Abstract: Dried soy protein hydrolysate powder was added to
the burger in order to enhance the oxidative stability as well as
decreases the microbial spoilage. The soybean bioactive compounds
(soy protein hydrolysate) as antioxidant and antimicrobial were added
at level of 1, 2 and 3 %.Chemical analysis and physical properties
were affected by protein hydrolysate addition. The TBA values were
significantly affected (P < 0.05) by the storage period and the level of
soy protein hydrolysate. All the tested soybean protein hydrolysate
additives showed strong antioxidant properties. Samples of soybean
protein hydrolysate showed the lowest (P < 0.05) TBA values at each
time of storage.
The counts of all determined microbiological indicators were
significantly (P < 0.05) affected by the addition of the soybean
protein hydrolysate. Decreasing trends of different extent were also
observed in samples of the treatments for total viable counts,
Coliform, Staphylococcus aureus, yeast and molds. Storage period
was being significantly (P < 0.05) affected on microbial counts in all
samples Staphylococcus aureus were the most sensitive microbe
followed by Coliform group of the sample containing protein
hydrolysate, while molds and yeast count showed a decreasing trend
but not significant (P < 0.05) until the end of the storage period
compared with control sample. Sensory attributes were also
performed, added protein hydrolysate exhibits beany flavor which
was clear about samples of 3% protein hydrolysate.
Abstract: This article deals with the conceptual modeling under uncertainty. First, the division of information systems with their definition will be described, focusing on those where the construction of a conceptual model is suitable for the design of future information system database. Furthermore, the disadvantages of the traditional approach in creating a conceptual model and database design will be analyzed. A comprehensive methodology for the creation of a conceptual model based on analysis of client requirements and the selection of a suitable domain model is proposed here. This article presents the expert system used for the construction of a conceptual model and is a suitable tool for database designers to create a conceptual model.
Abstract: The American Health Level Seven (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM) consists of six back-bone classes that have different specialized attributes. Furthermore, for the purpose of enforcing the semantic expression, there are some specific mandatory vocabulary domains have been defined for representing the content values of some attributes. In the light of the fact that it is a duplicated effort on spending a lot of time and human cost to develop and modify Clinical Information Systems (CIS) for most hospitals due to the variety of workflows. This study attempts to design and develop sharing RIM-based components of the CIS for the different business processes. Therefore, the CIS contains data of a consistent format and type. The programmers can do transactions with the RIM-based clinical repository by the sharing RIM-based components. And when developing functions of the CIS, the sharing components also can be adopted in the system. These components not only satisfy physicians- needs in using a CIS but also reduce the time of developing new components of a system. All in all, this study provides a new viewpoint that integrating the data and functions with the business processes, it is an easy and flexible approach to build a new CIS.
Abstract: The grey oyster mushroom, Pleurotus sajor-caju
(PSC), is a common edible mushroom and is now grown
commercially around the world for food. This fungus has been
broadly used as food or food ingredients in various food products for
a long time. To enhance the nutritional quality and sensory attributes
of bakery-based products, PSC powder is used in the present study to
partially replace wheat flour in baked product formulations. The
nutrient content and sensory properties of rice-porridge and
unleavened bread (paratha) incorporated with various levels of PSC
powder were studied. These food items were formulated with either
0%, 2%, 4% or 6% of PSC powder. Results show PSC powder
recorded β-glucan at 3.57g/100g. In sensory evaluation, consumers
gave higher score to both rice-porridge and paratha bread containing
2-4% PSC compared to those that are not added with PSC powder.
The paratha containing 4% PSC powder can be formulated with the
intention in improving overall acceptability of paratha bread.
Meanwhile, for rice-porridge, consumers prefer the formulated
product added with 4% PSC powder. In conclusion, the addition of
PSC powder to partially wheat flour can be recommended for the
purpose of enhancing nutritional composition and maintaining the
acceptability of carbohydrate-based products.
Abstract: Brassinosteroids (BRs) regulate cell elongation,
vascular differentiation, senescence, and stress responses. BRs signal
through the BES1/BZR1 family of transcription factors, which
regulate hundreds of target genes involved in this pathway. In this
research a comprehensive genome-wide analysis was carried out in
BES1/BZR1 gene family in Arabidopsis thaliana, Cucumis sativus,
Vitis vinifera, Glycin max and Brachypodium distachyon.
