Enzymatic syntheses of N-lauroyl-β-alanine homologs in organic media

Enyzmatic amidation of the primary amines β-alanine ethyl ester and 3-aminopropionitrile with methyl laurate by means of immobilized lipase (Candida antarctica lipase, CAL) resulted in the formation in good yield of N-lauroyl-β-alanine ethyl ester and 3-(N-lauroylamino)-propionitrile, respectively. When 3-amino-propionitrile was used as substrate, diisopropyl ether was a suitable solvent. Changing the reaction temperature (12–80°C) did not affect the yields, and room temperature was a suitable temperature for this reaction. In the investigation of reaction conditions, the use of equimolar amounts (5 mmol) of substrate and ester, along with 0.5 g of CAL, in diisopropyl ether gave the best yield (99.3%) after 24 h of incubation at 24°C. The enzyme activity in the amidation reaction did not decrease even after six uses. With β-alanine ethyl ester hydrochloride as substrate, diisopropyl ether was unsuited as a solvent owing to the low solubility of the substrate in this solvent. In this reaction, the best yield (82.0%) was attained by using dioxane as solvent. CAL achieved higher extents of amide synthesis with long-chain than with short-chain ester substrates. The enzyme accepted only nonbulky primary amines as substrates.     

Teaching materials to enhance the visual expression of Web pages for students not in art or design majors

The explosive growth of the Internet has made the knowledge and skills for creating Web pages into general subjects that all students should learn. It is now common to teach the technical side of the production of Web pages and many teaching materials have been developed. However teaching the aesthetic side of Web page design has been neglected, and students not in art or design majors are normally confronted with difficulties when they do expressive design of Web pages.     

Magnetic probe array with high sensitivity for fluctuating field

A magnetic probe array is constructed to measure precisely the spatial structure of a small fluctuating field included in a strong confinement field that varies with time. To exclude the effect of the confinement field, the magnetic probes consisting of figure-eight-wound coils are prepared. The spatial structure of the fluctuating field is obtained from a Fourier analysis of the probe signal. It is found that the probe array is more sensitive to the fluctuating field with a high mode number than that with a low mode number. An experimental demonstration of the present method is attempted using a field-reversed configuration plasma, where the fluctuating field with 0.1% of the confinement field is successfully detected.     

Teaching e-commerce Web page evaluation and design: a pilot study using tourism destination sites

This study explores a teaching method for improving business students’ skills in e-commerce page evaluation and making Web design majors aware of business content issues through cooperative learning. Two groups of female students at a Japanese university studying either tourism or Web page design were assigned tasks that required cooperation to investigate whether a minimum of formal training and interaction between the two groups would result in an increase in the “design” students’ awareness of content issues in page design, and an improvement in the “tourism” students’ ability to evaluate Web pages related to tourism. The results showed only slight improvements, suggesting that either the amount of cooperative learning must be increased or some formal instruction must be introduced.     

Flexible feature discovery and structural information control

In this paper, we propose a new information theoretic method called structural information control for flexible feature discovery. The new method has three distinctive characteristics, which traditional competitive learning fails to offer. First, the new method can directly control competitive unit activation patterns, whereas traditional competitive learning does not have any means to control them. Thus, with the new method, it is possible to extract salient features not discovered by traditional methods. Second, competitive units compete witheach other by maximizing their information content about input patterns. Consequently, this information maximization makes it possible to control flexibly competition processes. Third, in structural information control, it is possible to define many different kinds of information content, and we can choose a specific type of information according to a given objective. When applied to competitive learning, structural information can be used to control the number of dead or spare units, and to extract macro as well as micro features of input patterns in explicit ways. We first applied this method to simple pattern classification to demonstrate that information can be controlled and that different neuron firing patterns can be generated. Second, a dipole problem was used to show that structural information could provide representations similar to those by the conventional competitive learning methods. Finally, we applied the method to a language acquisition problem in which networks must flexibly discover some linguistic rules by changing structural information. Especially, we attempted to examine the effect of the information parameter to control the number of dead neurons, and thus to examine how macro and micro features in input patterns can explicitly be discovered by structural information.     

Varieties of antioxidant and antibacterial properties of Ecklonia stolonifera and Ecklonia kurome products harvested and processed in the Noto peninsula,Japan

Ecklonia stolonifera and Ecklonia kurome are traditional edible brown algae in the fisheries towns in Far East Asia. In the Noto Peninsula area, Ishikawa, Japan, both the Ecklonia are called ‘kajime’ and people believe that the algae improve the property of blood. To determine the varieties of antioxidant and antibacterial properties E. stolonifera and E. kurome products, assays for total phenolic content and antioxidant activities, including DPPH radical-scavenging activity, superoxide anion radical-generated by non-enzymatic system, ferrous-reducing power and WST-8, a tetrazolium salt, redox activity of four dried and two boiled E. stolonifera, and four dried and two raw E. kurome preparations were tested in this study. Furthermore, antibacterial activity of the products was tested. Though the total phenolic content, the antioxidant activity and the antibacterial activities of E. stolorifera and E. kurome products were high, these properties were varied by manufacturers or each product. Especially, two dried and two boiled products of E. stolonifera showed low activities. The results of this study indicate that the contents of functional compounds and their activities were affected or decreased greatly by the processing method.     

Determination of optical purity and absolute configuration of natural 12‐hydroxystearic acid by the 1H NMR anisotropy method

The enantiopure of (R)‐(?) MαNPA was allowed to react with racemic 18‐(tert‐butyldimethylsilyloxy)‐5‐octadecayne‐7‐ol which was derived from dodecane‐1,12‐diol, yielding diastereomeric esters mixture. These racemic esters were easily separated by HPLC on silica‐gel. The absolute configurations of the first‐eluted diastereomeric esters from the separated esters were determined using ¹H NMR anisotropy method. Analysis on ¹H NMR spectra and HPLC elution time of the synthesized esters and those of MαNP ester derived from natural methyl‐12‐hydroxystealate showed that the absolute configuration of natural 12‐hydroxystearic acid was R form, and the enantiomeric excess was over 99%.     

Enzymatic enantioselective hydrolysis of acyloxyferrocenophanes using lipases and esterases

Enantioselective hydrolysis of racemic acetate or butyrates of 1-hydroxy [3](1,1′) ferrocenophane and endo-1-hydroxy [4](1,2) ferrocenophane using lipases, pig liver esterase and horse liver esterase resulted in the formation of (R)-alcohols and (S)-esters.     

Technology choice and CDM projects in China: case study of a small steel company in Shandong Province

Corporate motives and strategies of both investing and hosting country affect the outcomes of a clean development mechanism (CDM) project—who introduces what technology to whom—and result in large differences in economic viability and the CO₂ emission reductions. This is particularly true for steel industry in which steel making consists of many detailed and complex processes, a given strategy could produce cumulative effects of the individual technologies used, leading to large energy savings overall. The objective of this study is to demonstrate some analytical methods that can be used to quantitatively evaluate the impacts of technology selection on the profit performance of CDM projects. Specifically, in this study we analyze a CDM project to introduce energy saving technology from Japan to a small steel manufacturer in China's Shandong Province, and conduct a simulation of the quantitative relationships between various technology options and profitability. Based on these results, we examine the environmental and economic significance of technology selection for CDM projects. To take this further, we then reconsider the profitability of a project as typical FDI activity (i.e., without the CDM), and by comparing this outcome with the CDM case, we clarify the significance and potential of the CDM.