Determination of fat in olestra-containing savory snack products by capillary gas chromatography

A quantitative method to determine fat in olestra-containing savory snack products was validated within the AOAC Peer-Verified Methods Program. The method may be used to demonstrate compliance with the guidelines of the U.S. Nutrition Labeling and Education Act for labeling products as "fat free" or "low fat." The method can measure total and saturated fat in savory snacks when present at levels of 0.2-10 g total fat and 0.1-3 g saturated fat per 30 g serving. The method is standardized to measure C6-C24 fatty acids. Extraction of olestra-containing savory snack samples with chloroform-methanol (modified AOAC Official Method 983.23) yields a lipid extract containing the total fat and olestra. The extracted lipid is hydrolyzed by lipase, yielding fatty acids and unreacted olestra. The fatty acids are precipitated as calcium soaps. Olestra is extracted from insoluble soaps with hexane and then discarded. The isolated soaps are converted back into fatty acids with hydrochloric acid and extracted with hexane. The isolated fatty acids are converted to methyl esters with boron trifluoride-methanol and quantitated by capillary gas chromatography using internal standard. Test samples were prepared by blending olestra-containing and full-fat (triglyceride) snacks to obtain 6 levels of spiking (0-10 g total fat added/30 g serving) in potato chips, potato crisps, cheese puffs, and nacho cheese-flavored corn chips. Results were linear (r2 > 0.997) between 0 and 10 g fat/30 g serving for each product matrix. Mean recovery was 101 +/- 6% standard deviation (SD) for total fat and 104 +/- 6% SD for saturated fat. Mean recovery by peer laboratory was 88 +/- 5% SD for total fat and 95 +/- 4% SD for saturated fat in potato chips (0-3 g total fat added/30 g serving). Two sets of 10 replicates of potato chips (0.5 g total fat/30 g serving and 0.16 g saturated fat/30 g serving) and potato crisps (0.5 g total fat/30 g serving and 0.16 g saturated fat/30 g serving) were analyzed by submitting and peer laboratories. Repeatability relative standard deviations ranged from 3.90 to 7.33% for total fat and from 4.01 to 11.53% for saturated fat. Reproducibility relative standard deviations were 7.33% (total fat, potato chips), 7.15% (total fat, potato crisps), 11.36% (saturated fat, potato chips), and 13.50% (saturated fat, potato crisps).     

A clinical evaluation in children of the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system for inhalant allergens

BACKGROUND: The Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system (CAP) for assaying serum IgE specific antibodies was evaluated in a clinical setting against skin-prick test (SPT) performed using Dome/Hollister-Steir allergen extracts. The five common inhalant allergens D. pteronyssinus, D. farinae, mould mix, grass mix and cat epithelium were tested concurrently by both methods in 167 children aged 7.5-12 years. The specific SPT for D. pteronyssinus and D. farinae were also tested against the CAP house dust mite (HDM) mix. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the study was to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system for detecting serum IgE specific antibodies to inhalant allergens in a clinical setting, using SPT result as the "gold standard'. METHODS: The SPTs were performed using Dome/Hollister-Steir allergen extracts. The serum IgE specific antibodies were quantitated using the radioimmunoassay version of the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system. A history of allergic disease was assessed using a validated questionnaire. RESULTS: SPT gave more positive reactions than CAP with the exception of cat epithelium. The concordance between SPT and CAP results was 91% over all the tests. The concordance with SPT was slightly higher for the specific CAP for D. pteronyssinus and D. farinae (93% and 95% respectively) than for the CAP HDM mix (86% and 90% respectively). There was a higher proportion of positive results for both SPT and CAP in the 115 children defined as having a history of allergic disease. Using SPT defined allergy as the gold standard, the sensitivity of the CAP system was 87% for the two specific house dust mites but was lower for cat epithelium (67%), mould mix (59%) and grass mix (46%). The sensitivity of the CAP system improved for D. pteronyssinus (96%) and the HDM mix (91%) when tested in subjects defined as having a history of allergy associated disease. The specificity of the CAP system showed less variation between allergens and ranged from 90-99%. CONCLUSION: The results of this study of children aged 7.5-12 years demonstrate that, for the inhalant allergens tested, the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system performs well in the setting of known allergic disease.     

African Clouds over the Oslo Opera

Expressive mobile narratives are in the early stages of design and participative formation. We ask what relations and articulations can be brought to play in the design and enactment of a mobile fictional space in which identity is a core motivation and design feature. Through a design case, we share experiences in the building and trial process of an experimental, mobile “social fiction” called NarraHand. We introduce a new category of expressive mobile narrative, the “reflexive place-space narrative,” along with the term Markers of Identity (MOI).     

