Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Identification Of Abundant Alkyl Ether Glycerophospholipids In The Human Lens By Tandem Mass Spectrometry Techniques, Roger J. Truscott, Jane Deeley, Todd W. Mitchell, Michael Thomas, Stephen J. Blanksby

Stephen Blanksby

Previous studies have shown that the human lens contains glycerophospholipids with ether linkages. These lipids differ from conventional glycerophospholipids in that the sn-1 substituent is attached to the glycerol backbone via an 1-O-alkyl or an 1-O-alk-1'-enyl ether rather than an ester bond. The present investigation employed a combination of collision-induced dissociation (CID) and ozone-induced dissociation (OzID) to unambiguously distinguish such 1-O-alkyl and 1-O-alk-1'-enyl ethers. Using these methodologies the human lens was found to contain several abundant 1-O-alkyl glycerophos-phoethanolamines, including GPEtn(16:0e/9Z-18:1), GPEtn(11Z-18:1e/9Z-18:1), and GPEtn(18:0e/9Z-18:1), as well as a related series of unusual 1-O-alkyl glycerophosphoserines, including GPSer(16:0e/9Z-18:1), GPSer(11Z-18:1e/9Z-18:1), GPSer(18:0e/9Z-18:1) that to our …

Detection And Quantification Of Tear Phospholipids And Cholesterol In Contact Lens Deposits: The Effect Of Contact Lens Material And Lens Care Solution, Jennifer Saville, Zhenjun Zhao, Mark D.P. Willcox, Stephen J. Blanksby, Todd W. Mitchell

Stephen Blanksby

PURPOSE. To examine the deposition of tear phospholipids and cholesterol onto worn contact lenses and the effect of lens material and lens care solution. METHODS. Lipids were extracted from tears and worn contact lenses using 2: 1 chloroform: methanol and the extract washed with aqueous ammonium acetate, before analysis by electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS). RESULTS. Twenty-three molecular lipids from the sphingomyelin (SM) and phosphatidylcholine (PC) classes were detected in tears, with total concentrations of each class determined to be 5 +/- 1 pmol/mu L (similar to 3.8 mu g/mL) and 6 +/- 1 pmol/mu L (similar to 4.6 …

Towards Novel Entangled Carbon Nanotube Composite Electrodes, Gordon G. Wallace, P. Sherrell, J. Chen, A. Minett

Gordon Wallace

The commercialization of carbon nanotube electrodes is impeded by the lack of bulk processing techniques. One approach to overcome this impediment is the growth of macroscopic CNT composite architectures which do not require any extra processing. Unfortunately the fundamental growth mechanisms of these carbon composites is not currently understood. To probe this mechanism a systematic examination of the effect of certain growth parameters was undertaken. Within this paper we present the promising preliminary findings of this study revealing extremely complex relationships between variables during growth. We also present the performance of the produced architectures as capacitor electrodes and the further …

When Practice Doesn’T Make Perfect: Effects Of Task Goals On Learning Computing Concepts, Craig S. Miller, Amber Settle

Amber Settle

Issues In Human Capital Development : Lessons For Public Administration And Governance, Deogratias Harorimana Mr

Dr Deogratias Harorimana

With few minerals or other natural resources, Rwanda believes that she can still achieve her ambitions by investing in human capital - her unique resource. If this ambition can be achieved, then is this the next role model for international development? We used a case study design and analysis methods to examine development models used elsewhere in recent decades, using both qualitative and quantitative data on Rwanda to establish the comparative advantages in relation to Singapore’s economic development model. The implications for international development are that (1) an effective human capital development strategy should be inclusive enough to respond to …

Recommendations For Australia’S Implementation Of The National Emergency Warning System Using Location-Based Services, Anas Aloudat, Katina Michael, Roba Abbas

Professor Katina Michael

Mobile alerts, notifications and location-based emergency warning systems are now an established part of mobile government strategies in an increasing number of countries worldwide. In Australia the national emergency warning system (NEWS) was instituted after the tragic Black Saturday Victorian Bushfires of February 2009. In the first phase, NEWS has enabled the provision of public information from the government to the citizen during emergencies anywhere and any time. Moving on from traditional short message service (SMS) notifications and cell broadcasting to more advanced location-based services, this paper provides executive-level recommendations about the viability of location-based mobile phone services in NEWS …

The Fall-Out From Emerging Technologies: On Matters Of Surveillance, Social Networks And Suicide, M.G. Michael, Katina Michael

M. G. Michael

No abstract provided.

Ancestral Landscapes Of The Pueblo World, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

No abstract provided.

