Identification of a gene for an ancient cytokine, interleukin 15-like, in mammals; interleukins 2 and 15 co-evolved with this third family member, all sharing binding motifs for IL-15Rα

Interleukins 2 and 15 (IL-2 and IL-15) are highly differentiated but related cytokines with overlapping, yet also distinct functions, and established benefits for medical drug use. The present study identified a gene for an ancient third IL-2/15 family member in reptiles and mammals, interleukin 15-like (IL-15L), which hitherto was only reported in fish. IL-15L genes with intact open reading frames (ORFs) and evidence of transcription, and a recent past of purifying selection, were found for cattle, horse, sheep, pig and rabbit. In human and mouse the IL-15L ORF is incapacitated. Although deduced IL-15L proteins share only ~21 % overall amino acid identity with IL-15, they share many of the IL-15 residues important for binding to receptor chain IL-15Rα, and recombinant bovine IL-15L was shown to interact with IL-15Rα indeed. Comparison of sequence motifs indicates that capacity for binding IL-15Rα is an ancestral characteristic of the IL-2/15/15L family, in accordance with a recent study which showed that in fish both IL-2 and IL-15 can bind IL-15Rα. Evidence reveals that the species lineage leading to mammals started out with three similar cytokines IL-2, IL-15 and IL-15L, and that later in evolution (1) IL-2 and IL-2Rα receptor chain acquired a new and specific binding mode and (2) IL-15L was lost in several but not all groups of mammals. The present study forms an important step forward in understanding this potent family of cytokines, and may help to improve future strategies for their application in veterinarian and human medicine.

Linking and sharing data in the humanities and creative arts: building the HuNI Virtual Laboratory

The Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) is one of the national Virtual Laboratories that are being developed as part of the Australian government's National e-Research Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) programme. This paper examines the methodologies and technical architecture being deployed by HuNI to link and share Australian data in the humanities and creative arts.

Migrating swans profit from favourable changes in wind conditions at low altitude

Because energy reserves limit flight range, wind assistance may be of crucial importance for migratory birds. We tracked eight Bewick's swans Cygnus columbianus bewickii, using 95-g satellite transmitters with altimeters and activity sensors, during their spring migration from Denmark to northern Russia in 1996. During the 82 occasions where a swan's location was recorded in flight, average flight altitude was 165 m a.s.1. with a maximum of 759 m a.s.1., despite winds often being more favourable at higher altitudes. We also counted Bewick's swans departing from the Gulf of Finland and subsequently passing an observatory in the next major stop-over area 800 km further north in the White Sea, northern Russia, during the springs of 1994, 1995 and 1996. A comparison of these counts with wind data provided evidence for Bewick's swans using favourable changes in wind conditions to embark on migration. Changes in the numbers of birds arriving in the White Sea correlated best with favourable changes in winds in the Gulf of Finland 1 day earlier. Again, migratory volume showed a correlation with winds at low altitudes only, despite wind conditions for the swans being more favourable at high altitudes. We conclude that the relatively large Bewick's swan tends to gear its migration to wind conditions at low altitude only. We argue that Bewick's swans do not climb to high altitudes because of mechanical and physiological limitations with respect to the generation of power for flight and to avoid rapid dehydration.

Organisational downsizing and knowledge sharing

Organisational downsizing has proven a popular strategic intervention in the new globalised competitive business environment. Yet surprisingly little research has been conducted in the knowledge management domain to help scholars and managers better understand the effects of downsizing on organisational knowledge sharing. This paper reports some of the key findings from an interpretive investigation of organisational knowledge sharing in a division of large Australian organisation where downsizing had recently taken place. The findings reveal structural and cultural effects stemming from downsizing, and shows how these effects influenced knowledge sharing. The paper provides sets of knowledge-based impacts of downsizing on (1) organisational structure and (2) organisational culture at the case organisation. Important implications for knowledge management research and practice are discussed.

