is interested in a relaying system that can achieve the maximal diversity order with a low system complexity. One enabling technique is equal gain combining (EGC) and its application in relaying systems is the main focus of this paper. In particular, the techniques of EGC and smart relaying are combined in the decode-and-forward (DF) processing method. It is shown that for a system with one relay and M-ary phase-shift-keying (M-PSK) modulation, maximal diversity orders of 2m and 2 are achieved over Nakagami-m and Hoyt fading environments, respectively. With K relays, simulation results suggest that the corresponding diversity orders are m(K?+?1) and (K?+?1).     

The influence of color on impulsiveness and arousal: Part 2 – Chroma

In the preceding Part 1, the effect of hue on impulsiveness and arousal was studied. From those results, yellow, red and orange were selected for further investigation since participants' performance was consistent with a low arousal state (high error rate and long response time) for the yellow background and high arousal state (low error rate and short response time) for the red background, whereas orange tended to result in high impulsiveness. This article will mainly investigate the fundamental theory of how chroma influences people's impulsiveness and arousal state. As in the previous article, the two main factors used to measure impulsiveness and arousal are also response time and error rate for each colored background. In the psychophysical experiment, participants were looking separately at backgrounds consisting of three hues (red, yellow and orange) with different chroma levels on screen to complete a range of psychometric tests. During the experiment, participants gave their response to the psychometric test as quickly and accurately as possible. From the results it can be seen that chroma has a significant influence on participants' response time and error rate, and influences impulsiveness and arousal. Gender difference will also be discussed in this article.     

Outage Probability of Regenerative Protocols for Two-Source Two-Destination Networks

In this paper, the analytical expressions for the outage probability of different decode-and-forward (DF) relaying strategies for two-source two-destination networks are evaluated allowing an investigation of their effectiveness in energy saving to be determined. Each source node transmits data to an interested destination node with the help of the remaining source node in a cooperative DF manner. Specifically, we consider four DF protocols, including repetition DF (RDF), parallel DF (PDF), network coding-based RDF (NC-RDF), and dirty paper coding-like network coding-based PDF (DPC-NC-PDF). The closed-form expression of the outage probability for each protocol is derived at high signal-to-noise ratio. The results show that the DPC-NC-PDF protocol achieves the best performance while the NC-RDF protocol is better than both the RDF and PDF protocols with proper linear NC coefficients. All the DF protocols are shown to achieve diversity order one and the highest multiplexing gain is achieved with the NC-RDF and DPC-NC-PDF protocols. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the analytical findings and show the system throughput comparison of various DF protocols.