50 Words or Less

50 Words or Less 50 Words or Less 50 Words or Less By Maeve Maddox In a recent post I have the following sentence: Conveying a coherent report in 50 words or less is quite a feat, and the writers in my paper usually do an amazingly good job of it. Several readers wrote to ask if I shouldn’t have written â€Å"50 words or fewer.† I appreciate readers who gently point out my errors so that I can have them corrected before too many more people see them. In the case of â€Å"50 words or less,† however, I’m on solid ground. The distinction between less and fewer when used to qualify nouns was codified in the 18th century. Fewer is used to qualify countable nouns: Channel 10 runs fewer commercials than Channel 5. Fewer people are in touch with Nature these days. Less is used to qualify uncountable nouns: She loves her new job, but she is earning less money. With the new standards, children may read less literature in school. There are exceptions to this rule. Less is used to describe units, such as time, money, and distance: I’ve spent less than two hours on my homework today. We owe less than $1,000 on the car. Our new house is located less than three miles from the school. When the relevant â€Å"items† (e.g., hours, dollars, miles) are seen as a unit and not as individual items, less is the word to use. A few years ago the UK store chain TESCO, overwhelmed by grammar sticklers, changed its express lane signs from â€Å"10 items or less† to â€Å"Up to 10 items.† According to Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Oxford, 2008), they needn’t have done so: Supermarket checkouts are correct when the signs they display read 5 items or less (which refers to a total amount), and are misguidedly pedantic when they read 5 items or fewer (which emphasizes individuality, surely not the intention). The usage â€Å"50 words or less† falls into the same category as the check-out sign. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Grammar category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Math or Maths?Homogeneous vs. Heterogeneous7 Proofreading Steps

Platos Socrates essays

Plato's Socrates essays Socrates is interesting not only for his teachings, but also for his life since it was a representation of his teachings. He made a huge influence on the world philosophy. Socrates did not aim for active public work. He led the life of the philosopher: he lived unpretentiously, but had leisure. All his time Socrates devoted to philosophical conversations and disputes. He had many students, but didnt take any money for his teachings. While testing others on wisdom, Socrates doesnt consider himself wise at all; in his opinion, wisdom applies only to the god. If the person believes that he has answers to all questions, such person is worthless for philosophy because there is no need for him to puzzle over searches of the truest concepts. All his truths are actually a collection of the most poor, flat representations of narrow-minded knowledge. After the overthrow of tyranny and restoration of democracy in Athens, Socrates was accused of not believing in gods, entering new deities, and of corrupting the youth of Athens. In reply to these accusations, Socrates has presented the defending speech in which he denied the accusations put forward against him. This great speech contains in Platos Apology. In this dialogue, Plato summarizes some of Socrates' most famous philosophical ideas: the necessity of doing what one thinks is right even in the face of common disagreement, and the need to pursue knowledge even when opposed. Socrates was supposed to be executed at once, but on the eve of the trial the ship with annual religious mission left Athens. Before the returning of the ship, all executions were forbidden by customs. Thus, Socrates had to spent thirty days in prison before execution. In the early morning of the execution day, Socrates old friend Crito came to Socrates and informed him that all guards are bribed and Socrates can run. In a dialogue with Crito, Socrates considers the proposal, try...

The effecst and changes in parenting of Asian families after Essay

The effecst and changes in parenting of Asian families after immigration to Western societies - Essay Example If the perceptions of parents and children are dissonant and based on lived historical experience or current realities, then their ability to manage the stresses of forced migration will be diminished even further. If the perceptions of each generation can be made more congruent, then it is likely that both parents and their children will see each other as resources rather than as additional stressors. To understand this problem, Asian parenting styles and characteristics need to be studied. Warmth and dominating control offer two important dimensions of parental style that may be universal, and against which the meaning of specific practices might be elucidated. The use of these styles as touchstones was an important strategy which can be used in understanding data from new western cultures. Immigration of Asian families to Western Societies usually involves major changes in parent–child relationships. The results of some studies have shown that the relations between immigrant parents and their children are vulnerable to the risks commonly associated with immigration, especially during the adolescent years (Nguyen & Williams, 1988). On the one hand, during adolescence, children become more cognitively sophisticated and think differently about what their parents can and cannot control in their lives. This developmental shift is compounded by the process of acculturation for immigrant adolescents, making them more likely to downplay their parents’ values and modes of behavior and adopt values and modes of behavior from the new society. Immigrant parents, on the other hand, may resist change in their traditional values. Some scholars suggest that despite years of living in the country of resettlement, many immigrant parents preserve their ideas about child-rearing, their expectations, norms, rules, and beliefs (Nguyen & Williams, 1988). The research findings suggest that family values that center around household chores,

