Effects of temperature and coating treatment on gas exchange of 'Braeburn' apples : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Science at Massey University

Achieving modified atmosphere (MA) effects on fruit through the use of surface coatings relies upon a suitable degree of internal atmosphere modification, which is strongly dependent upon both respiration rate and skin permeance to gases. In this study, skin porosity, skin permeance, internal partial pressures of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and respiration rate were measured at 0°C, 10°C, 20°C and 30°C in non-coated 'Braeburn' apples. Variation in respiration rate, internal partial pressures of oxygen and carbon dioxide, skin permeance to oxygen and carbon dioxide, and the extent to which all of these gas exchange characteristics affected by temperatures of 0°C, 5°C, 10°C, 15°C, 20°C were characterised in both non-coated and coated 'Braebum' apples. Coating treatments were 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 times either a 2% (w/w) solution of hydroxypropylcellulose (HPC) in distilled water, or a commercial formulation of carnauba wax and shellac coating, achieved by mixing the full strength solutions with distilled water. There was a 6- or 10-fold difference in respiration rate between fruit kept at 0°C and 20°C, or 0°C and 30°C, whilst the relative permeance to both O 2 and CO 2 differed only a factor of 1.7 or 1.5 in non-coated fruit. The differing effects of temperature upon these two variables were responsible for the depression of internal O 2 and elevation of internal CO 2 associated with increase in temperature from 0°C to 20°C or 30°C. There was no evidence that porosity was dependent on temperature, suggesting that the increasing permeance with higher temperatures may have resulted from increasing permeance of the cuticle. The modification of internal atmosphere composition in carnauba-coated fruit depended upon coating concentration and temperature. The effects of HPC coating on internal atmosphere, especially on internal CO 2 were less marked than those of temperature. In non-coated fruit, the magnitude of decline in internal O 2 was slightly greater than the increase in internal CO 2 over the temperature range in the experiment. For apples that were respiring aerobically, this indicates that the fruit skin had a slightly higher permeance to CO 2 than to O 2 . Since O 2 diffuses through pores were readily than CO 2 , gas exchange of these fruit appeared not to be pore dominated. The suppression of gas exchange by shellac coating was consistent with the coating blocking pores on the fruit surface to an extent that depended on coating concentration. The less pronounced effects of HPC coating in both skin permeance and internal gases were consistent with a coating that loosely covered the fruit surface rather than blocking the pores. Low concentrations of shellac coating achieved low internal O 2 levels at higher temperatures but had only slight effects on internal atmosphere composition at low temperatures. Higher concentrations that achieved MA benefit at low temperatures resulted in fermentation at higher temperatures. Given the natural variability in skin permeance, and the exacerbating effects of coating treatment and temperature, surface coatings appear unlikely to provide a reliable and safe means of achieving modified atmosphere benefits in 'Braeburn' apples

Divide and Fuse: A Re-ranking Approach for Person Re-identification

As re-ranking is a necessary procedure to boost person re-identification (re-ID) performance on large-scale datasets, the diversity of feature becomes crucial to person reID for its importance both on designing pedestrian descriptions and re-ranking based on feature fusion. However, in many circumstances, only one type of pedestrian feature is available. In this paper, we propose a "Divide and use" re-ranking framework for person re-ID. It exploits the diversity from different parts of a high-dimensional feature vector for fusion-based re-ranking, while no other features are accessible. Specifically, given an image, the extracted feature is divided into sub-features. Then the contextual information of each sub-feature is iteratively encoded into a new feature. Finally, the new features from the same image are fused into one vector for re-ranking. Experimental results on two person re-ID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Especially, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Market-1501 dataset.Comment: Accepted by BMVC201

Virtual to Real Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Reinforcement learning is considered as a promising direction for driving policy learning. However, training autonomous driving vehicle with reinforcement learning in real environment involves non-affordable trial-and-error. It is more desirable to first train in a virtual environment and then transfer to the real environment. In this paper, we propose a novel realistic translation network to make model trained in virtual environment be workable in real world. The proposed network can convert non-realistic virtual image input into a realistic one with similar scene structure. Given realistic frames as input, driving policy trained by reinforcement learning can nicely adapt to real world driving. Experiments show that our proposed virtual to real (VR) reinforcement learning (RL) works pretty well. To our knowledge, this is the first successful case of driving policy trained by reinforcement learning that can adapt to real world driving data

Cheng v. Romo

Plaintiff\u27s Opposition to Defendant\u27s Motion for Judgment as a Matter of La

Convolutional aggregation of local evidence for large pose face alignment

Methods for unconstrained face alignment must satisfy two requirements: they must not rely on accurate initialisation/face detection and they should perform equally well for the whole spectrum of facial poses. To the best of our knowledge, there are no methods meeting these requirements to satisfactory extent, and in this paper, we propose Convolutional Aggregation of Local Evidence (CALE), a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture particularly designed for addressing both of them. In particular, to remove the requirement for accurate face detection, our system firstly performs facial part detection, providing confidence scores for the location of each of the facial landmarks (local evidence). Next, these score maps along with early CNN features are aggregated by our system through joint regression in order to refine the landmarks’ location. Besides playing the role of a graphical model, CNN regression is a key feature of our system, guiding the network to rely on context for predicting the location of occluded landmarks, typically encountered in very large poses. The whole system is trained end-to-end with intermediate supervision. When applied to AFLW-PIFA, the most challenging human face alignment test set to date, our method provides more than 50% gain in localisation accuracy when compared to other recently published methods for large pose face alignment. Going beyond human faces, we also demonstrate that CALE is effective in dealing with very large changes in shape and appearance, typically encountered in animal faces

