Micro-encapsulation of shrimp oil using the mixture of whey protein concentrate (WPC) and sodium caseinate (SC) (1:1, w/w) as a wall materialwas carried out. The impact of core/wall material ratios (1:2 and 1:4, w/w) and homogenizing pressures (13.79 and 27.58 MPa) on characteristicsand stability of emulsion was investigated. The size of emulsion oil droplets decreased with increasing homogeniz…
Objective: α-Glucosidase inhibitors can be used as a new class of antidiabetic drug. By competitively inhibiting glycosidase activity, theseinhibitors help to prevent the fast breakdown of sugars and thereby control the blood sugar level. This study provides a wealth of informationabout α-glucosidase inhibitors isolated from medicinal plants; this knowledge will be useful in finding more pote…
A large amount of free radicals can be generated in human body during metabolic process. These free radicals can result in oxidative stress andhomeostasis imbalance, even some chronic diseases and cancers if they are not promptly removed. Currently, many studies devote to exploringand utilizing natural antioxidants to remove excessive free radicals in human body, thus realizing the prevention a…
Cancer is one of the two leading human fatal diseases. Drug development for cancer intervention has progressed well in past decades yet existingdrugs face many limitations in applications and effectiveness and are often associated with serious of side effects, which can further deteriorate thepatients’ quality of life. Recent development of natural product based and therapeutically sound anti…
Plants with potential therapeutic values have been used from time immemorial to cure various ailments and infectious diseases. Of late, scientificevidences have been provided on the potential therapeutic agent exhibited by certain traditionally used vegetable extracts. The importance ofwild edible plants may be traced to antiquity but systemic studies are recent. All the Momordica species have …
2014AbstractPolyporus umbellatus (formerly Grifola umbellatus), an edible fungus, has been used as traditional Chinese medicine. The present investigationaimed to uncover the active ingredients in this fungal species, with the emphasis on its polysaccharides. Two polysaccharides, one from fermentedmycelium and the other from the fruiting body, were chromatographically purified. Molecular weight…
Gastrointestinal microbes play important roles in the health and disease of the host. There are many documented evidences which demonstratedthat disturbance of intestinal microbiota is linked to the risk of developing infectious, inflammatory and allergic diseases. Human intestine is homefor a complex consortium of 1013–1014microbial cells. Interactions between the intestinal microbes, pathog…
The composition of Zizyphus mauritiana mucilage (ZMM) and several properties related to its nutritional quality were investigated. The ZMMwith good water holding capacity (25.21 g/g), swelling capacity (19.34 mL/g), glucose dialysis retardation index and in vitro amylolysis kineticsindicate that it may have the capability in controlling the diabetes. Structural characteristics of ZMM were analy…
Nature has never attended a course in probability theory. This poignant philosophical statement underlines the fact that the phenomenon of uncertainty cannot be described by means of probability theory alone. Data and models encountered in the natural sciences and engineering are more or less characterized by uncertainty. With the inclusion of interval variables and random variables classical m…
The most significant issues facing mankind today are related to the quality of our environment. Past decisions did not always consider environmental factors as critical elements. However, current decisions made daily should reflect the importance of the environment. All environment-related issues are multidisciplinary, ranging from science and engineering to social, economic, and regulatory iss…
The treatment of contaminated land to eliminate or reduce the presence of pollutants in the contaminated site has received (and will continue to receive) considerable attention from the practicing profession. Extensive research and development are still underway in respect to the delivery of more effective (and economic) means for site decontamination. The ongoing results can be seen in the…
Our current level of long-term and comparative information on estuaries in many cases prohibits objective determination of the status and trends among these ecosystems. The way to resolve this situation is to develop and evaluate estuarine environmental indicators that will permit objective and meaningful evaluation of estuaries. However, this effort far exceeds the ability of one or a few w…
This book presents the state-of-the-art principles, practices, and techniques related to estimating building costs in metric. It is primarily designed as a textbook for graduate and upper-division undergraduate students in civil engineering, architectural engineering, construction engineering and management, and related programs. Instructors should find the book very useful and suitable for…
Natural systems for the treatment and management of municipal and industrial wastewaters and residuals feature processes that use minimal energy and minimal or no chemicals, and they produce relatively lower amounts of residual solids. This book is intended for the practicing engineers and scientists who are involved in the planning, design, construction, evaluation, and operation of wastew…
The coastal zone is a big place: some 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the sea and this zone is under increasing pressure. Sustainable development and management of coastal zone resources are vitally important to human well-being, to national economies and to the ecosystems on which we depend. In simple spatial terms, the coastal zone is the interface between the lan…
It is becoming increasingly evident that human activities are the major cause of climate change and global warming. Human activities have caused major changes in our land, water, and atmosphere leading to permanent modifications to our environment such as removing major areas of forest land on Earth and increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. As the threat of climate change becomes more p…
Damages due to catastrophic earthquakes are huge. Over a million and half people have been killed during the most catastrophic ten earthquakes that have occurred since 1900. Still, the number of victims and material damage due to earthquakes has permanently been growing although, according to statistics, the number of catastrophic earthquakes per annum is constant. For example, the Haiti ea…