All Forms of Tobacco Should Be Made Illegal Essay

All Forms of Tobacco Should Be Made Illegal - Essay Example It is evidently clear from the discussion that tobacco items in widespread use and business preparation are derived from three sorts of tobacco preparation; rolls of tobacco smoked (e.g. Cigar, cigarette) pipes (counting water pipes) oral arrangements for biting and holding in the mouth or putting in the nose (e.g. snuff, snus, betel quid). Smoking in broad daylight was, for quite some time, done only by men, and when done by females was sometimes connected with promiscuity; In Japan, throughout the Edo period, prostitutes and their customers regularly approached each other under the appearance of offering a smoke. The same was correct for nineteenth-century Europe. At present, there are an expected 1.3 billion smokers on the planet. The death rate from tobacco utilization is currently 5 million individuals a year; if present usage examples continue, the number of deaths will be about twofold, reaching near 10 million by the year 2020. The higher rate of death and ailment is quickly moving to developing nations. Nearly one-half of cigarette smokers die early from tobacco intake. That is to say that in regards to 650 million individuals alive today will, in the end, die from a tobacco-related illness if they keep on smoking. In spite of what we think about tobacco use today, tobacco utilization keeps on increasing around the world. The plague is still growing, particularly in low- and moderate income nations. The tobacco business has an enormous potential market in these nations, where they regularly confront weaker tobacco control measures and ï ¬ nd an extraordinary number of possible new clients, around females specifically. Different sorts of tobacco items are connected with various sorts of diseases. For instance, despite the fact that smokeless tobacco items may not result in lung disease and different infections connected to smoke inhalation, their numerous other unfavorable effects still make them the real health concern in a few regions. Cigarettes, P ipes, water pipes and Cigars are the most commonly used forms of tobacco. Cigarettes are the most fatal and addictive items ever made by humans. At the point when utilized as intended by their producers, they kill more or less one a large portion of their clients. There are a few parts of the smoke and its advancement that have an extraordinary effect on the degree of the harm it does in health terms.

The Role of Scenario Planning in Exploring the Environment Essay

The Role of Scenario Planning in Exploring the Environment - Essay Example Increasing pressure on the resource, and factors to its production, however, identifies concerns over trends in its future market. These lead to the question, ‘how will the crude oil industry affect our country’s economy and households’ livelihoods in the year 2020?’ Trends in the crude oil industry identify many uncertainties, both short term and long term. Seasonal weather conditions that affect energy consumption levels in traveling and heating determines variable demand levels and prices of crude oil. Adverse weather phenomena such as hurricanes also hamper production process to influence supply, and subsequently price of crude oil. Other factors that influence trends in the industry include resolutions by OPEC, production cost, and technological developments for the industry’s applications. Increasing demand for oil by emerging Asian economies such as China and India is another driver to the industry’s trend (Nrcan 2010). Similarly, increasing global demand for oil indicates future demand concerns (Opec 2012). The industry’s critical uncertainties are demand and adverse weather conditions. Demand has a high potential level because it dictates the industry’s quantity of production and influences prices at given supply capacities. It is however uncertain because of possible changes such as the emergence of expanding economies and development of alternative sources of energy. Adverse weather conditions also dictate the ability to mine crude oil and are highly unpredictable, being natural conditions (Nrcan 2010; Opec 2012). Demand for crude oil identifies two extremes, high demand relative to supply and low demand relative to supply while weather conditions identify existence of adverse weather conditions and favorable weather. The two factors generate four scenarios as shown below (Burt 2006). A favorable condition will occur under high demand for crude oil and simultaneous favorable weather conditions. This would mean an active economy that utilizes energy for production activities and household needs. Availability of oil due to good weather would also mean sufficient supply and consequently favorable prices.  

