Natural Gas Fermentation: A Promising Approach for Sustainably Meeting the World’s Growing Nutritional Demands

The rapid increase in world population, combined with the rising expectation for more nutritional diets in many rapidly developing economies, is creating a strong demand for the protein-rich materials used for human consumption and/or animal feed. Meeting such a demand is already exerting significant pressure on the environment and creating significant pressure for identifying and implementing more sustainable approaches for protein production and utilization. This looming problem needs to be addressed quickly, considering the recent accelerating rise in feed and food prices and their subsequent impact on the sociopolitical stability of several developing societies.This paper quickly reviews the environmental impact of current practices used for meeting the world's protein needs. It then introduces an environmentally-friendly novel approach for converting natural gas into Single Cell Protein that can be used as an ingredient in animal feed formulations. After reviewing the historical background for this approach and the various factors affecting its sustainability, the main impediments to its widespread adoption are discussed, and several means for enhancing the overall sustainability of the approach are presented.</p

Effect of Contaminants on the Gas Holdup and Mixing in Internal Airlift Reactors Equipped with Microbubble Generator

The impact of contaminants on the gas holdup and mixing characteristics encountered in internal airlift reactors was investigated using a 200 L pilot scale unit equipped with a two-phase transonic sparger capable of generating microbubbles. Small dosages of a cationic surfactant (0–50 ppm of sodium dodecyl sulfonate (SDS)) were used to simulate the coalescence-retarding effect encountered in most industrial streams and resulted in the formation of bubbles that varied in size between 280 and 1,900 μm. Gas holdups as high as 0.14 were achieved in the riser under homogeneous flow regime when slowly coalescent systems were aerated at the relatively low superficial velocity of 0.02 ms−1, whereas liquid circulation velocities as high as 1.3 ms−1 were achieved in conjunction with rapidly coalescent systems at the same superficial velocity. This excellent hydrodynamic performance represents a 5-fold improvement in the riser gas holdup and up to 8-fold enhancement in the liquid circulation velocity and is expected to yield good mixing and mass transfer performance at low energy dissipation rates

Establishing norms with metanorms in distributed computational systems

Norms provide a valuable mechanism for establishing coherent cooperative behaviour in decentralised systems in which there is no central authority. One of the most influential formulations of norm emergence was proposed by Axelrod (Am Political Sci Rev 80(4):1095–1111, 1986). This paper provides an empirical analysis of aspects of Axelrod’s approach, by exploring some of the key assumptions made in previous evaluations of the model. We explore the dynamics of norm emergence and the occurrence of norm collapse when applying the model over extended durations . It is this phenomenon of norm collapse that can motivate the emergence of a central authority to enforce laws and so preserve the norms, rather than relying on individuals to punish defection. Our findings identify characteristics that significantly influence norm establishment using Axelrod’s formulation, but are likely to be of importance for norm establishment more generally. Moreover, Axelrod’s model suffers from significant limitations in assuming that private strategies of individuals are available to others, and that agents are omniscient in being aware of all norm violations and punishments. Because this is an unreasonable expectation , the approach does not lend itself to modelling real-world systems such as online networks or electronic markets. In response, the paper proposes alternatives to Axelrod’s model, by replacing the evolutionary approach, enabling agents to learn, and by restricting the metapunishment of agents to cases where the original defection is observed, in order to be able to apply the model to real-world domains . This work can also help explain the formation of a “social contract” to legitimate enforcement by a central authority

Expert System for Nutrition Care Process of Older Adults

This paper presents an expert system for a nutrition care process tailored for the specific needs of elders. Dietary knowledge is defined by nutritionists and encoded as Nutrition Care Process Ontology, and then used as underlining base and standardized model for the nutrition care planning. An inference engine is developed on top of the ontology, providing semantic reasoning infrastructure and mechanisms for evaluating the rules defined for assessing short and long term elders’ self-feeding behaviours, to identify unhealthy dietary patterns and detect the early instauration of malnutrition. Our expert system provides personalized intervention plans covering nutrition education, diet prescription and food ordering adapted to the older adult’s specific nutritional needs, health conditions and food preferences. In-lab evaluation results are presented proving the usefulness and quality of the expert system as well as the computational efficiency, coupling and cohesion of the defined ontology

Randomised Evaluations of Accepted Choices in Treatment (REACT) trials: large-scale pragmatic trials within databases of routinely collected electronic healthcare records

Databases of electronic health records (EHR), such as the General Practice Research Database (GPRD), provide a unique opportunity to conduct large scale pragmatic trials. This paper describes the infrastructure as being implemented for two feasibility pragmatic trials within GPRD

Towards personalised and adaptive QoS assessments via context awareness

Quality of Service (QoS ) properties play an important role in distinguishing between functionally-equivalent services and accommodating the different expectations of users. However, the subjective nature of some properties and the dynamic and unreliable nature of service environments may result in cases where the quality values advertised by the service provider are either missing or untrustworthy. To tackle this, a number of QoS estimation approaches have been proposed, utilising the observation history available on a service to predict its performance. Although the context underlying such previous observations (and corresponding to both user and service related factors) could provide an important source of information for the QoS estimation process, it has only been utilised to a limited extent by existing approaches. In response, we propose a context-aware quality learning model, realised via a learning-enabled service agent, exploiting the contextual characteristics of the domain in order to provide more personalised, accurate and relevant quality estimations for the situation at hand. The experiments conducted demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showing promising results (in terms of prediction accuracy) in different types of changing service environments

A service-based system for malnutrition prevention and self-management

Malnutrition is considered one of the root causes for the occurrence of other diseases. It is particularly common in the ageing population, where it requires more efficient handling and management to enable longer home independent living. However, to achieve this, a number of related challenges need to be overcome, especially those related to management of health and disease let alone other social and logistical barriers. This paper presents the design of a distributed system that enables homecare management in the context of self-feeding and malnutrition prevention through balanced nutritional intake. The design employs a service-based system that incorporates a number of services including monitoring of activities, nutritional reasoning for assessing feeding habits, diet recommendation for food planning, and marketplace invocation for automating food shopping to meet dietary requirements. The solution is deployed in a small pilot in 12 elder adult houses that, in early results, demonstrates its holistic user-centred scalable approach for malnutrition self-management

Integration operators for generating RDF/OWL-based user defined mediator views in a grid environment

Research and development activities relating to the grid have generally focused on applications where data is stored in files. However, many scientific and commercial applications are highly dependent on Information Servers (ISs) for storage and organization of their data. A data-information system that supports operations on multiple information servers in a grid environment is referred to as an interoperable grid system. Different perceptions by end-users of interoperable systems in a grid environment may lead to different reasons for integrating data. Even the same user might want to integrate the same distributed data in various ways to suit different needs, roles or tasks. Therefore multiple mediator views are needed to support this diversity. This paper describes our approach to supporting semantic interoperability in a heterogeneous multi-information server grid environment. It is based on using Integration Operators for generating multiple semantically rich RDF/OWL-based user defined mediator views above the grid participating ISs. These views support different perceptions of the distributed and heterogeneous data available. A set of grid services are developed for the implementation of the mediator views