Alternative Ingredient Recommendation: A Co-occurrence and Ingredient Category Importance Based Approach

As many people will refer to a recipe when cooking, there are several recipe-sharing websites that include lots of recipes and make recipes easier to access than before. However, there is often the case that we could not get all the ingredients listed on the recipe. Prior research on alternative ingredient substitution has built a recommendation system considering the suitability of a recommended ingredient with the remained ingredients. In this paper, in addition to suitability, we also take the diversity of the ingredient categories and the novelty of new combination of ingredients into account. Besides, we combine suitability with novelty as an index, to see whether our method could help find out a new combination of ingredients that is possibly to be a new dish. Our evaluation results show that our proposed method attains a comparable or even better performance on each perspective

An empirical study of the impact of internet financial reporting on stock prices

This study examines the economic consequences of internet financial reporting (IFR) in Taiwan. The results show that the stock prices of IFR firms change more quickly than those of the non-FR firms using Akaike’s (1969) Final Prediction Error (FPE) methodology. Second, the results from the event study methodology show that the cumulative abnormal returns of the firms with IFR are significantly higher than those of the firms without IFR. Lastly, the results indicate that firms with a higher degree of information transparency yield a higher abnormal return on theirstock prices

Formation mechanism of SiGe nanorod arrays by combining nanosphere lithography and Au-assisted chemical etching

The formation mechanism of SiGe nanorod (NR) arrays fabricated by combining nanosphere lithography and Au-assisted chemical etching has been investigated. By precisely controlling the etching rate and time, the lengths of SiGe NRs can be tuned from 300 nm to 1 μm. The morphologies of SiGe NRs were found to change dramatically by varying the etching temperatures. We propose a mechanism involving a locally temperature-sensitive redox reaction to explain this strong temperature dependence of the morphologies of SiGe NRs. At a lower etching temperature, both corrosion reaction and Au-assisted etching process were kinetically impeded, whereas at a higher temperature, Au-assisted anisotropic etching dominated the formation of SiGe NRs. With transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscopy analyses, this study provides a beneficial scheme to design and fabricate low-dimensional SiGe-based nanostructures for possible applications

In vivo sub-femtoliter resolution photoacoustic microscopy with higher frame rates

Microscopy based on non-fluorescent absorption dye staining is widely used in various fields of biomedicine for 400 years. Unlike its fluorescent counterpart, non-fluorescent absorption microscopy lacks proper methodologies to realize its in vivo applications with a sub-femtoliter 3D resolution. Regardless of the most advanced high-resolution photoacoustic microscopy, sub-femtoliter spatial resolution is still unattainable, and the imaging speed is relatively slow. In this paper, based on the two-photon photoacoustic mechanism, we demonstrated a in vivo label free laser-scanning photoacoustic imaging modality featuring high frame rates and sub-femtoliter 3D resolution simultaneously, which stands as a perfect solution to 3D high resolution non-fluorescent absorption microscopy. Furthermore, we first demonstrated in vivo label-free two-photon acoustic microscopy on the observation of non-fluorescent melanin distribution within mouse skin

In vitro activities of antimicrobial combinations against planktonic and biofilm forms of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia

ObjectivesTo investigate the in vitro activity of antibiotic combinations against Stenotrophomonas maltophilia isolates and their associated biofilms.MethodsThirty-two S. maltophilia clinical isolates with at least twenty-five different pulsotypes were tested. The antibacterial activity of various antibiotic combinations against seven randomly selected planktonic and biofilm-embedded S. maltophilia strains with strong biofilm formation was assessed using broth methods. Extraction of bacterial genomic DNA and PCR detection of antibiotic resistance and biofilm-related genes were also performed.ResultsThe susceptibility rates of levofloxacin (LVX), fosfomycin (FOS), tigecycline (TGC) and sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim (SXT) against 32 S. maltophilia isolates were 56.3, 71.9, 71.9 and 90.6%, respectively. Twenty-eight isolates were detected with strong biofilm formation. Antibiotic combinations, including aztreonam-clavulanic (ATM-CLA) with LVX, ceftazidime-avibactam (CZA) with LVX and SXT with TGC, exhibited potent inhibitory activity against these isolates with strong biofilm formation. The antibiotic resistance phenotype might not be fully caused by the common antibiotic-resistance or biofilm-formation gene.ConclusionS. maltophilia remained resistant to most antibiotics, including LVX and β-lactam/β-lactamases; however, TGC, FOS and SXT still exhibited potent activity. Although all tested S. maltophilia isolates exhibited moderate-to-strong biofilm formation, combination therapies, especially ATM-CLA with LVX, CZA with LVX and SXT with TGC, exhibited a higher inhibitory activity for these isolates