As Virtual Communities and electronic commerce are merging into each other, following the users wants and companies needs, at the same time electronic commerce is starting to support the whole buying process with agent technology adding efficiency and flexibility. We will discuss the integration of a multi agent market framework (CASBA) in a virtual community (VR-SHOP), which uses 3D graphical ...

In this paper, we improve and extend the MaSE methodology to bridge the gaps in this methodology. First, we propose an improvement process and, based on this process, we report the discovered gaps and weaknesses in the methodology during different phases of case study life cycle. For removing the reported weaknesses, we introduce a "Role Schema" to document roles properties and the "Knowledge M...

Circulating lipoproteins may offer interesting properties as therapeutic carriers for cytokines and hormones, in terms of both stability and bio-distribution. The fusion of apolipoprotein A-I with interleukin-15 (IL-15) targets the latter to high-density lipoproteins (HDLs). The bioactivity of this chimera can be further enhanced by creating triple fusions with IL-15 receptor α domain involved ...

One artifact from my childhood in the 1960’s that I still remember vividly is the series of plastic slidingblock puzzles manufactured by The Roalex Company of Forest Hills, NY (no relation to the maker of fine timepieces). These consisted of a high-quality plastic puzzle glued to a piece of cardboard containing information about the puzzle. Most of their sixty or so different designs were based...

We show that the mixing time for the fifteen puzzle in an n× n torus is on the order of n logn.

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In the course of our chemical screening program for novel metabolites by LC-MS monitoring, we isolated a new aspochracin derivative, JBIR-15 (1), together with aspochracin, from the culture broth of a sponge-derived fungus, Aspergillus sclerotiorum Huber Sp080903f04. The structure of 1 was determined to be N-demethyl aspochracin at the alanyl residue on the basis of extensive NMR and MS analyses.

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