Biological properties and fruit quality of sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) cultivars from Romanian assortment

The paper presents a 4-year study of the valuable characteristics in 15 autochthonous and cosmopolitan sweet cherry cultivars grown in northeastern Romania, named Moldavia area. Tree’s vigour, resistance to frost and anthracnosis, the fructification phenophases, epidermis colour, organoleptic and quality traits of fruits and also fruit’s and stone’s size were evaluated. Weak tree vigour was find at ‘Tereza’, ‘Ştefan’ and ‘Golia’ cultivars. From end of flowering to harvesting time were determined 39–40 days for the early cultivars (‘Scorospelka’, ‘Cătălina’), while for the late cultivars as ‘Marina’ and ‘George’ were identified 71–83 days. Eight cultivars have presented fruits’ resistance to cracking with low values between 1.3–9.3% fruits cracked. Fruit’s weight have varied between 5.9 g (‘Scorospelka’) and 9.2 g (‘Andreiaş’), while fruit’s equatorial diameter have varied between 22.4 mm (‘George’) and 25.8 mm (‘Paulică’). The cultivars with the largest fruit’s size were ‘Andreiaş’, ‘Bucium’, ‘Ştefan’, ‘Paulică’, ‘Golia’, ‘Van’ and ‘Stella’. The values of the soluble solids content range between 14.4°Brix (‘Scorospelka’) to 20.0°Brix (‘Bucium’), the titratable acidity has been between 0.39 (‘Andreiaş’) and 0.87 (‘Cătălina’) mg malic acid 100-1 mL juice and the total content of polyphenols has recorded values between 314.93–584.95 mg GAE 100-1 mL of fruit juice. The studied sweet cherry cultivars showed high variability but some got remarked through earliness, low vigour of the tree, large fruit’s size or fruit’s resistance to cracking

THE EFFECT OF TiO2 NANOPARTICLES (DOPED OR NOT WITH Ag, ENCAPSULATED OR NOT IN LYPOSOMES), ON THE SPLEEN ULTRASTRUCTURE IN Mus musculus SPECIES, EXPOSED AT A STRESS FACTOR X-RAYS

The present experiment was performed on young females of Mus musculus, 22-24 g each, intraperitoneal injected with a suspension of titanium dioxide (five injections of 0.5 ml each, one at two days, with 0.01% TiO2 or TiO2-Ag suspension). The TiO2 nanoparticles of anatase crystallization form, 10-20 nm size, wereconjugated or not with 1% Ag, encapsulated or not in lyposome. A day after the third injection, half of theanimals received a sublethal dose of X-rays (2.58 Gy; the stress factor). A day after the last injection, the animals were sacrificed through the section of thecarotid artery. Ultrastructural investigations were performed at the spleen level. The analysis of the ultrastructural features from the spleen level enabledthe following observations: the single action of the TiO2 or TiO2-Ag nanoparticles induced an inflammatory process, but in the presence of X-rays, they manifested a slight protective effect; the TiO2-Ag nanoparticles, encapsulated in liposome, manifested a strong radioprotective effect, but the endocapsulation process is not optimal and has to be improved; the presence of a protective effect at the spleen level can suggest that the TiO2-Ag nanoparticles can be used to enhance the organism resistance in case of carcinogenic treatment (in animal or in homo)

ChaLearn LAP 2016: First Round Challenge on First Impressions - Dataset and Results

This paper summarizes the ChaLearn Looking at People 2016 First Impressions challenge data and results obtained by the teams in the first round of the competition. The goal of the competition was to automatically evaluate five “apparent” personality traits (the so-called “Big Five”) from videos of subjects speaking in front of a camera, by using human judgment. In this edition of the ChaLearn challenge, a novel data set consisting of 10,000 shorts clips from YouTube videos has been made publicly available. The ground truth for personality traits was obtained from workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). To alleviate calibration problems between workers, we used pairwise comparisons between videos, and variable levels were reconstructed by fitting a Bradley-Terry-Luce model with maximum likelihood. The CodaLab open source platform was used for submission of predictions and scoring. The competition attracted, over a period of 2 months, 84 participants who are grouped in several teams. Nine teams entered the final phase. Despite the difficulty of the task, the teams made great advances in this round of the challenge

Reading Scepticism Historically. Scepticism, Acatalepsia and the Fall of Adam in Francis Bacon

The first part of this paper will provide a reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s interpretation of Academic scepticism, Pyrrhonism, and Dogmatism, and its sources throughout his large corpus. It shall also analyze Bacon’s approach against the background of his intellectual milieu, looking particularly at Renaissance readings of scepticism as developed by Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, Pierre de la Primaudaye, Fulke Greville, and John Davies. It shall show that although Bacon made more references to Academic than to Pyrrhonian Scepticism, like most of his contemporaries, he often misrepresented and mixed the doctrinal components of both currents. The second part of the paper shall offer a complete chronological survey of Bacon’s assessment of scepticism throughout his writings. Following the lead of previous studies by other scholars, I shall support the view that, while he approved of the state of doubt and the suspension of judgment as a provisional necessary stage in the pursuit of knowledge, he rejected the notion of acatalepsia. To this received reading, I shall add the suggestion that Bacon’s criticism of acatalepsia ultimately depends on his view of the historical conditions that surround human nature. I deal with this last point in the third part of the paper, where I shall argue that Bacon’s evaluation of scepticism relied on his adoption of a Protestant and Augustinian view of human nature that informed his overall interpretation of the history of humanity and nature, including the sceptical schools

Francis Bacon on Motion and Power

This book offers a comprehensive and unitary study of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, with special emphasis on the medical, ethical and political aspects of his thought. It presents an original interpretation focused on the material conditions of nature and human life. In particular, coverage in the book is organized around the unifying theme of Bacon\u2019s notion of appetite, which is considered in its natural, ethical, medical and political meanings. The book redefines the notions of experience and experiment in Bacon\u2019s philosophy of nature, shows the important presence of Stoic themes in his work as well as provides an original discussion of the relationships between natural magic, prudence and political realism in his philosophy. Bringing together scholarly expertise from the history of philosophy, the history of science and the history of literature, this book presents readers with a rich and diverse contextualization of Bacon\u2019s philosophy