Biopreservative technologies of food: an alternative to chemical preservation and recent developments

Food Science and Biotechnology - Despite centuries of developing strategies to prevent food-associated illnesses, food safety remains a significant concern, even with multiple technological...     

Water absorption behavior of PALF/GF hybrid polyester composites

The water absorption characteristics of pineapple leaf fiber (PALF)/glass fiber (GF) hybrid polyester(PER) composites, and chemically modified PALF/polyester composites were evaluated by immersion in distilled water at 28, 60, and 90°C. The diffusion properties of the intimately mixed (IM) and the layered hybrid composite GPG (Glass skin and PALF core) of different PALF/GF ratio at the three temperatures were compared in order to identify the environmental ageing mechanism at different temperatures. The effect of temperature on the kinetics and thermodynamics of diffusion were also examined. The water uptake of both IM and GPG hybrid composites was decreased with increase in glass fiber content; the lowest water uptake was observed for 0.46 V_f GF hybrid composite. Among the chemically modified composites, vinyl tri 2‐methoxy ethoxy silane treated composites showed the lowest water uptake. Finally, parameters like diffusion, sorption, and permeability coefficients were determined. It was observed that equilibrium water uptake is dependent on the nature of the composite and temperature. Experimental results were also compared with theoretical predictions. POLYM. COMPOS., 2011. © 2011 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Evaluation of orthogonal and biorthogonal wavelets for video steganography

ABSTRACT

In recent years, information security over the internet has gained enormous immersion due to a technological escalation in communication via digital media. Nowadays, videos are the most common form of media over the internet, and they have gained the attention of video steganography research community for the security of the communication. This paper implemented video steganography using a widely-known transform technique, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) which consists of different orthogonal and biorthogonal filters used for the decomposition of a frame/image. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative evaluation for orthogonal and biorthogonal DWT filters with different matrices such as MSE, PSNR. The performance of the different filters has been evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively to investigate the best among them. Also, the best of orthogonal and biorthogonal filters have been further evaluated with other metrics such as SSIM, BER and histogram analysis. Further, the embedding algorithm has been compared with the existing video steganography techniques. The experimental results illustrate that bior 6.8 (biorthogonal filter) outperforms the other orthogonal and biorthogonal filters in terms of visual distortion.     

Isaacs syndrome: long-term improvement with intravenous polyvalent immunoglobulins

A 35 year-old man developed a syndrome with muscle cramp, myokimia, generalized, fasciculations, excessive sweating, sleep disorders and severe impairment. It was a syndrome of continuous muscle fiber activity--or Isaacs syndrome--with central disorders (this may be called "Maladie de Morvan"). Previous reports have suggested that Isaac's syndrome might be an autoimmune disorder. Moreover, high doses intravenous immunoglobulins were given resulting in a substantial improvement six months after the onset of this treatment.     

A cluster prediction model-based data collection for energy efficient wireless sensor network

The Journal of Supercomputing - Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are expected to cover the major portion of the earth’s surface in the coming years. In the era of IoT, the WSN is the major data...     

A hybrid edge-based technique for segmentation of renal lesions in CT images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The entire community of medical experts uses various imaging techniques as the precursor for disease diagnosis with the assistance of computer-aided diagnosis...     

Transformation of the Nonprocessive Fast Skeletal Myosin II into a Processive Motor

Myosin family motors play diverse cellular roles. Precise insights into how the light chains contribute to the functional variabilities among myosin motors, however, remain unresolved. Here, it is demonstrated that the fast skeletal muscle myosin II isoform myosin heavy chain (MHC‐IID) can be transformed into a processive motor, by simply replacing the native regulatory light chain MLC2f with the regulatory light chain variant MLC2v from the slow muscle myosin II. Single molecule kinetic analyses and optical trapping measurements of the hybrid motor reveal marked changes such as increased association rate of myosin toward adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and actin by more than twofold. The direct consequence of high adenosine diphosphate (ADP) affinity and increased actin rebinding is the altered overall actomyosin association time during the cross‐bridge cycle. The data indicate that the MLC2v influences the duty ratio in the hybrid motor, suggestive of promoting interhead communication and enabling processive movement. This finding establishes that the regulatory light chain fine‐tunes the motor's mechanical output that may have important implications under physiological conditions. Furthermore, the success of this approach paves the way to engineer motors from a known motor protein element to assemble highly specialized biohybrid machines for potential applications in nano‐biomedicine and engineering.     

