Survival analysis methodology to predict the shelf-life of probiotic flavored yogurt

The feasibility of survival analysis methodology was used to determine the shelf-life of probiotic strawberry flavored yogurt supplemented with Bifidobacteirum animalis DN 173010 W was investigated. The quality parameters of probiotic yogurts were related to storage conditions which they are submitted. The consumers were shown sensitive to changes towards sensory characteristics introduced into the products. Using the survival analysis and considering 25% and 50% probability of consumer rejection, the shelf-life of the probiotic yogurt was estimated at 38 and 53 days, respectively. The findings of this research highlighted the feasibility this technique to determine the shelf-life of foods, in particular, functional foods, as probiotic yogurts.     

Belgrade, Serbia

Few cities in Europe have a history as dramatic and tumultuous as that of the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The gracious “White City,” which rises spectacularly along the banks of the Danube and the Sava River, has been the site of wars, conquests and rapidly changing fortunes for much of its thousands-years long history. Belgrade suffered heavy destruction under both World Wars, and it has the unfortunate distinction of being the only European capital to be bombed at the end of the 20th century. Its modern history is marked by abrupt shifts in political status: from a capital of a relatively small nation-state, to a center of a larger and prosperous multi-national federation, to a capital of a nation-state once again. These shifts parallel the changing geopolitical position of Serbia/Yugoslavia in Europe. In this City Profile, I present the evolution of the built environment of Belgrade in five historic stages: ancient/medieval/Ottoman, early modern, communist, transitional, and contemporary. I show how each period left a distinct spatial imprint on Belgrade’s fabric. Finally, I discuss some contemporary challenges and opportunities in planning Belgrade’s future.     

Yardstick competition: which neighbours matter?

This paper aims at testing the existence of yardstick competition by estimating a fully specified vote-function on a panel data set of 104 French local governments from 1989 to 2001. When comparing the performance of their incumbent to the one of their “neighbours”, voters might consider their close geographical neighbours but also the nearby cities that are similar according to some socio-economic characteristics such as population size. The estimation results show that voters sanction their incumbent if their own local housing tax is high. Moreover, we find that voters reward their incumbent when neighbouring cities that are similar in terms of demographic characteristics have high local taxes.     

Collaborative and Cognitive Network Platforms: Vision and Research Challenges

In this paper, we present a visionary concept referred to as Collaborative and Cognitive Network Platforms (CCNPs) as a future-proof solution for creating a dependable, self-organizing and self-managing communication substrate for effective ICT solutions to societal problems. CCNP creates a cooperative communication platform to support critical services across a range of business sectors. CCNP is based on the personal network (PN) technology which is an inherently cooperative environment prototyped in the Dutch Freeband PNP2008 and the European Union IST MAGNET projects. In CCNP, the cognitive control plane strives to exploit the resources to better satisfy the requirements of networked applications. CCNP facilitates collaboration inherently. Through cognition in the cognitive control plane, CCNP becomes a self-managed substrate. The self-managed substrate, in this paper, is defined as cognitive and collaborative middleware on which future applications run without user intervention. Endemic sensor networks may be incorporated into the CCNP concept to feed its cognitive control plane. In this paper, we present the CCNP concept and discuss the research challenges related to collaboration and cognition.     

Allocation of Firm-Energy Rights Among Hydro Plants: An Aumann–Shapley Approach

The firm energy of generation plants is a critical component in some electricity markets. It is usually calculated by the regulator and sets a cap to the amount a plant can trade in capacity markets (or auctions), in order to avoid free-riding behaviors. Firm energy is a systemic property and, in case of hydro plants, a synergy is observed whenever a cooperative operation occurs, i.e., the firm energy of a system is greater than the sum of the individual plants. This immediately raises the question of how to divide the system's firm energy among the individual hydro plants. The objective of this work is to investigate the application of different allocation methods of firm energy rights among hydro plants using a game-theoretic framework. It is shown that there is not an optimal and unique approach to make this allocation. The paper investigates the advantages and disadvantages of different methods, such as marginal allocation, average production during the critical period, incremental allocation, finally recommending the Aumann-Shapley as the allocation method. This method is tested for the Brazilian power system, which has around 100 hydro plants. The results obtained are compared with the current allocation adopted by the electricity regulatory agency of Brazil.     

