COVID-19 Crisis Catalyzed Disruptions in the Thai Seafood Supply Chain

This research studied the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Thai Seafood Supply Chain (ThaiSSC) and the responses taken by the supply chain from the beginning of the pandemic through the first quarter of 2022. Twenty-four semi-structured 1-to-1 in-depth interviews with veterans and leaders of the Thai seafood industry (farmers, processors, seafood brokers, importers, exporters, government officials and distributors) revealed the overall negative impact of the pandemic due to drastic changes in peoples’ livelihoods, and laws and regulations. Nevertheless, ThaiSSC maintained its overall structure, due to the transformations of many actors in the chain. Prompatanapak and Lopetcharat (2020) reported the transformation resembled to this findings. Hence, the COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst in accelerating these transformations from several years to a few months. This demonstrates the resiliency of the ThaiSSC, even though, about 30% of its connections disappeared due to the diminished influences of several stakeholders. Pre-processors and sourcing agents emerged as important new actors in the Thai seafood supply chain. The new roles and functions of these actors in the Thai seafood supply chain after the COVID-19 pandemic are reported and compared with those from before the pandemic

Approach for the determination of heat transfer coefficients for filling process of pressure vessels with compressed gaseous media

Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 30 June - 2 July, 2008.For fast and effective simulation of filling processes of pressure vessels with compressed gaseous media the governing equations are derived from a mass balance equation for the gas and from energy balance equations for the gas and the wall of the vessel. For simplicity the gas is considered as a perfectly mixed phase and two heat transfer coefficients are introduced. The first one is the mean heat transfer coefficient between the gas and the inner surface of the pressure vessel and the second one is the heat transfer coefficient between outer surface of the vessel and the surroundings. Although the process is transient, steady-state heat transfer coefficients for free convection are used between outer surface of the vessel and the surroundings. The use of available correlations for steady-state heat transfer coefficients to describe transient processes is common practice, e.g. in the modelling of the transient behaviour of heat exchangers [1]. But no correlations – neither steady-state nor transient – are available for the heat transfer coefficient between inflowing gas and inner surface of the vessel. To solve this problem a CFD tool is used to determine the gas velocities at the vicinity of the inner surface of the vessel for a number of discrete surface elements. The results of a large amount of numerical experiments show that there exists a unique relationship between the tangential fluid velocities at the vicinity of the inner surface of the vessel and the gas velocity at the inlet. Once this unique relationship is known the complete velocity distribution at the vicinity of the inner surface can be easily calculated from the inlet velocity of the gas. The nearwall velocities at the outer limit of the boundary layer are substituted into the heat transfer correlation for external flow over flat plates. The final heat transfer coefficient is the areaweighted mean of all local heat transfer coefficients. The method is applied to the special case of filling a 70 MPa composite vessel for fuel cell vehicles with hydrogen. Because of the heat capacity of the composite wall consisting of an inner aluminium liner wrapped with carbon fibre, heat transfer from the compressed gas to the vessel wall strongly influences the temperature field of the gas which is predicted by the model and confirmed by experiments.vk201

Perception of nonnative tonal contrasts by Mandarin-English and English-Mandarin sequential bilinguals

This study examined the role of acquisition order and crosslinguistic similarity in influencing transfer at the initial stage of perceptually acquiring a tonal third language (L3). Perception of tones in Yoruba and Thai was tested in adult sequential bilinguals representing three different first (L1) and second language (L2) backgrounds: L1 Mandarin-L2 English (MEBs), L1 English-L2 Mandarin (EMBs), and L1 English-L2 intonational/non-tonal (EIBs). MEBs outperformed EMBs and EIBs in discriminating L3 tonal contrasts in both languages, while EMBs showed a small advantage over EIBs on Yoruba. All groups showed better overall discrimination in Thai than Yoruba, but group differences were more robust in Yoruba. MEBs’ and EMBs’ poor discrimination of certain L3 contrasts was further reflected in the L3 tones being perceived as similar to the same Mandarin tone; however, EIBs, with no knowledge of Mandarin, showed many of the same similarity judgments. These findings thus suggest that L1 tonal experience has a particularly facilitative effect in L3 tone perception, but there is also a facilitative effect of L2 tonal experience. Further, crosslinguistic perceptual similarity between L1/L2 and L3 tones, as well as acoustic similarity between different L3 tones, play a significant role at this early stage of L3 tone acquisition.Published versio

