Analysis of radicals and radical reaction products in cell signalling and biomolecular damage:the long hard road to gold-standard measures

The field of free radical biology and medicine continues to move at a tremendous pace, with a constant flow of ground-breaking discoveries. The following collection of papers in this issue of Biochemical Society Transactions highlights several key areas of topical interest, including the crucial role of validated measurements of radicals and reactive oxygen species in underpinning nearly all research in the field, the important advances being made as a result of the overlap of free radical research with the reinvigorated field of lipidomics (driven in part by innovations in MS-based analysis), the acceleration of new insights into the role of oxidative protein modifications (particularly to cysteine residues) in modulating cell signalling, and the effects of free radicals on the functions of mitochondria, extracellular matrix and the immune system. In the present article, we provide a brief overview of these research areas, but, throughout this discussion, it must be remembered that it is the availability of reliable analytical methodologies that will be a key factor in facilitating continuing developments in this exciting research area.

Graduate employability, 'soft skills' versus 'hard' business knowledge:a European study

There is a growing awareness in the UK and mainland Europe of the importance of higher education to the development of a knowledge-based economy. European universities are increasingly required to produce highly mobile graduates able to respond to the ever-changing needs of the contemporary workplace. Following the Bologna Declaration (19991. 19 June 1999 . “The European Higher Education Area” (Bologna Declaration), Joint Declaration of the European Ministers of Education, Bologna, higher education across Europe has expanded rapidly. This has resulted in questions being raised about the quality of the graduate labour market and the ability of graduates to meet the needs of employers. This paper analyses graduate and employer perspectives of graduate employability in four European countries (UK, Austria, Slovenia and Romania). In doing so it adds to current debates in this area.

Replication-based inference algorithms for hard computational problems

Inference algorithms based on evolving interactions between replicated solutions are introduced and analyzed on a prototypical NP-hard problem: the capacity of the binary Ising perceptron. The efficiency of the algorithm is examined numerically against that of the parallel tempering algorithm, showing improved performance in terms of the results obtained, computing requirements and simplicity of implementation. © 2013 American Physical Society.

Evaluating transglutaminase crosslinked collagen gel systems for hard and soft tissue repair

Tissue Transglutaminase (TG2) and FXIIIa, members of the transglutaminase (TG) family, catalyses a transamidating reaction and form covalent bond between or within proteins. In bone development, both enzymes expressions correlate with the initial of the mineralisation process by osteoblasts and chondrocytes. Exogenous TG2 also promotes maturation of chondrocytes and mineralisation in pre-osteoblasts. To understand the role of endogenous TG2 in osteoblast mineralisation, the TG2 expression was examined during the human osteoblast (HOB) mineralisation. The expression of the endogenous TG2 increased during the mineralisation, yet, its expression was not essential for mineral deposition due to the compensation effect by other members in the TG family. The extracellular transamidating activity of HOBs was found increased during mineralisation and a shift from FXIIIa dominant- to TG2-dominant crosslinking activity was suggested after differentiation. However, the transamidating activity of both TG2 and FXIIIa were not critical for cell mineralisation. On the other hand, Exogenous TG2 was found to enhance wild type HOB and TG2 knockdown HOB mineral deposition. The transamidating activity of TG2 was not required but most likely a close conformation was essential for this enhancement. Results also demonstrated that exogenous TG2 may activate the ß-catenin pathway through LRP5 receptor thus contribute in cell mineralisation. This enhancement could be abolished by addition of ß-catenin inhibitors. Finally, using of TG2 crosslinked collagen gel for bone and cornea repair was evaluated. Crosslinked collagen gel showed promising results in improving HOB mineralisation, human corneal fibroblast (hCF) proliferation and migration. These effects might be resulted from the trapped TG2 within the collagen matrix and the alteration of matrix topography by TG2.

