Social virtual worlds (SVWs) have become increasingly important environments for social interaction, especially for the younger generations. For SVWs to be economically sustainable, attracting new users and retaining the existing ones existing users is a paramount issue. This calls for understanding of the reasons why people engage in social virtual worlds. This study investigates the motives f...

Governments worldwide have, increasingly, implemented e-government initiatives for their potential significant benefits; among which, delivering better services to citizens through increasing citizens' convenience, satisfaction, and independence; and saving their time, effort, and cost. Achieving each benefit is an objective to these governments and fulfilling each objective is considered a cri...

In the last few years, the number of Internet users in Indonesia was growing rapidly as many people started to use e-commerce sites. Utilization of C2C e-commerce in particular has a risk that may reduce people interest in online shopping. Of the many factors that may influence online shopping intention, trust becomes the key. This study built a model to explain the purchase intention in the C2...

Transcriptomic and peptidomic analysis of skin secretions from the Painted-belly leaf frog Phyllomedusa sauvagii led to the identification of 5 novel phylloseptins (PLS-S2 to -S6) and also of phylloseptin-1 (PSN-1, here renamed PLS-S1), the only member of this family previously isolated in this frog. Synthesis and characterization of these phylloseptins revealed differences in their antimicrobi...

Most bacterial glycoproteins identified to date are virulence factors of pathogenic bacteria, i.e. adhesins and invasins. However, the impact of protein glycosylation on the major human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus remains incompletely understood. To study protein glycosylation in staphylococci, we analyzed lysostaphin lysates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains by S...

The p21-activated kinases (PAKs) play essential roles in diverse cellular processes and are required for cell proliferation, apoptosis, polarity establishment, migration, and cell shape changes. Here, we have identified a novel function for the group I PAKs in cell-cell fusion. We show that the two Drosophila group I PAKs, DPak3 and DPak1, have partially redundant functions in myoblast fusion i...

This paper addresses the problem of online quality prediction in processes with multiple operating modes. The paper proposes a new method called mixture of partial least squares regression (Mix-PLS), where the solution of the mixture of experts regression is performed using the partial least squares (PLS) algorithm. The PLS is used to tune the model experts and the gate parameters. The solution...

Nicotine and a variety of other drugs and toxins are metabolized by cytochrome P450 (CYP) 2A6. The aim of the present study was to build a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) model to predict the activities of nicotine analogues on CYP2A6. Kernel partial least squares (K-PLS) regression was employed with the electro-topological descriptors to build the computational models. Both...

Projection to latent structures or partial least squares (PLS) produces output-supervised decomposition on inputX, while principal component analysis (PCA) produces unsupervised decomposition of inputX. In this paper, the effect of outputYon theX-space decomposition in PLS is analyzed andgeometric properties of the PLS structure are revealed. Several PLS algorithms are compared in a geometric w...