Is It Easy Being Green? On The Dilemmas Of Material Cultures Of Household Sustainability, Chris Gibson, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head, Nicholas J. Gill

Lesley Head

In the 1970s ‘greens’ were normally thought of as radicals because of their uncompromising political views about sustainability, non-violence, social justice and grassroots democracy. Sometimes greens were marginalised as ‘tree-huggers’ because of their affinity with the non-human world. Today, in popular discourse, ‘green’ provides the centre of sustainability gravity (Barr 2003). Green has become a definitive reflection of what individuals are to become as both consumers and citizens. It is easy, it is said, to be green. This is evident from product branding to categories used in government survey results to describe the ‘most acceptable’ household practices. But as green …

Changing Cultures Of Water In Eastern Australian Backyard Gardens, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Lesley Head

Research into diverse cultural understandings of water provides important contributions to the pressing global issue of sustainable supply, particularly when combined with analysis of relationships between everyday household practice and larger sociotechnical networks of storage and distribution. Here we analyse semi-structured interviews with 298 people about their 241 backyards in the Australian east coast cities of Sydney and Wollongong, undertaken during the 2002-03 drought. Water emerged as an important issue in both consciousness and practice. In contrast to a number of other environmental issues which stimulate more polarised responses, a commitment to reducing water consumption was shared across the study …

Australian Backyard Gardens And The Journey Of Migration, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir, E. Hampel

Lesley Head

Gardens have been an important site of environmental engagement in Australia since the British colonization. They are places where immigrant people and plants carry on traditions from their homelands, and work out an accommodation with new social and biophysical environments. We examine the backyard gardens of three contemporary migrant groups in suburban Australia, Macedonian, Vietnamese and British-born, and a fourth group of first generation Australians with both parents born overseas. There is strong emphasis on the production of vegetables in Macedonian backyards, and herbs and fruit in Vietnamese backyards. British backyards were more diverse, some focusing on non-native ornamental flowers …

Living With Trees – Perspectives From The Suburbs, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Lesley Head

A study of suburban backyards and backyarders in Sydney and Wollongong revealed evidence of attitudes and behaviours in relation to trees. Attitudes are characterised under themes that indicate conditions of tolerance and belonging. They include attachment/risk, order/freedom and nativeness/alienness. While love is common, high levels of suspicion and intolerance towards trees in the suburban context are more common. Our findings confirm and throw further light on previous work indicating that many Australians have very partitioned views of the world in relationto where humans and nonhuman lifeforms belong. This partitioning must be understood in conceptual as well as spatial terms.

Cultural Ecology: The Problematic Human And The Terms Of Engagement, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

As an intellectual container ‘cultural ecology’ is fraught with the same conceptual and ontological problems – what Anderson (2005: 280) calls ‘the stale binaries’ - that attend human impacts, cultural landscapes, indeed human and physical geographies. Yet the rich, detailed and diverse empirical material in evidence at the moment contradicts this in the doing. So perhaps we should be confident that in the public conversations we shall be known best by our works. Our students will be most effective if they can both groundtruth the satellite image of coastal vegetation and explain why the tsunami was experienced very differently by …

Local Engagements With Urban Bushland: Moving Beyond Bounded Practice For Urban Biodiversity Management, Nicholas J. Gill, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

Management of ecologically significant urban green space is likely to be increasingly governed by biodiversity policy frameworks. These frameworks tend to reproduce bounded thinking and strategies that separate green space from its context and characterise people as a disturbance. Like many green spaces these ecologically significant areas are highly valued by visitors and nearby residents. Green space is important for engagement with nature, social interaction, and for respite from daily life: it is strongly connected to surrounding areas and to the lives of people who live there. The dissonance between bounded management thinking and the role of green space in …

Retrofitting The Suburban Garden: Morphologies And Some Elements Of Sustainability Potential Of Two Australian Residential Suburbs Compared, Sumita Ghosh, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

No abstract provided.

Suburban Life And The Boundaries Of Nature: Resilience And Rupture In Australian Backyard Gardens, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Lesley Head

Despite an academic shift from dualistic to hybrid frameworks of culture/nature relations, separationist paradigms of environmental management have great resilience and vernacular appeal. The conditions under which they are reinforced, maintained or ruptured need more detailed attention because of the urgent environmental challenges of a humanly transformed earth. We draw on research in 265 Australian backyard gardens, focusing on two themes where conceptual and material bounding practices intertwine; spatial boundary-making and native plants. We trace the resilience of separationist approaches in the Australian context to the overlay of indigeneity/ non-indigeneity atop other dualisms, and their rupture to situations of close …

The (Aboriginal) Face Of The (Australian) Earth, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

No abstract provided.

Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 2, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Waldo’s predictions about the future for public administration describe five areas that would be problematic in the future: legitimacy, authority, knowledge, control, and confidence. Legitimacy includes not only that the government is legally legitimized but capable and focused on an intention to deliver the “good society.” Authority, according to Waldo, is the ability to implement policy with the acceptance of the people based on rationalism, expectations of public good, ethics, superior knowledge, and institutional contexts. Knowledge is institutional knowledge, the ability to arrange and utilize knowledge within the bureaucracy since coordination is the major challenge in knowledge management. Government has …

Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 1, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Dwight Waldo wrote The Enterprise of Public Administration in 1979 looking back on a long and fruitful academic career, but also as a reflection about the future for public administration. Can a 30 year old book still be relevant? You bet. Today, the public sector is increasingly facing fiscal challenges. Federal, state, and local governments throughout the country have major budget deficits followed by austerity measures that undermine the ability to deliver the good life of the future. In this day and age rereading Dwight Waldo’s The Enterprise of Public Administration is an intellectual exercise worth pursuing. Several of Dwight …

