Production and Productive Reason

This article explores two rival understandings of production and what it means to be a rational productive subject. Against ‘technicist’ models of productive reason, it defends a ‘phronetic’ model on both normative and pragmatic grounds. The discussion begins with a description of the general principles underpinning technicist theories of workplace organisation, principles which continue to inform work design approaches to this day. The technicist model is thereafter criticised on three counts: that it represents a specific managerial agenda which privileges sectional interests; that it is suspect morally for a number of reasons; and that despite its aspiration of arriving at ‘one best method’, it represents but one way of organising work processes. The phronetic model is then set out using the notion of ‘practices’ as a guide. This notion is important in providing a view of production in which technical reason is subsumed under a broader practical reason incorporating individual experience and judgement. Against the charge that this view is merely an instance of nostalgic craft romanticism having little relevance to present industrial realities, there are recognisable contemporary instances of phronetic production, one of the most interesting being Volvo’s innovations in automotive assembly systems.

Sustainability-related media coverage and socioeconomic development: a regional and North–South perspective

Abstract. With this paper we discuss the differences between sustainability-related media agendas across different countries and regions. Utilising a sample of 115 leading national newspapers covering forty-one countries, we show that typically no homogeneous global trends exist with regard to sustainability-related media agendas. Instead, significant differences exist regarding the national-level prioritisations of sustainability-related issues in the countries under review. To some extent, these observed differences can be attributed to different levels of socioeconomic development as measured by Human Development Index scores and gross domestic product per capita. Here, generic differences can be identified between newspapers from the Global North and South, with a range of issues such as climate change emerging as typically Northern issues, whereas issues such as corruption and poverty show significantly higher levels of coverage across newspapers from the Global South. We conclude with a discussion of the results in the context of global environmental governance.

Web Data Extraction from Query Result Pages Based on Visual and Content Features

A rapidly increasing number of Web databases are now become accessible via
their HTML form-based query interfaces. Query result pages are dynamically generated
in response to user queries, which encode structured data and are displayed for human
use. Query result pages usually contain other types of information in addition to query
results, e.g., advertisements, navigation bar etc. The problem of extracting structured data
from query result pages is critical for web data integration applications, such as comparison
shopping, meta-search engines etc, and has been intensively studied. A number of approaches
have been proposed. As the structures of Web pages become more and more complex, the
existing approaches start to fail, and most of them do not remove irrelevant contents which
may a®ect the accuracy of data record extraction. We propose an automated approach for
Web data extraction. First, it makes use of visual features and query terms to identify data
sections and extracts data records in these sections. We also represent several content and
visual features of visual blocks in a data section, and use them to ¯lter out noisy blocks.
Second, it measures similarity between data items in di®erent data records based on their
visual and content features, and aligns them into di®erent groups so that the data in the
same group have the same semantics. The results of our experiments with a large set of
Web query result pages in di®erent domains show that our proposed approaches are highly
e®ective.

Production and characterisation of monoclonal antibodies for the detection of AOZ, a tissue bound metabolite of furazolidone

3-amino-2-oxazolidinone (AOZ) is a tissue bound toxic metabolite derived from the nitrofuran antibiotic, furazolidone. AOZ is detected in the derivatised form of 3-{[(2-nitrophenyl) methylene]amino}-2-oxazolidinone (NP AOZ). 3-{[( 3- carboxyphenyl)-methylene]amino-2-oxazolidinone (CP AOZ) was used as the immunising hapten for the production of monoclonal antibodies against NP AOZ. Monoclonal antibodies were produced using hybridomas from the fusion of murine myeloma cells and spleen cells isolated from BALB/c mice immunised with CP AOZ-ethylenediamine-human serum albumin (CP AOZ-ed-HSA). The antibody production in ascitic fluids from clones 3B8/2B9 and 2D11/A4 was monitored during a 16 month period. Repeated cultures of these hybridomas, followed by injection into mice and cloning did not change the assay parameters. Clone 2D11/A4 exhibited long term stability in antibody production throughout the experiment whereas clone 3B8/2B9 demonstrated variability in particular antibody yields whilst retaining assay sensitivity. Reasons for this production variability in clones are discussed. In an optimised direct ELISA format, the antibodies exhibited a 50% binding inhibition in the range of 0.52-1.15 ng/ml with NP AOZ (0.22-0.50 ng/ml, respective AOZ equivalents) and showed high specificity towards this analyte. The sensitivity of monoclonal antibodies incorporated into the ELISA is compatible with the European Union MRLP and is currently in use for routine analysis.

