Willingness of Sri Lankan farmers to pay for a scheme to conserve elephants: An empirical analysis

This paper explores the feasibility of adopting an integrated economic approach to raise farmers’ tolerance of the presence of elephants on their farming lands. Responses to this approach were sought from a sample of farmers in the areas affected by human elephant conflict in the northwestern province of Sri Lanka. Results from a contingent valuation survey of their willingness to pay for a scheme to conserve elephants are also reported. Two separate logit regression analyses were undertaken to examine the factors that influence the farmers’ responses for the payment principle question and their opinions on the integrated economic approach. Although found that the majority of the respondents expressed their willingness to pay for the proposed scheme and supported for the implementation of the integrated approach, we have insufficient data yet to determine if their support and financial contribution would be sufficient to set up this programme and also to predict its economic viability. Nevertheless, the overall finding of this study provides an improved economic assessment of the farmers’ attitudes towards the wild elephant in Sri Lanka. At the same time the study shows that, contrary to commonly held assumptions, farmers in this developing country, do support wildlife conservation.

Assessing the effects of attention and emotion on startle eyeblink modulation

Two experiments were conducted to assess simultaneously the effects of attentional and emotional processes on startle eyeblink modulation. In each experiment, participants were presented with a pleasant and an unpleasant picture. Half the participants were asked to attend to the pleasant picture and to ignore the unpleasant picture, whereas the reverse was the case for the other participants. Startle probes were presented at 3500 and 4500 ins after stimulus onset in Experiment I and at 250, 750, and 4450 ms after stimulus onset and 950 ms after stimulus offset in Experiment 2. Attentional processing affected startle eyeblink modulation and electrodermal responses in both experiments, However, effects of picture valence on startle eyeblink modulation were found only in Experiment 2. The results confirm the utility of startle eyeblink modulation as an index of attentional and emotional processing. They also illustrate that procedural characteristics, such as the nature of the lead intervals and how attention and emotion are operationalized, can determine whether emotional or attentional processes will be reflected in startle eyeblink.

Elucidation of reaction scheme describing malondialdehyde-acetaldehyde-protein adduct formation

Malondialdehyde and acetaldehyde react together with proteins and form hybrid protein conjugates designated as MAA adducts, which have been detected in livers of ethanol-fed animals. Our previous studies have shown that MAA adducts are comprised of two distinct products. One adduct is composed of two molecules of malondialdehyde and one molecule of acetaldehyde and was identified as the 4-methpl-1,4-dihydropyridine-3,5-dicarbaldehyde derivative of an amino group (MHHDC adduct). The other adduct is a 1:1 adduct of malondialdehyde and acetaldehyde and was identified as the 2-formyl-3-(alkylamino)butanal derivative of an amino group (FAAB adduct). In this study, information on the mechanism of MAA adduct formation was obtained, focusing on whether the FAAB adduct serves as a precursor for the MDHDC adduct. Upon the basis of chemical analysis and NMR spectroscopy, two initial reaction steps appear to be a prerequisite for MDHDC formation. One step involves the reaction of one molecule of malondialdehyde and one of acetaldehyde with an amino group of a protein to form the FAAB product, while the other step involves the generation of a malondialdehyde-enamine. It appears that generation of the MDHDC adduct requires the FAAB moiety to be transferred to the nitrogen of the MDA-enamine. For efficient reaction of FAAB with the enamine to take place, additional experiments indicated that these two intermediates likely must be in positions on the protein of close proximity to each other. Further studies showed that the incubation of liver proteins from ethanol-fed rats with MDA resulted in a marked generation of MDHDC adducts, indicating the presence of a pool of FAAB adducts in the liver of ethanol-fed animals. Overall, these findings show that MDHDC-protein adduct formation occurs via the reaction of the FAAB moiety with a malondialdehyde-enamine, and further suggest that a similar mechanism may be operative in vivo in the liver during prolonged ethanol consumption.

Functional annotation of a full-length mouse cDNA collection

The RIKEN Mouse Gene Encyclopaedia Project, a systematic approach to determining the full coding potential of the mouse genome, involves collection and sequencing of full-length complementary DNAs and physical mapping of the corresponding genes to the mouse genome. We organized an international functional annotation meeting (FANTOM) to annotate the first 21,076 cDNAs to be analysed in this project. Here we describe the first RIKEN clone collection, which is one of the largest described for any organism. Analysis of these cDNAs extends known gene families and identifies new ones.