Specifications of the desired sequences, dot plot and hydropathy plot
were analyzed in the protein and genome sequences of five plant
species. The maximum amino acid length was attributed to protein
sequence Brdic3g with 374aa and the minimum amino acid length
was attributed to protein sequence Gm7g with 163aa. The maximum
Instability index was attributed to protein sequence AT1G19350
equal with 79.99 and the minimum Instability index was attributed to
protein sequence Gm5g equal with 33.22. Aliphatic index of these
protein sequences ranged from 47.82 to 78.79 in Arabidopsis
thaliana, 49.91 to 57.50 in Vitis vinifera, 55.09 to 82.43 in Glycin
max, 54.09 to 54.28 in Brachypodium distachyon 55.36 to 56.83 in
Cucumis sativus. Overall, data obtained from our investigation
contributes a better understanding of the complexity of the
BES1/BZR1 gene family and provides the first step towards directing
future experimental designs to perform systematic analysis of the
functions of the BES1/BZR1 gene family.
Abstract: Biological sequences from different species are called or-thologs if they evolved from a sequence of a common ancestor species and they have the same biological function. Approximations of Kolmogorov complexity or entropy of biological sequences are already well known to be useful in extracting similarity information between such sequences -in the interest, for example, of ortholog detection. As is well known, the exact Kolmogorov complexity is not algorithmically computable. In prac-tice one can approximate it by computable compression methods. How-ever, such compression methods do not provide a good approximation to Kolmogorov complexity for short sequences. Herein is suggested a new ap-proach to overcome the problem that compression approximations may notwork well on short sequences. This approach is inspired by new, conditional computations of Kolmogorov entropy. A main contribution of the empir-ical work described shows the new set of entropy-based machine learning attributes provides good separation between positive (ortholog) and nega-tive (non-ortholog) data - better than with good, previously known alter-natives (which do not employ some means to handle short sequences well).Also empirically compared are the new entropy based attribute set and a number of other, more standard similarity attributes sets commonly used in genomic analysis. The various similarity attributes are evaluated by cross validation, through boosted decision tree induction C5.0, and by Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis. The results point to the conclu-sion: the new, entropy based attribute set by itself is not the one giving the best prediction; however, it is the best attribute set for use in improving the other, standard attribute sets when conjoined with them.
Abstract: Most agricultural crops cultivated in Brazil are highly
nutrient demanding. Brazilian soils are generally acidic with low base
saturation and available nutrients. Demand for fertilizer application
has increased because the national agricultural sector expansion. To
improve productivity without environmental impact, there is the need
for the utilization of novel procedures and techniques to optimize
fertilizer application. This includes the digital soil mapping and GIS
application applied to mapping in different scales. This paper is
based on research, realized during 2005 to 2010 by Brazilian
Corporation for Agricultural Research (EMBRAPA) and its partners.
The purpose was to map soil fertility in national and regional scales.
A soil profile data set in national scale (1:5,000,000) was constructed
from the soil archives of Embrapa Soils, Rio de Janeiro and in the
regional scale (1:250,000) from COMIGO Cooperative soil data set,
Rio Verde, Brazil. The mapping was doing using ArcGIS 9.1 tools
from ESRI.
Abstract: Process measurement is the task of empirically and objectively assigning numbers to the properties of business processes in such a way as to describe them. Desirable attributes to study and measure include complexity, cost, maintainability, and reliability. In our work we will focus on investigating process complexity. We define process complexity as the degree to which a business process is difficult to analyze, understand or explain. One way to analyze a process- complexity is to use a process control-flow complexity measure. In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate the control-flow complexity measure in terms of Weyuker-s properties. Weyuker-s properties must be satisfied by any complexity measure to qualify as a good and comprehensive one.
Abstract: Automatic reusability appraisal could be helpful in
evaluating the quality of developed or developing reusable software
components and in identification of reusable components from
existing legacy systems; that can save cost of developing the software
from scratch. But the issue of how to identify reusable components
from existing systems has remained relatively unexplored. In this
paper, we have mentioned two-tier approach by studying the
structural attributes as well as usability or relevancy of the
component to a particular domain. Latent semantic analysis is used
for the feature vector representation of various software domains. It
exploits the fact that FeatureVector codes can be seen as documents
containing terms -the idenifiers present in the components- and so
text modeling methods that capture co-occurrence information in
low-dimensional spaces can be used. Further, we devised Neuro-
Fuzzy hybrid Inference System, which takes structural metric values
as input and calculates the reusability of the software component.