Building Factory Essay Example for Free

Building Factory Essay A company has announced that it wishes to build a large factory near your community. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this new influence on your community. Do you support or oppose the factory? Explain your position. I am from Saint-Petersburg, Russia. I believe that building a large factory near my community has advantages as well as disadvantages. In the following paragraphs I will list basic benefits and losses that will be brought by a new factory. For several reasons, I think that a new factory will not be a good addition to my neighborhood. First of all, factories often bring pollution. They are prone to contaminating the local air and water. Second of all, factories make noise. Another important aspect of building a new factory near by is that it will make the local traffic heavy. As a result of this, the amount of traffic congestions will increase, as well as contamination of the air. So, all these obviously will not make ones life happier and healthier in my community. From the other side, I believe that a new factory will bring some advantages to my community. First of all, it will bring new job opportunities. Many specialists will be required to work there. Second of all, I think many local community facilities will have to be renovated to obtain reliable supply of water and electricity. So, some old pipes may be changed. Another important benefit of this is that the local roads in order to manage the increasing traffic will be rebuilt and widened. However, I do not think that listed above benefits are worth all these troubles including water contamination and the constant pollution of air. From my point of view all factories must be built far from the people communities because they can be really harmful for peoples health.

Modelling of β-turns using Hidden Markov Model

Modelling of ÃŽ ²-turns using Hidden Markov Model Modelling of ÃŽ ²-turns using Hidden Markov Model Nivedita Rao Ms. Sunila Godara Abstract— One of the major tasks in predicting the secondary structure of a protein is to find the ÃŽ ²-turns. Functional and structural traits of a globular protein can be better understood by the turns as they play an important role in it. ÃŽ ²-turns play an important part in protein folding. ÃŽ ²-turns constitute on an average of 25% of the residues in all protein chains and are the most usual form of non-repetitive structures. It is already known that helices and ÃŽ ²-sheets are among the most important keys in stabilizing the structures in proteins. In this paper we have used hidden Markov model (HMM) in order to predict the ÃŽ ²-turns in proteins based on amino acid composition and compared it with other existing methods. Keywords- ÃŽ ²-turns, amino acid composition, hidden Markov model, residue. I. Introduction Bioinformatics has become a vital part of many areas of biology. In molecular biology, bioinformatics techniques such as signal processing or image processing allow mining of useful results from large volumes of raw data. In the field ofgeneticsandgenomics, it helps in sequencing and explaining genomes and their perceivedmutations. It plays an important part in the analysis of protein expression, gene expression and their regulation. It also helps in literal mining of biological prose and the growth of biological and gene ontologies for organizing and querying biological data. Bioinformatics tools aid in the contrast of genetic and genomic data and more commonly in the understanding of evolutionary facets of molecule based biology. At a more confederated level, bioinformatics helps in analyzing and categorizing the biological trails and networks that are an significant part of systems biology. In structural biology, bioinformatics helps in the understanding, simulation and modelling of RNA, DNA and protein structures as well as molecular bindings. The advancements in genome has increased radically over the recent years, thus resulting in the explosive growth of biological data widening the gap between the number of protein sequences stored in the databases and the experimental annotation of their functions. There are many types of tight turns. These turns may subject to the number of atoms form the turn [1]. Among them is ÃŽ ²-turn, which is one of the important components of protein structure as it plays an important part in molecular structure and protein folding. A ÃŽ ²-turn invokes four consecutive residues where the polypeptide chain bends back on itself for about 180 degrees [2]. Basically these chain reversals are the ones which provide a protein its globularity rather than linearity. Even ÃŽ ²-turns can be further classified into different types. According to Venkatachalam [3], ÃŽ ²-turns can be of 10 types based on phi, psi angles and also some other. Richardson[4] suggested only 6 distinct types(I,I,II,II,VIa and VIb) on the basis of phi, psi ranges, along with a new category IV. Presently, classification by Richardson is most widely used. Turns can be considered as an important part