“Technically Unavoidable” in Terms of Genetically Modified Organisms – an Approach for Food Control

In case of findings of authorized genetically modified (gm) plant ingredients below the 0.9 per cent threshold, exceptions from labelling requirements according to regulation (EC) No. 1829/2003 can only be made, “provided that this presence is adventitious or technically unavoidable”. The authors describe factors that should be considered regarding contaminations by gm plant ingredients as technically unavoidable or not. A practical approach for interpretation, taking into account quality control measures and documentation as well as present findings in comparable products is proposed. Received: February 23, 2007     

Magnetic separations in biotechnology—a review

Magnetic separation technology has a broad range of potential applications in both small and large scale biotechnology. This review considers a selection of magnetic techniques and their possible uses.     

卷轴式贴标签机剥离机构的优化设计

探讨了用解析的方法解决压敏标签贴标签机的剥离刀口的优化设计问题，分别提出了剥离刀口处的张力功、摩擦功、弹塑性变形功和剥离功的计算模型，并对结果进行了讨论，结果表明，剥离刀口的曲率半径存在一个最优值，此值分别与纸带预张力、压敏胶的特性、标签的瞬时剥离宽度、底纸带特性等有关。     

The use of the stable isotope 44Ca in studies of calcium incorporation into dentin

The incorporation into rat incisor dentin of two calcium isotopes, the stable ⁴⁴Ca and the radioactive ⁴⁵Ca, was studied using secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) stepscanning and imaging, and autoradiography, respectively. The results demonstrated a time-dependent incorporation of the calcium isotopes into the mineral phase of dentin. With the SIMS step-scanning, detecting ⁴⁴Ca, the ion yield was high in the odontoblasts 2 min after intravenous injection. After 10 min a marked increase in signal intensity was found at the dentin mineralization front. This result was consistent with those obtained by ⁴⁵Ca autoradiography; a peak of incorporation occurred 10 min after injection of the isotope. Likewise, localization of ⁴⁴Ca to the mineralization front could be demonstrated 10 min after injection by SIMS imaging. In images obtained at earlier intervals, no such increase in ion yield could be detected. The results show that the nonradioactive, stable isotope ⁴⁴Ca can be used as a marker for biomineralization in a similar way to radioactive ⁴⁵Ca.     

Scheduling Optimization Modelling: A Case Study of a Woven Label Manufacturing Company

Production scheduling involves all activities of building production schedules, including coordinating and assigning activities to each person, group of people, or machine and arranging work orders in each workplace. Production scheduling must solve all problems such as minimizing customer wait time, storage costs, and production time; and effectively using the enterprise’s human resources. This paper studies the application of flexible job shop modelling on scheduling a woven labelling process. The labelling process includes several steps which are handled in different work-stations. Each workstation is also comprised of several identical parallel machines. In this study, job splitting is allowed so that the power of work stations can be utilized better. The final objective is to minimize the total completion time of all jobs. The results show a significant improvement since the new planning may save more than 60% of lead time compared to the current schedule. The contribution of this research is to propose a flexible job shop model for scheduling a woven labelling process. The proposed approach can also be applied to support complex production scheduling processes under fuzzy environments in different industries. A practical case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model.     

Land‐use dynamic discovery based on heterogeneous mobility sources

Nowadays, cities are the most relevant type of human settlement and their population has been endlessly growing for decades. At the same time, we are witnessing an explosion of digital data that capture many different aspects and details of city life. This allows detecting human mobility patterns in urban areas with more detail than ever before. In this context, based on the fusion of mobility data from different and heterogeneous sources, such as public transport, transport‐network connectivity and Online Social Networks, this study puts forward a novel approach to uncover the actual land use of a city. Unlike previous solutions, our work avoids a time‐invariant approach and it considers the temporal factor based on the assumption that urban areas are not used by citizens all the time in the same manner. We have tested our solution in two different cities showing high accuracy rates.     

AA/AAm改性的PVF高速粘贴标签胶粘剂的研制

采用AA/AAm改性PVF的方法制备高速粘贴标签胶粘剂。对PVA用量、聚合反应温度、引发剂、pH值、AA/AAm等对胶粘剂性能的影响进行了研究。结果表明 ,这些因素对胶粘剂的粘度、稳定性、干燥速度和粘贴强度有很大的影响。该胶粘剂有较好的粘贴性能 ,适用于 14 0 0 0 -2 80 0 0支 /小时高速啤酒生产线粘贴标签     

Automatic annotation of tennis games: An integration of audio,vision, and learning

Fully automatic annotation of tennis game using broadcast video is a task with a great potential but with enormous challenges. In this paper we describe our approach to this task, which integrates computer vision, machine listening, and machine learning. At the low level processing, we improve upon our previously proposed state-of-the-art tennis ball tracking algorithm and employ audio signal processing techniques to detect key events and construct features for classifying the events. At high level analysis, we model event classification as a sequence labelling problem, and investigate four machine learning techniques using simulated event sequences. Finally, we evaluate our proposed approach on three real world tennis games, and discuss the interplay between audio, vision and learning. To the best of our knowledge, our system is the only one that can annotate tennis game at such a detailed level.     

Labelled-replica techniques: post-shadow labelling of intramembrane particles in freeze-fracture replicas

Three methods are described for direct post-fracture, post-shadow labelling of individual classes of intramembrane particles (IMPs) in freeze-fracture replicas of biological membranes. The P-face IMPs corresponding to the acetylcholine receptor complexes (AChRs) of vertebrate neuroeffector junctions are identified by post-replication labelling with ferritin-antibody complexes and with neurotoxin-biotin-avidin-colloidal gold affinity ligands. (The freeze-etch nomenclature of Branton et al., 1975, is used in this report.) These post-shadow labelling techniques resemble conventional en bloc labelling techniques except that the labelling reagents must penetrate a thin but discontinuous layer of platinum superimposed on the molecules of interest. In the ‘sectioned labelled-replica technique’, the replicated and labelled tissues are stained, embedded in plastic and sectioned parallel to the replica-tissue interfaces. In the direct ‘labelled-replica techniques’, the replicated and labelled samples are freeze-dried or critical point dried, the labelled surfaces are stabilized by carbon coating, and the underlying tissues are dissolved, allowing the labelled-replicas to be examined as conventional freeze-fracture replicas. The unshadowed side of each AChR IMP is shown to retain sufficient biochemical information to permit both immunospecific and neurotoxin specific labelling despite formaldehyde fixation, freezing, fracturing, platinum shadowing, and thawing in aqueous media. A new mixed ferricyanide-osmium staining method reveals electron opaque structures spanning the membrane bilayer in the same size, number and distribution as the labelled IMPs. These experiments demonstrate the feasibility of identifying individual IMPs in freeze-fracture replicas and may allow the identification of specific membrane lesions in human disease.