Dietetic determinants on food intake and effects in body weight regulation

Obesity is a multifactorial pathology currently considered one of the main public health problems. Its prevalence is increasing dramatically in the last decades, reaching huge rates in Brazil and many other countries. Regardless of the factors associated with genetic predisposition, this pathology is often associated with abnormal food intake, and also with high consumption of caloric foods and sedentary habits. Thus, obesity is the result of an imbalance between food intake and energy expenditure. One of the greatest research interests in nutrition has currently been the dietetic determinants that may exert an influence on the process of food intake, as well as the role of foods on physiological, physical and chemical factors most related to the processes of satiation and satiety. Based on these aspects, this paper analyzes several research works to gain a better insight of the dietetic factors affecting food intake and body weight regulation.     

Kinetics, dose--response, and excretion of methylmercury in free-living adult Cory's shearwaters

We evaluated methylmercury (MHg) kinetics, dose--responses, and excretion in free-living adult Cory's shearwaters using a nondestructive multi-tissue approach. Elimination of MHg in blood comprised an initial fast phase, with half-time of 1 d, and a slow terminal phase with half-time between 44 and 65 d. Molt was a crucial factor in determining the rate of MHg elimination. Half-times were independent of dose. A relationship between steady-state blood concentrations and dietary intake of MHg was derived. Ratios between Hg concentrations in eggs or hatchlings' plumage and parental blood were independent of dose, with tissue--blood partition coefficients identical to those in controls. Dose--response relationships were linear. Females were subjected to Hg concentrations 18% higher than males but exhibited a 10% lower dose--response in blood. The difference is not fully accounted for by excretion into the egg and may be due to unidentified sex-related differences in physiology. Excretion rates into plumage showed no dose dependency but were higher (33% of intake) in birds exposed during molt than in birds dosed 2 months before the start of molt. Hg excretion through the skin in exfoliated epidermal cells that adsorb into plumage was estimated to represent 8% of the intake. The results of this study may be used in advanced modeling of the kinetics of MHg in adult birds to fill the current gap of a bioenergetic model for avian exposure to MHg.     

Component-based end-user database design for ecologists

To solve today’s ecological problems, scientists need well documented, validated, and coherent data archives. Historically, however, ecologists have collected and stored data idiosyncratically, making data integration even among close collaborators difficult. Further, effective ecology data warehouses and subsequent data mining require that individual databases be accurately described with metadata against which the data themselves have been validated. Using database technology would make documenting data sets for archiving, integration, and data mining easier, but few ecologists have expertise to use database technology and they cannot afford to hire programmers. In this paper, we identify the benefits that would accrue from ecologists’ use of modern information technology and the obstacles that prevent that use. We describe our prototype, the Canopy DataBank, through which we aim to enable individual ecologists in the forest canopy research community to be their own database programmers. The key feature that makes this possible is domain-specific database components, which we call templates. We also show how additional tools that reuse these components, such as for visualization, could provide gains in productivity and motivate the use of new technology. Finally, we suggest ways in which communities might share database components and how components might be used to foster easier data integration to solve new ecological problems.     

Sustaining a Community Computing Infrastructure for Online Teacher Professional Development: A Case Study of Designing Tapped In

Community computing has recently grown to become a major research area in human–computer interaction. One of the objectives of community computing is to support computer supported cooperative work among distributed collaborators working toward shared professional goals in online communities of practice. A core issue in designing and developing community computing infrastructures – the underlying socio-technical layer that supports communitarian activities – is sustainability. Many community computing initiatives fail because the underlying infrastructure does not meet end user requirements; the community is unable to maintain a critical mass of users consistently over time; it generates insufficient social capital to support significant contributions by members of the community; or, as typically happens with funded initiatives, financial and human capital resource become unavailable to further maintain the infrastructure. Based on more than nine years of design experience with Tapped In – an online community of practice for education professionals – we present a case study that discusses four design interventions that have sustained the Tapped In infrastructure and its community to date. These interventions represent broader design strategies for developing online environments for professional communities of practice.     

Concurrent brief versus intensive smoking intervention during alcohol dependence treatment.

