Trash: a local solution to a global problem

Gemstone Team GREEN JUSTICE

Human Non-neutralizing HIV-1 Envelope Monoclonal Antibodies Limit the Number of Founder Viruses during SHIV Mucosal Infection in Rhesus Macaques.

HIV-1 mucosal transmission begins with virus or virus-infected cells moving through mucus across mucosal epithelium to infect CD4+ T cells. Although broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) are the type of HIV-1 antibodies that are most likely protective, they are not induced with current vaccine candidates. In contrast, antibodies that do not neutralize primary HIV-1 strains in the TZM-bl infection assay are readily induced by current vaccine candidates and have also been implicated as secondary correlates of decreased HIV-1 risk in the RV144 vaccine efficacy trial. Here, we have studied the capacity of anti-Env monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) against either the immunodominant region of gp41 (7B2 IgG1), the first constant region of gp120 (A32 IgG1), or the third variable loop (V3) of gp120 (CH22 IgG1) to modulate in vivo rectal mucosal transmission of a high-dose simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV-BaL) in rhesus macaques. 7B2 IgG1 or A32 IgG1, each containing mutations to enhance Fc function, was administered passively to rhesus macaques but afforded no protection against productive clinical infection while the positive control antibody CH22 IgG1 prevented infection in 4 of 6 animals. Enumeration of transmitted/founder (T/F) viruses revealed that passive infusion of each of the three antibodies significantly reduced the number of T/F genomes. Thus, some antibodies that bind HIV-1 Env but fail to neutralize virus in traditional neutralization assays may limit the number of T/F viruses involved in transmission without leading to enhancement of viral infection. For one of these mAbs, gp41 mAb 7B2, we provide the first co-crystal structure in complex with a common cyclical loop motif demonstrated to be critical for infection by other retroviruses.

[Book review] Symmetry - A Unifying Concept, István Hargittai and Magdolna Hargittai

Tony Mann provides a review of the book: István Hargittai and Magdolna Hargittai, Symmetry - A Unifying Concept, 1994, Ten Speed Press, 222pp. ISBN: 089815-590-8. £14.99

[Book review] Iterations: The New Image

Tony Mann provides a review of the book: Timothy Druckrey (ed.) Iterations: The New Image. MIT Press, (1994), 199pp. ISBN: 0-2620-4143-X. £35.95

[Book review] Colour: Art and Science

Tony Mann provides a review of the book: Trevor Lamb & Janine Bourriau (Eds.) Colour: Art and Science, 1995. (Darwin College Lectures), Cambridge University Press, 237pp. ISBN: 0521-49645-4 (hbk.) 0521-49963-1 (pbk.)

[Book review] Book of Shadows

Tony Mann provides a review of the book: Simon Biggs, Book of Shadows, Ellipsis (Electric Art Series: 1), 64pp. with CD-Rom, 1996, ISBN 1-899858-156. £15. [Needs Multimedia PC (Windows, 486 or Pentium processor), or Macintosh (68040 or PowerPC)]

[Book review] Instruction Paintings

Tony Mann provides a review of the book: Yoko Ono, Instruction Paintings, Weatherhill Inc., 1996, ISBN 0-8348-0348-8, £12.99

Maintenance of a case-base for the retrieval of rotationally symmetric shapes for the design of metal castings

In this paper, we discuss the problem of maintenance of a CBR system for retrieval of rotationally symmetric shapes. The special feature of this system is that similarity is derived primarily from graph matching algorithms. The special problem of such a system is that it does not operate on search indices that may be derived from single cases and then used for visualisation and principle component analyses. Rather, the system is built on a similarity metric defined directly over pairs of cases. The problems of efficiency, consistency, redundancy, completeness and correctness are discussed for such a system. Performance measures for the CBR system are given, and the results for trials of the system are presented. The competence of the current case-base is discussed, with reference to a representation of cases as points in an n-dimensional feature space, and a Gramian visualisation. A refinement of the case base is performed as a result of the competence analysis and the performance of the case-base before and after refinement is compared.

Across the bridge: CLEF 2001 - Non-English monolingual retrieval. The French task.

This paper presents work on document retrieval based on first time participation in the CLEF 2001 monolingual retrieval task using French. The experiment findings indicated that Okapi, the text retrieval system in use, can successfully be used for non-English text retrieval. A lot of internal pre-processing is required in the basic search system for conversion into Okapi access formats. Various shell scripts were written to achieve the conversion in a UNIX environment, failure of which would significantly have impeded the overall performance. Based on the experiment findings using Okapi - originally designed for English - it was clear that, although most European languages share conventional word boundaries and variant word morphemes formed by the additon of suffixes, there is significant difference between French and English retrieval depending on the adaptation of indexing and search strategies in use. No sophisticated method for higher recall and precision such as stemming techniques, phrase translation or de-compounding was employed for the experiment and our results were suggestively poor. Future participation would include more refined query translation tools.

[Crossword] Not! by Parsman

Tony Mann compiled this crossword under the pseudonym of Parsman.

[Lecture review] 4. 'Three great mathematicians: Euler', 6 March 2002

Tony Mann provides a review of the lecture: 'Three great mathematicians: Euler' held on 6 March 2002 as the fourth and last lecture of the Gresham College History of Mathematics season.