Relating rheology and tribology of commercial dairy colloids to sensory perception

This study aims to investigate the relationship between rheological and tribological properties of commercial full fat and fat-free/ low fat versions of liquid and soft solid colloidal systems (milk, yoghurt, soft cream cheese) with their sensory properties. Oscillatory measurements (strain, frequency), flow curves and tribological measurements (lubricational behaviour using Stribeck analysis) were conducted. Oral condition was mimicked using artificial saliva at 37 ○C. Discrimination test was conducted by 63 untrained consumers, followed by a qualitative questionnaire. Consumers significantly discriminated the fat-free/low fat from the full fat versions (p0.05). Full fat and fat free yoghurts had similar yielding behaviour and elastic modulus (G'), even in simulated oral conditions. However, in case of soft cream cheese, the full fat version had a moderately higher G’ than the low fat counterpart. Even in presence of artificial saliva, there was slight but significant difference in viscoelasticity between the cream cheese variants depending on fat content (p0.05). Results suggest that sensory distinction between fat-free and full fat versions, particularly in semi-solid systems could be better predicted by lubrication data as compared to bulk rheology

THE EYE'S MIND: PERCEPTUAL PROCESS AND EPISTEMIC NORMS

Philosophers have tended to formulate theories of perceptual justification independently of psychological investigation into perceptual functioning. Nevertheless, work in perceptual epistemology often conceals an implicit commitment to a normative view of what kinds of processing maximise the epistemic power of a perceptual experience, that is, its capacity to justify belief. This implicit commitment is to a set of “minimalist” norms, which treat sensory stimulation as the ultimate locus of epistemic power, and consequently set value on the purity of sensory signal and passivity of perceptual processing. These norms fit poorly with our best scientific models of perception, which draw out the ways in which it can be understood as akin to a hypothesis. Focusing on visual perception in particular, I argue that appreciating how it plays the role of a hypothesis within the visual system, whilst also constituting a form of evidence at the person level,gives us reason to reject these minimalist norms for perceptual processing

Mining document, concept, and term associations for effective biomedical retrieval - Introducing MeSH-enhanced retrieval models

Manually assigned subject terms, such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the health domain, describe the concepts or topics of a document. Existing information retrieval models do not take full advantage of such information. In this paper, we propose two MeSH-enhanced (ME) retrieval models that integrate the concept layer (i.e. MeSH) into the language modeling framework to improve retrieval performance. The new models quantify associations between documents and their assigned concepts to construct conceptual representations for the documents, and mine associations between concepts and terms to construct generative concept models. The two ME models reconstruct two essential estimation processes of the relevance model (Lavrenko and Croft 2001) by incorporating the document-concept and the concept-term associations. More specifically, in Model 1, language models of the pseudo-feedback documents are enriched by their assigned concepts. In Model 2, concepts that are related to users’ queries are first identified, and then used to reweight the pseudo-feedback documents according to the document-concept associations. Experiments carried out on two standard test collections show that the ME models outperformed the query likelihood model, the relevance model (RM3), and an earlier ME model. A detailed case analysis provides insight into how and why the new models improve/worsen retrieval performance. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed. This study provides new ways to formally incorporate semantic annotations, such as subject terms, into retrieval models. The findings of this study suggest that integrating the concept layer into retrieval models can further improve the performance over the current state-of-the-art models.Ye

Personality traits and mental disorders

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