Major abdominal surgery and the clearance of lipid emulsions

Reaction of bacterial adhesins with complementary receptors on the surfaces of mucosal respiratory, gastrointestinal and genitourinary cells leads to bacterial adhesion to the human body. This is the first step in the sequence of events leading to infection. It has been observed that subinhibitory concentrations (sub-MICs) of some antibiotics are able to reduce bacterial adhesion. The pharmacokinetic curves of antibiotics show that these sub-MICs are present in tissues during a typical course of therapy. This study investigated the ability of sub-MICs of seven macrolides and four fluoroquinolones to reduce adhesiveness of Staphylococcus aureus to human buccal cells. The literature generally reports data for only one antibiotic at a time. To obtain an overall view of the findings of eleven antibiotics together, the data have been normalized according to the molecular weight of each antibiotic and the dose-effect curves determined.     

Relationship between the enzymatic determination of starch and the starch iodine index in two varieties of cider apple

Monitoring the hydrolysis or disappearance of starch by the starch iodine test is a simple procedure for determining the maturity of cider apples, but it does not indicate the exact amount of starch present. So far, studies of starch in apples have dealt exclusively with dessert apples. In this paper the relationship between the visual starch index, the dark‐coloured surface area and the real starch content was studied in two varieties of cider apple commonly used in Normandy (France). Starch determination in cider apples required adapting the protocol provided by the Boehringer enzymatic kit. The work led to proposing a simplified index with five scales instead of 10. This index gives the correspondences between the new and old scales as well as the probable starch contents for each new scale. © 2002 Society of Chemical Industry     

A panoramic view and swot analysis of artificial intelligence for achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030: progress and prospects

Applied Intelligence - The17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations Agenda 2030 constitute a global blueprint agenda and instrument for peace and prosperity...     

Iron species incorporated over different silica supports for the heterogeneous photo-Fenton oxidation of phenol

Iron-containing catalysts have been prepared following different synthesis routes and silica supports (amorphous, zeolitic and mesostructured materials). Activity and stability of these materials were assessed on the photo-Fenton degradation of phenolic aqueous solutions using near UV irradiation (higher than 313 nm) at room temperature and initial neutral pH. Their catalytic performance was monitored in terms of phenol and total organic carbon (TOC) conversions. Aromatic compounds and carboxylic acids as by-products coming from incomplete mineralization of phenol as well as the efficiency of each catalytic system in the use of the oxidant were also studied. Stability of the materials throughout the photo-Fenton reaction was evaluated in terms of metal leachibility. Activity and stability depend on the environment of iron species and features of silica support. The evolution of pH with the reaction time and their relationship with TOC degradation and leaching degree has been discussed. A nanocomposite material of crystalline iron oxides supported over mesostructured SBA-15 material is shown the most successful catalyst for degradation of phenolic aqueous solutions by photo-Fenton processes, achieving an outstanding overall catalytic performance accompanied with a noteworthy stability.     

METIS-II: low resource machine translation

METIS-II was an EU-FET MT project running from October 2004 to September 2007, which aimed at translating free text input without resorting to parallel corpora. The idea was to use “basic” linguistic tools and representations and to link them with patterns and statistics from the monolingual target-language corpus. The METIS-II project has four partners, translating from their “home” languages Greek, Dutch, German, and Spanish into English. The paper outlines the basic ideas of the project, their implementation, the resources used, and the results obtained. It also gives examples of how METIS-II has continued beyond its lifetime and the original scope of the project. On the basis of the results and experiences obtained, we believe that the approach is promising and offers the potential for development in various directions.     

Rough set based approaches to feature selection for Case-Based Reasoning classifiers

This paper investigates feature selection based on rough sets for dimensionality reduction in Case-Based Reasoning classifiers. In order to be useful, Case-Based Reasoning systems should be able to manage imprecise, uncertain and redundant data to retrieve the most relevant information in a potentially overwhelming quantity of data. Rough Set Theory has been shown to be an effective tool for data mining and for uncertainty management. This paper has two central contributions: (1) it develops three strategies for feature selection, and (2) it proposes several measures for estimating attribute relevance based on Rough Set Theory. Although we concentrate on Case-Based Reasoning classifiers, the proposals are general enough to be applicable to a wide range of learning algorithms. We applied these proposals on twenty data sets from the UCI repository and examined the impact of feature selection over classification performance. Our evaluation shows that all three proposals benefit the basic Case-Based Reasoning system. They also present robustness in comparison to well-known feature selection strategies.     

Research trends in gender differences in higher education and science: a co-word analysis

The aim of this study is to map and analyze the structure and evolution of the scientific literature on gender differences in higher education and science, focusing on factors related to differences between 1991 and 2012. Co-word analysis was applied to identify the main concepts addressed in this research field. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to cluster the keywords and a strategic diagram was created to analyze trends. The data set comprised a corpus containing 652 articles and reviews published between 1991 and 2012, extracted from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. In order to see how the results changed over time, documents were grouped into three different periods: 1991–2001, 2002–2007, and 2008–2012. The results showed that the number of themes has increased significantly over the years and that gender differences in higher education and science have been considered by specific research disciplines, suggesting important research-field-specific variations. Overall, the study helps to identify the major research topics in this domain, as well as highlighting issues to be addressed or strengthened in further work.     

Characterization by culture-dependent and culture-independent methods of the bacterial population of suckling-lamb packaged in different atmospheres

This study offers insight into the dynamics of bacterial populations in fresh cuts of suckling lamb under four different atmospheric conditions: air (A), and three Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) environments, 15%O₂/30%CO₂/55%N₂ (C, commercial), 70%O₂/30%CO₂ (O), and 15%O₂/85%CO₂ (H) for 18 days. Microbial analyses by both conventional methods and PCR-DGGE were performed. Controversial and surprising results emerged from comparing both methods in relation to the genus Pseudomonas. Thus, conventional methods detected the presence of high numbers of Pseudomonas colonies, although PCR-DGGE only detected this genus in air-packaged samples. PCR-DGGE detected higher microbial diversity in the control samples (A) than in the modified atmospheres (C, O, H), having atmosphere H the fewest number of species. Brochothrix thermosphacta, LAB (Carnobacterium divergens and Lactobacillus sakei), and Escherichia spp. were detected in all the atmospheres throughout storage. Moreover, previously undescribed bacteria from lamb meat such as Enterobacter hormaechei, Staphylococcus equorum and Jeotgalicoccus spp. were also isolated in this study by DGGE. Additionally, qPCR analysis was used to detect and characterize strains of Escherichia coli. Virulence genes (stx₁, stx₂ and eae) were detected throughout storage in 97% of the samples. A high CO₂ atmosphere was the most effective packaging combination doubling storage time in comparison with commercial atmosphere.