Consumers’ attitude towards date marking system of packaged foods

Food labels play an important role in well being of consumers. As a part of it, date marking is a valid guide to shelf life of a food. The present study was done in 2010, in Smart Food Center, Wollongong; New South Wales, Australia to determine if the residents are familiar with date marking of food products. Data was accumulated by either interview guide or questionnaire method. Basic unselected samples of 200 shoppers were interviewed. Awareness of consumers about the method of date marking of food products, the frequency of purchasing spoiled or stale products, particularity about dates marked on food products before buying them, observation of the date marked on perishable and semi perishable food items, and satisfaction of consumers with the freshness and date marking of products were mainly studied. Out of 200 consumers who were interviewed, 112 (56%) supported date marking services. 128 (64%) consumers were well informed of the date making system. Most of the people in this group were between 35 to 44 years of age. 75% were or respondents women. The range of family income was between AUS$30000-750000 per months. There was no association between degree of knowledge of date marking and sex and educational level of consumers who purchased spoiled food products. Among consumers who purchased spoiled food items, a significant number were informed of date marking systems and used it when making purchases. Date marking has been observed by both male and female and was not related to their academic degrees.

Topic Models and Fusion Methods: a Union to Improve Text Clustering and Cluster Labeling

Topic modeling algorithms are statistical methods that aim to discover the topics running through the text documents. Using topic models in machine learning and text mining is popular due to its applicability in inferring the latent topic structure of a corpus. In this paper, we represent an enriching document approach, using state-of-the-art topic models and data fusion methods, to enrich documents of a collection with the aim of improving the quality of text clustering and cluster labeling. We propose a bi-vector space model in which every document of the corpus is represented by two vectors: one is generated based on the fusion-based topic modeling approach, and one simply is the traditional vector model. Our experiments on various datasets show that using a combination of topic modeling and fusion methods to create documents’ vectors can significantly improve the quality of the results in clustering the documents

Sea star (Echinodermata) species diversity and distribution in the south-east of Iran (Gulf of Oman)

Echinoderms are one of the oldest and most important groups of marine organisms which play an important role in the marine ecology especially in the coral reefs. During November 2012 to August 2013, six stations were selected in the intertidal zone at the north of Gulf of Oman according to sea bottom. At each station, the Sea star species of the selected area were counted in 10 m2 with 10 replications. This study was made in three seasons namely autumn, winter and summer. According to the result, cluster analyses showed the site similarity in species abundance and diversity with the same substrata. Maximum and minimum sea star diversity was shown in winter and summer, respectively

Automated Text Summarization Base on Lexicales Chain and graph Using of WordNet and Wikipedia Knowledge Base

The technology of automatic document summarization is maturing and may provide a solution to the information overload problem. Nowadays, document summarization plays an important role in information retrieval. With a large volume of documents, presenting the user with a summary of each document greatly facilitates the task of finding the desired documents. Document summarization is a process of automatically creating a compressed version of a given document that provides useful information to users, and multi-document summarization is to produce a summary delivering the majority of information content from a set of documents about an explicit or implicit main topic. The lexical cohesion structure of the text can be exploited to determine the importance of a sentence/phrase. Lexical chains are useful tools to analyze the lexical cohesion structure in a text .In this paper we consider the effect of the use of lexical cohesion features in Summarization, And presenting a algorithm base on the knowledge base. Ours algorithm at first find the correct sense of any word, Then constructs the lexical chains, remove Lexical chains that less score than other, detects topics roughly from lexical chains, segments the text with respect to the topics and selects the most important sentences. The experimental results on an open benchmark datasets from DUC01 and DUC02 show that our proposed approach can improve the performance compared to sate-of-the-art summarization approaches

The effect of food service system modifications on staff body mass index in an industrial organization

Due to the adverse effects of obesity and overweight on health status of people, organizations that provide daily food aim for a healthy Body Mass Index among their staff. The purpose of this applied randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to study the effect of modifications in the food service section and nutritional intervention on the BMI of staff in an industrial center. In this applied randomized controlled trial which lasted for 40 days, 116 overweight people (BMI ≥ 26) were randomly selected and divided into control and test groups. Individual daily food plan was prepared by a dietitian and nutritional education sessions were held for test group. At the management level, food menu was modified reduce the calorie intake by at least 1000 Kcal per day for the test group and also cost less for the center. The kitchen staffs were trained to promote healthy cooking and improving the food taste. The satisfaction level of food service was also evaluated before and after the intervention, using a questionnaire. To analyze the findings, SPSS 16 software, independent t-test and paired t-test, and Macnemar test were used. The results showed that BMI in test group decreased from 27.5 ± 2.36 to 26.8 ± 2.15 (p<0.05), while in control group increased by 0.5 Kg/m2. Similar result was observed in weight change. The level of satisfaction of food service following changes in the menu increased significantly in both groups. Also, cost of food and use of fat were reduced by 15% and 8%, respectively.  Dietary interventions and improving the nutritional knowledge along with modification in food service system could result in better weight management in organization staff using canteen food.  