Emotion in the workplace: The new challenge for managers

Emotions in workplace settings and emotional intelligence are hot topics in management today. Leading business journals such as Fortune and Harvard Business Review have featured articles on emotional intelligence. But there is more to emotions in the workplace than just emotional intelligence. The aim of this article is to acquaint managers with intriguing new research that examines both emotional intelligence and the broader issue of emotion, which has been shown to play a powerful role in workplace settings. We show that this research has a strong potential for practical application in organizations within many broad human-resource functions such as selection, performance management, and training, as well as implications for more narrow domains like customer service. We conclude that the study of emotions in organizational settings has provided new and important insights into the way in which people in organizations behave, and we offer advice for managers to enable them to develop and to maintain a positive emotional climate in their organizations.

Emotion and attribution of intentionality in leader-member relationships

In this article, we present a model of emotions and attributions of intentionality within the leader-member relationship. The model is predicated on two central ideas. The first is that leadership is intrinsically an emotional process, where leaders display emotion and attempt to evoke emotion in their members. The second is that leadership is a process of social interaction and is therefore appropriately defined in terms of social, psychological theories such as the attribution theory. Our focus is on the perspective of members, not the leaders. Specifically, members' attributions about their leader's intentions influence how the members evaluate, interpret, and eventually label the leader's influence attempts as either true or pseudo transformational leadership. These attributions are determined by and themselves influence the members' emotions. We describe each of the elements of the model and conclude with a discussion of the implications of the model for theory, research, and practice. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

A new joint coding and modulation scheme for channels with clipping

A major limitation in any high-performance digital communication system is the linearity region of the transmitting amplifier. Nonlinearities typically lead to signal clipping. Efficient communication in such conditions requires maintaining a low peak-to-average power ratio (PAR) in the transmitted signal while achieving a high throughput of data. Excessive PAR leads either to frequent clipping or to inadequate resolution in the analog-to-digital or digital-to-analog converters. Currently proposed signaling schemes for future generation wireless communications suffer from a high PAR. This paper presents a new signaling scheme for channels with clipping which achieves a PAR as low as 3. For a given linear range in the transmitter's digital-to-analog converter, this scheme achieves a lower bit-error rate than existing multicarrier schemes, owing to increased separation between constellation points. We present the theoretical basis for this new scheme, approximations for the expected bit-error rate, and simulation results. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

Practical scheme for quantum computation with any two-qubit entangling gate

Which gates are universal for quantum computation? Although it is well known that certain gates on two-level quantum systems (qubits), such as the controlled-NOT, are universal when assisted by arbitrary one-qubit gates, it has only recently become clear precisely what class of two-qubit gates is universal in this sense. We present an elementary proof that any entangling two-qubit gate is universal for quantum computation, when assisted by one-qubit gates. A proof of this result for systems of arbitrary finite dimension has been provided by Brylinski and Brylinski; however, their proof relies on a long argument using advanced mathematics. In contrast, our proof provides a simple constructive procedure which is close to optimal and experimentally practical.

Analysis of the mouse transcriptome based on functional annotation of 60,770 full-length cDNAs

Only a small proportion of the mouse genome is transcribed into mature messenger RNA transcripts. There is an international collaborative effort to identify all full-length mRNA transcripts from the mouse, and to ensure that each is represented in a physical collection of clones. Here we report the manual annotation of 60,770 full-length mouse complementary DNA sequences. These are clustered into 33,409 'transcriptional units', contributing 90.1% of a newly established mouse transcriptome database. Of these transcriptional units, 4,258 are new protein-coding and 11,665 are new non-coding messages, indicating that non-coding RNA is a major component of the transcriptome. 41% of all transcriptional units showed evidence of alternative splicing. In protein-coding transcripts, 79% of splice variations altered the protein product. Whole-transcriptome analyses resulted in the identification of 2,431 sense-antisense pairs. The present work, completely supported by physical clones, provides the most comprehensive survey of a mammalian transcriptome so far, and is a valuable resource for functional genomics.

Solvable models of Bose-Einstein condensates: A new algebraic Bethe ansatz scheme

A new algebraic Bethe ansatz scheme is proposed to diagonalize classes of integrable models relevant to the description of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute alkali gases. This is achieved by introducing the notion of Z-graded representations of the Yang-Baxter algebra. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.