Alcohol dependent smokers (N=118) enrolled in an intensive outpatient substance abuse treatment program were randomized to a concurrent brief or intensive smoking cessation intervention. Brief treatment consisted of a 15-min counseling session with 5 min of follow-up. Intensive intervention consisted of three 1-hr counseling sessions plus 8 weeks of nicotine patch therapy. The cigarette abstinence rate, verified by breath carbon monoxide, was significantly higher for the intensive treatment group (27.5%) versus the rate for the brief treatment group (6.6%) at 1 month after the quit date but not at 6 months, when abstinence rates fell to 9.1% for the intensive treatment group and 2.1% for the brief treatment group. Smoking treatment assignment did not significantly impact alcohol outcomes. Although intensive smoking treatment was associated with higher rates of short-term tobacco abstinence, other, perhaps more intensive, smoking interventions are needed to produce lasting smoking cessation in alcohol dependent smokers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The EuQoS system: a solution for QoS routing in heterogeneous networks [Quality of Service based Routing Algorithms for Heterogeneous Networks]

EuQoS is the acronym for "end-to-end quality of service support over heterogeneous networks", which is a European research project aimed at building an entire QoS framework, addressing all the relevant network layers, protocols, and technologies. This framework, which includes the most common access networks (xDSL, UMTS, WiFi, and LAN) is being prototyped and tested in a multidomain scenario throughout Europe, composing what we call the EuQoS system. In this article we present the novel QoS routing mechanisms that are being developed and evaluated in the framework of this project. The preliminary performance results validate the design choices of the EuQoS system, and confirm the potential impact this project is likely to have in the near future     

From Artefacts to Infrastructures

In their initial articulation of the direction of the CSCW field, scholars advanced an open-ended agenda. This continuing commitment to open-ness to different contexts and approaches is not, however, reflected in the contents of the major CSCW outlets. The field appears to privilege particular forms of cooperative work. We find many examples of what could be described as ‘localist studies’, restricted to particular settings and timeframes. This focus on the ‘here and now’ is particularly problematic when one considers the kinds of large-scale, integrated and interconnected workplace information technologies—or what we are calling Information Infrastructures—increasingly found within and across organisations today. CSCW appears unable (or unwilling) to grapple with these technologies—which were at the outset envisaged as falling within the scope of the field. Our paper hopes to facilitate greater CSCW attention to Information Infrastructures through offering a re-conceptualisation of the role and nature of ‘design’. Design within an Information Infrastructures perspective needs to accommodate non-local constraints. We discuss two such forms of constraint: standardisation (how local fitting entails unfitting at other sites) and embeddedness (the entanglement of one technology with other apparently unrelated ones). We illustrate these themes through introducing case material drawn on from a number of previous studies.     

Vitreous humor in the pathologic scope: Insights from proteomic approaches

The vitreous humor (VH) is the largest component of the eye. It is a colorless, gelatinous, highly hydrated matrix that fills the posterior segment of the eye between the lens and retina in vertebrates. In VH, a diversity of proteins that can influence retinal physiology is present, including growth factors, hormones, proteins with transporter activity, and enzymes. More importantly, the protein composition of VH has been described as being altered in a number of disease states. Therefore, attempts aiming at establishing a map of VH proteins and detecting putative biomarkers for ocular illness or protein fluctuations with putative physiologic significance were conducted over the last two decades, using proteomic approaches. Proteomic strategies often involve gel-based or LC techniques as sample fractioning approaches, subsequently coupled with MS procedures. This set of studies resulted in the proteomic characterization of a range of ocular disease samples, with particular incidence on diabetic retinopathy. However, practical therapeutic applications arising from these studies are scarce at the moment. A pertinent example of therapeutic targets arising from VH proteomics has emerged concerning vasoproliferative factors present in the vitreous, which should be involved in neovascularization and subsequent fibrovascular proliferation of the retina, in ocular disease context. Therefore, this review attempts to sum up the information acquired from the proteomic approaches to ocular disease conducted in VH samples, highlighting its clinical potential for disclosing ocular disease mechanisms and engendering pharmacological therapeutic treatments.     

A tutorial on modelling and inference in undirected graphical models for hyperspectral image analysis

ABSTRACT

Undirected graphical models have been successfully used to jointly model the spatial and the spectral dependencies in earth observing hyperspectral images. They produce less noisy, smooth, and spatially coherent land-cover maps and give top accuracies on many datasets. Moreover, they can easily be combined with other state-of-the-art approaches, such as deep learning. This has made them an essential tool for remote-sensing researchers and practitioners. However, graphical models have not been easily accessible to the larger remote-sensing community as they are not discussed in standard remote-sensing textbooks and not included in the popular remote-sensing software and toolboxes. In this tutorial, we provide a theoretical introduction to Markov random fields and conditional random fields-based spatial–spectral classification for land-cover mapping along with a detailed step-by-step practical guide on applying these methods using freely available software. Furthermore, the discussed methods are benchmarked on four public hyperspectral datasets for a fair comparison among themselves and easy comparison with the vast number of methods in literature which use the same datasets. The source code necessary to reproduce all the results in the paper is published on-line to make it easier for the readers to apply these techniques to different remote-sensing problems.