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in acute viral respiratory tract infections : An updated systematic review

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The relationship between MnSOD Val16Ala gene polymorphism and the level of serum total antioxidant capacity with the risk of chronic kidney disease in type 2 diabetic patients: A nested case-control study in the Tehran lipid glucose study

Background: Several studies have shown significant associations between manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) Val16Ala polymorphism and diabetic complications, but this association has not been explored in relation with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients. Total antioxidant capacity (TAC) level changes in diabetic condition and may play important role in onset or progression of the disease and its complications. The present study investigated the association of MnSOD Val16Ala polymorphism and serum TAC with the risk of CKD in T2DM patients. Methods: This nested case-control study included 280 type 2 diabetic patients with CKD and 280 age, sex and diabetes duration-matched control subjects selected from the participants of the Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study. MnSOD val16Ala (rs4880) SNP was genotyped by the Tetra-Primer ARMS-polymerase chain reaction analysis. Serum TAC was measured using ferric-reducing antioxidant power assay. Statistical analysis was performed using STATA statistical package v.12.0 or SPSS (Version 22.0). Results: The Ala allele of the MnSOD Val16Ala polymorphism was associated with a lower risk of CKD (odds ratio (OR), 0.55; 95 confidence interval (CI), 0.36-0.84; P = 0.006). Median serum TAC in CKD group was 920 μmol/L and was significantly lower (p < 0.001) compared to the control group (1045 μmol/L). Using an adjusted conditional logistic regression, we didn't observe any significant interaction between MnSOD Val16Ala SNP with quartiles of serum TAC in relation to CKD. Conclusion: A significant association was found between the MnSOD Val16Ala polymorphism and CKD, but this association is not affected by serum TAC level in T2DM patients. © 2018 The Author(s)

The relationship between MnSOD Val16Ala gene polymorphism and the level of serum total antioxidant capacity with the risk of chronic kidney disease in type 2 diabetic patients: A nested case-control study in the Tehran lipid glucose study

Background: Several studies have shown significant associations between manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) Val16Ala polymorphism and diabetic complications, but this association has not been explored in relation with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients. Total antioxidant capacity (TAC) level changes in diabetic condition and may play important role in onset or progression of the disease and its complications. The present study investigated the association of MnSOD Val16Ala polymorphism and serum TAC with the risk of CKD in T2DM patients. Methods: This nested case-control study included 280 type 2 diabetic patients with CKD and 280 age, sex and diabetes duration-matched control subjects selected from the participants of the Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study. MnSOD val16Ala (rs4880) SNP was genotyped by the Tetra-Primer ARMS-polymerase chain reaction analysis. Serum TAC was measured using ferric-reducing antioxidant power assay. Statistical analysis was performed using STATA statistical package v.12.0 or SPSS (Version 22.0). Results: The Ala allele of the MnSOD Val16Ala polymorphism was associated with a lower risk of CKD (odds ratio (OR), 0.55; 95 confidence interval (CI), 0.36-0.84; P = 0.006). Median serum TAC in CKD group was 920 μmol/L and was significantly lower (p < 0.001) compared to the control group (1045 μmol/L). Using an adjusted conditional logistic regression, we didn't observe any significant interaction between MnSOD Val16Ala SNP with quartiles of serum TAC in relation to CKD. Conclusion: A significant association was found between the MnSOD Val16Ala polymorphism and CKD, but this association is not affected by serum TAC level in T2DM patients. © 2018 The Author(s)

A new method for amide bond formation

© 2016 Dr. Aysa PourvaliThe synthesis of amide bonds is one the most important issues in organic chemistry. The reaction of thioamides and silver carboxylates to generate imides, and ultimately amide bonds, was investigated. This system was shown to be effective for the coupling of a range of N-protected amino acids with amino acid derived thioamides, leading to the preparation of dipeptide imides. Selective cleavage of the imide compounds by methanolysis or hydrolysis was shown to be a viable general method for amide bond formation. However, the described method was not suitable for the generation of polypeptides by coupling peptide acids with peptide N-thioacetamides. Nevertheless, the synthesis of polypeptides could be achieved by coupling of a peptide containing a free C-terminal carboxylic acid to an amino ester thioamide in the presence of silver(I), which after imide hydrolysis and ester deprotection gives the homologated peptide. This cycle is repeatable to synthesize longer polypeptides. The application of our method to synthesise polypeptides was exemplified by the synthesis of the pentapeptide thymopentin. The synthesis was performed in the N→C direction, without any epimerization. Initial investigations towards the synthesis of cyclopeptide alkaloids in the presence of Ag2CO3 were also undertaken