Revitalizing Western Metaphysics with Hermeneutics: Reading Gadamer in Light of Fundamental Themes in Chung-ying Cheng

The western tradition of metaphysics has been criticized by Chung-ying Cheng on the grounds that it does not have any fruitful bearing on practice. This judgement, however, depends on a concept of metaphysics that Gadamer overturns with a Pythagorean-Platonic ontology. When this side of his philosophy is developed in tandem with Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics, in particular its doctrine of harmonization, new possibilities for self-understanding in relation to the grounds of existence are charted: The event of Being emerges from the reciprocity of rhythm in a dialogue self-similar to the rhythms of nature grasped by Cheng in terms of yin and yang. This argument is developed by critically examining and building upon contemporary Gadamer scholarship that both attests to the limits of western thought while also forming conditions that consolidate a cross-fertilization between Cheng and Gadamer on the trans-historical foundations of hermeneutics.The western tradition of metaphysics has been criticized by Chung-ying Cheng on the grounds that it does not have any fruitful bearing on practice. This judgement, however, depends on a concept of metaphysics that Gadamer overturns with a Pythagorean-Platonic ontology. When this side of his philosophy is developed in tandem with Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics, in particular its doctrine of harmonization, new possibilities for self-understanding in relation to the grounds of existence are charted: The event of Being emerges from the reciprocity of rhythm in a dialogue self-similar to the rhythms of nature grasped by Cheng in terms of yin and yang. This argument is developed by critically examining and building upon contemporary Gadamer scholarship that both attests to the limits of western thought while also forming conditions that consolidate a cross-fertilization between Cheng and Gadamer on the trans-historical foundations of hermeneutics

The Harm of Bioethics: A Critique of Singer and Callahan on Obesity

Debate concerning the social impact of obesity has been ongoing since at least the 1980s. Bioethicists, however, have been relatively silent. If obesity is addressed it tends to be in the context of resource allocation or clinical procedures such as bariatric surgery. However, prominent bioethicists Peter Singer and Dan Callahan have recently entered the obesity debate to argue that obesity is not simply a clinical or personal issue but an ethical issue with social and political consequences. This article critically examines two problematic aspects of Singer and Callahan's respective approaches. First, there is an uncritical assumption that individuals are autonomous agents responsible for health-related effects associated with food choices. In their view, individuals are obese because they choose certain foods or refrain from physical activity. However, this view alone does not justify intervention. Both Singer and Callahan recognize that individuals are free to make foolish choices so long as they do not harm others. It is at this point that the second problematic aspect arises. To interfere legitimately in the liberty of individuals, they invoke the harm principle. I contend, however, that in making this move both Singer and Callahan rely on superficial readings of public health research to amplify the harm caused by obese individuals and ignore pertinent epidemiological research on the social determinants of obesity. I argue that the mobilization of the harm principle and corresponding focus on individual behaviours without careful consideration of the empirical research is itself a form of harm that needs to be taken seriously. Keywords: obesity; Peter Singer; Dan Callahan; harm principle; public healt

Student Perceptions and Learning Outcomes: Evidence from the Education Testing Service (ETS) Major Field Test in Business

We examine course evaluation data from the core finance course and analyze how these data relate to performance on the finance portion of the Educational Testing Service Major Field Test in Business (ETS). We find that gender, SAT scores, GPA and concentration all have significant impacts on student performance. We also find that student perceptions of teaching and of how much knowledge they gained do not relate to the finance ETS score. Finally, we find that students who feel challenged in their finance core course do significantly better on the finance portion of the exam. This result is robust to different data partitions

Association of Chlamydia pneumoniae with coronary artery disease and its progression is dependent on the modifying effect of mannose-binding lectin

Background— The possible association between coronary artery disease (CAD) and Chlamydia pneumoniae (C pneumoniae) infection is controversial. On the basis of the recent suggestion that mannose-binding lectin (MBL) variant alleles are related to an increased risk of severe atherosclerosis, and on the in vitro interaction of MBL with C pneumoniae, we asked whether MBL might contribute to CAD in conjunction with C pneumoniae. Methods and Results— Antibodies to C pneumoniae were measured by immunofluorescence and MBL alleles were determined by polymerase chain reaction technique in samples from 210 patients with CAD and 257 healthy subjects from Hungary collected between 1995 and 1996. A higher percentage of patients with CAD were anti-C pneumoniae positive as compared with the control group (P=0.058). However, at logistic regression analysis adjusted to age, sex, and serum lipid levels, this difference was confined only to subjects carrying MBL variant alleles (P=0.035, odds ratio 2.63, [95% CI: 1.07 to 6.45]). In contrast, no significant difference was seen in those homozygous for the normal MBL allele (P=0.412). During a 65±5.8-month follow-up period, major outcomes (new myocardial infarction, and/or bypass operation or cardiovascular death) occurred in 11 C pneumoniae positive and 3 C pneumoniae negative patients. In the C pneumoniae positive group, the odds ratio of development of outcomes was 3.27 (95% CI: 1.10 to 9.71, P=0.033) in the carriers of the MBL variant alleles compared with the homozygous carriers of the normal MBL allele. Conclusions— These results indicate that infection with C pneumoniae leads mainly to the development and progression of severe CAD in patients with variation in the MBL gene