Polyols in confectionery: the route to sugar-free, reduced sugar and reduced calorie confectionery

Polyol-containing confectionery offers considerable advantages over traditional sucrose-based confectionery in terms of reduced energy content and reduced cariogenicity. However, over-consumption of polyol confectionery may lead to gastrointestinal symptoms in some individuals. Rather than consider this as a distinct disadvantage to the consumer, this article discusses how careful consideration of the physico-chemical properties of polyols and advances in product development and formulation can provide suitable polyol-based products for the consumer. Furthermore. food legislation and ingredient pricing issues are just some of the factors that must be taken into account when designing new polyol-containing products if their functional benefits and good product quality are to be delivered to the consumer

Optimal client recommendation for market makers in illiquid financial products

The process of liquidity provision in financial markets can result in prolonged exposure to illiquid instruments for market makers. In this case, where a proprietary position is not desired, pro-actively targeting the right client who is likely to be interested can be an effective means to offset this position, rather than relying on commensurate interest arising through natural demand. In this paper, we consider the inference of a client profile for the purpose of corporate bond recommendation, based on typical recorded information available to the market maker. Given a historical record of corporate bond transactions and bond meta-data, we use a topic-modelling analogy to develop a probabilistic technique for compiling a curated list of client recommendations for a particular bond that needs to be traded, ranked by probability of interest. We show that a model based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation offers promising performance to deliver relevant recommendations for sales traders.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Kinematically Redundant Octahedral Motion Platform for Virtual Reality Simulations

We propose a novel design of a parallel manipulator of Stewart Gough type for virtual reality application of single individuals; i.e. an omni-directional treadmill is mounted on the motion platform in order to improve VR immersion by giving feedback to the human body. For this purpose we modify the well-known octahedral manipulator in a way that it has one degree of kinematical redundancy; namely an equiform reconfigurability of the base. The instantaneous kinematics and singularities of this mechanism are studied, where especially "unavoidable singularities" are characterized. These are poses of the motion platform, which can only be realized by singular configurations of the mechanism despite its kinematic redundancy.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Dual Drug-Loaded Biofunctionalized Amphiphilic Chitosan Nanoparticles: Enhanced Synergy between Cisplatin and Demethoxycurcumin against Multidrug-Resistant Stem-Like Lung Cancer Cells

Lung cancer kills more humans than any other cancer and multidrug resistance (MDR) in cancer stem-like cells (CSC) is emerging as a reason for failed treatments. One concept which addresses this root cause of treatment failure is the utilization of nanoparticles to simultaneously deliver dual drugs to cancer cells with synergistic performance, easy to envision - hard to achieve. It is challenging to simultaneously load drugs of highly different physicochemical properties into one nanoparticle, release kinetics may differ between drugs and general requirements for biomedical nanoparticles apply. Here self-assembled nanoparticles of amphiphilic carboxymethyl-hexanoyl chitosan (CHC) were shown to present nano-microenvironments enabling simultaneous loading of hydrophilic and hydrophobic drugs. This was expanded into a dual-drug nano-delivery system to treat lung CSC. CHC nanoparticles were loaded/chemically modified with the anticancer drug cisplatin and the MDR-suppressing Chinese herbal extract demethoxycurcumin, followed by biofunctionalization with CD133 antibody for enhanced uptake by lung CSC, all in a feasible one-pot preparation. The nanoparticles were characterized with regard to chemistry, size, zeta potential and drug loading/release. Biofunctionalized and non-functionalized nanoparticles were investigated for uptake by lung CSC. Subsequently the cytotoxicity of single and dual drugs, free in solution or in nanoparticles, was evaluated against lung CSC at different doses. From the dose response at different concentrations the degree of synergy was determined through Chou-Talalay's Plot. The biofunctionalized nanoparticles promoted synergistic effects between the drugs and were highly effective against MDR lung CSC. The efficacy and feasible one-pot preparation suggest preclinical studies using relevant disease models to be justified

YouTube as a source of information for patients considering surgery for ulcerative colitis

© 2017 Elsevier Inc. Background With the range of health information online, assessing the resources that patients access may improve the content of preoperative information. Our aim was to assess the content of the most viewed videos on YouTube related to surgery for ulcerative colitis (UC). Methods YouTube was searched for videos containing information on surgery for UC. The 50 most viewed videos were identified and user interaction analyzed. Upload source was classified as patient, individual health care professional (HCP), or hospital/professional association. Video content was categorized using an inductive thematic analysis on a purposive sample list of videos. The overarching theme of each video was classified once data saturation was achieved. Results Thirty videos were uploaded by patients, 15 by hospitals and 5 by HCPs. Seventeen videos (34%) discussed life after surgery. Sixteen of these were uploaded by patients who had previously undergone surgery for UC. No videos of this theme were uploaded by HCPs. Ten videos (20%) described a number of different operations. Other themes identified were alternative health therapies (12%), colonoscopy (12%), life with UC (8%), miscellaneous (8%), and education for HCPs (6%). Patient uploaded videos had significantly more comments (P = 0.0079), with 28% of comments on patient videos being users requesting further information. Conclusions Understanding the sequelae of surgery is most important to preoperative patients. There are a lack of professional videos addressing this topic on YouTube. HCPs must participate in the production of videos and adapt preoperative consultations to address common preoperative concerns

Unhealthy weight control behaviours in adolescent girls: a process model based on self-determination theory

This study used self-determination theory (Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The 'what' and 'why' of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268.) to examine predictors of body image concerns and unhealthy weight control behaviours in a sample of 350 Greek adolescent girls. A process model was tested which proposed that perceptions of parental autonomy support and two life goals (health and image) would predict adolescents' degree of satisfaction of their basic psychological needs. In turn, psychological need satisfaction was hypothesised to negatively predict body image concerns (i.e. drive for thinness and body dissatisfaction) and, indirectly, unhealthy weight control behaviours. The predictions of the model were largely supported indicating that parental autonomy support and adaptive life goals can indirectly impact upon the extent to which female adolescents engage in unhealthy weight control behaviours via facilitating the latter's psychological need satisfaction

Finite Element Modelling for the Investigation of Edge Effect in Acoustic Micro Imaging of Microelectronic Packages

In acoustic micro imaging of microelectronic packages, edge effect is often presented as artifacts of C-scan images, which may potentially obscure the detection of defects such as cracks and voids in the solder joints. The cause of edge effect is debatable. In this paper, a two-dimensional finite element model is developed on the basis of acoustic micro imaging of a flip-chip package using a 230 MHz focused transducer to investigate acoustic propagation inside the package in attempt to elucidate the fundamental mechanism that causes the edge effect. A virtual transducer is designed in the finite element model to reduce the coupling fluid domain, and its performance is characterised against the physical transducer specification. The numerical results showed that the Under Bump Metallization (UBM) structure inside the package has a significant impact on the edge effect. Simulated wavefields also showed that the edge effect is mainly attributed to the horizontal scatter, which is observed in the interface of silicon die-to-the outer radius of solder bump. The horizontal scatter occurs even for a flip-chip package without the UBM structure

Sub-Shot-Noise Quantum Optical Interferometry: A Comparison of Entangled State Performance within a Unified Measurement Scheme

Phase measurement using a lossless Mach-Zehnder interferometer with certain entangled $N$-photon states can lead to a phase sensitivity of the order of 1/N, the Heisenberg limit. However, previously considered output measurement schemes are different for different input states to achieve this limit. We show that it is possible to achieve this limit just by the parity measurement for all the commonly proposed entangled states. Based on the parity measurement scheme, the reductions of the phase sensitivity in the presence of photon loss are examined for the various input states.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure