Protein Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 6250 words

Protein - Research Paper Example Results indicated antibacterial activity to be present in pepsin-digested lactoferrin and F2 sample. Thus, purification of lactoferricin obtained through peptic digestion of bovine lactoferrin was accomplished by fractionation of the hydrolysate using cation exchange chromatography. Lactoferrin (Lf) is an iron-binding glycoprotein and, as the name suggests, is a constituent of milk. It is also found, to a lesser extent, in various mucosal (exocrine) secretions of mammals that are commonly exposed to normal flora such as tears, nasal exudate, saliva, bronchial mucus, gastrointestinal fluids, cervicovaginal mucus and seminal fluid (Weinberg, 2003). Also, Lf is produced by secondary granules of polymorphonuclear neutrophils for deposition at septic sites. The granular contents of neutrophils can be released into inflammatory fluids after neutrophil death, by what is known as "holocrine secretion". The protein is closely related to transferrin, the iron-transport protein present in the plasma. Lactoferrin is a multifunctional innate-defense protein, known to exert a broad-spectrum primary defense activity against microbes including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses (Orsi, 2004), and even some antibiotic-resistant pathogens (Wakabayashi et al., 2003). Lf is foun d in high concentrations in breast milk (~3–7 mg/ml) and tear fluid (1–4 mg/ml) (Rogan et al., 2006). Among the many constituents of milk which have revealed antimicrobial activity, lactoferrin exhibits both bacteriostatic and bactericidal activity against a wide array of microorganisms, including those causing gastroenteric infections, food poisoning, listeriosis and mastitis (Dionysius et al., 1993). Recently, clinical trials have demonstrated that bovine lactoferrin (bLF) administration can reduce the risk of colon carcinogenesis in humans (Tsuda et al., 2010). A key role of Lf is to scavenge non-protein-bound iron in body

Communications at Work Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Communications at Work - Essay Example Communication at work is one of the most important factors that determine how we perform our duties. Communication at work is takes the form of a dyad communication as we communicate with our managers vertically and we also communicate with our fellow workers horizontally. Effective communication is very important for efficient functioning of the dyad. However it has been shown that there are many factors that can affect the way we communicate with one another in the work place. Failure of communication at work can be a barrier to creating of an effective working environment as since it becomes difficult to understand each others. There are many barriers to effective communication in the workplace. This can result from environmental factors in the work place and at the same time it can be due to personal factors. However it has been shown that personal factors are the leading cause of barrier to communication in the work place as compared to environmental factors. Personal factors including the way we express ourselves during communication, attitudes and other factors have been shown to act as barriers to effective communication at the work place. This has adverse effects on the relationship in the dyad as we have described. Let us look at some of the personal factors that affect the communication process. Direct communication is one of the most commonly used means of communication at work... In this regard words are carefully chosen to communicate the message that we want to pass. However the way we choose words to pass our message has a lot of effect on other people. Certain words if used are likely to create a certain kind of expression to the person in the sense that they may emphasize or deemphasize the importance of the message that we are communicating at work. Attitudes Words are used careful when communicating to create and affect attitude. Word can be used to give a new attitude or alter the existing attitude about something or someone. However there has been a creative way in the use of the world in order to have such an effect. An attitude can be defined as a feeling towards someone or towards something. One may develop a positive or a negative attitude towards someone and this will affect the way they two people relate. It is usual that at first encounter, people usually have a neutral attitude towards something or towards someone. But as they interact with time, they tend to develop a positive or a negative attitude toward. This is usually affected by the judgment that people make from such an interaction. (Baby Center UK, 2008) As we communicate in the work place, we tend to form different kinds of attitudes. We may have a neutral attitude towards each other when we meet but as we interact we tend to change attitudes. In our communication process words play an important role as they alter the perception we had about someone or about something that we have related with in the work place. The way we choose our words to communicate with others also affects their attitude about us. In the dyad there are expectations that the supervisors or the managers may be expected to use authoritative

Long Term Effects of Social Media And Its Impact On Children's Research Paper

Long Term Effects of Social Media And Its Impact On Children's Behavioral And Mental Health - Research Paper Example It has been suggested that on average children use almost 11 hours a day using the entertainment media and as such while using other forms of entertainment i.e. TV, children also engage into activities like texting while watching TV. This however, result into division of attention and may have an impact on the learning and cognitive abilities of the children. A study on the cognitive abilities of the person suggested that those participants who were good at multi-tasking while using media performed badly as compared to the persons who could not perform better at doing multi-tasking while using the media. The study concluded that those who are quick at media multitasking can actually get distracted very easily. (Kirkorian, Wartella and Anderson) Some studies suggest that too much of the hypertexting through social media websites and use of multimedia contents can actually result into a fundamental change in the way our brains work. The hyper texting as well as the use of multimedia re sults into limited attention span in children besides child also experience poor focus, low level of comprehension as well as depression and long term memory damage. (Conley) The above study clearly identifies that a sustained use of social media and even other entertainment tools can actually damage the cognitive and behavioral abilities of the children. It is also because of this reason that new guidelines are emerging which focus on restricting the use of electronics within the rooms of the children. It is now suggested that laptops as well as smartphones shall be removed from the rooms of children especially during night time. By restricting the access of children to electronics in general actually can help reduce the number of hours children actually... This paper approves that it is also important to note that some studies have also suggested that the use of Facebook improves the verbal ability of the children. Checking the status of friends on Facebook and other activities actually result into better spelling, working memory as well as an improved verbal ability. This study however, suggested that students using Facebook only shows such improved ability as compared to the use of YouTube. This suggests that the extensive use of multi-media contents specially may further damage the verbal as well as other capabilities of the children whereas checking messages and statuses on Facebook may improve the verbal ability of children. This study however, is relatively different in nature and suggests that children using Facebook for more than one year actually show an improved performance on some of the tests however, exposure to multimedia contents may have a negative impact. This report makes a conclusion that long term use of social media may have negative as well as positive impacts on the psychological as well as mental abilities of the children. A sustained long term use of social media may result into more aggressive behavior in children including anti-social behaviors, mania as well as memory loss. Studies however, also suggest that use of Facebook may also result into improved verbal abilities. However, this advantage may not be available if children are using websites like YouTube suggesting that exposure to the multimedia contents can have further damaging effect on the children and their mental abilities.

Protein Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 6250 words

Protein - Research Paper Example Results indicated antibacterial activity to be present in pepsin-digested lactoferrin and F2 sample. Thus, purification of lactoferricin obtained through peptic digestion of bovine lactoferrin was accomplished by fractionation of the hydrolysate using cation exchange chromatography. Lactoferrin (Lf) is an iron-binding glycoprotein and, as the name suggests, is a constituent of milk. It is also found, to a lesser extent, in various mucosal (exocrine) secretions of mammals that are commonly exposed to normal flora such as tears, nasal exudate, saliva, bronchial mucus, gastrointestinal fluids, cervicovaginal mucus and seminal fluid (Weinberg, 2003). Also, Lf is produced by secondary granules of polymorphonuclear neutrophils for deposition at septic sites. The granular contents of neutrophils can be released into inflammatory fluids after neutrophil death, by what is known as "holocrine secretion". The protein is closely related to transferrin, the iron-transport protein present in the plasma. Lactoferrin is a multifunctional innate-defense protein, known to exert a broad-spectrum primary defense activity against microbes including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses (Orsi, 2004), and even some antibiotic-resistant pathogens (Wakabayashi et al., 2003). Lf is foun d in high concentrations in breast milk (~3–7 mg/ml) and tear fluid (1–4 mg/ml) (Rogan et al., 2006). Among the many constituents of milk which have revealed antimicrobial activity, lactoferrin exhibits both bacteriostatic and bactericidal activity against a wide array of microorganisms, including those causing gastroenteric infections, food poisoning, listeriosis and mastitis (Dionysius et al., 1993). Recently, clinical trials have demonstrated that bovine lactoferrin (bLF) administration can reduce the risk of colon carcinogenesis in humans (Tsuda et al., 2010). A key role of Lf is to scavenge non-protein-bound iron in body

