Search results for "Process"
showing 10 items of 22310 documents
High Pressure Processing Impact on Alternariol and Aflatoxins of Grape Juice and Fruit Juice-Milk Based Beverages.
2021
High-pressure processing (HPP) has emerged over the last 2 decades as a good alternative to traditional thermal treatment for food safety and shelf-life extension, supplying foods with similar characteristics to those of fresh products. Currently, HPP has also been proposed as a useful tool to reduce food contaminants, such as pesticides and mycotoxins. The aim of the present study is to explore the effect of HPP technology at 600 MPa during 5 min at room temperature on alternariol (AOH) and aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) mycotoxins reduction in different juice models. The effect of HPP has also been compared with a thermal treatment performed at 90 °C during 21 s. For this, different juice models, or…
Microbial safety of black summer truffle collected from Sicily and Umbria Regions, Italy
2021
Background: Tuber aestivum Vittad., known as black summer truffle, represents high-value food especially used as garnishment in nouvelle cuisine. The aim of this study was to investigate on the viable microbial populations associated with T. aestivum ascomata collected in different sites of Sicily and one locality of Umbria (Italy).
 Methods: The ripe ascomata of black summer truffles were collected from Central Italy. Cell densities of spoilage bacteria, fecal indicators, potential pathogens, yeasts, and molds were analyzed. Statistical analysis was conducted with XLSTAT software.
 Results: The microbiological counts of truffles ranged between 6.00 and 9.63 log Colony Forming Uni…
Compensatory strategies in processing facial emotions: evidence from prosopagnosia.
2006
We report data on the processing of facial emotion in a prosopagnosic patient (H.J.A.). H.J.A. was relatively accurate at discriminating happy from angry upright faces, but he performed at chance when the faces were inverted. Furthermore, with upright faces there was no configural interference effect on emotion judgements, when face parts expressing different emotions were aligned to express a new emergent emotion. We propose that H.J.A.'s emotion judgements relied on local rather than on configural information, and this local information was disrupted by inversion. A compensatory strategy, based on processing local face parts, can be sufficient to process at least some facial emotions.
Evaluation of the postural stability of elderly persons using time domain signal analysis
2012
A force platform is widely used in the evaluation of postural stability in man. Although an abundance of parameters are typically retrieved from force platform data, no uniform analysis of the data has been carried out. In general, the signal analysis does not analyze the underlying postural event, i.e., whether the signal consists of several small corrections or large excursions. In the present work, we studied the postural stability of 4589 elderly persons from Iceland on a force platform under visual and non-visual conditions during stance on a solid surface. We analyzed the internal relationship between frequently used time domain variables. In addition, we conducted a factor analysis u…
A Bio-Inspired Cognitive Agent for Autonomous Urban Vehicles Routing Optimization
2017
Autonomous urban vehicle prototypes are expected to be efficient even in not explicitly planned circumstances and dynamic environments. The development of autonomous vehicles for urban driving needs real-time information from vehicles and road network to optimize traffic flows. In traffic agent-based models, each vehicle is an agent, while the road network is the environment. Cognitive agents are able to reason on the perceived data, to evaluate the information obtained by reasoning, and to learn and respond, preserving their self-sufficiency, independency, self-determination, and self-reliance. In this paper, a bio-inspired cognitive agent for autonomous urban vehicles routing optimization…
The Artificial Society Analytics Platform
2020
Author's accepted manuscript Social simulation routinely involves the construction of artificial societies and agents within such societies. Currently there is insufficient discussion of best practices regarding the construction process. This chapter introduces the artificial society analytics platform (ASAP) as a way to spark discussion of best practices. ASAP is designed to be an extensible architecture capable of functioning as the core of many different types of inquiries into social dynamics. Here we describe ASAP, focusing on design decisions in several key areas, thereby exposing our assumptions and reasoning to critical scrutiny, hoping for discussion that can advance debate over be…
An Agent-Based Model of Extortion Racketeering
2016
Mafias can be considered as criminal organisations that are in the business of producing, promoting, and selling protection. Here, we describe the Palermo Scenario, an agent-based model of protection rackets aimed to deepen our understanding of protection rackets, and help policymakers to evaluate methods for destabilising them. Additionally, since the system is explicitly specified, we can use it to investigate the entire causal pathway from cause to effect: not only from actions to Mafia destabilisation, but also the intermediate actions along the path and actors' internal mental representations among the population.
A Generic Agent-Based Model of Historical Social Behaviors Change
2016
The primary theme of this chapter is trying to describe, discuss and understand how human societies change over time using agent-based modeling. Agents become a major paradigm of social simulation allow us to model the complex social phenomena under the bottom-up approach. Certainly one of the key points of the bottom-up approach is the emergence of macro level phenomena from micro level actions and interactions. The main objective of this work is to build a Virtual Social Laboratory, from Rafael Pla Lopez Social evolution model, in order to explore the social evolution of a set of artificial societies/agents that evolve within a grid of cells which are characterized by a level of natural r…
Do editors have a silver bullet? an agent-based model of peer review
2014
This paper presents an agent-based model of peer review that looks at the effect of different editorial policies of referee selection. We tested four author/referee matching scenarios as follows: random selection of referees, selection of referees with a similar status to submission authors, selection of higher-skilled and lower skilled referees. We tested these scenarios against three types of referee behaviour, i.e., fair, unreliable and strategic and measured their implications for the quality and efficiency of the process. Results show that in case of randomness of referee judgment, any editorial policy is detrimental for peer review. If referees behave strategically, certain matching p…
A Theoretical Agent-Based Model to simulate an Artificial Social Evolution
2013
Agent-based social simulation as a computational approach to social simulation has been largely used to explore social phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to build a theoretical agent-based model to simulate the social evolution of a set of agents/artificial societies. In this model, each agent (artificial society) has an available number of social behaviours that compete among each other. The agent/agent interactions are carried out by their social otherwise, the agent/environment interactions are expressed through the consumption of ecological resources in repression and satisfaction by social behaviours of the agent. In this work, we will present the structure and the formulation of …