Behavioural response to a sudden health risk: Dengue and educational outcomes in Colombia

Epidemics tend to have a debilitating influence on the lives of directly afflicted families. However, the presence of an epidemic can also change the behaviour and outcomes of those not directly affected. This paper makes use of a short, sharp, unexpected epidemic to examine the behavioural response of the general public to a sudden shift in the perceived risk to an individual's health and mortality. Our analysis finds that unafflicted school students change their behaviour substantially, affecting important life outcomes. In particular, we find that close to 4 fewer students, out of a typical class of 47 pupils, sit their school leaving examination for every additional 10 cases of severe Dengue per 10 000 inhabitants in a municipality. We rule out several possible mechanisms, leaving an increase in the salience of the disease's risks as a plausible explanation for our findings

iNeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation

We present iNeRF, a framework that performs mesh-free pose estimation by "inverting" a Neural RadianceField (NeRF). NeRFs have been shown to be remarkably effective for the task of view synthesis - synthesizing photorealistic novel views of real-world scenes or objects. In this work, we investigate whether we can apply analysis-by-synthesis via NeRF for mesh-free, RGB-only 6DoF pose estimation - given an image, find the translation and rotation of a camera relative to a 3D object or scene. Our method assumes that no object mesh models are available during either training or test time. Starting from an initial pose estimate, we use gradient descent to minimize the residual between pixels rendered from a NeRF and pixels in an observed image. In our experiments, we first study 1) how to sample rays during pose refinement for iNeRF to collect informative gradients and 2) how different batch sizes of rays affect iNeRF on a synthetic dataset. We then show that for complex real-world scenes from the LLFF dataset, iNeRF can improve NeRF by estimating the camera poses of novel images and using these images as additional training data for NeRF. Finally, we show iNeRF can perform category-level object pose estimation, including object instances not seen during training, with RGB images by inverting a NeRF model inferred from a single view.Comment: Website: http://yenchenlin.me/inerf

Influence of feeding system on Longissimus thoracis et lumborum volatile compounds of an Iberian local lamb breed

The chemical composition and volatile profile of the Longissimus thoracis et lumborum muscle of lambs reared in two distinct production systems (intensive and extensive) was evaluated. For this, sixty-six lambs for meat production of the autochthonous Gallega Iberian breed were raised with concentrate and grass in intensive (30 animals) and extensive (36 animals) system, respectively, until 4–4.5 months of age when they were slaughtered. Subsequently, Longissimus thoracis et lumborum muscles were excised for the determination of chemical composition (moisture, intramuscular fat, protein, and ash percentages) and volatile substances. The aftermaths obtained evidenced that moisture (75.90% and 75.68%), intramuscular fat (1.68% and 1.76%), and protein (20.62% and 20.97%) contents were not significantly (P gt 0.05) affected by the production system. However, the extensively-fed lambs displayed a higher ash content (1.35% vs. 1.24%). Additionally, the total volatile content was also not significantly (P gt 0.05) influenced by feeding system. Despite this, the total content of hydrocarbons, acids, aldehydes, ketones, esters, ethers, furans, sulfur compounds, and others was significantly (P lt 0.05) affected by diet, being the alcohol family the only group not influenced (P gt 0.05) by the production system (1321.3 vs. 1211.3 AU × 104/g fresh muscle). Specifically, intensively-fed lambs showed significantly higher amounts for all volatile families apart from ketones (2215 vs. 2826 AU × 104/g fresh muscle) and sulfur compounds (22.7 vs. 123.7 AU × 104/g fresh muscle). In addition, benzyl alcohol and carbon disulfide were proposed as appropriate biomarkers for grass diets, while 1-butanone, 2-heptanone, and furan, 2-penthyl were indicated as suitable tracers for concentrate-based diets.The authors are grateful to EU ERA-NET program and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Acciones de Programaci´on Conjunta Internacional, grant number PCIN-2017-053) for funding the project “EcoLamb–Holistic Production to Reduce the Ecological Footprint of Meat (SusAn/ 0002/2016). Authors would like to acknowledge to Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (Xunta de Galicia) for granting Noemí Echegaray with a predoctoral scholarship (Grant number IN606A-2018/002). Rubén Domínguez, Roberto Bermúdez Mirian Pateiro and José M. Lorenzo are members of the HealthyMeat network, funded by CYTED (ref. 119RT0568). CIMO authors are grateful to FCT and FEDER under Program PT2020 for financial support to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020). Dr. Gonzales-Barron acknowledges the national funding by FCT, P.I., through the Institutional Scientific Employment Program contract.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Effects of camu-camu (Myrciaria dubia) powder on the physicochemical and kinetic parameters of deteriorating microorganisms and salmonella enterica subsp. enterica Serovar Typhimurium in refrigerated vacuum-packed ground beef

