The Effects of Psychotrophic Contamination and the Addition of Sodium-Citrate on Major Chemical Components and Flavor of Buttermilk.

The main objective of this research was to determine what effect, if any, post-pasteurization contamination and/or sodium citrate would have on major chemical components and flavor of buttermilk. Also, it was of interest to establish chemical profiles of good versus bad buttermilk and to gain information which would aid in the prediction of buttermilk flavor. The research was divided into two parts. In Part I buttermilk was artificially inoculated with psychrotrophs (Pseudomonas fluorescens P27) at time of bottling. Part II examined the effect of psychrotrophic contamination at time of set with a lactic culture. Treatments consisted of buttermilk, both with and without added sodium citrate (.15%), and three inocula of psychrotrophs (0/ml, 10(\u274)/ml and 10(\u276)/ml). After processing, buttermilk was stored at 7(DEGREES)C in plastic 3.78 1 containers and sampled at 0, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 20 d. Volatile organics (acetaldehyde, acetone, ethanol and diacetyl) were determined by gas chromotography with headspace sampling followed by organic acid (orotic, lactic, acetic and propionic) analysis by high performance liquid chromotography. Microbial parameters examined were total lactic streptococci, gram negatives and citrate fermenting bacteria. Flavor evaluations were performed by a three member trained taste panel. The Hull test was used to determine proteolysis. Data revealed no significant changes in volatile organics or organic acids as a result of psychrotrophic contamination at time of bottling. Increases in acetaldehyde and decreases in acetone were observed in buttermilk inoculated with psychrotrophs at time of set with a lactic culture. The addition of sodium citrate to milk prior to fermentation yielded higher levels of diacetyl, acetone, lactic acid, acetic acid and propionic acid. Higher concentrations of these components resulted in a definite improvement in buttermilk flavor. Among the chemical components studied, acetone was that which was most often related to flavor. In addition, regression equations were established which laid a foundation for further study in the area of flavor prediction

A novel DSM philosophy for building integrated renewable systems

This paper presents an overview of a novel concept in IT network design and power control focused on matching building integrated renewable power generation with local demands. It describes how this is achieved through combination of energy demand reduction and dynamic utilisation of embedded energy storage in a robust, efficient and cost effective manner. A brief overview of the main features of the design is given in terms of its intended benefits as an integrated system. The load components and distribution topology are described for this experimental system within the limits set by the capacity, capabilities and desired function of the network. Power supply to the network is described as including a back-up source to the photovoltaic (PV) source to add functionality and stability with no requirements for undesirable exporting of excess PV generation. The necessary configuration of the renewable array integrating with the network is also highlighted with an example compatible solar module device. A trial of the technology and demand management control in a high profile office building is described. This trial in a live working environment is providing invaluable real world data to compare against modelling and network simulation results

Posterior Probability Based Confidence Measures Applied to a Children’s Speech Reading Tracking System

Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007. Editors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit. University of Tartu, Tartu, 2007. ISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online) ISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM) pp. 274-277

My Science Tutor (MyST) -- A Large Corpus of Children's Conversational Speech

This article describes the MyST corpus developed as part of the My Science Tutor project -- one of the largest collections of children's conversational speech comprising approximately 400 hours, spanning some 230K utterances across about 10.5K virtual tutor sessions by around 1.3K third, fourth and fifth grade students. 100K of all utterances have been transcribed thus far. The corpus is freely available (https://myst.cemantix.org) for non-commercial use using a creative commons license. It is also available for commercial use (https://boulderlearning.com/resources/myst-corpus/). To date, ten organizations have licensed the corpus for commercial use, and approximately 40 university and other not-for-profit research groups have downloaded the corpus. It is our hope that the corpus can be used to improve automatic speech recognition algorithms, build and evaluate conversational AI agents for education, and together help accelerate development of multimodal applications to improve children's excitement and learning about science, and help them learn remotely