e-Governance: Supporting pragmatic direct deliberative action through online communities of interest

Authors often report on the limited success of e-Government initiatives in developing nations. Top down, national strategies are developed to target improved government services, but maintain hierarchical, citizen-state conceptions of governance through representative democracy. An alternative conception, direct deliberative democracy, frames the potential role of the internet in governance differently. Web based platforms might support locally animated deliberations, which target pragmatic outcomes, while the resulting social networks afford collective learning through connections across traditional boundaries. This paper presents an investigation of direct deliberative governance as it occurs in online 'communities of interest', and is based on research with such a community in southern Africa. We investigate contributions to the online governance process and develop an action typology distinguishing between degrees of 'agency freedom'. Network analytic techniques are then used to understand how acts of varying degree are expressed in terms of the structure of a social network. The aim, more broadly, is to understand how the environment shapes acts of direct deliberative governance, and, in turn, how the acts shape the evolution and effectiveness of the community. The preliminary results suggest design considerations for online governance communities, and highlight their role to not only provide deliberative space, but to mediate social network connections

Straight Line Orbits in Hamiltonian Flows

We investigate periodic straight-line orbits (SLO) in Hamiltonian force fields using both direct and inverse methods. A general theorem is proven for natural Hamiltonians quadratic in the momenta in arbitrary dimension and specialized to two and three dimension. Next we specialize to homogeneous potentials and their superpositions, including the familiar H\'enon-Heiles problem. It is shown that SLO's can exist for arbitrary finite superpositions of $N$-forms. The results are applied to a family of generalized H\'enon-Heiles potentials having discrete rotational symmetry. SLO's are also found for superpositions of these potentials.Comment: laTeX with 6 figure

A Panel of Ancestry Informative Markers for the Complex Five-Way Admixed South African Coloured Population

Admixture is a well known confounder in genetic association studies. If genome-wide data is not available, as would be the case for candidate gene studies, ancestry informative markers (AIMs) are required in order to adjust for admixture. The predominant population group in the Western Cape, South Africa, is the admixed group known as the South African Coloured (SAC). A small set of AIMs that is optimized to distinguish between the five source populations of this population (African San, African non-San, European, South Asian, and East Asian) will enable researchers to cost-effectively reduce false-positive findings resulting from ignoring admixture in genetic association studies of the population. Using genome-wide data to find SNPs with large allele frequency differences between the source populations of the SAC, as quantified by Rosenberg et. al's -statistic, we developed a panel of AIMs by experimenting with various selection strategies. Subsets of different sizes were evaluated by measuring the correlation between ancestry proportions estimated by each AIM subset with ancestry proportions estimated using genome-wide data. We show that a panel of 96 AIMs can be used to assess ancestry proportions and to adjust for the confounding effect of the complex five-way admixture that occurred in the South African Coloured population.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Ligand-Receptor Interactions

The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic improvement of our understanding of these important phenomena. First, combination of genetic engineering and X ray cristallography made available a simultaneous knowledg of the precise structure and affinity of series or related ligand-receptor systems differing by a few well-defined atoms. Second, improvement of computer power and simulation techniques allowed extended exploration of the interaction of realistic macromolecules. Third, simultaneous development of a variety of techniques based on atomic force microscopy, hydrodynamic flow, biomembrane probes, optical tweezers, magnetic fields or flexible transducers yielded direct experimental information of the behavior of single ligand receptor bonds. At the same time, investigation of well defined cellular models raised the interest of biologists to the kinetic and mechanical properties of cell membrane receptors. The aim of this review is to give a description of these advances that benefitted from a largely multidisciplinar approach

6-thioguanine treatment in inflammatory bowel disease: A critical appraisal by a European 6-TG working party