Long Term Effects of Social Media And Its Impact On Children's Research Paper

Long Term Effects of Social Media And Its Impact On Children's Behavioral And Mental Health - Research Paper Example It has been suggested that on average children use almost 11 hours a day using the entertainment media and as such while using other forms of entertainment i.e. TV, children also engage into activities like texting while watching TV. This however, result into division of attention and may have an impact on the learning and cognitive abilities of the children. A study on the cognitive abilities of the person suggested that those participants who were good at multi-tasking while using media performed badly as compared to the persons who could not perform better at doing multi-tasking while using the media. The study concluded that those who are quick at media multitasking can actually get distracted very easily. (Kirkorian, Wartella and Anderson) Some studies suggest that too much of the hypertexting through social media websites and use of multimedia contents can actually result into a fundamental change in the way our brains work. The hyper texting as well as the use of multimedia re sults into limited attention span in children besides child also experience poor focus, low level of comprehension as well as depression and long term memory damage. (Conley) The above study clearly identifies that a sustained use of social media and even other entertainment tools can actually damage the cognitive and behavioral abilities of the children. It is also because of this reason that new guidelines are emerging which focus on restricting the use of electronics within the rooms of the children. It is now suggested that laptops as well as smartphones shall be removed from the rooms of children especially during night time. By restricting the access of children to electronics in general actually can help reduce the number of hours children actually... This paper approves that it is also important to note that some studies have also suggested that the use of Facebook improves the verbal ability of the children. Checking the status of friends on Facebook and other activities actually result into better spelling, working memory as well as an improved verbal ability. This study however, suggested that students using Facebook only shows such improved ability as compared to the use of YouTube. This suggests that the extensive use of multi-media contents specially may further damage the verbal as well as other capabilities of the children whereas checking messages and statuses on Facebook may improve the verbal ability of children. This study however, is relatively different in nature and suggests that children using Facebook for more than one year actually show an improved performance on some of the tests however, exposure to multimedia contents may have a negative impact. This report makes a conclusion that long term use of social media may have negative as well as positive impacts on the psychological as well as mental abilities of the children. A sustained long term use of social media may result into more aggressive behavior in children including anti-social behaviors, mania as well as memory loss. Studies however, also suggest that use of Facebook may also result into improved verbal abilities. However, this advantage may not be available if children are using websites like YouTube suggesting that exposure to the multimedia contents can have further damaging effect on the children and their mental abilities.

Individual, team and racquet athletics Essay Example for Free

Individual, team and racquet athletics Essay Sport contains mainly perceptual motor skills so it is important to select the correct skill for the situation. The process used to select the correct skill is called the information processing system or the DCR process, because we Detect information, Compare it with previous experiences and then react. Welford said that all information is taken in as stimuli through our senses. It is then stored in the short term memory before being sorted, if the stimulus is relevant to the current skill then it is stored in the short term memory where it is compared to previous experiences in the long term memory. Then a decision is made as to what action to take based on this comparison. The action that was performed and the outcome from this action are then stored in the long term memory for future reference. Welfords model is shown below: This model makes a performer react in the way that they do to a situation but there are many factors that can influence what action the performer decides to take. These include; time available, number and intensity of stimuli, experience, anticipation, fitness and motivation of the performer. The effect these factors have on a performer will vary from individual, racquet and team sports. The time that you have available to process the incoming stimuli differs in each sport. For example in rugby, which is externally paced, you have a small amount of time to process the stimuli and make a decision because there are usually many defenders around you. Tennis players also have very little time to react because the ball is usually travelling at a high speed and if they dont make a decision and return the ball they will lose the point. However in golf, an internally paced sport, the player can take as long as they need to make a decision because there are no opponents directly around them. There are three main types of stimuli that enter the sensory input these are; Vision: is where a player will react to a visual stimulus such as the position of the ball or an opponent. These stimuli are easier to detect