An investigation of the drivers,barriers, and incentives for environmental management systems in the Malaysian food and beverage industry

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Food production and consumption is one of the major causes of global environmental degradation. One way to address environmental impacts in the food...     

图形:最大的问题

如果问一位资深的游戏玩家：图像和游戏本身哪个更重要?他们一般会选后者。既然这样．为什么整个图形行业还在步调一致地开发新的图形技术。     

Parallelised production of fine and calibrated emulsions by coupling flow-focusing technique and partial wetting phenomenon

The capacity of microfluidic technology to fabricate monodisperse emulsion droplets is well established. Parallelisation of droplet production is a prerequisite for using such an approach for making high-quality materials for either fundamental or industrial applications where product quantity matters. Here, we investigate the emulsification efficiency of parallelised drop generators based on a flow-focusing geometry when incorporating the role of partial wetting in order to make emulsion droplets with a diameter below 10 μm. Confinement intrinsically encountered in microsystems intensifies the role played by interfaces between liquids and solids. We thus take advantage of partial wetting to enhance the maximum confinement accessible due to liquid flow focusing. We compare the performances brought by partial wetting to more established routes such as step emulsification. We show that the step configuration and the partial wetting regime are both well suited for being parallelised and thus open the way to the production of fine and calibrated emulsions for further applications. Finally, this new route of emulsification that exploits partial wetting between the fluids and the channel walls opens possibilities to the formation of substantially smaller droplets, as required in many fields of application.     

Mobile digcovery: discovering and interacting with the world through the Internet of things

The application of Internet-enabled devices in the real world for the development of Smart Cities, environmental monitoring, bus tracking, and parking requires scalability, extensibility, and integration of emerging resources to reach a suitable ecosystem for data acquisition and interaction with citizens. Internet of things needs to offer efficient support for global communications and access to services and information. It needs to enable homogeneous and seamless machine-to-machine communication for different solutions and applications. This work presents an homogeneous and suitable mechanism for global resource discovery, device access for deployed smart objects in different scenarios, and sensors and devices from end users (participative sensing). The integration of legacy and sensors already available from smart buildings and smart objects is presented. For this purpose, a resolution infrastructure called “digcovery” is defined for maximizing efficiency and sustainability of deployments. Digcovery architecture offers the framework to allow users to register/include their own sensors into a common infrastructure and access/discover the available resources through mobile digcovery. Mobile digcovery exploits the context-awareness, geo-location, and identification technologies available in mobile platforms such as smartphones to discover, interact, and access the resources through its ElasticSearch engine.     

Exploring the Belief Systems of Software Development Professionals

It is commonly accepted that an individual's beliefs and actions are based on his or her assessment and perceptions of the world. In order to determine what practices an individual is likely to follow at any given time, it is necessary to understand the individual's behavioral intention in a given circumstance. From an Information Technology perspective, a software development professional's belief systems are potentially the basis for the adoption and implementation of new and innovative work practices and processes. In this article, we explore the belief systems of software development professionals in order to understand the beliefs underlying intention and practice, and we seek answers about how they adopt or reject new and innovative software development processes and practices. The results point out a strong influence of past experiences, personality types, and repeated behavior on current software development processes and practices in industrial settings.     

Penetrating aortic ulcer: clinical and angiographic characteristics

BACKGROUND: "Penetrating aortic ulcer", an atherosclerotic lesion with ulceration that penetrates the internal elastic lamina and allows haematoma formation within the aortic wall, is rarely considered in the differential diagnosis of patients with sudden onset of severe chest or back pain. It has been suggested that it is a pathologic process that involves elderly hypertensive patients with severe atherosclerosis and rarely has been observed in the ascending aorta. METHODS: To determine the characteristics of this process, 11 clinical, 2 hemodynamic, 3 angiographic and 4 surgical variables were compared between 10 consecutive patients with penetrating aortic ulcers and 20 matched patients with classic acute aortic dissection. RESULTS: Clinical and hemodynamic variables were similar in both compared groups. In the group of patients with penetrating ulcer mean age was 58 +/- 6 years, previous hypertension was observed in 6 patients and the penetrating ulcer was located in the ascending aorta in 6 cases. In comparison to patients with aortic dissection, more angiographic projections were necessary to obtain the diagnosis in the group of patients with penetrating ulcer (2.4 +/- 0.8 vs 1.7 +/- 0.6; p < 0.05). In addition, the presence of angiographic aortic valve regurgitation was only observed in the group of patients with acute dissection (60% vs 0%; p < 0.001). Severe atherosclerosis was not present angiographically in any patient with penetrating ulcer. CONCLUSIONS: Penetrating aortic ulcer can also affect middle age patients without severe atherosclerosis and is frequently observed in the ascending aorta. Its form of presentation and clinical characteristics are similar to classic aortic dissection. The lack of angiographic confirmatory evidence of dissection with suggestive clinical history, should raise the possibility of penetrating aortic ulcer.     

Molecular and genetic features of fragile X syndrome

This study explored the claim that superior disembedding performance in autism reflects "less capture by meaning" and/or reduced "central coherence" [Shah & Frith, Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 24, 613-620 (1983); Shah & Frith, Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 34, 1351-1364 (1993)]. Meaningless as well as meaningful disembedding contexts were used, and memory for contextual information was examined. Neither qualitative (search strategy) nor quantitative (RT or accuracy) data indicated that high-functioning individuals with autism/PDD were superior to younger, developmentally matched controls. For both groups, disembedding was slowest from meaningful contexts, which generally were remembered best. No evidence was provided for "less capture by meaning" or reduced "central coherence" in autism/PDD, raising the possibility that earlier findings reflect a developmental, rather than a stable autism-specific, phenomenon.     

Innovative techniques in pediatric liver transplantation: reduced-, split- and living-donor related liver transplantation

BACKGROUND: Biological systems that show threshold phenomena are candidates for stochastic resonance as a mechanism to explain what appears to be biovariability. Stochastic resonance is the amplification of weak signals by "noise." OBJECTIVE: This review discusses the areas of contact dermatitis in which threshold events have been documented. The purpose is to point out the mechanism by which stochastic resonance may affect patch test results. METHODS: A literature review technique was used. RESULTS: The recent finding of a neurological influence on contract dermatitis provides a mechanism for stochastic resonance to affect patch test results. CONCLUSION: Stochastic resonance is likely to affect patch test results when more than one patch test result is positive.     

An internet of things–based personal device for diabetes therapy management in ambient assisted living (AAL)

Diabetes therapy management in AAL environments, such as old people and diabetes patients homes, is a very difficult task since many factors affect a patient’s blood sugar levels. Factors such as illness, treatments, physical and psychological stress, physical activity, drugs, intravenous fluids and change in the meal plan cause unpredictable and potentially dangerous fluctuations in blood sugar levels. Right now, operations related to dosage are based on insulin infusion protocol boards, which are provided by physicians to the patients. These boards are not considering very influential factors such as glycemic index from the diet, consequently patients need to estimate the dosage leading to dose error, which culminates in hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia episode. Therefore, right insulin infusion calculation needs to be supported by the next generation of personal-care devices. For this reason, a personal device has been developed to assist and consider more factors in the insulin therapy dosage calculation. The proposed solution is based on Internet of things in order to, on the one hand, support a patient’s profile management architecture based on personal RFID cards and, on the other hand, provide global connectivity between the developed patient’s personal device based on 6LoWPAN, nurses/physicians desktop application to manage personal health cards, glycemic index information system, and patient’s web portal. This solution has been evaluated by a multidisciplinary group formed by patients, physicians, and nurses.