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Graph: Basic Books, 2021, 336 pp., US$ 23.99 I Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life i is a book written by one of the greatest mathematical communicators of our time, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. "One of the problems of teaching of mathematics in schools is that it often leads to shallow knowledge of many rules and procedures without the development of interconnected schemata.". [Extracted from the article]

After explaining the purpose of the book in a one-page first chapter, I Getting Started i , the subsequent three chapters cover the fundamentals of addition, multiplication, and division. The authors are back with the third edition of the book after catching dozens of errors in the second edition that had somehow made it into the first edition. [Extracted from the article]

Cell migration is a central biological process that requires fine coordination of molecular events in time and space. A deregulation of the migratory phenotype is also associated with pathological conditions including cancer where cell motility has a causal role in tumor spreading and metastasis formation. Thus cell migration is of critical and strategic importance across the complex disease spectrum as well as for the basic understanding of cell phenotype. Experimental studies of the migration of cells in monolayers are often conducted with ‘wound healing’ assays. Analysis of these assays has traditionally relied on how the wound area changes over time. However this method does not take into account the shape of the wound. Given the many options for creating a wound healing assay and the fact that wound shape invariably changes as cells migrate this is a significant flaw. Here we present a novel software package for analyzing concerted cell velocity in wound healing assays. Our method encompasses a wound detection algorithm based on cell confluency thresholding and employs a Bayesian approach in order to estimate concerted cell velocity with an associated likelihood. We have applied this method to study the effect of siRNA knockdown on the migration of a breast cancer cell line and demonstrate that cell velocity can track wound healing independently of wound shape and provides a more robust quantification with significantly higher signal to noise ratios than conventional analyses of wound area. The software presented here will enable other researchers in any field of cell biology to quantitatively analyze and track live cell migratory processes and is therefore expected to have a significant impact on the study of cell migration, including cancer relevant processes. Installation instructions, documentation and source code can be found at licensed under GPLv3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics: the Winton Gallerystrives, like any exhibition concerning mathematics, to make meaningful contact between the abstruse realms of mathematics and the viewing audience. Unlike many other exhibitions, this is here accomplished by displaying a rich range of objects that demonstrate the essential role of mathematics in the world by emphasizing connections to the viewers’ existing cognitive environments. Through a focus on the ways that mathematical work affects and informs our human world, the exhibition succeeds in connecting a mathematical way of thinking with the lives of the viewing public in a complex and profound way, in exchange for their efforts and attention. While an approach which places the interweave of life and mathematics at its centre may invite worries about the representation of pure mathematics or whether such a strategy insulates the viewer from an understanding of ‘real’ mathematics, what this exhibition does is to offer a sense of the mind-set that underscores mathematical work. By revealing the implications of this mode of thought, the exhibition encourages the audience to understand their own lives and world in a more mathematically-oriented way, while also encouraging them to understand mathematics in terms of the ways their human world is already formed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the trading such as stock market, investment analysis, commodity market discussions, foreign exchanges, and insurance decision-making could be efficiently practised with pertinent financial data and statistical computing techniques. Some salient features of this well-illustrated book are I short versus long-term asset management, currency exchanging concepts, auction theory and implementation, economic fundamentals of freedom, liquidity concepts, autoregressive integrated moving average processes, asset return analysis, multivariate time series techniques, principal component analysis, market volatility, neural networking, filter rules, decomposition algorithms, high-frequency equity pairs trading, mean-variance portfolio theory and its statistical underpinnings, portfolio allocations, from market attention and sentiment in trading, normalizing analytics, market impacts, bench marking, order routing, i and I multiple asset analysis i among others. [Extracted from the article]

Computational protein design (CPD) is a powerful technique to engineer existing proteins or to design novel ones that display desired properties. Rosetta is a software suite including algorithms for computational modeling and analysis of protein structures and offers many elaborate protocols created to solve highly specific tasks of protein engineering. Most of Rosetta’s protocols optimize sequences based on a single conformation (i. e. design state). However, challenging CPD objectives like multi-specificity design or the concurrent consideration of positive and negative design goals demand the simultaneous assessment of multiple states. This is why we have developed the multi-state framework MSF that facilitates the implementation of Rosetta’s single-state protocols in a multi-state environment and made available two frequently used protocols. Utilizing MSF, we demonstrated for one of these protocols that multi-state design yields a 15% higher performance than single-state design on a ligand-binding benchmark consisting of structural conformations. With this protocol, we designed de novo nine retro-aldolases on a conformational ensemble deduced from a (βα)8-barrel protein. All variants displayed measurable catalytic activity, testifying to a high success rate for this concept of multi-state enzyme design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]