Virtual communities include everything from discussion boards to massive multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual realities such as Second Life. The business world has assumed that virtual communities can be leveraged to provide access to consumers and consumer data. The benefits of this assumption have not always been realized. The purpose of this article is to understand why some bus...

The human neuraminidase enzymes (hNEU) are a family of four isoenzymes that hydrolyze sialosides, including gangliosides and glycoproteins. These enzymes are proposed to play roles in several important signaling pathways and are implicated in diseases such as diabetes and cancer. Despite their importance, only a limited number of studies have sought to identify potent inhibitors for these enzym...

Many peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been proposed for the provision of scalable live video streaming services over the Internet. While the literature contains surveys of the architectures of these systems, there is a lack of work on methodologies for their evaluation. We identify the main issues in the evaluation of P2P live streaming systems and use the Community Network Game (CNG) project as...

Recently, there have been growing concerns about excessive online gaming. Playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) appears to be particularly problematic, because these games require a high degree of commitment and time investment from the players to the detriment of occupational, social, and other recreational activities and relations. A number of gaming motives have b...

In a Voronoi game, each of a finite number of players chooses a point in some metric space. The utility of a player is the total measure of all points that are closer to him than to any other player, where points equidistant to several players are split up evenly among the closest players. In a recent paper, Dürr and Thang (2007) considered discrete Voronoi games on graphs, with a particular fo...

Role-Playing Games: Motivations, Emotional Investment, Relationships and Problematic Usage by Nicholas Yee [ Yee, N. (2006). The Psychology of MMORPGs: Emotional Investment, Motivations, Relationship Formation, and Problematic Usage. In R. Schroeder & A. Axelsson (Eds.), Avatars at Work and Play: Collaboration and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments (pp. 187-207). London: Springer-Verlag. ]

The antisaccade task has been widely used to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying volitional movement control. In this task, subjects suppress reflexive saccades to the sudden appearance of peripheral visual stimuli (prosaccades) and generate a saccade in the opposite direction. Recent imaging studies suggest that the globus pallidus (GP) is involved in the generation of antisaccades. T...

Online gaming has become one of the most popular forms of online leisure activity today. Massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), being highly persistent and immersive, is however often presented as being potentially dangerous of leading to problematic use. Despite a rising concern over this emerging societal challenge, the theoretical understanding of problematic use of MMOG is lacking in the...

In a framework similar to the models of expectation on economic policy, we purpose a model where the government subsidizes firms privatized by massive giveaways to the managers who are empirebuilders. The government injects funds because its aim is to avoid a drastic fall of output when a negative external macroshock hits the country. The consequence is that the economy can be locked into a sof...

Sir2p, Sir3p, Sir4p, and the core histones form a repressive chromatin structure that silences transcription in the regions near telomeres and at the HML and HMR cryptic mating-type loci in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Null alleles of SAS4 and SAS5 suppress silencing defects at HMR; therefore, SAS4 and SAS5 are negative regulators of silencing at HMR. This study revealed that SAS4 and SAS5 contrib...