Genomic comparison of diverse Salmonella serovars isolated from swine.

Food animals act as a reservoir for many foodborne pathogens. Salmonella enterica is one of the leading pathogens that cause food borne illness in a broad host range including animals and humans. They can also be associated with a single host species or a subset of hosts, due to genetic factors associated with colonization and infection. Adult swine are often asymptomatic carriers of a broad range of Salmonella servoars and can act as an important reservoir of infections for humans. In order to understand the genetic variations among different Salmonella serovars, Whole Genome Sequences (WGS) of fourteen Salmonella serovars from swine products were analyzed. More than 75% of the genes were part of the core genome in each isolate and the higher fraction of gene assign to different functional categories in dispensable genes indicated that these genes acquired for better adaptability and diversity. High concordance (97%) was detected between phenotypically confirmed antibiotic resistances and identified antibiotic resistance genes from WGS. The resistance determinants were mainly located on mobile genetic elements (MGE) on plasmids or integrated into the chromosome. Most of known and putative virulence genes were part of the core genome, but a small fraction were detected on MGE. Predicted integrated phage were highly diverse and many harbored virulence, metal resistance, or antibiotic resistance genes. CRISPR (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) patterns revealed the common ancestry or infection history among Salmonella serovars. Overall genomic analysis revealed a great deal of diversity among Salmonella serovars due to acquired genes that enable them to thrive and survive during infection

From the web of data to a world of action

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 8.4 (2010): 10.1016/j.websem.2010.04.007This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring 'typing' of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.Parts of this work were supported by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program of the European Commission as part of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (Contract G038- 507618). Thanks also to Emanuele Tracanna, Marco Piva, and Raffaele Giuliano for their work on On Time

How Leadership Affects Organizational Change Process

Leadership seems to be the chief factor which aligns and coordinates with the organizational processes. Leadership of the organization is linked with the functioning and performance of the organization and it reflect how effective they are in achieving their desirable outcomes, (Lewis, Packard, and Lewis, 2007). Leadership styles, traits, approaches and strategies are the starting point of the change process. It goes to the large extent in affecting the management capacity by designing different systems in the organization Keywords: ,change process, leadership, Pakistani public sectors

A Visual Analytic Environment to Co-locate Peoples' Tweets with City Factual Data

Social Media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.) are used heavily by public to provide news, opinions, and reactions towards events or topics. Integrating such data with the event or topic factual data could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying event or topic. Targeting this, we present our visual analytics tool, called VC-FaT, that integrates peoples' tweet data regarding crimes in San Francisco city with the city factual crime data. VC-FaT provides a number of interactive visualizations using both data sources for better understanding and exploration of crime activities happened in the city during a period of five years.Comment: 2 page

Technology Based Employees Training and Organizational Performance as Perceived by Employees

The present study explores the nature of the technology-based HR trainings practices with a focus on the banking sector in Pakistan. The study was carried out in the twin-cites of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Random sampling technique was adopted and population mainly was categorized into six Islamic banks and 6 conventional Banks. The study recommends that by implementing the technology-based training and acquiring the inputs from the top level management and the internal customers using this input and information for the organizational strategies and goal, can further the market shares and the profitability