Newtonianism and the enthusiasm of Enlightenment

The career of John Jackson (1686-1763), Arian theologian and controversialist, provides a key to unlocking the early reception and quick collapse of a Newtonian natural apologetic originally developed by Samuel Clarke. The importance of friendship and discipleship in eighteenth-century intellectual enquiry is emphasised, and the links between Newton and his followers are traced alongside those of a group of Cambridge Lockeans, led by Jackson’s direct contemporary Daniel Waterland, who proved instrumental in the initial dismantling of Clarke’s brand of Newtonian apologetic. The controversial context of this engagement is shown to have been largely provided by the religiously compromising rise of freethinking, and Tindal’s Christianity as old as the creation (1731) signalled the dangers to proponents of natural religion as an adjunct of Christian apologetic in such a heated atmosphere. Religious division of the sort that resulted paradoxically played into the hands of the freethinkers in the anticlerical atmosphere of the 1730s, and accusations were exchanged between Newtonians and Lockeans accordingly. The dynamic of England’s Enlightenment experience is, then, a complicated one, and, as the career and writings of Jackson and William Whiston demonstrate, it was one which absorbed as well as repudiated ‘enthusiasm’.     

The influence of chronic nicotine treatment on stress-induced gastric ulceration and emptying rate in rats.

Ten-day treatment with nicotine (5, 25 or 50 micrograms/ml drinking water) dose-dependently intensified gastric ulceration induced by cold-restraint, and emptying rate. Stomach contractions produced by graded doses of bethanechol i.v. were elevated further by nicotine treatment. It is suggested that chronic nicotine administration produces hypersensitivity of the gastric muscarinic receptors; stomach hypermotility contributes to the ulcer-worsening action of the alkaloid.     

Efficient and power-awareness query over sensor networks

Sensor networks consisted of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional miniature sensor devices have played an important role in our daily life. Light and humidity monitoring, seismic and animal activity detection, environment and habitat monitoring are the most common applications. However, due to the limited power supply, ordinary query methods and algorithms can not be applied on sensor networks. Queries over sensor networks should be power-aware to guarantee the maximum power savings. The minimal power consumption by avoiding the expensive communication of the redundant sensor nodes is concentrated on. A lot of work have been done to reduce the participated nodes, but none of them have considered the overlapping minimum bounded rectangle (MBR) of sensors which make them impossible to reach the optimization solution. The proposed OMSI-tree and OMR algorithm can efficiently solve this problem by executing a given query only on the sensors involved. Experiments show that there is an obvious improvement compared with TinyDB and other spatial index, adopting the proposed schema and algorithm.     

Feature network-driven quadrant mapping for summarizing customer reviews

With the rapid growth of e-commerce, customers increasingly write online reviews of the product they purchase. These customer reviews are one of the most valuable sources of information affecting selection of products or services. Summarizing these customer reviews is becoming an interesting area of research, inspiring researchers to develop a more condensed, concise summarization for users. However, most of the current efforts at summarization are based on general product features without feature’s relationship. As a result, these summaries either ignore feedback from customers or do a poor job of reflecting the opinions expressed in customer reviews. To remedy this summarization shortcoming, we propose a feature network-driven quadrant mapping that captures and incorporates opinions from customer reviews. Our focus is on construction of a feature network, which is based on co-occurrence and sematic similarities, and a quadrant display showing the opinions polarity of feature groups. Moreover, the proposed approach involves clustering similar product features, and thus, it is different from standard text summarization based on abstraction and extraction. The summarized results can help customers better understand the overall opinions about a product.     

Ube3a,the E3 ubiquitin ligase causing Angelman syndrome and linked to autism,regulates protein homeostasis through the proteasomal shuttle Rpn10

Ubiquitination, the covalent attachment of ubiquitin to a target protein, regulates most cellular processes and is involved in several neurological disorders. In particular, Angelman syndrome and one of the most common genomic forms of autism, dup15q, are caused respectively by lack of or excess of UBE3A, a ubiquitin E3 ligase. Its Drosophila orthologue, Ube3a, is also active during brain development. We have now devised a protocol to screen for substrates of this particular ubiquitin ligase. In a neuronal cell system, we find direct ubiquitination by Ube3a of three proteasome-related proteins Rpn10, Uch-L5, and CG8209, as well as of the ribosomal protein Rps10b. Only one of these, Rpn10, is targeted for degradation upon ubiquitination by Ube3a, indicating that degradation might not be the only effect of Ube3a on its substrates. Furthermore, we report the genetic interaction in vivo between Ube3a and the C-terminal part of Rpn10. Overexpression of these proteins leads to an enhanced accumulation of ubiquitinated proteins, further supporting the biochemical evidence of interaction obtained in neuronal cells.