Over the last one hundred and plus years, linguistic anthropology has grown to cover almost any aspect of language structure and language use. From a discipline that was at first conceived to provide the tools for the documentation of endangered languages, especially in North America, it has become an intellectual shelter and a cultural amplifier for the richness of human communication in s…
Module parallel connection for three-phase VSC can increase the system level effectively. However, the circulating currents problem will occur. The circulating currents will distort the three-phase currents, increase the power loss and decrease the system efficiency.Anovel deadbeat circuiting currents control method is proposed in this paper. Based on the analysis of the average model of parall…
This paper presents an electric circuit-based battery and a capacity fade model suitable for electric vehicles (EVs) in vehicle-to-grid applications. The circuit parameters of the battery model (BM) are extracted using genetic algorithm-based optimization method. A control algorithm has been developed for the battery, which calculates the processed energy, charge or discharge rate, and state of…
We propose a 2D shape deformation method to fit technical drawings of garments (“flats”) to body figure drawings with a diversity of fashion poses. We first dress a flat onto a body figure in a standard standing pose using Radial Basis Function (RBF) mapping. For different types of clothing, we suggest two levels of treatment to determine handles automatically. We deform the flats using th…
This paper introduces the development and implementation of a ball mill grinding circuit simulator, NEUSimMill. Compared to the existing simulators in this field which focus on process flowsheeting, NEUSimMill is designed to be used for the test and verification of grinding process control system including advanced control system such as integrated control. The simulator implements the dynamic…
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a ubiquitous wireless technology which allows objects to be identified automatically. An RFID tag is a small electronic device with an antenna and has a unique identification (ID) number. RFID tags can be categorized into passive and active tags. For passive tags, a standard communication protocol known as EPC-globalGeneration-2, or briefly EPC Gen-2, is…
We examine a scheduling problemof cluster tools that concurrently process two wafer types in a cyclic operational sequence. Whereas the process steps for different wafer types are assigned to different processing modules (PMs), the wafer loading and unloading tasks at the PMs are performed by a single robot. For a given cycle plan, which is a mix of different wafers for each cycle, we wish to d…
We used a seven-step process to identify genes involved in glucosinolate biosynthesis and metabolism in the Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa). We constructed an annotated data set with 34,570 unigenes from B. rapa and predicted 11,526 glucosinolate-related candidate genes using expression profiles generated across nine stages of development on a 47k-gene microarray. Using our multi-layered screen…
This paper reports the development of a maximum power-point tracking (MPPT) method for photovoltaic (PV) systems under partially shaded conditions using firefly algorithm. The major advantages of the proposed method are simple computational steps, faster convergence, and its implementation on a lowcost microcontroller. The proposed scheme is studied for two different configurations of PV arrays…
When a single Cloud service (i.e., a software image and a virtual machine), on its own, cannot satisfy all the user requirements, a composition of Cloud services is required. Cloud service composition, which includes several tasks such as discovery, compatibility checking, selection, and deployment, is a complex process and users find it difficult to select the best one among the hundreds, if n…
Condition monitoring helps reduce the operations and maintenance costs by providing information about the physical condition of wind power systems. This study proposes to use a statistical method for effective condition monitoring. The turbine operation is significantly affected by external weather conditions.We model the wind turbine response as a function of weather variables, using a nonpar…
This paper presents a concurrent error detection (CED) scheme for orthogonal Latin square (OLS) parallel decoders. Different from a CED scheme found in the technical literature that protects only the syndrome generator, the proposed CED scheme protects the whole OLS decoder for single stuck-at faults. This paper presents the detailed design and analysis of the proposed CED scheme and shows that…
Stochastic, meta-heuristic and linear construction algorithms for the design of DNA strands satisfying Hamming distance and reverse-complement constraints often use a GC-content constraint to pre-process the DNA strands. Since GC-content is a poor predictor of DNA strand hybridization strength the strands can be filtered by post-processing using thermodynamic calculations. An alternative approa…
With cloud data services, it is commonplace for data to be not only stored in the cloud, but also shared across multiple users. Unfortunately, the integrity of cloud data is subject to skepticism due to the existence of hardware/software failures and human errors. Several mechanisms have been designed to allow both data owners and public verifiers to efficiently audit cloud data integrity witho…
Over the past decade the scientific acti vities of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), which focuses on the role of the oceans in controlling climate change via the transport and storage of greenhouse gases and organic matter, have led to an increased interest in the study ofthe biogeochemistry of organic matter. There is also a growing interest in global climate fluctuations. This, …
This Dictionary aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date reference of construction, surveying, and civil engineering terms within one publication. The entries address the needs of those studying on built environment courses or engaged in professional practice as well as providing much useful information for those with a general interest in architecture or construction. Builders, trade…
