Effect of hepatic vagotomy on plasma insulin levels during fasting in rats

The present investigation was designed to evaluate the effect of a selective hepatic vagotomy (HV) on the insulin response in rats fasted for 24 h when blood glucose levels were or were not maintained by a constant glucose infusion. Rats were divided into three dietary groups: one group of normally fed rats, one group of 24-h fasted rats, and one group of 24-h fasted rats infused with glucose throughout the fasting period. Each of these groups was subdivided into HV and sham-operated (SHM) rats. Fasting without glucose infusion resulted in a significant (p < 0.05) decrease in plasma glucose, liver glycogen, and insulin concentrations and in a significant (p < 0.01) increase in beta-hydroxybutyrate and FFA concentration. Despite the maintenance of plasma glucose concentrations in the glucose-infused groups, the concentrations of liver glycogen and insulin were still decreased (p < 0.01) and the concentrations of beta-hydroxybutyrate were still increased (p<0.05) at the end of the fasting period. However, no significant differences in insulin or in beta-hydroxybutyrate concentration were found between HV and SHM rats. It is concluded that the decline in plasma glucose concentration during fasting does not totally explain the insulinopenic response to fasting, and that the liver, through the mediation of the hepatic vagus nerve, does not seem to contribute to insulinopenia in 24-h fasted rats.     

Electrical resistivity, structure and composition of d.c. sputtered WNx films

WN_x films have been deposited by reactive d.c. diode sputtering in an Ar-N₂ gas mixture on Si substrates. The electrical resistivity, structure, microstructure and composition of the films were investigated. The parameters were the total and partial pressures, the discharge current and the negative bias voltage applied to the substrate. We have found that good W₂N films are obtainable with a dense structure and a resistivity of near 200 μΩ cm, but either the resistivity or the composition and structure suffer great variations with the discharge parameters. Depending on the nitrogen partial pressure and the bias voltage, the deposited layers are W₂N films, W₂N-W mixtures or W films.     

Directional scanning of complex electromagnetic environments

A directional scanning technique is formulated for determining characteristics of an electromagnetic (EM) environment with a relatively small number of measurements, and results of a simulated application are presented. The method relies on measurements with a directional probe to obtain information about the coefficients in a planewave expansion of the field within a large volume. The simulation indicates that although the spatial variation of the field can not be accurately determined, the spatial average of the field intensity can.     

A model-driven approach for usability engineering of interactive systems

Usability is considered to be one of the most important quality factors that determine the success/failure in the actual use of an interactive system. This can explain the ever-increasing number of publications addressing the problem of usability evaluation. However, most of these proposals only consider usability evaluations after the application is fully implemented and deployed. Some others are based on reviewing usability principles in intermediate artifacts with regard to their conformance with a set of guidelines. Since the traceability between these artifacts and the final application is not well established, performing usability evaluations by considering these artifacts as input may not ensure the usability of the final application. This problem may be alleviated by using a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach due to its intrinsic traceability mechanisms that are established by the transformation processes. The present paper aims to delineate a method for evaluating usability throughout an MDE development life cycle by considering conceptual models as input. To do this, two main contributions are proposed. The first one, called usability-driven model transformation, aims to ensure that an intermediate artifact with the required level of usability is generated. It controls the model transformation process according to a set of usability attributes. The second contribution, called early usability evaluation, performs the usability evaluation from the conceptual models by defining metrics based on conceptual primitives that constitute the conceptual models. This evaluation would be a significant advantage with regard to saving time and resources. The early usability evaluation is empirically validated by comparing the usability measure obtained by our proposal and the level of usability perceived by the end-users.     

Electrochemical Oxidation of Ferulic Acid in Aqueous Solutions at Gold Oxide and Lead Dioxide Electrodes

A kinetic study of the electrochemical oxidation of ferulic acid (3-methoxy-4-hydroxycinnamic acid) by direct electron transfer at treated gold disk was combined with results of electrolyses in order to produce total degradation into CO₂ and H₂O at Ta/PbO₂ anode. The oxidation of ferulic acid at gold electrode was studied by cyclic voltammetry. At low concentration, ferulic acid shows one irreversible anodic peak. The peak current shows adsorption characteristics. For ferulic acid concentrations higher than 0.02 mmol dm⁻³, the voltammogram shows two anodic peaks. The effect of experimental conditions on the ratio of these two peaks was examined. The proposed mechanism is based on the hypothesis of two-electron oxidation of ferulic acid molecule involving a three intermediate cation mesomers. Hydrolysis of these mesomers leads to the formation of caffeic acid, methoxyhydroquinone and 3,4-dihydroxy-5-methoxycinnamic acid. Then ferulic acid was quantitatively oxidised by electrolysis on lead dioxide to produce, via intermediate aromatic compounds, maleic acid, oxalic acid and formic acid whose oxidation leads to carbon dioxide.     

