Linguistic intergroup bias: Differential expectancies or in-group protection?

The linguistic intergroup bias describes the tendency to communicate positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors more abstractly than negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. This article investigated whether this bias is driven by differential expectancies or by in-group protective motives. In Exp 1, northern and southern Italian participants (N?=?151) described positive and negative behaviors of northern or southern protagonists that were either congruent or incongruent with stereotypic expectancies. Regardless of valence, expectancy-congruent behaviors were described more abstractly than incongruent ones. Exp 2 (N?=?40) showed that language is used in an equally biased fashion for individuals as previously demonstrated for groups. Exp 3 (N?=?192) induced expectancies experimentally and found greater abstraction for expectancy-congruent behaviors regardless of valence. All experiments confirmed the differential expectancy approach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Synergistic antioxidant and antibacterial activity of rosemary plus butylated derivatives

Antioxidant and antibacterial activity of a methanol rosemary extract (RE) containing 30% carnosic acid (CA), 16% carnosol (COH) and 5% rosmarinic acid (RA) was studied in vitro alone and in combination with the antioxidant food additives butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) and butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA). The antioxidant efficiency of the extract, CA, and RA, was determined by a kinetic analysis of the 2,2-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl hydrate radical (DPPH·) scavenging activity. RE showed two different rate slopes in the reduction of DPPH· vs. time curve, which correlated with the distinct behaviours of RA and CA; pure RA reached the plateau more rapidly than CA. A synergistic antioxidant effect between RE and BHT was demonstrated by isobolographic analysis and a synergistic interaction of RE with BHA to inhibit Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus growth was observed. Therefore, rosemary not only enhances the antioxidant efficiency of BHA and BHT, but also the antibacterial effect of BHA; allowing a decrease from 4.4 to17 folds in the amounts of the synthetic compounds used.     

Serotonin‐transporter promoter polymorphism modulates the ability to control food intake: Effect on total weight loss

Scope

The biggest challenge for losing weight is the ability to control the amount of food eaten; the tendency to overeat is called disinhibition. Our aims were to determine whether (a) the SLC6A 4‐promoter variant (5‐HTTLPR) relates to disinhibition; (b) this association could affect total weight‐loss during a behavioral/dietary treatment for obesity.

Methods and results

A total of 2961 subjects attended voluntarily five weight‐loss clinics; a subsample (n = 624) was recruited for SLC6A4 genotyping. Total weight‐loss, emotional‐eating‐score and disinhibition‐score were examined. We observed that: (a) the reduced ability to control food intake (disinhibition) is implicated in the impairment to lose weight; (b) SLC6A 4‐promoter variant is implicated in disinhibition. S carriers (low‐expressing) of the SLC6A4‐promoter variant had a lower inhibition capacity and showed more failure (1.6 times) to control the amount of food eaten than LL (p < 0.05); other factors such as eating while bored, overeating after work at night, or craving for specific foods were associated to the SLC6A4 genotype (p < 0.05); (c) The combination of disinhibition (high disinhibition) and genetics (S carrier) had a higher impact on total weight loss than each factor separately.

Conclusions

SLC6A 4‐promoter variant is associated with the ability to control food intake and interacts with emotional eating to modulate total weight loss.

     

Reaction Processing of Al2O3 Composites Containing Iron and Iron Aluminides

Different Fe-Al₂O₃ and FeAl-Al₂O₃ composites with metallic contents up to 30 vol% have been fabricated via reaction processing of Al₂O₃, Fe, and Al mixtures. Low Al contents (<∼10 vol%) within the starting mixture lead to composites consisting of Fe embedded in an Al₂O₃ matrix, whereas aluminide-containing Al₂O₃ composites result from powder mixtures with higher Al contents. In both cases, densification up to 98% TD can be achieved by pressureless sintering in inert atmosphere at moderate temperatures (1450°-1500°C). The proposed reaction sintering mechanism includes the reduction of native oxide layers on the surface of the Fe particles by Al and, in the case of mixtures with high Al contents, aluminide formation followed by sintering of the composites. Density and bending strengths of the reaction-sintered composites depend strongly on the Al content of the starting mixture. In the case of samples containing elemental Fe, crack path observations indicate the potential for an increase of fracture toughness, even at room temperature, by crack bridging of the ductile Fe inclusions.     

Abstracting Digital Movies Automatically

Large video-on-demand databases consisting of thousands of digital movies are not easy to handle: the user must have an attractive means of retrieving his movie of choice. For analog video, movie trailers are produced to allow a quick preview and perhaps stimulate possible buyers. This paper presents techniques for automatically producing such movie abstracts of digital videos.     