This study aims to evaluate the effects of camu-camu powder (CCP), Amazonian berry fruit with documented bioactive properties, physicochemical meat parameters, and the growth kinetics parameters of S. enterica ser. Typhimurium, psychrotrophic bacteria (PSY), and lactic acid bacteria (LAB) in vacuum-packed ground beef. Batches of ground beef were mixed with 0.0%, 2.0%, 3.5%, and 5.0% CCP (w/w), vacuum-packed as 10 g portions, and stored at 5â—¦C for 16 days. Centesimal composition analyses (only on the initial day), pH, TBARS, and color were quantified on storage days 1, 7, and 15, while PSY and LAB were counted on days 0, 3, 6, 9, 13, and 16. Another experiment was conducted with the same camu-camu doses by inoculating S. enterica ser. Typhimurium microbial kinetic curves were modeled by the Huang growth and Weibull decay models. CCP decreased TBARS in beef from 0.477 to 0.189 mg MDA·kg−1 . No significant differences in meat pH between treated and control samples were observed on day 15. CCP addition caused color changes, with color a* value decreases (from 14.45 to 13.44) and color b* value increases (from 17.41 to 21.25), while color L* was not affected. Higher CCP doses caused progressive LAB growth inhibition from 0.596 to 0.349 log CFU·day−1 at 2.0% and 5.0% CCP, respectively. Similarly, PSY growth rates in the treated group were lower (0.79–0.91 log CFU·day−1 ) compared to the control (1.21 log CFU·day−1 ). CCP addition at any of the investigated doses produced a steeper S. enterica ser. Typhimurium inactivation during the first cold storage day, represented by Weibull’s concavity α shape parameter, ranged from 0.37 to 0.51, in contrast to 1.24 for the control. At the end of the experiment, however, S. enterica ser. Typhimurium counts in beef containing CCP were not significantly different (p lt 0.05) from the control. Although CCP affects bacterial kinetics, it does not protect ground beef against spoilage bacteria and Salmonella to the same degree it does against lipid peroxidation.The authors would like to thank CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel)—Brazil, for supporting the first author with a scholarship from the international Sandwich Exchange Program—PDSE 047/2017/Process no. 88881.189927/2018-01 and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—CNPq (Process: 310462/2018-5), and to PROPeq/PROPG-UFMT, Brazil. U. Gonzales-Barron and V. Cadavez are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020). U. Gonzales-Barron acknowledges FCT, P.I., for the institutional scientific employment program contract.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evolution of spoilage microorganisms in vacuum-packed lamb meat from two portuguese breeds

