Near-infrared spectroscopy applications for high-throughput phenotyping for cassava and yam: A review

The review aimed to identify the different high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) techniques that used for quality evaluation in cassava and yam breeding programmes, and this has provided insights towards the development of metrics and their application in cassava and yam improvements. A systematic review of the published research articles involved the use of NIRS in analysing the quality traits of cassava and yam was carried out, and Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Sciences and Google Scholar were searched. The results of the review established that NIRS could be used in understanding the chemical constituents (carbohydrate, protein, vitamins, minerals, carotenoids, moisture, starch, etc.) for high-throughput phenotyping. This study provides preliminary evidence of the application of NIRS as an efficient and affordable procedure for HTP. However, the feasibility of using mid-infrared spectroscopy (MIRS) and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) in combination with the NIRS could be further studied for quality traits phenotyping.     

Ontologies on trial: the lesson of Maurice v. Judd (New York, 1818)

Ontologies, and legal ontologies are a particular class of application of these, have become fairly popular. Are they fit for purpose? Like with all kinds of tools from legal computing, one must be cautious, and consider very attentively what the likely receptions are going to be, among users. Maurice v. Judd (New York, 1818), when a jury was called to decide whether whale oil is fish oil, and decided that indeed whales are fish, is a trial that was analysed in Graham Burnett's Trying Leviathan: The nineteenth-century New York court case that put the whale on trial and challenged the order of nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University). It is a highly readable book, and it has something important to teach developers of ontologies in the legal domain. The intended public of users of any software, or of ontologies in particular, is paramount. Those intended users you are catering to with your new tool are going to make or break it, just as it happened, e.g. to sentencing information systems in Canadian provinces.     

Comparison of Corrosion Resistance Properties of Electrophoretically Deposited MoS2 and WS2 Nanosheets Coatings on Mild Steel

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A - The present work compares the corrosion resistance properties of electrophoretically deposited MoS2 and WS2 nanosheets coatings on mild steel....     

A unified approach for encoding clean and noisy sources by means ofwaveform and autoregressive model vector quantization

Data compression by vector quantization is considered for sources which have been degraded by noise. It is shown that, by appropriately modifying the given distortion measure, the problem becomes a standard quantization problem for the noisy source and the modified distortion measure. For the special case of sources corrupted by statistically independent additive noise, the authors provide sufficient conditions on the original distortion measure and probability distributions of the source and the noise for convergence of the generalized Lloyd algorithm in designing the quantizers. The results are specialized to waveform and autoregressive model vector quantization using the weighted quadratic and the Itakura-Saito distortion measures, respectively     

Upgrading automation for nuclear fuel in-core management: From the symbolic generation of configurations, to the neural adaptation of heuristics

FUELCON is an expert system in nuclear engineering. Its task is optimized refueling-design, which is crucial to keep down operation costs at a plant. FUELCON proposes sets of alternative configurations of fuel-allocation; the fuel is positioned in a grid representing the core of a reactor. The practitioner of in-core fuel management uses FUELCON to generate a reasonably good configuration for the situation at hand. The domain expert, on the other hand, resorts to the system to test heuristics and discover new ones, for the task described above. Expert use involves a manual phase of revising the ruleset, based on performance during previous iterations in the same session. This paper is concerned with a new phase: the design of a neural component to carry out the revision automatically. Such an automated revision considers previous performance of the system and uses it for adaptation and learning better rules. The neural component is based on a particular schema for a symbolic to recurrent-analogue bridge, called NIPPL, and on the reinforcement learning of neural networks for the adaptation.     

Sacubitril/Valsartan Improves Diastolic Function But Not Skeletal Muscle Function in a Rat Model of HFpEF

The angiotensin receptor/neprilysin inhibitor Sacubitril/Valsartan (Sac/Val) has been shown to be beneficial in patients suffering from heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF). However, the impact of Sac/Val in patients presenting with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is not yet clearly resolved. The present study aimed to reveal the influence of the drug on the functionality of the myocardium, the skeletal muscle, and the vasculature in a rat model of HFpEF. Female obese ZSF-1 rats received Sac/Val as a daily oral gavage for 12 weeks. Left ventricle (LV) function was assessed every four weeks using echocardiography. Prior to organ removal, invasive hemodynamic measurements were performed in both ventricles. Vascular function of the carotid artery and skeletal muscle function were monitored. Sac/Val treatment reduced E/é ratios, left ventricular end diastolic pressure (LVEDP) and myocardial stiffness as well as myocardial fibrosis and heart weight compared to the obese control group. Sac/Val slightly improved endothelial function in the carotid artery but had no impact on skeletal muscle function. Our results demonstrate striking effects of Sac/Val on the myocardial structure and function in a rat model of HFpEF. While vasodilation was slightly improved, functionality of the skeletal muscle remained unaffected.