Toward a receiver-based theory of knowledge sharing

Managers and researchers alike have sought new ways to address the challenges of sharing dispersed knowledge in modern business environments. Careful consideration by sharers of receivers' knowledge needs and behaviours may improve the effectiveness of organisational knowledge sharing. This research examines how sharers react to their perceptions of receivers' knowledge needs and behaviours when making choices relating to sharing knowledge. The focus of this article is to propose and empirically explore a theoretical framework for a study of the role of the receiver in knowledge sharing - receiver-based theory. Data collected from two case studies highlight a key role played by perceived receiver knowledge needs and behaviours in shaping sharer choices when explicit knowledge is shared. A set of receiver influences on knowledge sharing is provided that highlights key receiver and sharer issues. The paper concludes that companies should develop better ways to connect potential sharers with receivers' real knowledge needs. Further, the findings suggest that sharing on a need-to-know basis hinders change in organisational power structures, and prevents the integration of isolated pockets of knowledge that may yield new value. © 2008, IGI Global.

Nonlinear backstepping controller design for sharing active and reactive power in three-phase grid-connected photovoltaic systems

In this paper, a nonlinear backstepping controller is designed for three-phase grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to share active and reactive power. A cascaded control structure is considered for the purpose of sharing appropriate amount of power. In this cascaded control structure, the dc-link voltage controller is designed for balancing the power flow within the system and the current controller is designed to shape the grid current into a pure sinusoidal waveform. In order to balance the power flow, it is always essential to maintain a constant voltage across the dc-link capacitor for which an incremental conductance (IC) method is used in this paper. This approach also ensures the operation of solar PV arrays at the maximum power point (MPP) under rapidly changing atmospheric conditions. The proposed current controller is designed to guarantee the current injection into the grid in such a way that the system operates at a power factor other than unity which is essential for sharing active and reactive power. The performance of the proposed backstepping approach is verified on a three-phase grid-connected PV system under different atmospheric conditions. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme in terms of achieving desired control objectives.

Sharing the load: role equity in the incubation of a monomorphic shorebird, the masked lapwing (Vanellus miles)

Sex roles during incubation vary dramatically in socially monogamous shorebirds. The "incubator conspicuousness" hypothesis posits that, for biparentally incubating and sexually dimorphic birds, the more conspicuous sex should incubate when visually foraging predators are inactive, and in many ecosystems this is at night. Therefore, sexually monomorphic species should share incubation equitably throughout the day and night. We examined incubation patterns in Masked Lapwings Vanellus miles and found that the contribution of the sexes to incubation was equitable. Another measure of incubation behavior, bout duration, was similar between the sexes; male bout durations were slightly shorter than for females. This finding is consistent with the predictions of the incubator conspicuousness hypothesis, although other processes may also explain equitable care.

Perspectives on social impact measurement and non-profit organisations

Purpose– Acknowledgement of the social impact created by organisations has become an increasingly frequent discussion among practitioners. The importance of such value creation cannot be understated, yet in an increasingly competitive funding environment, the need to articulate “true” value is paramount. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Australian and US managers of non-profit organisations (NPOs) and foundations view the measurement of the social impact of NPOs.Design/methodology/approach– The paper includes 19 in-depth interviews of non-profit professionals in the USA and Australia. Respondents included non-profit managers, foundation managers and consultants in both countries.Findings– The in-depth interviews found that in both countries respondents generally agreed that objective measures of impact are desirable, but recognised the difficulties in developing objective assessment frameworks enabling comparisons across the non-profit sector. These difficulties, as well as the implications for developing assessments of social value for NPOs, are discussed. This paper demonstrates that there is an opportunity to reposition reporting expectations. The NPO sector can pool together and build on each other’s strengths and market their outcomes as a collective entity. A sector-wide approach provides potential for much needed within-sector mentoring and will showcase the rich and varied outcomes generated by NPOs.Originality/value– This research compares viewpoints in two Western countries, thus offering at least an exploratory examination of social impact assessment from an international perspective. Additionally, this research shows commonalities in terms of what is valued and what is most difficult for non-profits when determining social impact.