in globular proteins in respect to its structural and functional view. Without the component of turns, a polypeptide chain cannot fold itself into a compressed structure. Also, turns normally occur on the visible surface of proteins and therefore it possibly represents antigenic locations or involves molecular recognition. Thus, due to the above reasons, the prediction of ß-turns in proteins becomes an important element of secondary structure prediction. II. RELATED WORK A lot of work has been done for the prediction of ÃŽ ²-turns. To determine chain reversal regions of a globular protein, Chou at al. [5] used conformational parameters. Chou at al. [6] has given a residue-coupled model in order to predict the ÃŽ ²-turns in proteins. Chou at al. [7] used sequence of tetra peptide. Chou [8] again predicted tight turns and their types in protein using amino acid residues. Guruprasad K at al. [9] predicted ÃŽ ²-turn and ÃŽ ³-turn in proteins using a new set of amino acid and hydrogen bond. Hutchinson at al. [10] created a program called PROMOTIF to identify and analyse structural motifs in proteins. Shepherd at al. [11] used neural networks to predict the location and type of ÃŽ ²-turns. Wilmot at al. [12] analysed and predicted different types of ÃŽ ²-turn in proteins using phi, psi angles and central residues. Wilmot at al. [13] proposed a new nomenclature GORBTURN 1.0 for predicting ÃŽ ²-turns and their distortions. This study has used hidden Markov model to predict the ÃŽ ²-turns in the protein. HMM has been widely used as biological tools. (a) (b) Figure 1.1 (a) defines Type-I ß-turns and (b) defines Type-II ß-turns. The hydrogen bond is denoted by dashed lines. [14] III. Materials and methods A. Dataset The dataset used in the experiment is a non-redundant dataset which was previously described by Guruprasad and Rajkumar [9]. This dataset contains around 426 non-homologous protein chains. All protein chains do not have more than 25% sequence similarity. It is basically to ensure that there is very little correlation in the training set. In this dataset, each protein chain contains at least one beta turn and has X-ray crystallography with resolution 2 or more. The dataset shows there are mainly ten classes and other classes are made using the combination of these ten classes. Table 1 Datasets Description [14] B. Hidden markov model In our work, we have used the probabilistic feature of HMM for ÃŽ ²-turns prediction. A model is presumed that ruminate the protein sequence being generated with a stochastic process that alternates amid two hidden states: â€Å"turns† and â€Å"non-turns†. The HMM is trained using 20 protein sequences. The probability transition matrix is 2Ãâ€"2 for two states: turns and non-turns. The probability emission matrix is considered as 2Ãâ€"20 as there are 2 states and 20 amino acids. We prepared our probability transition matrix and probability emission matrix according to the knowledge that we have for dataset that is the probability of ÃŽ ²-non-turns is more than ÃŽ ²-turns in a protein sequence and by considering probabilities of each residue as the parameter taken from Chou [7] for calculating the emission and transition matrix. There are more than ten classes and this HMM model parameter is estimated in2 super states and the training was performed. Let P be a protein sequence of length n, which can also be expressed as Where ri is the amino acid residue at sequence position i. The sequence is considered to be generated from r1 to rn in hidden Markov model. The model is trained using Baum-Welch algorithm [15]. Baum-Welch algorithm is a standard method for finding the maximum likelihood estimation of HMMs, in which posterior probabilities were performed by using both forward and backward algorithms. These algorithms were used to compile the state transition probability and emission probability matrices. The initial probabilities are calculated, taking into account a correlation between residues in different position. The most probable path is calculated using Viterbi algorithm [16] as it automatically segments the protein into its component regions. The probability of residue in the protein sequence used to generate the emission matrix given by Where, m is the total number that of residue in the protein sequence and n is the total number of residues in the protein sequence. C. Accuracy measures Once the prediction of ÃŽ ²-turns is performed using the hidden Markov model, the problem arises of finding an appropriate measure for the quality of the prediction. Four different scalar measures are used to assess the models performance [17]. These measures can be derived four different quantities: TP (true positive), p, is the number of correctly classified ÃŽ ²-turn residues. TN (true negative), n, is the number of correctly classified non-ÃŽ ²-turn residues. FP (false positive), m, is the number of non-ÃŽ ²-turn residues incorrectly classified as ÃŽ ²-turn residues. FN( false negative), o, is the number of ÃŽ ²-turn residues incorrectly classified as non-ÃŽ ²-turn residues. The