Effects of neutralization with lime on the quality of acid olive oil

The technique described in this study makes it possible to neutralize olive oils having very high acidities. The neutralization is carried out in a solid-liquid biphasic medium, which is slightly hydrated, by substituting lime (calcium hydroxide, an inexpensive and locally manufactured product) for soda (sodium hydroxide) as the neutralizing agent. Neutralization by lime limits TAG hydrolysis. The use of lime as a neutralizing agent makes it possible to preserve almost 80% of the α-tocopherol. Oils neutralized with lime have higher temperatures of thermal decomposition than oils neutralized with soda. Oils neutralized with lime had better oxidative stability because natural antioxidants were preserved. Oils neutralized by lime conformed with international olive oil standards.     

Precision measurement method for cryogenic amplifier noise temperatures below 5 K

We report precision measurements of the effective input noise temperature of a cryogenic (liquid-helium temperature) monolithic-microwave integrated-circuit amplifier at the amplifier reference planes within the cryostat. A method is given for characterizing and removing the effect of the transmission lines between the amplifier reference planes and the input and output connectors of the cryostat. In conjunction with careful noise measurements, this method enables us to measure amplifier noise temperatures below 5 K with an uncertainty of 0.3 K. The particular amplifier that was measured exhibits a noise temperature below 5.5 K from 1 to 11 GHz, attaining a minimum value of 2.3 K/spl plusmn/0.3 K at 7 GHz. This corresponds to a noise figure of 0.034 dB/spl plusmn/0.004 dB. The measured amplifier gain is between 33.4 dB/spl plusmn/0.3 dB and 35.8 dB/spl plusmn/0.3 dB over the 1-12-GHz range.     

Optimizing the overlap between the stator teeth of a claw pole transverse-flux permanent-magnet Machine

The paper presents a three-dimensional finite-element analysis-based optimization of the overlap between adjacent stator teeth of a claw pole transverse flux permanent magnet machine (TFPM). Two major optimization criteria are considered: 1) the maximization of the output torque and 2) the minimization of the cogging torque. The paper shows that an overlap of almost 30% fulfills both optimization criteria.     

Modelling of Failure of Woven Composites. Part 2: Experimental and Numerical Justification of the Interzone Concept

The failure of woven composites has been examined. This study is presented in two parts:

• Modelling of failure of woven composites. Part 1: nomenclature defining the interzone concept;
• Modelling of failure of woven composites. Part 2: experimental and numerical justification of the interzone concept.

In the first part, the concepts of the interzone and the geometry of an interzone have been defined in a general way for a large panel of woven composites. In the second part, it has been shown that the failure of woven composites is well described by using the interzone concept. The load transfer between intact interzones and broken interzones has been evaluated for two types of loadings (tensile loading and loading in bending). The analysis of these load transfers explains why in the case of a tensile loading the failure is of a sudden-death type whereas in the case of bending loading the failure is progressive. The concept of failure of an interzone has been also defined.     

Incremental data-driven learning of a novelty detection model for one-class classification with application to high-dimensional noisy data

Most conventional learning algorithms require both positive and negative training data for achieving accurate classification results. However, the problem of learning classifiers from only positive data arises in many applications where negative data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. This paper describes a new machine learning approach, called ILoNDF (Incremental data-driven Learning of Novelty Detector Filter). The approach is inspired by novelty detection theory and its learning method, which typically requires only examples from one class to learn a model. One advantage of ILoNDF is the ability of its generative learning to capture the intrinsic characteristics of the training data by continuously integrating the information relating to the relative frequencies of the features of training data and their co-occurrence dependencies. This makes ILoNDF rather stable and less sensitive to noisy features which may be present in the representation of the positive data. In addition, ILoNDF does not require extensive computational resources since it operates on-line without repeated training, and no parameters need to be tuned. In this study we mainly focus on the robustness of ILoNDF in dealing with high-dimensional noisy data and we investigate the variation of its performance depending on the amount of data available for training. To make our study comparable to previous studies, we investigate four common methods: PCA residuals, Hotelling’s T ² test, an auto-associative neural network, and a one-class version of the SVM classifier (lately a favored method for one-class classification). Experiments are conducted on two real-world text corpora: Reuters and WebKB. Results show that ILoNDF tends to be more robust, is less affected by initial settings, and consistently outperforms the other methods.