and react to if the stimulus is brighter. For example in tennis the ball is bright yellow which makes it easier to see. But there are also unwanted stimuli such as ball boys moving or crowd movements these stimuli are obviously irrelevant but they are still initially taken in which slows down the whole process. In an individual sport there are fewer visual stimuli for example in a 100m race the only real visual stimulus is where the finish line is in relation to you. Audition: this is all stimuli that are heard, for example when a team mate calls for the ball in rugby. Auditable stimuli are heard and processed easier and faster if they are loud and clear. There are also irrelevant auditable stimuli such as crowd noise these will slow down the information processing model. Proprioception: this is made up of three components; Equilibrium: this is an awareness of your body position and balance. We can tell if we are about to fall over and where we are in relation to objects. Team sports are more likely to have an uneven playing surface which means that your balance will have to be constantly adjusted as you are running. But in individual and racquet sports the playing surface is fairly constant with the exception of golf, where a stance may have to be altered to adjust to the surface. Kinaesthesis: this is where the body senses the muscle movement and contraction it is sometimes known as muscle memory. It is if the movement feels right to the performer. It is developed through practice and experience one example would be a conversion kick in rugby the player may take there step away from the ball in the same way they usually do but they may just feel that they are not in the right place. It doesnt apply as much in team games as in individual and racquet sports apart from set plays. Tactile sense: this is the feeling of pressure this is important for all sports. It can be affected be the weather conditions because cold weather affects our ability to feel effectively. The short term sensory store is where all information is stored for a split second before it is processed. All relevant and irrelevant information is stored in here before it is replaced and lost. This does not differ between sports only what enters it does. The perception stage is where all the information that has come from the short term sensory store is processed. This is when irrelevant information is thrown away and useful stimuli such as where the ball is, is kept to make a decision and stored in the STM. This will vary between individual, racquet and team sports because of the amount of stimuli. In team sports there are more stimuli so it takes longer to sort through whereas there are relatively small amounts of stimuli in individual sports so it wont take as long to sort them out. It also differs depending upon whether the performer is experienced or not as it will be easier for a expert to sort through the stimuli because they have more experience. We sort through the stimuli with selective attention and take only the important pieces of information because only around 7-10 pieces of information can be stored in the STM. The information passed on from the perception stage is then stored in the STM. Because only 7-10 pieces of information can be stored an experienced player may chunk information together so that the position of all players is one piece, but a beginner may not be able to do this so each player may be a separate piece. Team sports would be much more affected because of the amount of information so not all stimuli can be stored so a poor decision may be made but less poor decisions will be made in an individual or racquet sport because there is less information. The LTM holds information on movement patterns and the results of using them in certain situations and can hold them for a lifetime. Team sports have many memories but individual sports may have less. The decision making process is where whats happening now (in the short term memory) with what has happened previously (in the long term memory). In the LTM the performer will be looking for similar situations and actions and their outcomes. This makes team games decision making process a lot longer because of the vast amount of information and possible actions to take. Whereas in an individual sport there is much less information and less possible actions. The motor output is the performance of the chosen skill. One example may be for a badminton player to put in a drop shot because the opponent is at the back of the court. The action is referred to the muscle movement in the LTM. The action and its consequences are then stored in the long term memory for future reference. Individual sports, because they are individually paced, make them the simplest in the IP model. Also because there are fewer stimuli there is a shorter reaction time which gives the performer more time to carry out the IP model which should result in a better decision. Racquet sports are externally paced due to the fact that there is an opponent; this means that there is less time for the performer to react. There are some irrelevant stimuli which will slow down the IP model which means it takes longer to decide than in an individual sport but not as long as in a team sport because there are fewer possibilities for what action to take. Team sports are externally paced which reduces the time available to react. Also there are much more irrelevant stimuli in team sports, this will lengthen the IP. The IP will also be lengthened due to the complexity of most team games because there are more situations and possible responses to choose from. Bibliography Advanced PE for Edexcel Heinemann by F. Galligan et al.