Effect of dietary fatty acids on expression of lipogenic enzymes and fatty acid profile in tissues of bulls

This study investigated the effects of dietary linolenic acid (C18:3n-3) v. linoleic acid (C18:2n-6) on fatty acid composition and protein expression of key lipogenic enzymes, acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC), stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) and delta 6 desaturase (6d) in longissimus muscle and subcutaneous adipose tissue of bulls. Supplementation of the diet with C18:3n-3 was accompanied by an increased level of n-3 fatty acids in muscle which resulted in decrease of n-6/n-3 ratio. The diet enriched with n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) significantly inhibited SCD protein expression in muscle and subcutaneous adipose tissue, and reduced the 6d expression in muscle. There was no significant effect of the diet on ACC protein expression. Inhibition of the 6d expression was associated with a decrease in n-6 PUFA level in muscles, whereas repression of SCD protein was related to a lower oleic acid (C18:1 cis-9) content in the adipose tissue. Expression of ACC, SCD and 6d proteins was found to be relatively higher in subcutaneous adipose tissue when compared with longissimus muscle. It is suggested that dietary manipulation of fatty acid composition in ruminants is mediated, at least partially, through the regulation of lipogenic enzymes expression and that regulation of the bovine lipogenic enzymes expression is tissue specific. © 2010 The Animal Consortium

Identification and functional analysis of the genes encoding Δ6-desaturase from Ribes nigrum†

Gamma-linolenic acid (γ-linolenic acid, GLA; C18:3 Δ6, 9, 12) belongs to the omega-6 family and exists primarily in several plant oils, such as evening primrose oil, blackcurrant oil, and borage oil. Δ6-desaturase is a key enzyme involved in the synthesis of GLA. There have been no previous reports on the genes encoding Δ6-desaturase in blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum L.). In this research, five nearly identical copies of Δ6-desaturase gene-like sequences, named RnD8A, RnD8B, RnD6C, RnD6D, and RnD6E, were isolated from blackcurrant. Heterologous expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and/or Arabidopsis thaliana confirmed that RnD6C/D/E were Δ6-desaturases that could use both α-linolenic acids (ALA; C18:3 Δ9,12,15) and linoleic acid (LA; C18:2 Δ9,12) precursors in vivo, whereas RnD8A/B were Δ8-sphlingolipid desaturases. Expression of GFP tagged with RnD6C/D/E showed that blackcurrant Δ6-desaturases were located in the mitochondrion (MIT) in yeast and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in tobacco. GC-MS results showed that blackcurrant accumulated GLA and octadecatetraenoic acids (OTA; C18:4 Δ6,9,12,15) mainly in seeds and a little in other organs and tissues. RT-PCR results showed that RnD6C and RnD6E were expressed in all the tissues at a low level, whereas RnD6D was expressed at a high level only in seeds, leading to the accumulation of GLA and OTA in seeds. This research provides new insights to our understanding of GLA synthesis and accumulation in plants and the evolutionary relationship of this class of desaturases, and new clues as to the amino acid determinants which define precise enzyme activity

Neurolinguistic measures of typological effects in multilingual transfer: introducing an ERP methodology

This article has two main objectives. First, we offer an introduction to the subfield of generative third language (L3) acquisition. Concerned primarily with modeling initial stages transfer of morphosyntax, one goal of this program is to show how initial stages L3 data make significant contributions toward a better understanding of how the mind represents language and how (cognitive) economy constrains acquisition processes more generally. Our second objective is to argue for and demonstrate how this subfield will benefit from a neuro/psycholinguistic methodological approach, such as event-related potential experiments, to complement the claims currently made on the basis of exclusively behavioral experiments