Recently, the suggestion to use 6-thioguanine (6-TG) as an alternative thiopurine in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has been discarded due to reports about possible (hepato) toxicity. During meetings arranged in Vienna and Prague in 2004, European experts applying 6-TG further on in IBD patients presented data on safety and efficacy of 6-TG. After thorough evaluation of its risk-benefit ratio, the group consented that 6-TG may still be considered as a rescue drug in stringently defined indications in IBD, albeit restricted to a clinical research setting. As a potential indication for administering 6-TG, we delineated the requirement for maintenance therapy as well as intolerance and/or resistance to aminosalicylates, azathioprine, 6-mercaptopurine, methotrexate and infliximab. Furthermore, indications are preferred in which surgery is thought to be inappropriate. The standard 6-TG dosage should not exceed 25 mg daily. Routine laboratory controls are mandatory in short intervals. Liver biopsies should be performed after 6-12 months, three years and then three-yearly accompanied by gastroduodenoscopy, to monitor for potential hepatotoxicity, including nodular regenerative hyperplasia (NRH) and veno-occlusive disease (VOD). Treatment with 6-TG must be discontinued in case of overt or histologically proven hepatotoxicity. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Revival of the magnetar PSR J1622-4950: observations with MeerKAT, Parkes, XMM-Newton, Swift, Chandra, and NuSTAR

New radio (MeerKAT and Parkes) and X-ray (XMM-Newton, Swift, Chandra, and NuSTAR) observations of PSR J1622-4950 indicate that the magnetar, in a quiescent state since at least early 2015, reactivated between 2017 March 19 and April 5. The radio flux density, while variable, is approximately 100x larger than during its dormant state. The X-ray flux one month after reactivation was at least 800x larger than during quiescence, and has been decaying exponentially on a 111+/-19 day timescale. This high-flux state, together with a radio-derived rotational ephemeris, enabled for the first time the detection of X-ray pulsations for this magnetar. At 5%, the 0.3-6 keV pulsed fraction is comparable to the smallest observed for magnetars. The overall pulsar geometry inferred from polarized radio emission appears to be broadly consistent with that determined 6-8 years earlier. However, rotating vector model fits suggest that we are now seeing radio emission from a different location in the magnetosphere than previously. This indicates a novel way in which radio emission from magnetars can differ from that of ordinary pulsars. The torque on the neutron star is varying rapidly and unsteadily, as is common for magnetars following outburst, having changed by a factor of 7 within six months of reactivation.Comment: Published in ApJ (2018 April 5); 13 pages, 4 figure

ENIGMA and global neuroscience: A decade of large-scale studies of the brain in health and disease across more than 40 countries

This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of "big data" (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA's activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial factors

Near-Surface Interface Detection for Coal Mining Applications Using Bispectral Features and GPR

The use of ground penetrating radar (GPR) for detecting the presence of near-surface interfaces is a scenario of special interest to the underground coal mining industry. The problem is difficult to solve in practice because the radar echo from the near-surface interface is often dominated by unwanted components such as antenna crosstalk and ringing, ground-bounce effects, clutter, and severe attenuation. These nuisance components are also highly sensitive to subtle variations in ground conditions, rendering the application of standard signal pre-processing techniques such as background subtraction largely ineffective in the unsupervised case. As a solution to this detection problem, we develop a novel pattern recognition-based algorithm which utilizes a neural network to classify features derived from the bispectrum of 1D early time radar data. The binary classifier is used to decide between two key cases, namely whether an interface is within, for example, 5 cm of the surface or not. This go/no-go detection capability is highly valuable for underground coal mining operations, such as longwall mining, where the need to leave a remnant coal section is essential for geological stability. The classifier was trained and tested using real GPR data with ground truth measurements. The real data was acquired from a testbed with coal-clay, coal-shale and shale-clay interfaces, which represents a test mine site. We show that, unlike traditional second order correlation based methods such as matched filtering which can fail even in known conditions, the new method reliably allows the detection of interfaces using GPR to be applied in the near-surface region. In this work, we are not addressing the problem of depth estimation, rather confining ourselves to detecting an interface within a particular depth range