Microarray technology allows for the collection of multiple replicates of gene expression time course data for hundreds of genes at a handful of time points. Developing hypotheses about a gene transcriptional network, based on time course gene expression data is an important and very challenging problem. In many situations there are similarities which suggest a hierarchical structure between t…
Ensemble learning is a common tool for data stream classification, mainly because of its inherent advantages of handling large volumes of stream data and concept drifting. Previous studies, to date, have been primarily focused on building accurate ensemble models from stream data. However, a linear scan of a large number of base classifiers in the ensemble during prediction incurs significant c…
A novel signal folding and reconstruction scheme for neural recording applications that exploits the characteristics of neural signals is described in this paper. The amplified output is ‘folded’ into a predefined range of voltages by using comparison and reset circuits along with the core amplifier. After this output signal is digitized and transmitted, a reconstruction algorithm can be ap…
In this paper, a new single-error-correction and double-adjacent-error-correction (SEC-DAEC) code is proposed for simultaneous testing of the most general memory fault models in both data bit and check bit arrays of memories. Simultaneous testing of data bit and check bit arrays eliminates the test time and hardware overheads required for separate check bit array tests. In order to test data b…
Activity cycle diagram (ACD), which is essentially a timed Petri net, is one of the oldest formal modeling tools for discrete-event systems, and a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a highly automated job shop that is used widely in mechanical and electronics industries. Previous FMS modeling studies have indicated that formal modeling of real-life (or industrial) FMSs with classical ACDs …
In single-particle electron microscopy (EM), multiple micrographs of identical macromolecular structures or complexes are taken from various viewing angles to obtain a 3D reconstruction. A high-quality EM reconstruction typically requires several thousand to several million images. Therefore, an automated pipeline for performing computations on many images becomes indispensable. In this paper,…
This paper proposes a noninvasive temperature measurement technique of indirect type, applicable in the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drives. The motor temperature is required for protection and monitoring purposes, as well as for updating temperature-dependent control parameters. Direct measurement with dedicated sensors requires peripherals and cabling; hence, it is quite involve…
One of the important tasks for bridge maintenance is bridge deck crack inspection. Traditionally, a human inspector detects cracks using his/her eyes and marks the location of cracks manually. However, the accuracy of the inspection result is low due to the subjective nature of human judgement. We propose a crack inspection system that uses a camera-equipped mobile robot to collect images on th…
In real-world cargo transportation, there are charges associated with both the traveling distance and the loading quantity. Cargo trucks must comply with a mandatory lower carbon emissions policy: the emissions of large-volume cargo truck/containers depend greatly on the cargo loading and the traveling distance. To address this issue, instead of assuming a constant vehicle loading from one cust…
Analytical description of a constant power fed supercapacitor behavior is revealed in the paper. The derivation is based on a simple RC model with parameters taken from a manufacturer datasheet. Different power and energy-related figures of merit are obtained using the derived expressions. It is shown that some of the performance figures used in datasheets are strictly theoretical and cannot be…
A novel power curve monitoring method for wind turbines was developed to prevent a turbine failure in a wind farm. Compared with the existing methods, this algorithm automatically calculates the power curve limits for power curve monitoring, even when a considerable number of abnormal data are included in wind speed-output power data measured at a wind turbine. In addition, the proposed algori…
Dueto the wind speed variation, wind shear and tower shadow effects, grid connected wind turbines are the sources of power fluctuations which may produce flicker during continuous operation. This paper presents a model of an MW-level variablespeed wind turbine with a doubly fed induction generatorto investigate the flicker emission and mitigation issues. An individual pitch control (IPC) strat…
Biosensors based on microcantilevers convert biological recognition events into measurable mechanical displacements. They offer advantages such as small size, low sample volume, labelfree detection, ease of integration, high-throughput analysis, and low development cost. The design and development of a microcantilever-based aptasensor employing SU-8 polymer as the fabrication material is presen…
The ability to detect changes is an essential competence that robots should possess for increased autonomy. In several applications, such as surveillance, a robot needs to detect relevant changes in the environment by comparing current sensory data with previously acquired information from the environment. We present an efficientmethod for point cloud comparison and change detection in 3D envir…
Management of uncertain data in spatial queries has drawn extensive research interests to consider the granularity of devices and noises in the collection and the delivery of data. Most previous works usually model and handle uncertain data to find the required results directly. However, it is more difficult for users to obtain useful insights when data uncertainty dramatically increases. In th…
Though the structured light measurement system has been successfully applied to the profilemeasurement of diffuse objects, it is still a challenge to measure shiny objects due to the mix of both specular and diffuse reflections. To this end, we propose a robust encoding and decoding method in this paper. First, the monochromatic stripe patterns are utilized to eliminate the effect of texture an…
Information theory has been used for quite some time in the area of computational biology. In this paper we present a pattern discovery method, named Fast Entropic Profiler, that is based on a local entropy function that captures the importance of a region with respect to the whole genome. The local entropy function has been introduced by Vinga and Almeida in [29], here we discuss and improve t…