Film as Explicador for Hypertext

A few ideas from film theory, most notably Eisenstein's concept of montage, can improve students' understanding of hypertexts and lessen their resistance to open-ended, nonlinear narratives. These structural characteristics, so frustrating to many new readers of hypertext, can also be found in popular and experimental films. In particular, Godfrey Reggio's (1983) documentary Koyaanisqatsi provides a good starting point for merging hypertext and film theory. Koyaanisqatsi not only broke new ground for documentary film; its structure also resembles Landow's model for an axial hypertext. At the same time, techniques pioneered by Landow, Joyce, Guyer, and others involved in creating and critiquing hypertext can be used to examine film. Having students look closely at Koyaanisqatsi's composition allows them to become amateur cinematographers, who now possess software for breaking a film down and examining its composition, montage, transitions, subliminal messages, and motifs – a process that may then be applied to hypertext.     

Synthesis and characterization of radiation cross-linked PVP hydrogels and investigation of its potential as an antileishmanial drug carrier

Polymer Bulletin - The aim of this study was to elaborate a suitable hydrogel to be used as drug carrier for antileishmanial treatment. Therefore, a PVP hydrogel was synthesized using gamma...     

Instrument recognition in polyphonic music based on automatic taxonomies

We propose a new approach to instrument recognition in the context of real music orchestrations ranging from solos to quartets. The strength of our approach is that it does not require prior musical source separation. Thanks to a hierarchical clustering algorithm exploiting robust probabilistic distances, we obtain a taxonomy of musical ensembles which is used to efficiently classify possible combinations of instruments played simultaneously. Moreover, a wide set of acoustic features is studied including some new proposals. In particular, signal to mask ratios are found to be useful features for audio classification. This study focuses on a single music genre (i.e., jazz) but combines a variety of instruments among which are percussion and singing voice. Using a varied database of sound excerpts from commercial recordings, we show that the segmentation of music with respect to the instruments played can be achieved with an average accuracy of 53%.     

Temporal Integration for Audio Classification With Application to Musical Instrument Classification

Nowadays, it appears essential to design automatic indexing tools which provide meaningful and efficient means to describe the musical audio content. There is in fact a growing interest for music information retrieval (MIR) applications amongst which the most popular are related to music similarity retrieval, artist identification, musical genre or instrument recognition. Current MIR-related classification systems usually do not take into account the mid-term temporal properties of the signal (over several frames) and lie on the assumption that the observations of the features in different frames are statistically independent. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the information carried by the evolution of these characteristics over time. To that purpose, we propose a number of methods for early and late temporal integration and provide an in-depth experimental study on their interest for the task of musical instrument recognition on solo musical phrases. In particular, the impact of the time horizon over which the temporal integration is performed will be assessed both for fixed and variable frame length analysis. Also, a number of proposed alignment kernels will be used for late temporal integration. For all experiments, the results are compared to a state of the art musical instrument recognition system.     

Fatty acid profile,physiochemical properties and oxidative stability of ewe’s sausage as affected by distillated myrtle (Myrtus communis) leaves’ intake

The effects of distilled myrtle leaves (DML) intake on physiochemical traits, fatty acid profile and lipid oxidation of ewe’s sausage (Merguez) were investigated. Twenty-seven ewes were divided into three homogenous groups. Ewes were fed hay and concentrate for control group (C). They received concentrate and M-Hay pellets, containing 87% DML, as substitute to hay in MH group; for MC group, ewes received hay, concentrate and M-Conc pellets having 30% DML in partial substitution to concentrate. They were slaughtered at the end of trial (90 days) with an average body weight of 42 kg. DML did not affect the physicochemical and sensory properties (P > 0.05) of Merguez; whereas, it increased lipid oxidative stability (P < 0.05). MH group showed the highest values of α-tocopherol content, C18:2-n6 fatty acid and polyunsaturated fatty acids. DML could be used in animal feeding to obtain higher meat product quality with better fatty acids content and antioxidant potential.     

