Determination of Optimum Conditions for the Extraction of Squalene from Olive Pomace with Supercritical CO2

Olive pomace is a standard by-product of olive oil production containing valuable compounds recoverable by supercritical fluid extraction (SFE). The solvent/solubility characteristics of a supercritical fluid may be fine tuned by changing the external pressure-temperature conditions of the extraction. This allows for the selective extraction of certain compounds. The present study describes a series of experiments, the methodology, instrumentation, and results of supercritical extraction of olive pomace with CO2. The effects that primarily affect supercritical extraction, temperature, pressure and flow rate, have been investigated and monitored on, both, the concentration of squalene at the extract and the overall recovery of squalene from pomace. The Box-Behnken approach was used for designing the experiments. The effects are easily visualized in the resulting 3D plots, which were used for identifying the optimum extraction conditions

Impact of malaria related messages on insecticide-treated net (ITN) use for malaria prevention in Ghana

Background: Media messages have been used in Ghana to promote insecticide-treated net (ITN)/bed net usage in an effort to impact on malaria prevention. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of such malaria-related messages delivered through electronic/print media and by volunteers/health workers on the use of ITNs by children living in a household. Methods: Data was collected from September to November of 2008 using a structured, interviewer-administered questionnaire by the Ghana Statistical Service as part of a national demographic and health survey (DHS). Secondary data analysis was performed on the collected data using multivariate logistic regression for both individual messages and a composite (any of) message variable. Results: From the 11,788 households surveyed, 45% had at least one net. Households with male heads were more likely to have a child sleeping under a bed net the previous night (p = 0.0001). Individual Messages delivered by a health worker or a dedicated radio programme, had the highest effect for one or more children sleeping under a net the night before (OR adjusted = 1.65; 95% CI = 1.44 to 1.88 and OR adjusted = 1.26; 95% CI =1.12 to 1.42 respectively) while hearing any of the eight messages (composite score) resulted in the highest odds for one or more children (OR adjusted = 3.06; 95% CI = 2.27 to 4.12) sleeping under a bed net. Conclusion: Efforts to relate ITN messages to the public are very useful in increasing use of bed nets and having multiple ways of reaching the public increases their effect, with the biggest effect seen when health workers and volunteers were used to deliver malaria-related messages to the public

Natriuretic peptide receptor-3 underpins the disparate regulation of endothelial and vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation by C-type natriuretic peptide

CM Panayiotou was the recipient of a Wellcome Trust Prize PhD studentship. RS Khambata was the recipient of a Medical Research Council PhD studentshi

Cyber insurance of information systems: Security and privacy cyber insurance contracts for ICT and helathcare organizations

Nowadays, more-and-more aspects of our daily activities are digitalized. Data and assets in the cyber-space, both for individuals and organizations, must be safeguarded. Thus, the insurance sector must face the challenge of digital transformation in the 5G era with the right set of tools. In this paper, we present CyberSure-an insurance framework for information systems. CyberSure investigates the interplay between certification, risk management, and insurance of cyber processes. It promotes continuous monitoring as the new building block for cyber insurance in order to overcome the current obstacles of identifying in real-time contractual violations by the insured party and receiving early warning notifications prior the violation. Lightweight monitoring modules capture the status of the operating components and send data to the CyberSure backend system which performs the core decision making. Therefore, an insured system is certified dynamically, with the risk and insurance perspectives being evaluated at runtime as the system operation evolves. As new data become available, the risk management and the insurance policies are adjusted and fine-tuned. When an incident occurs, the insurance company possesses adequate information to assess the situation fast, estimate accurately the level of a potential loss, and decrease the required period for compensating the insured customer. The framework is applied in the ICT and healthcare domains, assessing the system of medium-size organizations. GDPR implications are also considered with the overall setting being effective and scalable

Local E-Government in Cyprus: A Comparison of Perceptions Between Citizens and Decision Makers

This paper identifies attitudes and perceptions on e-government among two key populations: citizens of the Republic of Cyprus and local government decision makers. The research methodology is based on both secondary and primary data collection, with the latter including a questionnaire survey of the public and another of major local governments\u27 officials who were directly involved in the decision making of the services provided through local egovernment initiatives. The results of the surveys are analysed and cross-related The research has reached three principal clusters of conclusions. The first relates to a number of discrepancies found when comparing the public\u27s perceptions, needs and potentialities on e-government and the corresponding perceptions of the municipality decision makers. The second cluster relates to the wider potentialities of local e-government in Cyprus. The third cluster is provides directions and towards a successful local e-government implementation in Cyprus