Although meat ageing at cold storage is essential to improve meat tenderness (Prates, 2000), the natural process of microbial spoilage takes place at the same time due to the proliferation of psychrotrophic bacteria, lactic acid bacteria, Pseudomonas spp. and Clostridium spp. (Berruga et al., 2005). A known strategy to moderately extend the shelf-life of meat is vacuum packaging. However, the spoilage retardation rate mainly depends on the initial microbiological quality of meat as well as its initial pH. The objective of this study was to evaluate the evolution of lactic acid bacteria and spoilage microorganisms (i.e., mesophiles, psychrotrophic bacteria and Pseudomonas spp.) in vacuum-packed lamb meat during cold storage at 4ºC. The microbial spoilage in meat originating from two Portuguese ovine breeds, Bordaleira- de-Entre-Douro-e-Minho (BEDM) and Churra-Galega-Bragançana (CGB), was compared.This work was supported by European Research Area on Sustainable Animal Production Systems (SusAn, ERA-NETSUSAN 2016/48, EcoLamb project).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Compositional attributes and fatty acid profile of lamb meat from Iberian local breeds

This study aimed to compare lamb meat composition from five Iberian breeds raised in their typical rearing systems and to reveal trends in compositional meat attributes due to breed or production system. The meat quality of 153 animals was analysed. The combined effect of breed × production system produced significant differences in lamb meat quality. Meat from the extensively-reared Bordaleira-de-Entre-Douro-e-Minho (BEDM) and Gallega breeds had elevated amounts of n-3 PUFAs, tocopherol content and favourable n-6/n-3 ratio. Meat from lambs grown under extensive and semi-extensive systems presented higher content of conjugated linoleic acid than the two breeds reared intensively. The meat of commercial breed (INRA401) was characterised by higher content of protein and MUFAs and lower atherogenic potential than the breeds reared in extensive and semi-extensive systems. Principal component analysis demonstrated that meat from extensively raised lambs was associated to higher SFA, CLA, α-tocopherol, n-3, atherogenic index and cholesterol content, but lower intramuscular fat and retinol content, MUFA and n-6/n-3.The authors are grateful to EU ERA-NET programme and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for funding the project “EcoLamb–Holistic Production to Reduce the Ecological Footprint of Meat (SusAn/0002/2016). CIMO authors are grateful to FCT and FEDER under Programme PT2020 for financial support to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020). Dr. Gonzales-Barron acknowledges the national funding by FCT, P.I., through the Institutional Scientific Employment Programme contract. Jos´e M. Lorenzo is member of the HealthyMeat network, funded by CYTED (ref. 119RT0568).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Influence of the production system (Intensive vs. extensive) at farm level on proximate composition and volatile compounds of portuguese lamb meat

Today’s society demands healthy meat with a special emphasis on integrated animal husbandry combined with the concern for animal welfare. In this sense, the raising of lambs in an extensive system has been one of the most common practices, which results in meats with high nutritional value. However, both the production system and the diet play a fundamental role in the chemical composition of the meat, which has a direct impact on the content of volatile compounds. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine the effect of two production systems (intensive and extensive) on the chemical composition and volatile profile of lamb meat. Twenty-eight lambs of the Bordaleira-de-Entre-Douro-e-Minho (BEDM) sheep breed were raised for meat production under the intensive or extensive system and were fed with concentrate and pasture, respectively. All animals were carried out in the muscle longissimus thoracis et lumborum. Results evidenced that all the composition parameters were affected by the production system. Extensively-reared lambs produced meat with the highest fat and protein contents, while these animals had the lowest percentages of moisture and ash. Similarly, the total content of volatile compounds was affected (p lt 0.05) by the production system and were higher in the meat of lambs reared extensively. Furthermore, the content of total acids, alcohols, aldehydes, esters, ethers, furans and sulfur compounds as well as most of the individual compounds were also affected (p lt 0.05) by the production system, whereas total hydrocarbons and ketones were not affected (p gt 0.05). As a general conclusion, the production system had very high influence not only in proximate composition but also in the volatile compounds.Noemí Echegaray acknowledges Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (Xunta de Galicia) for granting with a predoctoral scholarship (Grant number IN606A-2018/002). Rubén Domínguez, Laura Purriños, Roberto Bermúdez and José M. Lorenzo are members of the HealthyMeat network and funded by CYTED (ref. 119RT0568). CIMO authors are grateful to FCT and FEDER under Programme PT2020 for the financial support to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020). Gonzales-Barron acknowledges the national funding by FCT, P.I., through the Institutional Scientific Employment Programme contract.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