predictive performance of the HMM model can be expressed by the following parameters: Qtotal gives the percentage of correctly classified residues. MCC (Matthews Correlation Coefficient) [18] is a measure that counts for both over and under- predictions. Qpredicted , is the percentage of ÃŽ ²-turn predictions that are correct. Qobserved is the percentage of observed ÃŽ ²-turns that are correctly predicted. IV. results and discussions A. Results This model is used to predict the ÃŽ ²-turns and is based on hidden Markov model. There are basically two classes: turns and non-turns. It is used to predict one protein sequence at a time. It has been observed that it performs better than some existing prediction methods. B. Comparison with other methods In order to examine of this method, it has been compared with other existing methods as shown in table 2. For now, the comparison is done on a single protein sequence. The comparison is for protein sequence with PDB code 1ah7. Figure 2 shows comparison of Qtotal using different algorithms. Figure 3 shows comparison of Qpredicted using different algorithms. Figure 4 shows comparison of Qobserved using different algorithms. Figure 5 shows comparison of MCC using different algorithms. The HMM based method shows better results than some of the already existing algorithms of the prediction. Figure 2. comparison of Qtotal with different algorithms Figure 4. comparison of Qobserved with different algorithms Figure 3. comparison of QPredicted with different algorithms Figure 5. comparison of MCC with different algorithms Table 2 Comparison with other methods V. conclusion In this paper, we presented a way in which HMM can be used to predict ÃŽ ²-turns in a protein chain. Our method is used to predict turns and non-turns of single protein sequence at a time. The results thus obtained are better than some of the other existing methods. The performance of the ÃŽ ²-turns can further be improved by considering other techniques such as using predicted secondary structures and dihedral angles from multiple predictors or by using feature selection technique [19] or by considering combination of many features together. We can also combine different machine learning techniques together to improve the performance of the prediction. References Chou, Kuo-Chen. Prediction of tight turns and their types in proteins.Analytical biochemistry286.1 (2000): 1-16. Chou, P.Y. and Fasman, G.D. (1974) Conformational parameters for amino acids in helical, beta-sheet and random coil regions calculated from proteins.Biochemistry, 13, 211-222. Venkatachalam, C. M. Stereochemical criteria for polypeptides and proteins. V. Conformation of a system of three linked peptide units.Biopolymers6.10 (1968): 1425-1436. Richardson, Jane S. The anatomy and taxonomy of protein structure. Advances in protein chemistry34 (1981): 167-339. Chou, P. Y., and G. D. Fasman. Prediction of beta-turns.Biophysical journal 26.3 (1979): 367-383. Chou, K.C. â€Å"Prediction of beta-turns† Journal of Peptide Research(1997): 120-144. Chou, Kou-Chen, and James R. Blinn. Classification and prediction of ÃŽ ²-turn types.Journal of protein chemistry16.6 (1997): 575-595. Chou, Kuo-Chen. Prediction of tight turns and their types in proteins.Analytical biochemistry286.1 (2000): 1-16. Guruprasad, Kunchur, and Sasidharan Rajkumar. Beta-and gamma-turns in proteins revisited: a new set of amino acid turn-type dependent positional preferences and potentials.Journal of biosciences25.2 (2000): 143. Hutchinson, E. Gail, and Janet M. Thornton. PROMOTIF—a program to identify and analyze structural motifs in proteins.Protein Science5.2 (1996): 212-220. Shepherd, Adrian J., Denise Gorse, and Janet M. Thornton. Prediction of the location and type of ÃŽ ²-turns in proteins using neural networks.Protein Science8.5 (1999): 1045-1055. Wilmot, C. M., and J. M. Thornton. Analysis and prediction of the different types of ÃŽ ²-turn in proteins.Journal of molecular biology203.1 (1988): 221-232. Wilmot, C. M., and J. M. Thornton. ÃŽ ²-Turns and their distortions: a proposed new nomenclature.Protein engineering3.6 (1990): 479-493. Available from :http://imtech.res.in/raghava/betatpred/intro.html Welch, Lloyd R. Hidden Markov models and the Baum-Welch algorithm.IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter53.4 (2003): 10-13. Lou, Hui-Ling. Implementing the Viterbi algorithm.Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE12.5 (1995): 42-52. Fuchs, Patrick FJ, and Alain JP Alix. High accuracy prediction of ÃŽ ²Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ turns and their types using propensities and multiple alignments.Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics59.4 (2005): 828-839. Matthews, Brian W. Comparison of the predicted and observed secondary structure of T4 phage lysozyme.Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA)-Protein Structure405.2 (1975): 442-451. Saeys, Yvan, Ià ±aki Inza, and Pedro Larraà ±aga. A review of feature selection techniques in bioinformatics.bioinformatics23.19 (2007): 2507-2517.