Decision tree algorithm is used to decide initial set of fuzzy rules for
the Neuro-fuzzy system. The results obtained are convincing enough
to propose the system for economical identification and retrieval of
reusable software components.
Abstract: The effects of irrigation with dairy factory wastewater
on soil properties were investigated at two sites that had received
irrigation for > 60 years. Two adjoining paired sites that had never
received DFE were also sampled as well as another seven fields from
a wider area around the factory. In comparison with paired sites that
had not received effluent, long-term wastewater irrigation resulted in
an increase in pH, EC, extractable P, exchangeable Na and K and
ESP. These changes were related to the use of phosphoric acid,
NaOH and KOH as cleaning agents in the factory. Soil organic C
content was unaffected by DFE irrigation but the size (microbial
biomass C and N) and activity (basal respiration) of the soil
microbial community were increased. These increases were
attributed to regular inputs of soluble C (e.g. lactose) present as milk
residues in the wastewater. Principal component analysis (PCA) of
the soils data from all 11sites confirmed that the main effects of DFE
irrigation were an increase in exchangeable Na, extractable P and
microbial biomass C, an accumulation of soluble salts and a liming
effect. PCA analysis of soil bacterial community structure, using
PCR-DGGE of 16S rDNA fragments, generally separated individual
sites from one another but did not group them according to irrigation
history. Thus, whilst the size and activity of the soil microbial
community were increased, the structure and diversity of the
bacterial community remained unaffected.
Abstract: Lacking an inherent “natural" dissimilarity measure
between objects in categorical dataset presents special difficulties in
clustering analysis. However, each categorical attributes from a given
dataset provides natural probability and information in the sense of
Shannon. In this paper, we proposed a novel method which
heuristically converts categorical attributes to numerical values by
exploiting such associated information. We conduct an experimental
study with real-life categorical dataset. The experiment demonstrates
the effectiveness of our approach.
Abstract: The rapid expansion of the web is causing the
constant growth of information, leading to several problems such as
increased difficulty of extracting potentially useful knowledge. Web
content mining confronts this problem gathering explicit information
from different web sites for its access and knowledge discovery.
Query interfaces of web databases share common building blocks.
After extracting information with parsing approach, we use a new
data mining algorithm to match a large number of schemas in
databases at a time. Using this algorithm increases the speed of
information matching. In addition, instead of simple 1:1 matching,
they do complex (m:n) matching between query interfaces. In this
paper we present a novel correlation mining algorithm that matches
correlated attributes with smaller cost. This algorithm uses Jaccard
measure to distinguish positive and negative correlated attributes.
After that, system matches the user query with different query
interfaces in special domain and finally chooses the nearest query
interface with user query to answer to it.
Abstract: The textural parameters, together with appearance and
flavor, are sensory attributes of great importance for the product to be
accepted by the consumer. The objective of the present study was the
evaluation of the textural attributes of Packhams pears in the fresh
state, after drying in a chamber with forced convection at 50ºC,
lyophilized and re-hydrated. In texture analysis it was used the
method of Texture Profile Analysis (TPA). The parameters analyzed
were hardness, cohesiveness, adhesiveness, elasticity and chewiness.
From the results obtained is possible to see that the drying operation
greatly affected some textural properties of the pears, so that the
hardness diminished very much with drying, for both drying
methods.
Abstract: Disposal of health-care waste (HCW) is considered as
an important environmental problem especially in large cities.
Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques are apt to deal
with quantitative and qualitative considerations of the health-care
waste management (HCWM) problems. This research proposes a
fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making approach with a multilevel
hierarchical structure including qualitative as well as
quantitative performance attributes for evaluating HCW disposal
alternatives for Istanbul. Using the entropy weighting method,
objective weights as well as subjective weights are taken into account
to determine the importance weighting of quantitative performance
attributes. The results obtained using the proposed methodology are
thoroughly analyzed.