MIRA: Mental Imagery for Robotic Affordances

Humans form mental images of 3D scenes to support counterfactual imagination, planning, and motor control. Our abilities to predict the appearance and affordance of the scene from previously unobserved viewpoints aid us in performing manipulation tasks (e.g., 6-DoF kitting) with a level of ease that is currently out of reach for existing robot learning frameworks. In this work, we aim to build artificial systems that can analogously plan actions on top of imagined images. To this end, we introduce Mental Imagery for Robotic Affordances (MIRA), an action reasoning framework that optimizes actions with novel-view synthesis and affordance prediction in the loop. Given a set of 2D RGB images, MIRA builds a consistent 3D scene representation, through which we synthesize novel orthographic views amenable to pixel-wise affordances prediction for action optimization. We illustrate how this optimization process enables us to generalize to unseen out-of-plane rotations for 6-DoF robotic manipulation tasks given a limited number of demonstrations, paving the way toward machines that autonomously learn to understand the world around them for planning actions.Comment: CoRL 2022, webpage: https://yenchenlin.me/mir

Fatty acid profile of lamb meat from two portuguese autochthonous breeds

In Portugal, sheep and goat meat production accounts for 2.8% of the total meat production in the country; and it is capable of supplying approximately 82% of the domestic demand (INE, 2015). Churra-Galega-Bragançana (CGB) and Bordaleira-entre-Douro-e-Minho (BEDM) are two native breeds of the north of Portugal, classified as endangered lamb breeds. These breeds are exploited for meat production, the former in the Atlantic bio-region and the latter in the Mediterranean area. Production factors, such as breed, have a great influence on nutritional aspects related with the content and quality of fat and fatty acid profile (Frank et al., 2016), which are considered important quality indicators that have a great influence on consumer acceptability (Andersen et al., 2005), especially nowadays as consumers have become increasingly concerned about health and the relationship between meat consumption and saturated fatty acids (Leroy and De Smet, 2019). These autochthonous breeds constitute an important genetic heritage that must be preserved, so assessing their fatty acid profile will allow a correct characterization of these breeds and their products.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

EVALUACIÓN DE COLOR DEL GARBANZO (Cicer arietinum L.) POR MÉTODOS INSTRUMENTALES Y SENSORIALES

Chickpea is a well recognized source of vegetable protein, especially in underdeveloped areas of the world. Mexican chickpea is highly priced in the international market due to its desired quality. The Northwest of Mexico, especially Sonora and Sinaloa, are also recognized for the quality of chickpea, where a high percentage of the annual production is placed in the international market. Among the various characteristics of high-quality chickpea, color is one of the most important, since it influences both: the selection of new improved varieties at the experimental research stations, and also the price at the international market. The purpose of this study was to evaluate two objective instrumental methods of color determination as related to sensory evaluation analysis, using a panel of trained judges. The color determination method with the highest correlation with sensory evaluation results could be used for the implementation of a color scale for chickpeas. Results from this study will help the improvement selection programs at the agriculture experimental stations for the selection of chickpea varieties with better color quality attributes and also it will increase the commercialization of chickpea produced in the Northwest of Mexico. Ten chickpea samples were selected for this study: seven were chickpea varieties and three were advanced lines, under improved selection programs. Samples were measured by the reflectometer, AGTRON (Md. M300A) and Hunter Lab. apparatus. Sensory evaluation analyses were conducted using a ranking test, where a trained panel of twelve judges ranked chickpea samples in their preference of color. Statistical analyses of variance showed a significantly high correlation between objective and subjective methodologies for color determination.Chickpeas, color, instrumental methods, sensory evaluation., Agribusiness,