4,776 research outputs found

    Vegetal Sources of Iron

    Get PDF
    Iron deficiency anemia is a global public health problem. According to the World Health Organization, anemia affects 1620 million of people worldwide, which corresponds to 28% of the population. Fifty percent of the anemia cases are attributed to low iron intake. Among the main sources of iron from vegetable origin are legumes, such as beans, lentils, soybeans, lupin, some vegetables such as spinach, and some dehydrated fruits. Non-hemic iron is mainly from legumes and is the most important source of this mineral in the diet of developing countries’ population, but its bioavailability is very variable. Consequently, the fortification of foods with high and cheap iron sources is a practical way to prevent its deficiency. Some studies have shown that the roots of some legumes, especially nitrogen fixers, accumulate a significant amount of iron mainly in the nodule proteins. The purpose of this chapter is to present the current knowledge of novel sources of plant-based hemic iron with a high bioavailability to be used in food fortification

    Defense spending and fiscal multipliers: it's all in the variance

    Get PDF
    We provide estimates of U.S. government expenditure multipliers for defense and non-defense spending over 1939-2014, using a fairly standard DSGE model that includes anticipated military spending changes ("war news shocks"), and find the following. First, our model's war news shocks compare favorably to Ramey's (2011) narrative-based "defense news" shocks. Second, war news shocks have little effect on model variables regardless of the period under examination. Unanticipated military expenditure accounts for substantial movements in output, but only when observations from 1939 to 1954 are considered. Apart from that, movements in output are entirely driven by total factor productivity shocks. Third, our structural model can generate defense expenditure multipliers above unity under two conditions: (i) the multiplier is calculated using the peak of the impulse-response function and (ii) a large number of observations before and up to the Korean War are included. When multipliers are calculated according to Mountford and Uhlig's (2009) present-value definition, they never exceed unity, regardless of the sample under analysis

    An h-Adaptive Solution of the Spherical Blast Wave Problem

    Get PDF
    Shock waves and contact discontinuities usually appear in compressible flows, requiring a fine mesh in order to achieve an acceptable accuracy of the numerical solution. The usage of a mesh adaptation strategy is convenient as uniform refinement of the whole mesh becomes prohibitive in three-dimensional (3D) problems. An unsteady h-adaptive strategy for unstructured finite element meshes is introduced. Non-conformity of the refined mesh and a bounded decrease in the geometrical quality of the elements are some features of the refinement algorithm. A 3D extension of the well-known refinement constraint for 2D meshes is used to enforce a smooth size transition among neighbour elements with different levels of refinement. A density-based gradient indicator is used to track discontinuities. The solution procedure is partially parallelised, i.e. the inviscid flow equations are solved in parallel with a finite element SUPG formulation with shock capturing terms while the adaptation of the mesh is sequentially performed. Results are presented for a spherical blast wave driven by a point-like explosion with an initial pressure jump of 105 atmospheres. The adapted solution is compared to that computed on a fixed mesh. Also, the results provided by the theory of self-similar solutions are considered for the analysis. In this particular problem, adapting the mesh to the solution accounts for approximately 4% of the total simulation time and the refinement algorithm scales almost linearly with the size of the problem.Fil: Rios Rodriguez, Gustavo Adolfo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico. Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: Storti, Mario Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico. Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: Lopez, Ezequiel Jose. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico. Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: Sarraf, Sofia Soledad. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico. Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Litoral; Argentin

    Soft computing methods with phase space reconstruction for wind speed forecasting—A performance comparison

    Get PDF
    This article presents a comparison of wind speed forecasting techniques, starting with the Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average, followed by Artificial Intelligence-based techniques. The objective of this article is to compare these methods and provide readers with an idea of what method(s) to apply to solve their forecasting needs. The Artificial Intelligence-based techniques included in the comparison are Nearest Neighbors (the original method, and a version tuned by Differential Evolution), Fuzzy Forecasting, Artificial Neural Networks (designed and tuned by Genetic Algorithms), and Genetic Programming. These techniques were tested against twenty wind speed time series, obtained from Russian and Mexican weather stations, predicting the wind speed for 10 days, one day at a time. The results show that Nearest Neighbors using Differential Evolution outperforms the other methods. An idea this article delivers to the reader is: what part of the history of the time series to use as input to a forecaster? This question is answered by the reconstruction of phase space. Reconstruction methods approximate the phase space from the available data, yielding m (the system’s dimension) and τ (the sub-sampling constant), which can be used to determine the input for the different forecasting methods.JCR del journal reportado al año de publicación del artículo (2019): 2.70

    Polyclonality of Concurrent Natural Populations of Alteromonas macleodii

    Get PDF
    We have analyzed a natural population of the marine bacterium, Alteromonas macleodii, from a single sample of seawater to evaluate the genomic diversity present. We performed full genome sequencing of four isolates and 161 metagenomic fosmid clones, all of which were assigned to A. macleodii by sequence similarity. Out of the four strain genomes, A. macleodii deep ecotype (AltDE1) represented a different genome, whereas AltDE2 and AltDE3 were identical to the previously described AltDE. Although the core genome (∼80%) had an average nucleotide identity of 98.51%, both AltDE and AltDE1 contained flexible genomic islands (fGIs), that is, genomic islands present in both genomes in the same genomic context but having different gene content. Some of the fGIs encode cell surface receptors known to be phage recognition targets, such as the O-chain of the lipopolysaccharide, whereas others have genes involved in physiological traits (e.g., nutrient transport, degradation, and metal resistance) denoting microniche specialization. The presence in metagenomic fosmids of genomic fragments differing from the sequenced strain genomes, together with the presence of new fGIs, indicates that there are at least two more A. macleodii clones present. The availability of three or more sequences overlapping the same genomic region also allowed us to estimate the frequency and distribution of recombination events among these different clones, indicating that these clustered near the genomic islands. The results indicate that this natural A. macleodii population has multiple clones with a potential for different phage susceptibility and exploitation of resources, within a seemingly unstructured habitat

    A New Method of Dynamic Horizontal Fragmentation for Multimedia Databases Contemplating Content-Based Queries

    Get PDF
    Artículo. Publicación de resultadosThe proper storage and management of multimedia data is a topic of great interest to industry and academia. Database fragmentation plays a fundamental role as a mechanism to guarantee cost reduction and improve response time performance in distributed data management environments. Multimedia database access patterns are constantly changing; due to this, it is important that the partitioning schemes also adapt to these changes. Dynamic fragmentation techniques offer this advantage and represent a reduction of the tasks that an administrator must perform and the complete autonomy to determine when to carry out a new fragmentation based on a cost model

    A note on comonotonicity and positivity of the control components of decoupled quadratic FBSDE

    Get PDF
    In this small note we are concerned with the solution of Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDE) with drivers that grow quadratically in the control component (quadratic growth FBSDE or qgFBSDE). The main theorem is a comparison result that allows comparing componentwise the signs of the control processes of two different qgFBSDE. As a byproduct one obtains conditions that allow establishing the positivity of the control process.Comment: accepted for publicatio
    corecore