Development of two forecasting systems and the design of hard copy information displays

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Randomized Parallelization – a New Method for Solving Hard Combinatorial Problems

A new method for solving some hard combinatorial optimization problems is suggested, admitting a certain reformulation. Considering such a problem, several different similar problems are prepared which have the same set of solutions. They are solved on computer in parallel until one of them will be solved, and that solution is accepted. Notwithstanding the evident overhead, the whole run-time could be significantly reduced due to dispersion of velocities of combinatorial search in regarded cases. The efficiency of this approach is investigated on the concrete problem of finding short solutions of non-deterministic system of linear logical equations.

Using Covariance as a Similarity Measure for Document Language Identification in Hard Contexts

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: C2P99.

Delegation in hard times:the financial management of arm's length bodies in the UK

This paper explores the effectiveness of financial management tools in regulating the use of resources by arm’s length bodies (ALBs) in a period of fiscal stress. The paper presents research undertaken into the implementation of a new financial management tool for ALBs in the UK since the 2008 financial crisis. Drawing on conflict ambiguity theory, the paper shows how the effectiveness of such tools is affected by deep-rooted tensions implicit within arm’s length governance. This gives rise to micro-level conflict over the means of achieving fiscal regulation, underpinned by macro-level ambiguity over the logic of governance pursued by the government.

What makes ISAF s/tick: An investigation of the politics of coalition burden-sharing

This paper is interested in conceptualising the often raised issue of over- and under-contributing in coalition operations; that of how and why members of complex coalitions2 may be punching above and below their weight, respectively. To this end, the first section presents a parsimonious baseline assumption regarding what variables may fundamentally inform coalition burden-sharing, to subsequently discuss how much each of these are found to play a role in the Afghanistan context. The second section elaborates on this by assessing the perception and the interpretation of threats by coalition member countries, related to Afghanistan, as this pertains to prioritising other variables within the scheme outlined in the previous section. The third and fourth sections then proceed to examine and further enrich the existing literature on coalition burden-sharing, and provide further insights regarding the operations of the International Security Assistance Force–Afghanistan, and regarding ISAF member-country decisionmaking; the objective here is to generate further refined assumptions, that can permit a preliminary assessment of the phenomenon of uneven burden-sharing in ISAF, complementing the initial baseline expectations.

The effects of bilingual and monolingual reading videos on story recall with students who are deaf and hard of hearing

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of bilingual and monolingual videos on the reading comprehension of students with significant hearing impairments and/or deafness. Children with and without hearing losses need reading programs in which comprehension of meaning is the primary goal. This can occur only when print is represented in meaningful context, allowing children to create meaning from their own experience, background, and knowledge of language.^ Investigated in this study was whether students with significant hearing losses comprehended more information in a bilingual or monolingual instructional video format. There were three instructional videos produced: (a) the bilingual video which incorporated American Sign Language (ASL) with standard English captions, (b) a monolingual English video with standard English captions only, and (c) a monolingual ASL-only video. It was hypothesized that the effects of English captioning with ASL might serve as a bridge during instruction, increasing reading comprehension and written English for students. It was further hypothesized that this would allow students to integrate their own ASL knowledge to the printed text to construct meaning.^ Four separate analyses were conducted to see if the hypothesis was supported by the findings. However, all results indicated that there were no significant differences in students' written measures of reading comprehension recall across any of the three presentations of information (two monolingual and one bilingual condition). There were seven variables (word identification, word recall, sentence recall, story recall, written passage theme, written passage word count, and number of mature words) used to evaluate reading comprehension recall. No variable, either individually or grouped, demonstrated a significant difference between monolingual or bilingual instruction. ^

Maintaining your loyal customers during hard times: An observation from the gaming industry

The Las Vegas gaming arena was one of the most severely affected consumeroriented industries to be impacted by the recent economic recession. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of relational benefits on customers’ behavioral loyalty in the Las Vegas gaming industry. This study particularly took a comparative approach and examined the relational impact during the economic recession and after the economic recession. Secondary data was obtained and regression analysis was performed to test the study hypothesis. The findings of this study revealed the economic recession impact on the Las Vegas gaming industry, as well as valuable insights for effective utilization of relational benefits to increase customer loyalty.