Construction of Information Engine

Construction of Information Engine Coiza Making sense of information   1. Introduction I more or less run my life directed by information from the Internet. I check the weather, check the traffic, look for places to go, look for reviews for the places, get updates from my friends and work and browse lots of information from many other sources. The information I am interested in depends on many factors including the time of the day, my location, whether it is a work day or a weekend, whether I am at home or on vacation. Indeed many times the information I am interested is prompted by information I have already discovered. For example, on a work day I might check the weather and, if it looks like rain, check the availability of trains to get me home (well I wouldnt want to get wet!). Technology like Google Now do a great job of automating information assimilation by guessing what information relevant is relevant to me. The challenge of this type of technology is that assimilation, particularly across many information sources, can be complex and not easy to guess. An alternative approach is to explicitly define the rules by which information is assimilated in a way that can then be automatically processed by what I call Information Engines. In this article I want to talk about an Information Engine that I have constructed called Coiza. Coiza is built around information channels that can be subscribed to and which display information as feeds like those used by Facebook and Twitter. Channels may display raw information, for example a news channel (like the BBC), or may display information resulting from combining information, for example location and Wikipedia summaries for that location. Channels can produce any information including context information like location and time of day. The most interesting feature of Coiza is that it allows the definition of new channels based on existing channels and rules on how the information from the existing channels gets used to produce information from a new channel. 2. Viewing Channels Channels can be subscribed to within Coiza. Depending on the channel it may be necessary to supply parameter values and/or authorisations for Coiza to access private information (e.g. Google Calendar) using the OAuth protocol. Once channels have been subscribed to then information is displayed from that channel in a feed like format where the feed is hidden if there is no information to display. 3. Creating Channels Viewing channels is where most users will spend the majority of the time, but the richness of channels available to view is enabled by ability to build new channels with relative ease. Any user within Coiza can create and publish channels by writing CoizaLang code. CoizaLang code consists of two primary constructs: Info A model of a piece of information that is either consumed or produced by a channel and can be rendered within feeds. Channel Consumes zero or more info flows, emits a single info flow, and defines rules for producing the output flow. Channels may be nested within each other. 3.1 Building Infos Here is an example of a CoizaLang info for Message illustrating the key features of infos. Firstly like all constructs, infos live within a namespace, or package, in this case coiza since it is supplied as part of the coiza platform. All infos (and for that matter channels) must live in a namespace beginning with the username of the coiza user that created it which in my case is jwillans. Infos can subtype, or extend, other infos which, as we shall see a bit later, allows the same instance of a type to play different roles depending on the channel using it. In this example Message subtypes TitledContent and, in addition to having the link and author fields defined locally, title and content fields are inherited through the sub type relationship. Fields can be typed using primitive values or other info types. A further important feature of infos is the optional render block which defines how infos are turned into html for display within a feed. When a subscribed channel is displayed (see the screenshot in Section 2) the supplied feed is a result of turning infos into html using the render block. Render blocks support a subset of html along with the ability to reference and navigate info fields using a small expression language. 3.2 Building Channels Channels are the bread and butter of coiza. A CoizaLang channel has zero or more input ports, a single output port, all of which are typed by infos. The job of a channel is to produce output infos often as a result of processing input infos. The resulting infos can then either be displayed as feeds, assuming the channel has being subscribed to, and/or used as the input to a further channel. In this way networks of channels can be created building on one another. 3.2.1 Getting the news Here is a simple example of a channel which does not do any processing directly but wraps the existing channel RSSFeedProvider to define a BBC news channel. I sometimes call these types of channels assembly channels. RSSFeedProvider is one of a number of channels that hook in to externally supplied data, in this case getting information from an RSS feed. Other example of external data channels in coiza includes Google Calendar, IMAP email, LinkedIn, current location, Wikipedia, currency converters à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ and the list is growing all the time. From a coiza point of view these behave exactly like any other (user defined) channel. Like infos, channels are named and live within a package namespace. A channel can have zero or more parameters which are declared in the parenthesis after the channel name (line 5). In the case of the BBC News channel no parameters are required. However RSSFeedProvider does have a single string parameter defining the RSS feed location, and the URL of the BBC news feed is supplied as an argument to the RSS feed (line 7). This BBC News channel has no input ports but defines a single output port (line 9) which simply takes the output of RSSFeedProvider. By the way, although it cannot be seen from the above code, RSSFeedProvider produces infos of type Message which we covered in the previous section. 3.2.2 Filtering the news Lets get more adventurous and explore some of the other features of CoizaLang. Suppose we wanted to filter the news by title, we could define a further channel as follows: FilteredTitle demonstrates a parameterised channel, requiring a filter string, with both input (+) and output (-) ports and a body that does some processing. Note how the ports are typed as Titled infoswhich is the base type Message subtypes thereby enabling this channel to filter titles on any type that extends Titled including Messages. The body of the channel iterates over all the incoming infos from feed and filters them using a pattern (line 11) which essentially says that an info must be of type Titled and the title field must contain the value of filter. Any matching infos are emitted to the output port. Now that we have a filter channel we can create a new assembly channel to filter the BBC news leveraging the two channels we have created. Most of the features of this channel has been illustrated previously, the one new feature is the wire declaration (line 14) which, as you may guess, defines how output ports are connected to input ports. In this case how the output of the BBC news channel is the input of the filter title channel. The output of this channel is then the output of the assembly channel (line 12). 3.2.3 Publishing the news During developing a channel it is possible to test the channel in order to ensure it works as designed as shown below. For a user channel to be subscribable, and used outside of testing, then it is important to guarantee that it is not going to change. To do this, a channel must be published which then prevents change. Before publication can happen, all infos or channels that are referenced by the channel must also be published and the channel must not have any type checking issues (there is no sense in publishing a channel that wont work). Unpublishing can only take place if the construct being unpublished has no dependents either in the form of other constructs or user subscriptions. If a change is required to a published channel with dependents then the only approach is to create a new version of that channel (or indeed info). We have created a couple of channels BBC News and Filtered BBC News that once published can be subscribed to by any user. Rather than the user having to search for the CoizaLang channel name (i.e. BBCNews or FilteredBBCNews) it is possible to give the channel a user friendly name along with a description which are both used as part of the search for subscribable channels mechanism. 3.2.4 Tell me in the morning Youve probably got a handle now on how coiza works and how anyone can build channels and those channels once published can either be subscribed to or used as a basis of further channels. By way of a final example, if Bob Brown publishes a channel to filter based on the time of day, then we can create another BBC News channel which filters both on the title and the time of day. 4. Summary I have talked about how Information Engines can help bring information together into a form that is more appropriate to what the users is interested in knowing, and I have walked through an example of an Information Engine I have constructed called Coiza. Hopefully Coiza looks useful and you will consider becoming a subscriber to the rich array of channels that are beginning to be defined or indeed define one or more channel for yourself. Finally in case you were wondering why is Coiza called Coiza it comes from the Portuguese word coisa meaning thing!