Optimisation of the Wax and Oil Phases in a Conventional Lipstick Using Mixture Design

Lipstick is essentially a mixture of oils, waxes and pastes. The type and ratio of ingredients in the lipstick base determine the type and intensity of interactions, which directly affect the quality of lipstick. Fundamentally, a lipstick must have sufficient stick strength to withstand the force during application, but it should also have appropriate ‘pay off’ characteristics. The traditional empirical approach may be inefficient in the development of lipsticks, because of the number of formulation variables and the two competing requirements. The results of this study have revealed the quantitative relationship between the hardness of a lipstick (expressed as its breaking and softening point) and its ‘glide’ performance. The use of the Mixture Design approach has made it possible to effectively select the samples with the best overall characteristics, on the basis of limited but focused experimental work

The Nutrition Transition in High and Low-Income Countries: What are the Policy Lessons?

The world has seen a remarkable shift from a period when diets, activity patterns and body composition were characterized by the period termed the receding famine pattern to one dominated by nutrition-related non-communicable diseases (NR-NCDs). This presentation first examines the speed of these changes, summarizes dietary changes, and provides some sense of the way the burden of obesity is shifting from the rich to the poor not only in urban but also rural areas throughout the world. The focus is on the lower- and middle- income countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America but some examples will come from the United States, Australia, and the UK. After showing that changes are occurring at great speed and at earlier stages of countries' economic and social development, the presentation shifts to some of the critical policy opportunities and some example of options. Few policy lessons exist at a macro level outside of selected countries such as South Korea and Finland. Examples of ways price policy and other options might work, using Chinese longitudinal case studies, are presented. The challenge is for the agricultural economics profession to focus on this major global issue-one which challenges some of the earlier paradigms of food policy an agricultural development.diet composition, price policy, economic growth, health effects, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Job satisfaction and organizational commitment among teachers: The moderating effect of demographic factors

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment among public school teachers in Malaysia. Therefore this study could make important contribution to extant research in management and organizational behavior. Besides that, it increasing the understanding the importance’s role of teachers in the Malaysia education system. In the literature, it discussed about job satisfaction, organizational commitment and two of these variables’ relationship. This study generated 203 teachers become the respondents for this research. In this entire study, the data were gathered through questionnaires and was analyzed through statistical model such as reliability analysis, descriptive analysis, factor analysis, correlation analysis, simple regression analysis and hierarchy regression analysis. All these analysis are used to measure the purpose, research question, objective and hypothesis in this research study. As a conclusion, there is significant relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment

Gutzwiller Projected wavefunctions in the fermonic theory of S=1 spin chains

We study in this paper a series of Gutzwiller Projected wavefunctions for S=1 spin chains obtained from a fermionic mean-field theory for general S>1/2 spin systems [Phys. Rev. B 81, 224417] applied to the bilinear-biquadratic (J-K) model. The free-fermion mean field states before the projection are 1D paring states. By comparing the energies and correlation functions of the projected pairing states with those obtained from known results, we show that the optimized Gutzwiller projected wavefunctions are very good trial ground state wavefunctions for the antiferromagnetic bilinear-biquadratic model in the regime K0). We find that different topological phases of the free-fermion paring states correspond to different spin phases: the weak pairing (topologically non-trivial) state gives rise to the Haldane phase, whereas the strong pairing (topologically trivial) state gives rise to the dimer phase. In particular the mapping between the Haldane phase and Gutwziller wavefunction is exact at the AKLT point K=1/3. The transition point between the two phases determined by the optimized Gutzwiller Projected wavefunction is in good agreement with the known result. The effect of Z2 gauge fluctuations above the mean field theory is analyzed.Comment: 10 pages,7 figure

Block diagonal and schur complement preconditioners for block-toeplitz systems with small size blocks

In this paper we consider the solution of Hermitian positive definite block-Toeplitz systems with small size blocks. We propose and study block diagonal and Schur complement preconditioners for such block-Toeplitz matrices. We show that for some block-Toeplitz matrices, the spectra of the preconditioned matrices are uniformly bounded except for a fixed number of outliers where this fixed number depends only on the size of the block. Hence, conjugate gradient type methods, when applied to solving these preconditioned block-Toeplitz systems with small size blocks, converge very fast. Recursive computation of such block diagonal and Schur complement preconditioners is considered by using the nice matrix representation of the inverse of a block-Toeplitz matrix. Applications to block-Toeplitz systems arising from least squares filtering problems and queueing networks are presented. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2007 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.published_or_final_versio