Development of green banana (Musa paradisiaca) as potential food packaging films and coatings

The aim of this study was to develop biodegradable packaging films based on a unripe green banana (Musa paradisiaca L.) with different plasticizers; glycerol, polyethylene glycol (PEG) and sorbitol at various concentrations (10-50%). Banana films were produced by using casting method and physical properties of these films were determined. Banana films with 10% of PEG showed the lowest water solubility (P≤0.05) followed by films with glycerol and sorbitol. Banana films with 40% plasticizers possessed the lowest water vapour permeability (WVP) whereas films with 30% glycerol exhibited higher values of tensile strength (P≤0.05) compared to films with PEG and sorbitol. However, types of plasticizers did not influence the thickness of the films. Also, used of higher concentrations of plasticizers had increased the solubility values. These findings reveal that concentrations and types of plasticizers have significant roles to provide banana film or coating with good physical properties

Social media adoption framework for aged care service providers in Australia

© 2017 IEEE. The aged care sector has been a late adopter of social media platforms for communicating, collaborating, marketing and creating brand awareness. There is little research that examines the adoption of social media by aged care service providers for these purposes. This paper reviews the status of social media adoption in the Australian aged care industry, to understand in what ways social media can serve older people's needs, and to develop recommendations for aged-care service providers to adopt social media applications to empower older people. Through a review of the literature and interviews with Australian experts, this paper suggests aged care providers use a three-phase framework when adopting social media in the aged care sector. The first phase is to adopt a popular public social media platform such as Facebook followed by Instagram and Twitter. The second phase supports interaction by encouraging posts and feedback by locally hosted member forums. The third phase is the adoption of specialised social applications for closed groups and specific functions. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of the framework and proposes directions for future research

Exploring the dark side of online social networks: A taxonomy of negative effects on users

© 26th European Conference on Information Systems: Beyond Digitization - Facets of Socio-Technical Change, ECIS 2018. All Rights Reserved. The use of online social networks (OSNs) has grown substantially over the past few years and many studies have reported the benefits and positive effects of using these platforms. However, the negative effects of OSNs have received little attention. Given the lack of a comprehensive picture of the dark side of using OSNs, we conducted a systematic literature review of the top information systems journals to categorise negative effects and develop a taxonomy of the dark side of OSNs use. Our review of 20 papers identified 43 negative effects of OSNs use, which we grouped into six categories: cost of social exchange, annoying content, privacy concerns, security threats, cyber bullying and low performance that formed the holistic view of dark side of OSNs use. This paper discusses implications of the findings, identifies gaps in the literature and provides a roadmap for future research

Method and apparatus for evaluating multilayer objects for imperfections

A multilayer object having multiple layers arranged in a stacking direction is evaluated for imperfections such as voids, delaminations and microcracks. First, an acoustic wave is transmitted into the object in the stacking direction via an appropriate transducer/waveguide combination. The wave propagates through the multilayer object and is received by another transducer/waveguide combination preferably located on the same surface as the transmitting combination. The received acoustic wave is correlated with the presence or absence of imperfections by, e.g., generating pulse echo signals indicative of the received acoustic wave, wherein the successive signals form distinct groups over time. The respective peak amplitudes of each group are sampled and curve fit to an exponential curve, wherein a substantial fit of approximately 80-90% indicates an absence of imperfections and a significant deviation indicates the presence of imperfections. Alternatively, the time interval between distinct groups can be measured, wherein equal intervals indicate the absence of imperfections and unequal intervals indicate the presence of imperfections

Method and apparatus for evaluating multilayer objects for imperfections

A multilayer object where the layers are arranged in a stacking direction is evaluated for imperfections such as voids, delaminations, and microcracks. First, an acoustic wave is transmitted into the object in the stacking direction via an appropriate transducer/waveguide combination. The wave propagates through the multilayer object and is received by another transducer/waveguide combination preferably located on the same surface as the transmitting combination. The received acoustic wave is correlated with the presence or absence of imperfections by generating pulse echo signals indicative of the received acoustic wave, wherein the successive signals form distinct groups over time. The respective peak amplitudes of each group are sampled and fitted to an exponential curve, wherein a substantial fit of approximately 80-90 percent indicates the absence of imperfections. Alternatively, the time interval between distinct groups can be measured, wherein equal intervals indicate the absence of imperfections and unequal intervals indicate the presence of imperfections

SUAVE: Integrating UAV video using a 3D model

Controlling an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) requires the operator to perform continuous surveillance and path planning. The operator's situation awareness degrades as an increasing number of surveillance videos must be viewed and integrated. The Picture-in-Picture display (PiP) provides a solution for integrating multiple UAV camera video by allowing the operator to view the video feed in the context of surrounding terrain. The experimental SUAVE (Simple Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Environment) display extends PiP methods by sampling imagery from the video stream to texture a 3D map of the terrain. The operator can then inspect this imagery using world in miniature (WIM) or fly-through methods. We investigate the properties and advantages of SUAVE in the context of a search mission with 3 UAVs

Range Shortest Unique Substring queries

Let be a string of length n and be the substring of starting at position i and ending at position j. A substring of is a repeat if it occurs more than once in; otherwise, it is a unique substring of. Repeats and unique substrings are of great interest in computational biology and in information retrieval. Given string as input, the Shortest Unique Substring problem is to find a shortest substring of that does not occur elsewhere in. In this paper, we introduce the range variant of this problem, which we call the Range Shortest Unique Substring problem. The task is to construct a data structure over answering the following type of online queries efficiently. Given a range, return a shortest substring of with exactly one occurrence in. We present an -word data structure with query time, where is the word size. Our construction is based on a non-trivial reduction allowing us to apply a recently introduced optimal geometric data structure [Chan et al. ICALP 2018]