Genetic background modifies amyloidosis in a mouse model of ATTR neuropathy

AbstractPenetrance and age of onset of ATTRV30M amyloidotic neuropathy varies significantly among different populations. This variability has been attributed to both genetic and environmental modifiers. We studied the effect of genetic background on phenotype in two lines of transgenic mice bearing the same ATTRV30M transgene. Amyloid deposition, transthyretin (TTR), megalin, clusterin and disease markers of endoplasmic reticulum stress, the ubiquitin-proteasome system, apoptosis, and complement activation were assessed with WB and immunohistochemistry in donor and recipient tissue. Our results indicate that genetic background modulates amyloid deposition by influencing TTR handling in recipient tissue and may partly account for the marked variability in penetrance observed in various world populations

On the Complexity of Congestion Free Routing in Transportation Networks

Traffic congestion has been proven a difficult problem to tackle, particularly in big cities where the number of cars are steadily increasing while the infrastructure remains stagnant. Several approaches have been proposed to alleviate the effects of traffic congestion, however, so far congestion is still a big problem in most cities. In this work we investigate a new route reservation approach to address the problem which is motivated by air traffic control. This paper formulates the route reservation problem under different assumptions and examines the complexity of the resulting formulations. Two waiting strategies are investigated, (i) vehicles are allowed to wait at the source before they start their journey, and (ii) they are allowed to wait at every road junction. Strategy (i) though more practical to implement, results to an NP-complete problem while strategy (ii) results to a problem that can be solved in polynomial time but it is not easily implemented since the infrastructure does not have adequate space for vehicles to wait until congestion downstream is cleared. Finally, a heuristic algorithm (based on time-expanded networks) is derived as a solution to both proposed waiting strategies. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works C. Menelaou, P. Kolios, S. Timotheou and C. Panayiotou, "On the Complexity of Congestion Free Routing in Transportation Networks," 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Las Palmas, 2015, pp. 2819-2824. doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2015.453 Document type: Conference objec

Congestion Free Vehicle Scheduling Using a Route Reservation Strategy

Traffic congestion in big cities has been proven to be a difficult problem with adverse effects in terms of driver delay and frustration, cost and impact to the environment. Motivated by the approaches used in air-traffic control, this work investigates a method for controlling traffic congestion using time-dependent route reservation. The advances in information, communication and computation technologies has made such a reservation strategy feasible. This paper illustrates that the new reservation strategy is scalable and can be applied even to large metropolitan areas. To do so, we decompose the road network spatially and temporarily and propose a vehicle scheduling and routing algorithm which completely eliminate congestion. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is very promising. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, in-cluding reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to serv-ers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. C. Menelaou, P. Kolios, S. Timotheou and C. G. Panayiotou, "Congestion Free Vehicle Scheduling Using a Route Reservation Strategy," 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Las Palmas, 2015, pp. 2103-2108. doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2015.340 https://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/rights_policies.html Document type: Conference objec

A congestion-free vehicle route reservation architecture

Transportation research is mainly focused on answering the question of how to eliminate traffic congestion over large scale areas. Inasmuch as a large portion of big cities suffers from traffic congestion with severe (in many cases) consequences on personal mobility. Drawbacks of congestion include driver delay and frustration, higher fuel consumption, air pollution and financial losses (in terms of man-hours lost on working days). Congestion has, traditionally, been a difficult problem to tackle since traffic demand fluctuates dynamically. The major cause of congestion is that a portion of the network is conferred to accommodate higher number of vehicles than its actual capacity. Nonetheless, congestion usually occurs due to lack of an efficient management of transport network utilization and not because demand exceeds network's capacity [1]. Therefore, it is possible to alleviate congestion if vehicles are more effectively distributed over the entire network achieving better load balancing. • "© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, in-cluding reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to serv-ers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. C. Menelaou, P. Kolios, S. Timotheou and C. G. Panayiotou, "A congestion-free vehicle route reservation architecture," 2016 18th Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), Lemesos, 2016, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/MELCON.2016.7495458 • https://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/rights_policies.html Document type: Conference objec