Quality Assessment During the Fermentation of Cocoa Beans: Effects of Partial Mucilage Removal

Fermentation of cocoa beans is the most important process contributing to the flavor in chocolate and other related products. The present study aimed to investigate the fermentation at a laboratory scale of cocoa beans with and without 10% w/w mucilage removal (whole beans). The physicochemical properties and microorganism development were monitored for six days of continuous fermentation (sampling was conducted every 24 hours). The results indicated the effects of partial mucilage removal of cocoa beans before the fermentation, in which the temperature, pH, and mucilage content (with/without mucilage removal) were recorded as 36.5 oC/38.6 oC, 3.44/3.31, and 18.41%/21.84%, respectively at the final day. Besides, the density of microorganisms (yeast-mold, lactic acid bacteria, and acetic acid bacteria) of cocoa beans with partial mucilage removal was higher than whole cocoa beans due to the increased aeration of the beans with mucilage removal, creating favorable conditions for the growth of microorganisms. After the fermentation, several physicochemical properties of the two cocoa bean types were compared, which demonstrated the more favorable quality of the cocoa beans with partial mucilage removal compared to the whole cocoa beans for the fermentation, e.g., lower seed shell content (14.1% vs. 17.8%), lower total acid (1.67% vs. 2.77%), and pH of around 5.0

Vietnamese Version of Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia at an Outpatient Memory Clinic: A Reliability and Validity Study

Background: In Vietnam, there has been, currently, no standardized tool for depression assessment for people with dementia (PWD). Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia (CSDD) is a widely studied and used scale for PWD worldwide. Objectives: The aim of this study was to standardize the Vietnamese version of the CSDD (V-CSDD) in depression assessment in PWD through reliability and validity examination. Methods: V-CSDD was rated in terms of reliability and validity with gold standard regarding "major depressive episode"and "major depressive-like episode"of DSM-5. Cronbach's α, ICC, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and receiver operating characteristic analysis were performed. Results: V-CSDD was found to have a high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.80), inter-rater reliability at sound ranking (ICC = 0.89; 95% CI = 0.81-0.94), maximum cut-off mark of 13 (sensitivity = 70%, specificity = 92%), and EFA, which suggested that V-CSDD may comprise 5 factors. Conclusions: Results indicate the V-CSDD to be a reliable and valid assessment and to be beneficial in classifying and diagnosing depression in dementia outpatients in clinical contexts

SDP-Based Quality Adaptation and Performance Prediction in Adaptive Streaming of VBR Videos

Recently, various adaptation methods have been proposed to cope with throughput fluctuations in HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS). However, these methods have mostly focused on constant bitrate (CBR) videos. Moreover, most of them are qualitative in the sense that performance metrics could only be obtained after a streaming session. In this paper, we propose a new adaptation method for streaming variable bitrate (VBR) videos using stochastic dynamic programming (SDP). With this approach, the system should have a probabilistic characterization along with the definition of a cost function that is minimized by a control strategy. Our solution is based on a new statistical model where the future streaming performance is directly related to the past bandwidth statistics. We develop mathematical models to predict and develop simulation models to measure the average performance of the adaptation policy. The experimental results show that the prediction models can provide accurate performance prediction which is useful in planning adaptation policy and that our proposed adaptation method outperforms the existing ones in terms of average quality and average quality switch

AMMONIA REMOVAL FROM SWINE WASTEWATER USING AN AEROBIC, ANOXIC FILTER AT A PILOT-SCALE IN THANH LOC BIOSTATION

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Firm History and Managerial Entrenchment: Empirical Evidence for Vietnam Listed Firms

Managerial entrenchment occurs when managers are able to manipulate financing decisions to support their own interests rather than those of shareholders. Such possible actions can involve deception and fraud. Furthermore, the market timing activity is explained by managers' financing decisions through which companies choose to raise debt or equity to finance their investment opportunities. Nevertheless, the relationship between managerial entrenchment and leverage ratio, together with the link between market timing and leverage ratio, have not been considered carefully and investigated in the Vietnamese context. The paper provides empirical evidence of the effect of managerial entrenchment and market timing through firms' histories on leverage ratio in Vietnam using a sample of 289 non-financial firms listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HOSE) during the period 2006-2017. OLS, GMM and the endogenous switching methods are used for estimating the models. Findings from the paper indicate that there is a negative relationship between managerial entrenchment and leverage ratio, and that there is a negative effect of firm history, including financial deficit, various timing measures, and stock price history on the leverage ratios of Vietnam's listed firms

