Electronic institutions (EIs) have been proposed as a means of regulating open agent societies. EIs define the rules of the game in agent societies by fixing what agents are permitted and forbidden to do and under what circumstances. And yet, there is the need for EIs to adapt their regulations to comply with their goals despite coping with varying populations of self-interested agents. This pa...

The "enhanced intracellular survival" (eis) gene of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is involved in the intracellular survival of M. smegmatis. However, its exact effects on host cell function remain elusive. We herein report that Mtb Eis plays essential roles in modulating macrophage autophagy, inflammatory responses, and cell death via a reactive oxygen species (ROS)-dependent pathway. Macrop...

To further understand Mycobacterium tuberculosis pathogenesis, the regulation of potential virulence genes needs to be investigated. The eis gene of M. tuberculosis H37Rv enhances the intracellular survival of Mycobacterium smegmatis, which does not contain eis, within macrophages (J. Wei, J. L. Dahl, J. W. Moulder, E. A. Roberts, P. O'Gaora, D. B. Young, and R. L. Friedman, J. Bacteriol. 182:3...

In recent years, a number of organisations have invested heavily in executive information systems (EIS) in order to improve the performance gains of their executives’ roles. Although executives presided over and authorised investment in EIS projects to support their roles, the majority of executives are unenthusiastic about using EIS because of the design flaws and failures of these systems. St...

The success of an executive information system (EIS) depends upon many factors, including providing support for the strategic management process (SMP). The SMP is comprised of five phases: organizational objectives, environmental scanning, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and strategic control. The study empirically investigated (1) the support of EISs for the phases of the SMP an...

Although there have been a number of studies on large scale implementation of proprietary enterprise information systems (EIS), open-source software (OSS) for EIS has received limited attention in spite of its potential as a disruptive innovation. Cost saving is the main driver for adopting OSS among the other possible benefits including security and reliability, transparency of development pro...

There is growing evidence that strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis differ in pathogenicity and transmissibility, but little is understood about the contributory factors. We have previously shown that increased expression of the principal sigma factor, SigA, mediates the capacity of M. tuberculosis strain 210 to grow more rapidly in human monocytes, compared with other strains. Strain 210 is p...

This paper shows that the CRRA specification of intertemporal preferences (implying a constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution, or EIS), imposes surprising limitations on within period budget allocations. Consequently, the constant EIS assumption can be tested with demand data. In fact, the parameter of the CRRA utility function is pinned down completely by the shape of Engel curves; i...

We present here a study of XMM-Newton data of two distant galaxy cluster candidates. One of these was discovered serendipitously in near infrared data, CL J0533-2411, the other one corresponds to the cluster EIS J0533-2412 part of the EIS cluster survey. The estimated redshift of CL J0533-2411 is z = 1.2 − 1.7. EIS J0533-2412 is a rich system (Λcl = 299), with a spectroscopically confirmed reds...

The feasibility and sensitivity of electrochemical noise (EN), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and linear polarization resistance (LPR) for detection of corrosion in post-tensioning (PT) components was investigated. The use of the electrical resistance (ER) technique, as well EIS and LPR, to detect air space corrosion at the grout voids was also explored. The results showed that h...