Digital image correlation techniques to investigate strain fields and cracking phenomena in asphalt materials

This paper is the outcome of a specific task group of the RILEM Technical Committee 241-MCD “Mechanisms of Cracking and Debonding in Asphalt and Composite Pavements”. The group on “Advanced Measurement Techniques” was established in 2011 to investigate DIC applications for non-destructive and non-contact measurements of strain fields during laboratory testing. The paper illustrates different DIC/optical flow applications in measuring strain distribution during laboratory testing. Specific applications of DIC for evaluating crack initiation and crack propagation in asphalt materials are presented.     

Multi‐level reranking approach for bug localization

Bug fixing has a key role in software quality evaluation. Bug fixing starts with the bug localization step, in which developers use textual bug information to find location of source codes which have the bug. Bug localization is a tedious and time consuming process. Information retrieval requires understanding the programme's goal, coding structure, programming logic and the relevant attributes of bug. Information retrieval (IR) based bug localization is a retrieval task, where bug reports and source files represent the queries and documents, respectively. In this paper, we propose BugCatcher, a newly developed bug localization method based on multi‐level re‐ranking IR technique. We evaluate BugCatcher on three open source projects with approximately 3400 bugs. Our experiments show that multi‐level reranking approach to bug localization is promising. Retrieval performance and accuracy of BugCatcher are better than current bug localization tools, and BugCatcher has the best Top N, Mean Average Precision (MAP) and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) values for all datasets.     

Effect of modified atmosphere and vacuum packaging on some quality characteristics of sliced ‘sucuk’ produced using probiotics culture

The effects of probiotics (Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium lactis), packaging (vacuum, 50% N₂ + 50% CO₂ or 100% CO₂), storage temperature (4 and 10 °C) and storage time (90 d) on lipid oxidation, colour and microbial properties of sliced dry fermented sausage ‘sucuk’, which has a long storage time at low temperatures, was investigated. Probiotic‐added samples showed a significant reduction in the thiobarbituric acid‐reactive substances (TBARS) values compared with a control and starter culture groups. The analysis showed that control groups had the highest pH and that the pH was not affected by packaging or storage temperature. Probiotic use had a significant effect on total aerobic bacteria, lactic acid bacteria and Micrococcus/Staphylococcus counts, and bacterial counts decreased with storage time. The Enterobacteriaceae count was below detectable levels (<2.00 CFU g⁻¹) throughout the storage period. The storage temperatures had no effect on the microbial counts. Packaging had a significant effect on lactic acid bacteria, and the highest value was determined with 50% N₂ + 50% CO₂. The addition of probiotics and the storage time resulted in a significant decrease of colour values (L*, a* and b*). Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

Endogenous ADP-ribosylation of eukaryotic elongation factor 2 and its 32 kDa tryptic fragment.

Eukaryotic elongation factor 2 (eEF-2) can undergo ADP-ribosylation in the absence of diphtheria toxin. The binding of free ADP-ribose and endogenous transferase-dependent ADP-ribosylation were distinct reactions for eEF-2, as indicated by different findings. Incubation of eEF-2 tryptic fragment 32/33 kDa (32F) with NAD was ADP-ribosylated and gave rise to the covalent binding of ADP-ribose to eEF-2. 32F was revealed to be at the C-terminal by Edman degradation sequence analysis. In our study, the elution of 32F from SDS-PAGE was ADP-ribosylated both in the presence and absence of diphtheria toxin. These results suggest that endogenous ADP-ribosylation of 32F might be related to protein synthesis. This modification appears to be important for the cell function.     

Utilization of brewer's spent grain in the production of Frankfurters

The effects of dried and ground brewer's spent grain (BSG) on dietary fibre content and some quality characteristics of beef Frankfurters were investigated. BSG preparations of fine (<212 μm), medium (212–425 μm) and coarse (425–850 μm) particle sizes were used in the production of Frankfurters. The total dietary fibre (TDF) content of the Frankfurters supplemented with BSG of different particle sizes increased significantly ( P  < 0.05) as the level of addition was increased. The mean TBA (2-thiobarbituric acid), colour and texture values except springiness had significant differences ( P  < 0.05) among the treatments. The overall acceptability scores for the control and the Frankfurters with BSG were 7.57 and 5.47–7.02 on a nine-point scale, respectively. Cluster analysis was also carried out to divide the measured parameters into clusters according to their similarities and to find out the correlations among them. It can be concluded that BSG can be added to Frankfurters to increase their fibre content without deleteriously affecting their sensory parameters.     

A Novel Approach to Steganography: Enhanced Least Significant Bit Substitution Algorithm Integrated with Self-Determining Encryption Feature

One of the most well-known and used algorithms for Steganography is Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution. Although LSB has several advantages such as simplicity, efficiency, and easy-to-do implementation, it has some distinct disadvantages such as it openness to miscellaneous attacks. In this study, we aim to improve the traditional LSB algorithm by eliminating its main disadvantage, being easy to detect, and this way propose an enhanced LSB algorithm called E-LSB. We mainly aim to minimize differences which are due to encryption and image hiding steps in LSB algorithm and make it more difficult to notice that some text has been hidden in the original cover image.
As most of the researchers and practitioners in security field argue, stenographic techniques alone are not sufficient for protecting sensitive information and thus must be used together with encryption algorithms. Therefore, the proposed approach integrates E-LSB with an encryption algorithm. E-LSB does not modify the file size and allows the flexibility of choosing one of well-known encryption algorithms including RSA, AES and CAESAR, but others can be implemented in it. With a set of experiments, the proposed approach is compared with the traditional LSB based embedding approach, and its efficiency and usability is analyzed. A set of performance evaluations realized with the developed software tool based on E-LSB algorithm show that E-LSB is better than the traditional LSB algorithm from security point of view.