Design of Mobile Manipulator for Fire Extinguisher Testing. Part I Key Specifications and Conceptual Design

All flames are extinguished as early as possible, or fire services have to deal with major conflagrations. This leads to the fact that the quality of fire extinguishers has become a very sensitive and important issue in firefighting. Inspired by the development of automatic fire fighting systems, this paper proposes key specifications based on the standard of fire extinguishers that is ISO 7165:2009 and ISO 11601:2008, and feasible solutions to design a mobile manipulator for automatically evaluating the quality or, more specifically, power of fire extinguishers. In addition, a part of the mechanical design is also discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, the 7th International Conference on Advanced Engineering, Theory and Application

Systematic risk at the industry level: A case study of Australia

The cornerstone of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) lies with its beta. The question of whether or not beta is dead has attracted great attention from academics and practitioners in the last 50 years or so, and the debate is still ongoing. Many empirical studies have been conducted to test the validity of beta within the framework of CAPM. However, it is a claim of this paper that beta at the industry level has been largely ignored in the current literature. This study is conducted to examine if beta, proxied for a systematic risk, should be considered valid in the application of the CAPM at the industry level for Australia using daily data on 2200 stocks listed on the Australian Securities Exchange from January 2007 to 31 December 2016. Various portfolio formations are utilized in this paper. General economic conditions such as interest rate, inflation, and GDP are examples of systematic risk. Findings from this study indicate that the selection of portfolio construction, estimation technique, and news about economic conditions significantly affects the view whether or not beta should be considered as a valid measure of systematic risk

PRELIMINARY STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF ANAERORIC MICROORGANISM ON THE AMMONIUM OXIDATION OF BIOMASS CULTURED FROM PIG FARM SLUDGE

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Network-Aided Intelligent Traffic Steering in 6G O-RAN: A Multi-Layer Optimization Framework

To enable an intelligent, programmable and multi-vendor radio access network (RAN) for 6G networks, considerable efforts have been made in standardization and development of open RAN (O-RAN). So far, however, the applicability of O-RAN in controlling and optimizing RAN functions has not been widely investigated. In this paper, we jointly optimize the flow-split distribution, congestion control and scheduling (JFCS) to enable an intelligent traffic steering application in O-RAN. Combining tools from network utility maximization and stochastic optimization, we introduce a multi-layer optimization framework that provides fast convergence, long-term utility-optimality and significant delay reduction compared to the state-of-the-art and baseline RAN approaches. Our main contributions are three-fold: i) we propose the novel JFCS framework to efficiently and adaptively direct traffic to appropriate radio units; ii) we develop low-complexity algorithms based on the reinforcement learning, inner approximation and bisection search methods to effectively solve the JFCS problem in different time scales; and iii) the rigorous theoretical performance results are analyzed to show that there exists a scaling factor to improve the tradeoff between delay and utility-optimization. Collectively, the insights in this work will open the door towards fully automated networks with enhanced control and flexibility. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of the convergence rate, long-term utility-optimality and delay reduction.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures. A short version will be submitted to IEEE GLOBECOM 202

Classification of cow’s behaviors based on 3-DoF accelerations from cow’s movements

Cow’s behavior classification helps people to monitor cow activities, thus the health and physiological periods of cows can be well tracked. To classify the behavior of cows, the data from the 3-axis acceleration sensor mounted on their neck is often used. Data acquisition and preprocessing of sensor data is required in this device. We acquire data from the 3-axis acceleration sensor mounted on the cows’neck and send to the microcontrollter. At the microcontroller, a proposed decision tree is applied in real-time manner to classify four important activities of the cows (standing, lying, feeding, and walking). Finally, the results can be sent to the server through the wireless transmission module. The test results confirm the reliability of the proposed device