Abstract: Conventional approaches in the implementation of logic programming applications on embedded systems are solely of software nature. As a consequence, a compiler is needed that transforms the initial declarative logic program to its equivalent procedural one, to be programmed to the microprocessor. This approach increases the complexity of the final implementation and reduces the overall system's performance. On the contrary, presenting hardware implementations which are only capable of supporting logic programs prevents their use in applications where logic programs need to be intertwined with traditional procedural ones, for a specific application. We exploit HW/SW codesign methods to present a microprocessor, capable of supporting hybrid applications using both programming approaches. We take advantage of the close relationship between attribute grammar (AG) evaluation and knowledge engineering methods to present a programmable hardware parser that performs logic derivations and combine it with an extension of a conventional RISC microprocessor that performs the unification process to report the success or failure of those derivations. The extended RISC microprocessor is still capable of executing conventional procedural programs, thus hybrid applications can be implemented. The presented implementation is programmable, supports the execution of hybrid applications, increases the performance of logic derivations (experimental analysis yields an approximate 1000% increase in performance) and reduces the complexity of the final implemented code. The proposed hardware design is supported by a proposed extended C-language called C-AG.
Abstract: This paper proposes a method that discovers sequential patterns corresponding to user-s interests from sequential data. This method expresses the interests as constraint patterns. The constraint patterns can define relationships among attributes of the items composing the data. The method recursively decomposes the constraint patterns into constraint subpatterns. The method evaluates the constraint subpatterns in order to efficiently discover sequential patterns satisfying the constraint patterns. Also, this paper applies the method to the sequential data composed of stock price indexes and verifies its effectiveness through comparing it with a method without using the constraint patterns.
Abstract: The notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in communication studies. This fuzziness has led to tensions among engineers across tenures in interpreting what constitutes communicative competence. The study seeks to investigate novice and professional engineers- understanding of the said notion in terms of two main elements of communicative competence: linguistic and rhetorical competence. Novice engineers are final year engineering students, whilst professional engineers represent engineers who have at least 5 years working experience. Novice and professional engineers were interviewed to gauge their perceptions on linguistic and rhetorical features deemed necessary to enhance communicative competence for the profession. Both groups indicated awareness and differences on the importance of the sub-sets of communicative competence, namely, rhetorical explanatory competence, linguistic oral immediacy competence, technical competence and meta-cognitive competence. Such differences, a possible attribute of the learning theory, inadvertently indicate sublime differences in the way novice and professional engineers perceive communicative competence.
Abstract: In this paper, based on the work in [1], we further give
a general model for acquiring knowledge, which first focuses on the
research of how and when things involved in problems are made
then describes the goals, the energy and the time to give an optimum
model to decide how many related things are supposed to be involved
in. Finally, we acquire knowledge from this model in which there are
the attributes, actions and connections of the things involved at the
time when they are born and the time in their life. This model not
only improves AI theories, but also surely brings the effectiveness
and accuracy for AI system because systems are given more
knowledge when reasoning or computing is used to bring about
results.
Abstract: The information systems with incomplete attribute
values and fuzzy decisions commonly exist in practical problems. On
the base of the notion of variable precision rough set model for
incomplete information system and the rough set model for
incomplete and fuzzy decision information system, the variable rough
set model for incomplete and fuzzy decision information system is
constructed, which is the generalization of the variable precision
rough set model for incomplete information system and that of rough
set model for incomplete and fuzzy decision information system. The
knowledge reduction and heuristic algorithm, built on the method and
theory of precision reduction, are proposed.
Abstract: The concept of housing affordability is a contested
issue, but a pressing and widespread problem for many countries.
Simple ratio measures based on housing expenditure and income are
habitually used to defined and assess housing affordability. However,
conceptualising and measuring affordability in this manner focuses
only on financial attributes and fails to deal with wider issues such as
housing quality, location and access to services and facilities.
The research is based on the notion that the housing affordability
problem encompasses more than the financial costs of housing and a
households ability to meet such costs and must address larger issues
such as social and environmental sustainability and the welfare of
households. Therefore, the need arises for a broad and more
encompassing set of attributes by which housing affordability can be
assessed. This paper presents a system of criteria by which the
affordability of different housing locations could be assessed in a
comprehensive and sustainable manner. Moreover, the paper explores
the way in which such criteria could be measured.