Taxisim: A Multiagent Simulation Platform For Evaluating Taxi Fleet Operations, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen

Shih-Fen CHENG

Taxi service is an important mode of public transportation in most metropolitan areas since it provides door-to-door convenience in the public domain. Unfortunately, despite all the convenience taxis bring, taxi fleets are also extremely inefficient to the point that over 50% of its operation time could be spent in idling state. Improving taxi fleet operation is an extremely challenging problem, not just because of its scale, but also due to fact that taxi drivers are self-interested agents that cannot be controlled centrally. To facilitate the study of such complex and decentralized system, we propose to construct a multiagent simulation platform …

Using Social Media For Natural Disaster Resilience (Booklet), Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Review Of Community Bushfire Warnings (Report), Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Engagement Or Education?, Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Asean+3 Monetary And Financial Integration: What We Need For A New Framework?, Reza Moosavi Mohseni

Reza Moosavi Mohseni

In this paper at first we investigate the viability of creating an optimum currency area (OCA) in the East Asia. Then we try to find the currency bloc which is more suitable for this region. A ten-variable VAR model employed to estimate the underlying shocks and test the symmetry of them. The results show that forming an OCA for all of the countries in the region is costly and difficult to sustain. But at first five countries called Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippine with symmetric supply shocks can create the single currency area. The rest of the countries …

The Penetration Of Social Media In Governance,Political Reforms And Building Public Perception, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. While we know that social media can play an important role in publicizing political activities such as protests, do we have evidence that such actions have led to substantive political change? Is it possible to develop a set of indicators to more effectively gauge the impact of new technologies and media on questions of political change? That social media can help coordinate large and discrete activities, such as protests and …

Berberine-Inf55 (5-Nitro-2-Phenylindole) Hybrid Antimicrobials: Effects Of Varying The Relative Orientation Of The Berberine And Inf55 Components, Danuta Tomkiewicz, Gabriele Casadei, Jonah Larkins-Ford, Terence I. Moy, James A. Garner, John B. Bremner, Frederik M. Ausubel, Kim Lewis, Michael J. Kelso

Kim Lewis

Hybrid antimicrobials containing an antibacterial linked to a multidrug resistance (MDR) pump inhibitor make up a promising new class of agents for countering efflux-mediated bacterial drug resistance. This study explores the effects of varying the relative orientation of the antibacterial and efflux pump inhibitor components in three isomeric hybrids (SS14, SS14-M, and SS14-P) which link the antibacterial alkaloid and known substrate for the NorA MDR pump berberine to different positions on INF55 (5-nitro-2-phenylindole), an inhibitor of NorA. The MICs for all three hybrids against wild-type, NorA-knockout, and NorA-overexpressing Staphylococcus aureus cells were found to be similar (9.4 to 40.2 mu …

Antimicrobial And Antioxidant Activities Of Essential Oil And Methanol Extract Of Matricaria Chamomilla L. From Djibouti, Fatouma M. Abdoul-Latif, Mohamed Nabil, Prosper Edou, Adwa A. Ali, Samatar O. Djama, Louis-Clément Obamé, Mamoudou H. Dicko Prof.

Pr. Mamoudou H. DICKO, PhD

The essential oil and methanol extracts of Matricaria Chamomilla L. were subjected to screening for their possible antioxidant activity by two complementary test systems, namely 2,2-diphenykpicrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging and β-carotene-linoleic acid assays. BHT was used as positive control in both test systems. In the DPPH test system, the IC50 values of essential oil and methanol extracts were 4.18 and 1.83 μg/ml, respectively. In the β-carotene-linoleic acid system, oxidation was effectively inhibited by M. Chamomilla, the RAA value of essential oil and methanol extracts were 12.69 and 11.37 %, respectively. When compared to BHT, the essential oil and methanol …

Two Faces Of Media While Covering Human Right Activities In India, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

The situation of human rights in India is a complex one, as a result of the country's large size and tremendous diversity, its status as a developing country and a sovereign, secular, democratic republic, and its history as a former colonial territory. The Constitution of India provides for Fundamental rights, which include freedom of religion. Clauses also provide for Freedom of Speech, as well as separation of executive and judiciary and freedom of movement within the country and abroad. In its report on human rights in India during 2010, Human Rights Watch stated India had "significant human rights problems". They …

Language Discourse- A Critical Analysis Of Michel Focault's Work On Language Discourse With Special Reference To His Masterpiece "The Archeology Of Knowledge", Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication or debate". The following are three more specific definitions: (1) In semantics and discourse analysis: A generalization of the concept of conversation to all modalities and contexts. (2) "The totality of codified linguistic usages attached to a given type of social practice. (E.g.: legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse.)" (3) In the work of Michel Foucault, and social theorists inspired by him: "an entity of sequences of signs in that they are enouncements (enoncés)" (Foucault 1969: 141). An enouncement (often translated as "statement") is not a unity of signs, but an abstract …

Brief Of Amicus Curiae In Support Of Affirmance, Ron D. Katznelson

Ron D. Katznelson

No abstract provided.