Technological and safety properties of Lactobacillus plantarum strains isolated from a Tunisian traditional salted meat

A total of 17 strains of Lactobacillus plantarum, isolated from a Tunisian traditional salted meat and identified by biochemical and molecular methods, were characterized according to their technological properties including acidifying, antimicrobial and enzymatic activities as well as antibiotic resistance in order to select the most suitable for use as starter cultures for the production of fermented sausages. All the strains studied showed good acidifying activity and were able to reduce the pH to less than 4.3 in 72, 48 and 24h at 15, 25 and 37°C respectively. The majority of strains displayed antimicrobial activities against Salmonella arizonae, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeuroginosa and Escherichia coli, however characterization of the antimicrobial substances showed that none of the strains could produce bacteriocins. All the L. plantarum strains were able to hydrolyze casein, whereas none of them was found to possess lipolytic activity. The majority of strains of L. plantarum were resistant to tetracycline, erythromycin, rifampicin, ampicillin and penicillin G.     

Film as <Emphasis Type="Italic">Explicador</Emphasis> for Hypertext

A few ideas from film theory, most notably Eisenstein's concept of montage, can improve students' understanding of hypertexts and lessen their resistance to open-ended, nonlinear narratives. These structural characteristics, so frustrating to many new readers of hypertext, can also be found in popular and experimental films. In particular, Godfrey Reggio's (1983) documentary Koyaanisqatsi provides a good starting point for merging hypertext and film theory. Koyaanisqatsi not only broke new ground for documentary film; its structure also resembles Landow's model for an axial hypertext. At the same time, techniques pioneered by Landow, Joyce, Guyer, and others involved in creating and critiquing hypertext can be used to examine film. Having students look closely at Koyaanisqatsi's composition allows them to become amateur cinematographers, who now possess software for breaking a film down and examining its composition, montage, transitions, subliminal messages, and motifs – a process that may then be applied to hypertext.     

Effects of neutralization with lime on the quality of acid olive oil

The technique described in this study makes it possible to neutralize olive oils having very high acidities. The neutralization is carried out in a solid-liquid biphasic medium, which is slightly hydrated, by substituting lime (calcium hydroxide, an inexpensive and locally manufactured product) for soda (sodium hydroxide) as the neutralizing agent. Neutralization by lime limits TAG hydrolysis. The use of lime as a neutralizing agent makes it possible to preserve almost 80% of the α-tocopherol. Oils neutralized with lime have higher temperatures of thermal decomposition than oils neutralized with soda. Oils neutralized with lime had better oxidative stability because natural antioxidants were preserved. Oils neutralized by lime conformed with international olive oil standards.     

Characterization and technological properties of Staphylococcus xylosus strains isolated from a Tunisian traditional salted meat

The technological properties of strains of Staphylococcus xylosus were studied to select the most suitable for use as starter cultures for the production of dried fermented meat products. Strains of S. xylosus were isolated from traditional salted Tunisian meat and were identified by biochemical and molecular methods. Thirty strains of S. xylosus were studied to evaluate their catalase, nitrate reductase, lipolytic, proteolytic and antibacterial activities as well as growth ability at different temperatures, pH's and NaCl concentrations. All strains of S. xylosus had catalase activity and were able to reduce nitrates to nitrites. The nitrate reductase activity increased when the strains were kept under anaerobic conditions. Proteolytic activity on milk and on gelatin agar was demonstrated for 100% and 83.3% of the S. xylosus isolates, respectively. However extracellular proteolytic activity as assessed by the azocasein method was poor in all the strains. Lipolytic activity as assessed by the agar method showed that 76.6% of strains of S. xylosus could hydrolyze Tween 20 against 33.3% that could hydrolyze tributyrin. Tween 80 was hydrolyzed by only 10% of strains. Strains of S. xylosus hydrolyzed pork fat better than beef and lamb fat. The majority of strains had antibacterial activity against Salmonella arizonae, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeuroginosa, Escherichia coli and Enterococcus faecalis.