Enhancing multi-document summarization using concepts

In this paper we propose a methodology to mine concepts from documents and use these concepts to generate an objective summary of all relevant documents. We use the conceptual graph (CG) formalism as proposed by Sowa to represent the concepts and their relationships in the documents. In the present work we have modified and extended the definition of the concept given by Sowa. The modified and extended definition is discussed in detail in section 2 of this paper. A CG of a set of relevant documents can be considered as a semantic network. The semantic network is generated by automatically extracting CG for each document and merging them into one. We discuss (i) generation of semantic network using CGs and (ii) generation of multi-document summary. Here we use restricted Boltzmann machines, a deep learning technique, for automatically extracting CGs. We have tested our methodology using MultiLing 2015 corpus. We have obtained encouraging results, which are comparable to those from the state of the art systems.     

Synthesis,defect characterization and photocatalytic degradation efficiency of Tb doped CuO nanoparticles

Monoclinic undoped and Tb doped CuO are prepared by solution combustion method and annealed at different temperatures. The effect of annealing and doping on their structural and optical properties of CuO are examined using XRD, FTIR and DRS. The surface and lattice defects in CuO and Tb doped CuO is analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using positron lifetime and Doppler broadening spectroscopy. The average positron lifetime and electron momentum (energy) S parameter increases owing to the number of vacancies in the CuO lattice upon doping and decreases with increasing temperature. The migration of vacancies from grain to grain boundary region is observed at 600 °C annealed samples. At 800 °C, the overall behavior of lifetime value denotes that the vacancy type defect is recovered, cluster vacancy and microvoids exists with reducing size. The photocatalytic performance of undoped and Tb doped CuO on degradation of methylene blue (MB) and methyl orange (MO) is investigated under visible light for two different lamp power and dye concentration. The influence of annealing temperature and dopant ion on the efficiency is also elaborated. Enhanced photocatalytic efficiency in Tb doped CuO is observed upon annealing. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) result indicates that the valence states of Cu, O and Tb ions exist at the surface of the particles. Brunauer–Emmett–Teller N₂ adsorption–desorption analyses were employed to characterize specific surface area and porosity of Tb doped CuO. The doped CuO with pore size of about ～34 nm have a surface area of 16–28 m²/g. The surface area effect plays an important role in the enhanced catalytic performance on Tb doped catalysts.     

Ensemble Learning Based Collaborative Filtering with Instance Selection and Enhanced Clustering

Recommender system is a tool to suggest items to the users from the extensive history of the user's feedback. Though, it is an emerging research area concerning academics and industries, where it suffers from sparsity, scalability, and cold start problems. This paper addresses sparsity, and scalability problems of model-based collaborative recommender system based on ensemble learning approach and enhanced clustering algorithm for movie recommendations. In this paper, an effective movie recommendation system is proposed by Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithm, enhanced Balanced Iterative Reducing and Clustering using Hierarchies (BIRCH) algorithm and truncation method. In this research paper, a new hyper parameters tuning is added in BIRCH algorithm to enhance the cluster formation process, where the proposed algorithm is named as enhanced BIRCH. The proposed model yields quality movie recommendation to the new user using Gradient boost classification with broad coverage. In this paper, the proposed model is tested on Movielens dataset, and the performance is evaluated by means of Mean Absolute Error (MAE), precision, recall and f-measure. The experimental results showed the superiority of proposed model in movie recommendation compared to the existing models. The proposed model obtained 0.52 and 0.57 MAE value on Movielens 100k and 1M datasets. Further, the proposed model obtained 0.83 of precision, 0.86 of recall and 0.86 of f-measure on Movielens 100k dataset, which are effective compared to the existing models in movie recommendation.