Molecular structure and granule morphology of native and heat‐moisture‐treated pinhão starch

Pinhão seed is an unconventional source of starch and the pines grow up in native forests of southern Latin America. In this study, pinhão starch was adjusted at 15, 20 and 25% moisture content and heated to 100, 110 and 120 °C for 1 h. A decrease in λ max (starch/iodine complex) was observed as a result of increase in temperature and moisture content of HMT. The ratio of crystalline to amorphous phase in pinhão starch was determined via Fourier transform infra red by taking 1045/1022 band ratio. A decrease in crystallinity occurred as a result of HMT. Polarised light microscopy indicated a loss of birefringence of starch granules under 120 °C at 25% moisture content. Granule size distribution was further confirmed via scanning electron microscopy which showed the HMT effects. These results increased the understanding on molecular and structural properties of HMT pinhão starch and broadened its food and nonfood industrial applications.     

V2O5/RGO/Pt nanocomposite on oxytetracycline degradation and pharmaceutical effluent detoxification

The cover image is based on the Research Article V₂O₅/RGO/Pt nanocomposite on oxytetracycline degradation and pharmaceutical effluent detoxification by Mohan, H et al., DOI: 10.1002/jctb.6238 .

     

Capsiate Intake with Exercise Training Additively Reduces Fat Deposition in Mice on a High-Fat Diet,but Not without Exercise Training

While exercise training (ET) is an efficient strategy to manage obesity, it is recommended with a dietary plan to maximize the antiobesity functions owing to a compensational increase in energy intake. Capsiate is a notable bioactive compound for managing obesity owing to its capacity to increase energy expenditure. We aimed to examine whether the antiobesity effects of ET can be further enhanced by capsiate intake (CI) and determine its effects on resting energy expenditure and metabolic molecules. Mice were randomly divided into four groups (n = 8 per group) and fed high-fat diet. Mild-intensity treadmill ET was conducted five times/week; capsiate (10 mg/kg) was orally administered daily. After 8 weeks, resting metabolic rate and metabolic molecules were analyzed. ET with CI additively reduced the abdominal fat rate by 18% and solely upregulated beta-3-adrenoceptors in adipose tissue (p = 0.013) but did not affect the metabolic molecules in skeletal muscles. Surprisingly, CI without ET significantly increased the abdominal fat rate (p = 0.001) and reduced energy expenditure by 9%. Therefore, capsiate could be a candidate compound for maximizing the antiobesity effects of ET by upregulating beta-3-adrenoceptors in adipose tissue, but CI without ET may not be beneficial in managing obesity.     

Collective institutional work: the case of Airbnb in Amsterdam,London and New York

ABSTRACT

Given that online platforms disrupt established industries and challenge existing institutions, they can only be successful if their innovation becomes both legal and legitimate. This requires ‘institutional work’ that changes perceptions and regulations within society. Rather than only focussing on the online platform as the sole agent engaging in institutional work, our study analyses institutional work as a collective process. We investigate the case of home-sharing platform Airbnb and the process of institutional change its introduction prompted regarding short-term rental in Amsterdam, London and New York. We find, contrary to the popular view of online platforms as disruptive entrepreneurs, that the platform mainly focusses on creating new institutions rather than disrupting existing ones, and that users and non-users undertake most of the institutional work activities. We also show that different types of actors carry out different types of institutional work suggesting that the process of institutional work is highly distributed.     

Compensation paradox: the influence of monetary rewards on user behaviour

Many e-commerce companies collect users’ personal data for marketing purposes despite privacy concerns. Information-collecting companies often offer a monetary reward to users to alleviate privacy concerns and ease the collection of personal information. This study focused on the negative effects of monetary rewards on both information privacy concerns (IPC) and information disclosure. A survey approach was used to collect data and 370 final responses were analysed using a two-way analysis of variance and a binomial logistic regression model. The results show that monetary rewards increase IPC when an information-collecting company requires sensitive information. Additional results indicate that building trust is a more effective way of collecting personal data. This study identifies how organisations can best execute information-collection activities and contributes additional insights for academia and practitioners.     

A Multiscale-Porous Anion Exchange Membrane for Convenient and Scalable Electrokinetic Concentration of Cationic Species

A device able to electrokinetically concentrate cationic samples has many potential medical and industrial applications, but until now has remained undeveloped due to the lack of a commercial anion-permselective material leading to a prohibitively complex fabrication procedure. Herein, a novel multiscale-porous anion exchange membrane (MP-AEM) that enables the convenient and scalable electrokinetic concentration of cationic species is proposed. A mechanically enhanced multiscale-porous structure with a solid framework is realized by adopting polyester resin as an additive to overcome the intrinsic limitations of the AEM material. The scalable MP-AEM-embedded electrokinetic concentrator is devised based on the peculiar properties of the MP-AEM that for allow both ion and fluid transport. With the MP-AEM, the concentrator is fabricated in a highly streamlined manner consisting only of a simple insertion and assembly. The concentration performance of the MP-AEM-embedded electrokinetic concentrator is demonstrated with a positively charged fluorescent dye and a fluorescein-labeled protein, and the results show enrichment factors of 250 and 500, respectively. The MP-AEM makes cationic electrokinetic concentration more accessible and scalable, thereby enabling further progress in a wide range of fields.     

A Novel Beam Search to Improve Neural Machine Translation for English-Chinese

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, overcoming the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Although NMT based systems have gained their popularity in commercial translation applications, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Being the most popular search algorithm in NMT, beam search is vital to the translation result. However, traditional beam search can produce duplicate or missing translation due to its target sequence selection strategy. Aiming to alleviate this problem, this paper proposed neural machine translation improvements based on a novel beam search evaluation function. And we use reinforcement learning to train a translation evaluation system to select better candidate words for generating translations. In the experiments, we conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our methods. CASIA corpus and the 1,000,000 pairs of bilingual corpora of NiuTrans are used in our experiments. The experiment results prove that the proposed methods can effectively improve the English to Chinese translation quality.     

Color preferences for different topics in connection to personal characteristics

Studies on color preferences are dependent on the topic and the relationships with personal characteristics, particularly personality, but these are seldom studied in one population. Therefore a questionnaire was collected from 1095 Dutch people asking for color preferences about different topics and relating them to personal characteristics. Color preferences regarding different topics show different patterns and significant differences were found between gender, age, education and personality such as being technical, being emotional or being a team player. Also, different colors were mentioned when asked for colors that stimulate to be quiet, energetic, and able to focus or creative. Probably, due to unconsciousness of contexts, many people had no color preference, a result that in the literature seldom is mentioned. Blue was the overall favorite color; however, most males chose for blue (25%) while most females had no color preference (18%). Black was the overall favorite color for clothing, mainly chosen by females (40%), while males primarily chose blue (27%). For building interiors subjects preferred white. For moods, subjects preferred white for being quiet or being able to focus, red for being energetic and had no color preference for being creative. It is concluded that color preferences are dependent upon the topic, and personal characteristics. The findings are important for architects, interior designers, fashion designers and product designers to have a basic idea of preferred colors for different objects by different types of people. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 62–71, 2015