Novel hapten synthesis for antibody production and development of an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for determination of furaltadone metabolite 3-amino-5-morpholinomethyl-2-oxazolidinone (AMOZ)

A heterologous competitive indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ciELISA) for the determination of the furaltadone metabolite 3-amino-5-morpholinomethyl-2-oxazolidinone (AMOZ) was developed. AMOZ was derivatised with 2-(4-formylphenoxy) acetic acid or 2-(3-formylphenoxy) acetic acid to obtain two novel immunizing haptens. The ability of these haptens in producing specific polyclonal antibodies against the nitrophenyl derivative of AMOZ (NPAMOZ) was compared with that of traditional immunizing haptens (derivatised AMOZ with 3-carboxybenzaldehyle or 4-carboxybenzaldehyle). The results indicated that the novel immunizing haptens were able to produce antibodies with almost a two-fold improvement in sensitivity of the ciELISA for NPAMOZ in comparison with the existing antibody based ELISAs. The differences in sensitivity were explained by the molecular modeling of the lowest energy conformations of NPAMOZ and the haptens. Another novel hapten, derivatised AMOZ with 2-oxoacetic acid, was synthesized and used as a heterologous coating hapten. The results showed that this strategy of using only a partial structure of the target molecule as the coating hapten was able to obtain a two to three-fold improvement in sensitivity. This study provided a modern approach for the development of an immunoassay with improved sensitivity for the metabolites of nitrofuran antibiotics. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Production and evaluation of the utility of novel phage display-derived peptide ligands to Salmonella spp. for magnetic separation

Aims: The objectives of this study were to produce Salmonella-specific peptide ligands by phage display biopanning and evaluate their use for magnetic separation (MS).
Methods and Results: Four phage display biopanning rounds were performed and the peptides expressed by the two most Salmonella-specific (on the basis of phage binding ELISA results) phage clones, MSal020401 and MSal020417, were chemically synthesized and coupled to MyOne™ tosylactivated Dynabeads®. Peptide capture capability for whole Salmonella cells from non-enriched broth cultures was quantified by MS + plate counts and MS + Greenlight™ detection, and compared to capture capability of anti-Salmonella (antibody-coated) Dynabeads®. MS + Greenlight™ gave a more comprehensive picture of capture capability than MS + plate counts and showed that Peptide MSal020417-coated beads exhibited at least similar, if not better, capture capability to anti-Salmonella Dynabeads® (mean capture values of 36.0 ± 18.2 % and 31.2 ± 20.1 %, respectively, over Salmonella spp. concentration range 3 x 101 - 3 x 106 cfu ml-1) with minimal cross-reactivity (= 1.9 %) to three other foodborne bacteria.
Conclusions: One of the phage display-derived peptide ligands was demonstrated by MS + Greenlight™ to be a viable antibody-alternative for MS of Salmonella spp.
Significance and Impact of Study: This study demonstrates an antibody-free approach to Salmonella detection and opens substantial possibilities for more rapid tests for this bacterium.

Life Cycle Assessment guidelines for the sustainable production and recycling of aggregates:The Sustainable Aggregates Resource Management project (SARMa)

The mining/quarrying industry is a sector of industry where there are very few Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools, and where the role of LCA has been poorly investigated. A key issue is the integration of three inter-dependent life cycles: Project, Asset and Product. Given the unique features of mining LCAs, this Note from the Field presents a common methodology implemented within the Sustainable Aggregates Resource Management (SARMa) Project (www.sarmaproject.eu) in order to boost adoption of LCA in the aggregate industry in South Eastern Europe. The proposed methodology emphasises the importance of resource efficiency and recycling in the context of a Sustainable Supply Mix of aggregates for the construction industry. Through its adoption, aggregate producers, recyclers, and governmental planners would gain confidence with LCA tools and conduct consistent and meaningful life cycle analyses of natural and recycled aggregates. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Why are you tall while others are short? Agricultural production and other proximate determinants of global heights

We analyze the proximate determinants of the biological standard of living from a global perspective, namely high-quality nutrition and the disease environment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Until the mid-twentieth century, the local availability of cattle, meat, and milk per capita and the local disease environment mainly determined the stature of the population – and, by implication, how long they lived and how healthy they were. During the late twentieth century, the trade of agricultural products and health-promoting technologies increased in relative importance; hence, the local availabilities became less decisive in explaining height differences.

Production and Processing of Spider Silk Proteins

Natural spider silk fibers have impressive mechanical properties (outperforming many man-made fibers) and are, moreover, biocompatible, biodegradable, and produced under benign conditions (using water as a solvent at ambient temperature). The problems associated with harvesting natural spider silks inspired us to devise a method to produce spider silk-like proteins biotechnologically (the first subject tackled in this highlight); we subsequently discuss their processing into various materials morphologies, and some potential technical and biomedical applications.