Adulteration and Presence of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Extra Virgin Olive Oil Sold on the Brazilian Market

Seventy samples sold in the Brazilian market as extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) were evaluated for the presence of the 13 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) classified as carcinogenic and genotoxic by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), to verify if the products were adulterated and to evaluate if there is a correlation between PAH presence and adulteration. PAH were detected in 93% of the samples, with summed levels varying from not detected to 41.10 μg/kg. Five samples showed BaP concentration above acceptable levels set by European legislation and by Brazilian regulation (2.0 μg/kg) and 7 presented PAH4 levels above the limit set by European legislation (10.0 µg/kg). The levels of fatty acid composition, sterols content, stigmastadiene and specific extinction did not comply with both Brazilian and International Olive Council (IOC) standards in 18, 31, 30 and 21% of the samples, respectively. The tolerance levels for these analyses in the Brazilian standards are 55.0–83.0 g/100 g (oleic acid), 3.5–21.0 g/100 g (linoleic acid), ≤0.05 g/100 g (trans-oleic acid), ≤0.05 g/100 g (trans-linoleic + trans-linolenic acid), ≤0.15 mg/kg (stigmastadiene), ≤2.50 (K232), ≤0.22 (K270), ≤0.01 (?K), 1000–1600 mg/kg (Σ sterols). Results indicate that 19 samples were adulterated. According to principal component analysis, samples were distinguished as: (1) EVOO with addition of vegetable oil from another source, (2) EVOO with addition of refined oil and (3) samples possibly not adulterated. The variable ΣPAH was related mainly to samples of EVOO with addition of vegetable oil from another source.     

Towards Scalable Instance Retrieval over Ontologies

In this paper, we consider the problem of query answering over multimedia ontologies. Traditional reasoning systems may have problems to deal with large amounts of expressive ontological data (terminological as well as assertional data) that usually must be kept in main memory. We propose to overcome this problem with a new so-called filter and refine paradigm for ontology-based query answering. The contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) For both steps, algorithms are presented. (2) We evaluate our approach on real world multimedia ontologies from the BOEMIE project.     

Synthesis of NiAl2O4 with high surface area as precursor of Ni nanoparticles for hydrogen production

NiAl₂O₄ with high surface area was synthesized by the combustion method, evaluating the effect of urea/nitrate (U/N) ratio. The use of a stoichiometric U/N ratio resulted in a material with high surface area and homogeneous nanocrystallites, while the excess of fuel resulted in a non-porous material with low surface area. The formation of superficial Ni nanoparticles resulted in excellent stability on CO₂ methane reforming. This can be attributed to the rearrangement of nickel in the aluminate matrix and the migration of nickel particles through carbon filaments at the surface during the activation process.     

Voluntary agreements in the field of energy efficiency and emission reduction: Review and analysis of experiences in the European Union

A number of Member States of the EU have introduced voluntary agreements (VAs) that aim to deliver energy savings and emission reductions via increased energy efficiency in different end-use sectors, mainly targeting industry.     

Are We There Yet? A Roadmap of Network Visualization from Surveys to Task Taxonomies

Networks are abstract and ubiquitous data structures, defined as a set of data points and relationships between them. Network visualization provides meaningful representations of these data, supporting researchers in understanding the connections, gathering insights, and detecting and identifying unexpected patterns. Research in this field is focusing on increasingly challenging problems, such as visualizing dynamic, complex, multivariate, and geospatial networked data. This ever-growing, and widely varied, body of research led to several surveys being published, each covering one or more disciplines of network visualization. Despite this effort, the variety and complexity of this research represents an obstacle when surveying the domain and building a comprehensive overview of the literature. Furthermore, there exists a lack of clarification and uniformity between the terminology used in each of the surveys, which requires further effort when mapping and categorizing the plethora of different visualization techniques and approaches. In this paper, we aim at providing researchers and practitioners alike with a “roadmap” detailing the current research trends in the field of network visualization. We design our contribution as a meta-survey where we discuss, summarize, and categorize recent surveys and task taxonomies published in the context of network visualization. We identify more and less saturated disciplines of research and consolidate the terminology used in the surveyed literature. We also survey the available task taxonomies, providing a comprehensive analysis of their varying support to each network visualization discipline and by establishing and discussing a classification for the individual tasks. With this combined analysis of surveys and task taxonomies, we provide an overarching structure of the field, from which we extrapolate the current state of research and promising directions for future work.