Transcriptome and elemental analysis of the selenium hyperaccumulator Stanleya pinnata and non-accumulator Stanleya elata

2015 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

Evaluation of Hypochlorous Acid (Electrolyzed Water), Lactic Acid, and Peroxyacetic Acid as Sanitizers for Fresh Vegetables

Our objectives were to determine the effectiveness of hypochlorous acid (i.e., electrolyzed water), lactic acid, peroxyacetic acid, and sodium thiocyanate against indigenous bacteria on a standardized surface treatment area (150 cm^2) of different types of vegetables, for their potential application as antimicrobial treatments for fresh produce. Vegetable samples were dipped in three concentrations of electrolyzed water (50, 100, or 200 ppm Cl^-), lactic acid (1%, 2%, or 4%), and peroxyacetic acid (50 ppm) to control microbial populations at three dwell treatment times (1, 2, or 4 min). The effects of electrolyzed water (25 or 50 ppm) combined with lactic acid (0.5% or 1%), and electrolyzed water dip followed by sodium thiocyanate spray treatment were also tested. Samples were drained and rinsed with 50 ml buffer peptone water (BPW), and stomached to resuspend remaining viable cells. Serial dilutions were made in 0.1% BPW and plated on Plated Count Agar (PCA). Our results suggest that, a standardized surface area of produce will better reflect the relative effectiveness of different antimicrobials on various types of produce than evaluation based on weight. All dipping solutions tested in our study were capable of reducing microbial populations to some extent, but, the antimicrobial effects were dependent on concentrations, treatment times, and types of produce. Electrolyzed water (50 ppm), with a 1 min dipping treatment time, may be effective in reducing microbial loads from some food produce surfaces whereas other types of produce may require higher levels and/or longer treatment times. Lactic acid was tested in combination with electrolyzed water and performed well in reducing bacteria on food produce surfaces at lower levels of LA or EW than if either were used alone. The bactericidal activity of electrolyzed water is more pronounced on firm "skin" (grape tomatoes) than rough "skin" (baby carrots) vegetables.Department of Animal Scienc

Fairness-aware Network Revenue Management with Demand Learning

In addition to maximizing the total revenue, decision-makers in lots of industries would like to guarantee fair consumption across different resources and avoid saturating certain resources. Motivated by these practical needs, this paper studies the price-based network revenue management problem with both demand learning and fairness concern about the consumption across different resources. We introduce the regularized revenue, i.e., the total revenue with a fairness regularization, as our objective to incorporate fairness into the revenue maximization goal. We propose a primal-dual-type online policy with the Upper-Confidence-Bound (UCB) demand learning method to maximize the regularized revenue. We adopt several innovative techniques to make our algorithm a unified and computationally efficient framework for the continuous price set and a wide class of fairness regularizers. Our algorithm achieves a worst-case regret of $\tilde O(N^{5/2}\sqrt{T})$, where $N$ denotes the number of products and $T$ denotes the number of time periods. Numerical experiments in a few NRM examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for balancing revenue and fairness

Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on EMD-TEO and Mahalanobis Distance

A intelligent rolling bearing fault diagnosis method is proposed on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) – Teager Energy Operator (TEO) and Mahalanobis distance. EMD can adaptively decompose vibration signal into a series of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs), that is, zero mean mono-component AM-FM signal. TEO can estimate the total mechanical energy required to generate signals, so it has good time resolution and self-adaptive ability to the transient of the signal, which shows the advantage to detect the signal impact characteristics. With regards to the impulse feature of the bearing fault vibration signals, TEO can be used to detect cyclical impulse characteristic caused by bearing failure, gain the instantaneous amplitude spectrum of each IMF component, then identify the characteristic frequency of the interesting and single IMF component in bearing faults by means of Teager energy spectrum. The amplitude of the Teager energy spectrum in inner race fault frequency, outer fault frequency and the ratio of the energy of the resonance frequency to the total energy were extracted as the feature vectors, which were used as training samples and test samples separately for fault diagnosis. Then the Mahalanobis distances between the real measure and different type overalls of fault sample are calculated to classify the real condition of rolling bearing. Experimental results was concluded that this method can accurately identify and diagnose different fault types of rolling bearing

The impact of monetary policy shocks on income inequality: a tale of two countries

The easing monetary policy after the global financial crisis triggered wide concerns on the responses of income inequality. In this paper, we investigate impact of monetary policy shocks on income inequality. We propose a general equilibrium model and show that monetary policies could affect income inequality by affecting the earnings of high-income households in financial markets and business operations. Using a TVP-FAVAR model, we find contradictory distributional effects of monetary policy shocks in China and the US. Specifically, expansionary monetary policy shocks persistently increase income inequality in China but decrease income inequality in the US. Moreover, the impacts are volatile in the short-term, but stabilise after 10 periods. The investigation on the responses of top 1% and bottom 50% income share confirms the finding of contradictory distributional effects of monetary policy shocks

Effect of institutional quality and foreign direct investment on economic growth and environmental quality: evidence from African countries

This study applies the method of the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) method and the vector error correction model (VECM) to explore whether institutional quality (IQ) and foreign direct investment (FDI) promoted economic growth (EG) and environmental quality (EQ) in oil-producing and non-oil-producing African countries from 1999 to 2017. The FMOLS findings demonstrate that IQ significantly promoted EG and improved EQ in the non-oil-producing countries, however it only improved EQ and showed no significant impact on EG in oil-producing countries. FDI significantly promoted EG to a higher extent in oil-producing countries than in non-oil-producing countries, but it presented no significant impact on EQ in both groups. The VECM results reveal that (i) two-way causation among IQ and EG, IQ and EQ, FDI and EG, and FDI and EQ was occurred in both groups, in the long-run. (ii) two-way causation among FDI and EQ and one-way causation from FDI to EG was observed in non-oil-producing countries in the short-run. Moreover, two-way causation among IQ and EG, and one-way causation from IQ to EQ were observed in non-oilproducing countries. To realize the sustainable development of economy and environment, a series of policy suggestions have been discussed