Animatronic shader lamps avatars

Applications such as telepresence and training involve the display of real or synthetic humans to multiple viewers. When attempting to render the humans with conventional displays, non-verbal cues such as head pose, gaze direction, body posture, and facial expression are difficult to convey correctly to all viewers. In addition, a framed image of a human conveys only a limited physical sense of presence—primarily through the display’s location. While progress continues on articulated robots that mimic humans, the focus has been on the motion and behavior of the robots rather than on their appearance. We introduce a new approach for robotic avatars of real people: the use of cameras and projectors to capture and map both the dynamic motion and the appearance of a real person onto a humanoid animatronic model. We call these devices animatronic Shader Lamps Avatars (SLA). We present a proof-of-concept prototype comprised of a camera, a tracking system, a digital projector, and a life-sized styrofoam head mounted on a pan-tilt unit. The system captures imagery of a moving, talking user and maps the appearance and motion onto the animatronic SLA, delivering a dynamic, real-time representation of the user to multiple viewers.     

命名和征服(英文)

This paper introduces a technique that has been used successfully in University College Dublin,Ireland and Fudan University in Shanghai,China,to teach the formal aspects of computer programming to undergraduate students.The technique,name and conquer,relies on the use of modelling small mathematical domains and allowing the results of these models to form the basis for the programming task.     

Utility function of TCP

Understanding the TCP congestion control mechanism from a global optimization point of view is not only important in its own right, but also crucial to the design of other transport layer traffic control protocols with provable properties. In this paper, we derive a global utility function and the corresponding optimal control law, known as TCP control law, which maximizes the global utility. The TCP control law captures the essential behaviors of TCP, including slow start, congestion avoidance, and the binary nature of congestion feedback in TCP. We find that the utility function of TCP is linear in the slow start phase and is proportional to the additive increase rate and approaches the well-known logarithm function as the data rate becomes large in the congestion avoidance phase. We also find that understanding the slow start phase with a fixed threshold is critical to the design of new transport layer control protocols to enable quality of service features. Finally, as an application, we design a Minimum Rate Guaranteed (MRG) traffic control law that shares the same utility function as the TCP control law. Our simulation study of the MRG control law indicates that it is indeed TCP friendly and can provide minimum rate guarantee as long as the percentage of network resource consumed by the MRG flows is moderately small.     

Immunity-based hybrid evolutionary algorithm for multi-objective optimization in global container repositioning

The development of evolutionary algorithms for optimization has always been a stimulating and growing research area with an increasing demand in using them to solve complex industrial optimization problems. A novel immunity-based hybrid evolutionary algorithm known as Hybrid Artificial Immune Systems (HAIS) for solving both unconstrained and constrained multi-objective optimization problems is developed in this research. The algorithm adopts the clonal selection and immune suppression theories, with a sorting scheme featuring uniform crossover, multi-point mutation, non-dominance and crowding distance sorting to attain the Pareto optimal front in an efficient manner. The proposed algorithm was verified with nine benchmarking functions on its global optimal search ability as well as compared with four optimization algorithms to assess its diversity and spread. Sensitivity analysis was also carried out to investigate the selection of key parameters of the algorithm. It is found that the developed immunity-based hybrid evolutionary algorithm provides a useful means for solving optimization problems and has successfully applied to the problem of global repositioning of containers, which is one of a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. The developed HAIS will assist shipping liners on timely decision making and planning of container repositioning operations in global container transportation business in an optimized and cost effective manner.     

Scale‐aware Structure‐Preserving Texture Filtering

This paper presents a novel method to enhance the performance of structure‐preserving image and texture filtering. With conventional edge‐aware filters, it is often challenging to handle images of high complexity where features of multiple scales coexist. In particular, it is not always easy to find the right balance between removing unimportant details and protecting important features when they come in multiple sizes, shapes, and contrasts. Unlike previous approaches, we address this issue from the perspective of adaptive kernel scales. Relying on patch‐based statistics, our method identifies texture from structure and also finds an optimal per‐pixel smoothing scale. We show that the proposed mechanism helps achieve enhanced image/texture filtering performance in terms of protecting the prominent geometric structures in the image, such as edges and corners, and keeping them sharp even after significant smoothing of the original signal.     

Social media,design and creative citizenship: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This article serves as an introduction to a special issue of the journal Digital Creativity, which addresses the challenges, potentials and meaning of different creative forms of citizenship enacted through social media. The articles in this special issue paint a complex picture of the expressions and meaning and citizenship. This introduction aims to provide a wider context for the contributions to this special issue by reviewing some of the claims made for the creative civic potential of social media and identifying a number of issues and questions that might inform analyses of the subject.     

Reflections on the evolution of implicit Navier–Stokes algorithms

This article gives a historical perspective on the evolution of implicit algorithms for the Navier–Stokes equations that utilize time or Newton linearizations and various forms of approximate factorization including alternating-direction, lower/upper, and symmetric relaxation schemes. A theme of the paper is how progress in implicit Navier–Stokes algorithms has been influenced and enabled by the introduction of characteristic-based upwind approximations, unstructured-grid discretizations, parallelization, and by advances in computer performance and architecture. Historical examples of runtime, problem size, and estimated cost are given for actual and hypothetical Navier–Stokes flow cases from the past 40 years.