A new input indicator for the assessment of science &; technology research?

Traditional input indicators of research performance, such as research funding, number of active scientists, and international collaborations, have been widely used to assess countries’ publication output. However, while publication in today’s English-only research world requires sound research in readable English, English proficiency may be a problem for the productivity of non-native English-speaking (NNES) countries. Data provided by the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) containing the academic profile of 51,223 Brazilian researchers show a correlation between English proficiency and publication output. According to our results, traditional input indicators may fall short of providing an accurate representation of the research performance of NNES developing countries.     

Challenges to engaging Black male victims of community violence in healthcare research: Lessons learned from two studies.

A dearth of literature exists on barriers to conducting research with Black male victims of community violence, despite the need for evidence-based postinjury interventions. This study used qualitative data from a cross-sectional interview study (n = 16) and a pilot intervention study (n = 11) conducted in Boston, MA to identify challenges and facilitators to conducting research with Black male victims of community violence, particularly with regard to recruitment and maintenance of a study sample. Qualitative methods, including Grounded Theory and ethnography, were used to analyze the data. Challenges included a fear of police involvement, an impression of “snitching” when disclosing personal information, mistrust of research motives, suspicion of the informed consent process, the emotional impact of the trauma itself, and logistical issues. Facilitators to research included monetary incentives and motivation to help oneself and others. Participant recommendations on recruitment methods relating to approach and timing are provided. Findings from this study may assist in the planning of research studies for Black male victims of community violence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Water Activity and Temperature Effects on Fungal Growth and Ochratoxin A Production by Ochratoxigenic Aspergillus carbonarius Isolated from Tunisian Grapes

ABSTRACT: This study investigated the effects of temperature (15 to 37 °C) and water activity (0.90 to 0.99) on the growth and production of ochratoxin A (OTA) by Aspergillus carbonarius cultured on synthetic nutrient medium (SNM) after 5 and 10 d of incubation. Total of 8 ochratoxigenic A. carbonarius, isolated from vineyards located in different regions of Tunisia, were used. Growth data were modeled by the flexible model of Baranyi and growth rates at each set of conditions were obtained. For both growth and OTA production, optimal water activity was 0.99; however, optimal temperature varied. The optimal temperature for growth was 30 °C. At 37 °C, the growth rate decreased significantly (P < 0.05). Maximum toxin production occurred at temperatures in the range of 15 to 25 °C with the optimum one depending on the isolate tested. Significant amounts of OTA were produced after only 5 d of incubation. Our results showed that A. carbonarius isolated from Tunisian grapes behave as those from European and Australian grapes, as reported in the literature, although some differences in trends for growth and OTA production were observed.     

Dynamic spatial Bayesian models for radioactivity deposition

Dynamic spatial Bayesian (DSB) models are proposed for the analytical modelling of radioactivity deposition after a nuclear accident. The proposed models are extensions of the multi‐variate time‐series dynamic linear models of West and Harrison (1997) to Markov random field processes. They combine the outputs from a long‐range atmospheric dispersal model with measured data (and prior information) to provide improved deposition prediction in space and time. Two versions of a Gaussian DSB model were applied to the radioactivity deposition in Bavaria over a 15 days period during the Chernobyl nuclear accident. One version had fixed functional forms for its spatial variances and covariances while the other allowed those to adapt and ‘learn’ from data in the conjugate Bayesian paradigm. There were two main sources of information for radioactivity deposition in our application: radioactivity measurements at a sparse set of 13 monitoring stations, and the numerical deposition evaluation of the atmospheric dispersal K‐model for the points of a 64 × 64 regular grid. We have analysed the temporal predictions (one‐step‐ahead forecasting) of those DSB models to show that the dispersal K‐model tended in general to underestimate the deposition levels at all times while the DSB models corrected for that although with different degrees of adjustment.