Nottingham Trent University

About: Nottingham Trent University is a education organization based out in Nottingham, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 4702 authors who have published 12862 publications receiving 307430 citations. The organization is also known as: NTU & Trent Polytechnic.

Differential inflammatory response to Helicobacter pylori infection: etiology and clinical outcomes

Abstract: The bacterial pathogen Helicobacter pylori commonly colonizes the human gastric mucosa during early childhood and persists throughout life. The organism has evolved multiple mechanisms for evading clearance by the immune system and, despite inducing inflammation in the stomach, the majority of infections are asymptomatic. H. pylori is the leading cause of peptic ulcer disease and gastric cancer. However, disease outcomes are related to the pattern and severity of chronic inflammation in the gastric mucosa, which in turn is influenced by both bacterial and host factors. Despite over 2 decades of intensive research, there remains an incomplete understanding of the circumstances leading to disease development, due to the fascinating complexity of the host-pathogen interactions. There is accumulating data concerning the virulence factors associated with increased risk of disease, and the majority of these have pro-inflammatory activities. Despite this, only a small proportion of those infected with virulent strains develop disease. Several H. pylori virulence factors have multiple effects on different cell types, including the induction of pro- and anti-inflammatory, immune stimulatory, and immune modulatory responses. The expression of multiple virulence factors is also often linked, making it difficult to assess the meaning of their effects in isolation. Overall, H. pylori is thought to usually modulate inflammation and limit acute damage to the mucosa, enabling the bacteria to persist. If this delicate balance is disturbed, disease may then develop.

The effect of copper on osmoregulation in the freshwater amphipod Gammarus pulex.

Abstract: The influence of copper on osmoregulation in the freshwater amphipod Gammarus pulex was determined from the analysis of water permeability, haemolymph sodium concentration, sodium influx and gill Na(+)/K(+) ATPase and Mg(2+) ATPase activity. Exposure to nominal copper concentrations of 100 microg l(-1) or greater caused a significant reduction in both haemolymph sodium concentration and sodium influx within 4 h. Measurements of water permeability, expressed as the half-time of exchange of body water (t(1/2)), excluded structural gill damage as the cause of this fall in haemolymph sodium. Copper at 10 microg l(-1) or above in the assay solution significantly reduced gill Na(+)/K(+) ATPase activity. In contrast gill Mg(2+) ATPase activity was markedly less affected by copper. These differences in enzyme sensitivity were considered with respect to the potential mechanisms of copper toxicity.

Gender, Traditional Authority, and the Politics of Rural Reform in South Africa

Abstract: The new South African Constitution together with later policies and legislation affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas where women’s right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the ‘former homelands’ through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit Mpumalanga province. There a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development and in so doing undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime. (author’s)

TeKET : a Tree-Based Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Technique

Abstract: Automatic keyphrase extraction techniques aim to extract quality keyphrases for higher level summarization of a document. Majority of the existing techniques are mainly domain-specific, which require application domain knowledge and employ higher order statistical methods, and computationally expensive and require large train data, which is rare for many applications. Overcoming these issues, this paper proposes a new unsupervised keyphrase extraction technique. The proposed unsupervised keyphrase extraction technique, named TeKET or Tree-based Keyphrase Extraction Technique, is a domain-independent technique that employs limited statistical knowledge and requires no train data. This technique also introduces a new variant of a binary tree, called KeyPhrase Extraction (KePhEx) tree, to extract final keyphrases from candidate keyphrases. In addition, a measure, called Cohesiveness Index or CI, is derived which denotes a given node’s degree of cohesiveness with respect to the root. The CI is used in flexibly extracting final keyphrases from the KePhEx tree and is co-utilized in the ranking process. The effectiveness of the proposed technique and its domain and language independence are experimentally evaluated using available benchmark corpora, namely SemEval-2010 (a scientific articles dataset), Theses100 (a thesis dataset), and a German Research Article dataset, respectively. The acquired results are compared with other relevant unsupervised techniques belonging to both statistical and graph-based techniques. The obtained results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed technique over other compared techniques in terms of precision, recall, and F1 scores.

Covalent organic framework based microspheres as an anode material for rechargeable sodium batteries

Abstract: Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) promise several benefits as materials in terms of gas adsorption, for use in optoelectronic devices, etc. However, the energy storage ability of COFs has not been well studied, especially in sodium batteries. In this report, for the first time, a covalent organic framework (COF), TFPB-TAPT COF, is used as an anode with high capacity in sodium batteries. The TFPB-TAPT COF exhibits an initial reversible capacity of 246 mA h g−1 and a capacity of 125 mA h g−1 is retained after 500 cycles. The TFPB-TAPT COF further exhibits Na+ ion storage capability at different current rates. The Na+ ion storage viability of the TFPB-TAPT COF arises mainly because of its open ordered nanoporous framework, which provides reversible accommodation for ions. This work opens up a promising new approach for further utilization of COFs as electrode materials in rechargeable sodium batteries.