Online video recommendation in sharing community

The creation of sharing communities has resulted in the astonishing increasing of digital videos, and their wide applications in the domains such as entertainment, online news broadcasting etc. The improvement of these applications relies on effective solutions for social user access to video data. This fact has driven the recent research interest in social recommendation in shared communities. Although certain effort has been put into video recommendation in shared communities, the contextual information on social users has not been well exploited for effective recommendation. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the content and social information of videos for the recommendation in sharing communities. Specifically, we first exploit a robust video cuboid signature together with the Earth Mover's Distance to capture the content relevance of videos. Then, we propose to identify the social relevance of clips using the set of users belonging to a video. We fuse the content relevance and social relevance to identify the relevant videos for recommendation. Following that, we propose a novel scheme called sub-community-based approximation together with a hash-based optimization for improving the efficiency of our solution. Finally, we propose an algorithm for efficiently maintaining the social updates in dynamic shared communities. The extensive experiments are conducted to prove the high effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed video recommendation approach.

Cost-effective authentic and anonymous data sharing with forward security

Data sharing has never been easier with the advances of cloud computing, and an accurate analysis on the shared data provides an array of benefits to both the society and individuals. Data sharing with a large number of participants must take into account several issues, including efficiency, data integrity and privacy of data owner. Ring signature is a promising candidate to construct an anonymous and authentic data sharing system. It allows a data owner to anonymously authenticate his data which can be put into the cloud for storage or analysis purpose. Yet the costly certificate verification in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) setting becomes a bottleneck for this solution to be scalable. Identity-based (ID-based) ring signature, which eliminates the process of certificate verification, can be used instead. In this paper, we further enhance the security of ID-based ring signature by providing forward security: If a secret key of any user has been compromised, all previous generated signatures that include this user still remain valid. This property is especially important to any large scale data sharing system, as it is impossible to ask all data owners to re-authenticate their data even if a secret key of one single user has been compromised. We provide a concrete and efficient instantiation of our scheme, prove its security and provide an implementation to show its practicality.

Forecasting bike sharing demand using fuzzy inference mechanism

Forecasting bike sharing demand is of paramount importance for management of fleet in city level. Rapidly changing demand in this service is due to a number of factors including workday, weekend, holiday and weather condition. These nonlinear dependencies make the prediction a difficult task. This work shows that type-1 and type-2 fuzzy inference-based prediction mechanisms can capture this highly variable trend with good accuracy. Wang-Mendel rule generation method is utilized to generate rule base and then only current information like date related information and weather condition is used to forecast bike share demand at any given point in future. Simulation results reveal that fuzzy inference predictors can potentially outperform traditional feed forward neural network in terms of prediction accuracy.

A Resource Centric Approach For Advancing Collaboration Through Hydrologic Data And Model Sharing

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of HydroShare is to enable scientists to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop or perform analyses in a distributed computing environment that may include grid, cloud or high performance computing model instances as necessary. Scientists may also publish outcomes (data, results or models) into HydroShare, using the system as a collaboration platform for sharing data, models and analyses. HydroShare is expanding the data sharing capability of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System by broadening the classes of data accommodated, creating new capability to share models and model components, and taking advantage of emerging social media functionality to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. One of the fundamental concepts in HydroShare is that of a Resource. All content is represented using a Resource Data Model that separates system and science metadata and has elements common to all resources as well as elements specific to the types of resources HydroShare will support. These will include different data types used in the hydrology community and models and workflows that require metadata on execution functionality. The HydroShare web interface and social media functions are being developed using the Drupal content management system. A geospatial visualization and analysis component enables searching, visualizing, and analyzing geographic datasets. The integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) is being used to manage federated data content and perform rule-based background actions on data and model resources, including parsing to generate metadata catalog information and the execution of models and workflows. This presentation will introduce the HydroShare functionality developed to date, describe key elements of the Resource Data Model and outline the roadmap for future development.