Machine Learning in Terminology Extraction from Czech and English Texts

The method of automatic term recognition based on machine learning is focused primarily on the most important quantitative term attributes. It is able to successfully identify terms and non-terms (with success rate of more than 95 %) and find characteristic features of a term as a terminological unit. A single-word term can be characterized as a word with a low frequency that occurs considerably more often in specialized texts than in non-academic texts, occurs in a small number of disciplines, its distribution in the corpus is uneven as is the distance between its two instances. A multi-word term is a collocation consisting of words with low frequency and contains at least one single-word term. The method is based on quantitative features and it makes it possible to utilize the algorithms in multiple disciplines as well as to create cross-lingual applications (verified on Czech and English).

Scale and Number

Much recent anthropology reflects on how scales are contested and contingent products of heterogeneous social interactions, not the ‘ontological givens’ (sensu Carr and Lempert) described in earlier scholarship. This article examines the importance of number in the formation of scales of measurement. It does so regarding a pastoral Mongolian scale of livestock-counting based on the number ten thousand, or tüm[en]: a qualitative-cum-quantitative term suggesting plenty and abundance. Drawing on literature on the anthropology of number, and bringing it into dialogue with studies of scale and ideology, this article argues that number is not just a means for calibrating pre-existing scales. Instead, as something endowed with particular qualities and conceptual stability, number can be mobilized to produce ideologically charged scales of measurement.

Rapid generation of sequence-diverse terminator libraries and their parameterization using quantitative Term-Seq

Synthetic biology and the rational design and construction of biological devices require vast numbers of characterized biological parts, as well as reliable design tools to build increasingly complex, multigene architectures. Design principles for intrinsic terminators have been established; however, additional sequence-structure studies are needed to refine parameters for termination-based genetic devices. We report a rapid single-pot method to generate libraries of thousands of randomized bidirectional intrinsic terminators and a modified quantitative Term-Seq (qTerm-Seq) method to simultaneously identify terminator sequences and measure their termination efficiencies (TEs). Using qTerm-Seq, we characterize hundreds of additional strong terminators (TE > 90%) with some terminators reducing transcription read-through by up to 1000-fold in Escherichia coli. Our terminator library and qTerm-Seq pipeline constitute a flexible platform enabling identification of terminator parts that can achieve transcription termination not only over a desired range but also to investigate their sequence-structure features, including for specific genetic and application contexts beyond the common in vivo systems such as E. coli.

Rheological Properties of Natural and Synthetic Rubbers

One of the important factors determining the processing characteristics of a rubber or unvulcanized rubber stock is the “plasticity”. This term has been used by rubber technologists to define the rate at which a material can be made to flow under a set of conditions of stress, geometry, and temperature. Strictly speaking, plasticity is not a quantitative term but, because of past usage, it seems justifiable to continue to employ it as an inverse index of resistance to flow. Three principal types of instruments have been employed for measuring plasticity of rubberlike materials: parallel plate, rotating disk or cylinder, and extrusion plastometers. The parallel-plate type, like the rotary type plastometer, is designed to operate with no slippage between rubber and confining surfaces, and both operate at rather low rates of shear. The rotating disk plastometer, however, permits attainment of thixotropic equilibrium and simple calculation of the mean shearing stress at a given average rate of shear. All extrusion plastometers described in the literature have employed rather short, large bore extrusion tubes, which permit appreciable slippage between rubber and tube walls, and have operated at a constant driving pressure and temperature, the rate of efflux serving as the plasticity index. The existence of slippage, of course, eliminates the possibility of calculating absolute consistency (inverse of plasticity), but is an advantage in that factory processing conditions, where slippage is a factor, are simulated. High rates of shear of the order of magnitude of those existing in factory extruders may be readily attained with extrusion plastometers. It has been argued that high rates of shear in a plastometer are desirable from the standpoint of predicting processability, since the shear stress vs. rate of shear relationship for rubberlike materials departs radically from linearity.